Page 239 - The Rapture Question by John F. Walvoord

The Rapture Question: Revised and Enlarged Edition
Ladd, after properly defining the term, said, “ The mystery of the
Rapture is not the time of the Rapture as pretribulationists assume;
it is the fact of the Rapture.”2
Ladd was a bit overeager to destroy the force of this term
in relation to the pretribulation Rapture. Obviously if the
Rapture was not revealed in the Old Testament, nothing
about it was revealed, including the time. Gundry, in his dis­
cussion of the church as a mystery, spent all his time trying to
minimize the fact that the Rapture is a truth not predicted in
the Old Testament.3
All posttribulationists seek to avoid the main point, that
is, that the resurrection and translation of the church is de­
clared to be a mystery and. as such, is not included in any
passage in the Old Testament dealing with the second coming
of Christ. What posttribulationists also want to avoid is the
fact that the translation of the church is not mentioned any­
where in the New Testament in a passage that clearly speaks
of the coming of Christ after the Great Tribulation.
In Gundry’s discussion, once again he attempted to shift
the burden of proof to the pretribulationist to prove that the
Rapture does not occur at the time of the Second Coming. He
stated. “If the burden of proof rather rests on pretribu­
lationists to show that the tribulation saints will not belong
to the Church, the ‘failure" of NT writers to single out a tribu-
lational generation of the Church on the earth as posses­
sive of the ‘mysteries' weighs nothing—the application of the
‘mysteries’ to all generations of the Church is a matter of
course.”4 Again the question may be asked, Why is the bur­
den of proof on the pretribulationist if the posttribulationists
want to assert that the Rapture occurs at the Second Com­
ing?5 It would seem that the burden of proof is on post­
tribulationists to prove it.
A second aspect of the discussion revolves around the
phrase “the last trumpet.” In 1 Corinthians 15:52 it is de­
clared that the Rapture will occur “in a flash, in the twinkling
248