Page 149 - The Rapture Question by John F. Walvoord

The Rapture Question: Revised and Enlarged Edition
coming of the Lord, and the Millennium to follow. How the
coming of the Lord could be a daily expectation as is indicated
by the early Fathers and at the same time have a lengthy scries
of events preceding the Second Advent was apparently not
resolved in the early church. Some were undoubtedly post-
tribulational, but others are not clear. If major doctrines like
the Trinity and the procession of the Spirit took centuries to
find acceptable statement, it is hardly to be expected that the
problems of eschatology would be all settled in the early cen­
turies. The inroads of the spiritualizing principles of Origen,
which caused the downfall of prcmillennialism in the third
and fourth centuries and the departure from the Scriptures
and which characterized the organized church until the Prot­
estant Reformation, were hardly a climate in which an intri­
cate problem such as pretribulationism versus posttribu-
lationism could be solved.
The early church was far from settled on details of es­
chatology, though definitely premillennial. It was actually im­
possible for the tribulation question even to be discussed in­
telligently until the Protestant Reformation had restored a
theological foundation that would support it. Unfortunately
the Reformers went back to Augustine for their eschatology
instead of the early chiliastic Fathers; and until premillen-
nialism was again established in the post-Reformation period,
the advance of the interpretation of prophecy' had to wait. In a
word, the carlv Fathers were not specifically pretribulational.
neither were they all posttribulational in the modern meaning
of the term. They simply had not raised the questions involved
in this controversy.
Henry C. Thiessen has given a good summary of the
testimony of the early church on this question: “Let us first
note that, according to Moffat, ‘Rabbinic piety (Sanh. 98b)
expected exemption from the tribulation of the latter days only
for those who were absorbed in good works and in sacred
studies.’ [Cf. Possible allusion of Christ to this teaching, Luke
156