CurtBlog

My blog has been migrated to Community Server 1.0.  For now, I'm just using the blogging stuff.  I think I'll wait until the next release to play around with the Gallery piece.

Over the past few years I've had a number of conversations with people regarding the rapture theology that seems to be dominant in the evangelical church now.  This has been brought to the forefront more in recent years by the success of the Left Behind series.  The Left Behind series is a work of fiction, in most every sense of the word.  But when I say things like “I don't believe in the rapture” to most Christians, I get responses ranging from disbelief to questions about my spirituality.  The truth is that the “theology” of the rapture as it is generally taught in evangelical circles is not even 200 years old. It certainly wasn't part of generally accepted mainstream theology before that, although there were some fringe teachings here and there that were similar.

The main proponent of this view was a Plymouth Brethren minister named John Nelson Darby in the 1830s.  This was later picked up by the Scofield Bible, which is partly responsible for the spread of this view in the early 1900s.  Certainly another influential book in recent history was “The Late Great Planet Earth” by Hal Lindsey, which was a huge bestseller in the 70s.  This view is also closely tied to dispensationalism. The Bible certainly teaches the second coming of Jesus, but the apostle Paul and others would have been bewildered by what many evangelicals believe today.   

Here are some links for further reading.  I don't necessarily agree with everything on these sites, but there is some good information on the origin of the idea of the rapture.

http://mb-soft.com/believe/txw/rapture.htm
http://www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org/articles/dogmatics/cozby_rapture1.htm
http://www.rutherford.org/oldspeak/blog/articles/religion/oldspeak-worldwar3.asp
http://www.graceonlinelibrary.org/articles/subcats.asp?id=9%7C21
http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=4621

Telligent's Community Server version 1.0 has finally been released. Now I need to get serious about playing around with it, I may move my own site to it and there is another site I'm working on that might be a good candidate.

I'm finally taking the big step of finding a condo, I'm getting way too old not to own my residence. The Chicago market is pretty good, so I think it's overall a good investment and that I'll be here long enough to make it well worth it. It's pretty scary though to figure everything out the first time. I've been reading up on things for awhile now and have listened to Dave Ramsey talk about real estate a lot over the years, so I'm not going in completely blind. But there is definitely a lot to consider.

Narnia toys