The Rapture Plot

Book excerpt: Early in the 1800's-as the second wave of the Great Awakening reached its zenith-a tiny religious sect in Britain began to publicly teach a new end-of-the-world doctrine. Later in the 1800's, a second British sect-afraid the millions of ordinary Christians would learn of the bizarre origin of this new view-plotted to cover up its origins. And now it has grown to be the popular and sensational fundamentalist and evangelical any-moment, pretribulation rapture theory. MacPherson carefully documents, step by step, its origin in the 1820's, and follows its subsequent development and popularization in America by Darby and Scofield. This book is the never-before-told true story of how visions, subtle document changes, plagiarism, and what MacPherson called the mother of all revisionisms, has obscured the true origin of what has now become the sensationalist end-of-the-world doctrine pervading evangelicalism today.