You are correct. Christ does not come to earth during the rapture. We go up to meet Him. His second coming is after the tribulation when He defeats the armies of Satan.
>>If there was such a statement, and not just a bunch of subjective inferences, we would not be debating this.<<
We are not talking about a "2 stage return". Only you are. The whole word does not see Him when the rapture occurs. They most certainly do when He returns.
Ok, here goes, hope I don’t get too long and drawn out here:
The line of thought for pretribs goes something like this (I know, because I was once pretrib myself). Jesus said nothing about any other coming except the one after the tribulation in Matt. 24 (vss 29-31). You therefore have to go to Paul, in passages like 1 Thess. 4 and 1 Cor. 15, according to the pretrib line of thought, and have Paul reveal to us what Jesus did not.
Paul is supposed to reveal the mystery of an additional coming, where Jesus leaves heaven, comes down to the atmosphere of earth, catches away the saints, turns around and goes back to heaven… then comes again with those selfsame saints seven years later. This time all the way to the earth.
It would be nice if we actually had Paul describing all this for us. Especially this additional coming before the tribulation that Jesus said nothing about in Matt. 24. Which, since Jesus had only a post-trib coming, and Paul’s is in addition to Jesus’ (even if he does not come all the way down to the earth, it is still additional to the one in Matt. 24), this would be nothing else but “two stage.”
But, if Paul is supposed to reveal this tremendous new mystery to us, he did an awful poor job of it. What he described in the Thessalonian and 1 Cor. Passages, can just as easily be seen as the SAME coming Jesus described in Matt. 24, Howbeit with much more detail. Post-tribs see that additional detail AS the “behold I shew you a mystery” of 1 Cor. 15:51.
No additional coming is revealed in that passage, one has to read it into the text (thus an inference), for the text says no such thing. Both the Thessalonian passage and the 1 Cor. 15 one, describe WHAT will happen at Christ’s Parousia, not WHEN it will happen. We should already know “when” from Matt. 24, i.e., after the tribulation.