Hi, for full disclosure I classify myself as an atheist. Recently my friend gave me a bible and suggested I should try reading it. Out of respect for them and their beliefs I decided I would try reading it. If nothing else it can't harm anyone to gain a comprehensive understanding of what Christians believe.
I'm currently reading it cover to cover and am currently at Isaiah chapter 29.
I've been discussing online with people on other sites to try understand various peoples interpretations of the Bible. I've come to realise there are many different interpretations.
Most seem to speak of the Bible with similar attitudes with minor discrepancies on interpretation and meanings of certain commandments or translations.
However a group of people have been commenting to me only in private messages not in view of other people. This has happened across multiple platforms.
People have sent me links to a website called the rapture countdown and a the word Dispensationalism keeps coming up whenever they message me.
Ive looked it up and see it is a group of Christians that believe the Bible is to be taken literally.
My questions are: Is Dispensationalism something commonly believed amongst Christians? Why do these people not post publicly? What are people's general thoughts on this?
Now I wish to make clear I do not fully understand the beliefs of Christians, this is why I'm reading the Bible. My intention is not to mock or insult anyone's religion only to learn what you believe and I have absolutely no interest in trying to make anyone question their beliefs. Im just trying to understand.
Any insight in to this would be appreciated. Thank you.
Hello there atheist, welcome to ChristianForums.net! I can see that you have been posting with others online and yet none of their words have turned you around completely from being an atheist. I'm sure that some of the things they have said will have made an impact of sorts and others may have said things that will prove to work against your faith. But it is to be expected that changing a person's way of thinking may require time and many minor adjustments.
So the bible contains information that you need to have knowledge of in order to be able to consider the views that contribute toward faith. It is good to get all that information into your mind where it may reside in your memory and it can be used by your mind when considering things. In addition to that, it can be used by the Holy Spirit when others speak to you, because our words might be able to remind you of the things that you have read in the bible. Sometimes the Holy Spirit even speaks through a person in order to do that work of building-up your knowledge and insights. It is normal that people will usually not recognise that the Holy Spirit is speaking when that happens, but it doesn't necessarily invalidate the purpose of His doing so as long as you are able to decide accurately on the ideas that come to mind and in that way He can lead you to have the understanding that He is planning for you. So as long as you stay on the path of discussing things and questioning things, accepting the truth when it applies and not falling into feign just for the sake of "belonging" or whatever... then you'll end up coming to the conclusion that God is in fact doing that kind of work in these ways. As to your questions here I do have some thoughts to offer:
You speak of the rapture and dispensationism, which are doctrines taught in some circles in Christianity that not all Christians agree about. What is important to keep in mind is that those words don't appear in the bible (try searching for "dispensation" and "rapture" in the bible) - they are concepts that have been developed to answer certain questions, and those questions have come about from people who have not immediately understood what the bible is teaching. Maybe if you have read any of the New Testament, you would remember Jesus saying famously "If the blind leads the blind, they will both fall into a pit". That sort of language is poetic, meaning to speak of the inability of a person to see the truth rather than the literal meaning of a person who has no eye sight. There's a lot of that poetic language in the bible, and the understandings that are being conveyed by the spiritual concepts are what eventually grows into the knowledge that Jesus is referring to. The disciples who were with Jesus asked Him "why do you speak in parables?" and He explained to them that whoever is able to see the meaning of the parables will see more through them, but those who do not see will be made even more blind by them. It is because a person really needs to love the truth in order to accept the things that Jesus teaches, and even in these days when we speak in ways that have deep meaning, there are people who really don't see that deeper meaning - yet they will be fervent Christians and very enthusiastic teachers. They are the types that Jesus spoke of as being false teachers and blind guides. Of course He was speaking of people who were of the Jewish religion (that was the equivalent of what Christianity is today - because the religion of Christianity came about when the Jews forfeited their claim to the kingdom of God by crucifying Jesus Christ - consider Matthew 21:33-45). In many ways the Christians have also forfeited their claim to the kingdom of God over the years, because to be Christian really means that we need to be like Christ Himself. When that proves too difficult or unattractive, then a person claiming to be Christian needs to begin living contrary to what their conscience and what God expects of them - yet they will continue to call themselves Christian because they don't want to give up the benefits of being Christian - they just want to be a sinner too. So the New Testament mentions that happening, and says that as a result of the false teachers, there were false teachings creeping in among the churches. That was happening right after Jesus had been resurrected, some two thousand years ago, and if you spend time observing people of the Christian religion you will even see them doing the same thing these days. So that's why you see so much disagreement among Christians: it is because for one reason or another they just can't hold to the truth when it matters, so they become cut off from the truth and having their own belief system, and then looking for support from others to prop them up. That's probably largely why they approach you privately, because they have a deep desire to convince you to join them and they are taking extra steps to try and have influence over you without the competition. You'll understand what the New Testament is saying about that side of human nature when you read it knowing that religion can produce people like that. Getting back to the doctrines you mentioned:
Rapture is a doctrine that supposes the faithful believers will be physically lifted out of the earth when the most destructive time is about to happen. Obviously it depends upon a view that God is going to bring such destructive times upon the earth, and that it hasn't already happened. To speak in that way is to make predictions about the future, and when people do that, they base their predictions upon the things written in the bible that is called "prophecy". The thing about those prophecies is that they are written in a way that is very deep and purposefully imaginative - in fact the style of prophecy is such that it is hard to form a definite picture of what it is saying, and that is why the ideas about how prophecy should be interpreted are wide and varied. In addition to that, the interpretations that people teach, such as the rapture, usually involve the combination of several independent prophecies - as for instance, the man who is known as St. John was one of Jesus' twelve disciples. He wrote the vision of the book of Revelation that gives the most graphic descriptions of the return of Jesus, yet the doctrine of the rapture comes primarily from a small writing of St. Paul, who is the one who wrote 1/4 of the New Testament, but who was converted to Christianity after the resurrection of Jesus and who is known to have never met Jesus in the flesh prior to that time. So when you read the writing of St. John, it is clear that he is giving his own independent account of a vision that he received from God but he is not making any references to the comments made by St. Paul - and in a similar way, it is not apparent that St. Paul even knows about the vision that St. John had written, but instead he seems to be describing the inside knowledge that he had come to understand by having discussed religion so much in his years as a Christian. Therefore, it is best to keep in mind that prophecy is an insider's knowledge, and it is meant to be knowledge that God Himself reveals to us when He decides that it is useful for us to know it. If you start asking questions of those people who are approaching you privately to try and find out their purpose and intention, maybe you will be able to find out whether they are in possession of genuine insider's knowledge or whether they have themselves been duped into joining the culture of believers in order to "belong". There's a word for that: it is called "rote" knowledge, and when you get into the book of Jeremiah you will see how that man was particularly persecuted by those types of believers because they didn't accept the things he said and he wasn't interested in making compromises for them.
(split into two posts because of the character limit)
2 Yes, the early church tended to be 'Covenant Theology' although the term never came into use until the Westminster Confession coined the phrase. Dispensationalism is quite a lot more recent. I belong to a modern disp. church, but I prefer c.t. like you 