Rapture in the context of "Millennialism"

Christian eschatology is a branch of study within Christian theology which deals with the doctrine of the "last things", especially the Second Coming of Christ, or Parousia. The word eschatology derives from two Greek roots meaning "last" (ἔσχατος) and "study" (-λογία) – involves the study of "end things", whether of the end of an individual life, of the end of the age, of the end of the world, or of the nature of the Kingdom of God. Broadly speaking, Christian eschatology focuses on the ultimate destiny of individual souls and of the entire created order, based primarily upon biblical texts within the Old and New Testaments.Christian eschatology looks to study and discuss matters such as death and the afterlife, Heaven and Hell, the Second Coming of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, the rapture, the tribulation, millennialism, the end of the world, the Last Judgment, and the New Heaven and New Earth in the world to come.

Eschatological passages appear in multiple places in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments. A number of extra-biblical examples of eschatological prophecies also exist, as well as extra-biblical ecclesiastical traditions relating to the subject.

Nicholas Thomas Wright FRSE (born 1 December 1948), known as N. T. Wright or Tom Wright, is an English New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian and Anglican bishop. He was the bishop of Durham and Lord Spiritual in the UK Parliament from 2003 to 2010. He then became research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary's College in the University of St Andrews in Scotland until 2019, when he became a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford.

Wright writes about theology and Christian life and the relationship between them. He advocates a biblical re-evaluation of theological matters such as justification, women's ordination, and popular Christian views about life after death. He has also criticised the idea of a literal Rapture.

Dispensationalism is a Christian theological framework for interpreting the Christian Bible which maintains that history is divided into multiple ages called dispensations in which God interacts with his chosen people in different ways. It is often distinguished from covenant theology, the traditional Reformed view of reading the Bible. These are two competing frameworks of biblical theology that attempt to explain overall continuity in the Bible. The coining of the term "dispensationalism" has been attributed to Philip Mauro, a critic of the system's teachings, in his 1928 book The Gospel of the Kingdom.

Dispensationalists use a literal interpretation of the Bible and believe that divine revelation unfolds throughout its narrative. They believe that there is a distinction between Israel and the Church, and that Christians are not bound by Mosaic law. They maintain beliefs in premillennialism, Christian Zionism, and a rapture of Christians before the expected Second Coming of Jesus, who Christians believe to be the Messiah, generally before the Great Tribulation.

The Seekers, also called The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, were a group of rapturists or a UFO religion in mid-twentieth century Midwestern United States. The Seekers met in a nondenominational church; the group was originally organized in 1953 by Charles Laughead, a staff member at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. They were led by Dorothy Martin (also called Sister Thedra) from the Chicago area, who believed a UFO would save them from a catastrophe on December 21, 1954. They are believed to have been the earliest UFO religion.

Martin told her followers that the United States was going to be destroyed by a massive earthquake and a huge tidal wave on December 21, 1954, according to telepathic messages that she claimed to have received from aliens. She called the aliens the Guardians and said they came from a planet called Clarion. Believers would be saved from the destruction by flying saucers that would take them to Clarion.