"I was wrong about Darby."
Very understandable. Entrenched, rigid, narrow, tidy little boxed biases are very hard to change for all of us. Thankfully, you evidently were not the one who placed the $500 challenge to anyone who could find evidence of Pre-Trib Rapture prior to Darby.
So here's another example of pre-Darby accurate understanding of prophetic Scriptures . . . this one from p 42 of LaHay's THE RAPTURE: Who Will Face the Tribulation? Quix's extra emphases, of course.
Reverend Morgan Edwards was a Baptist pastor in Philadelphia who included a discussion on the pre-Tribulation return of Christ for His church in his book Millenium, Last Days Novelties, written in
Although he saw only a three-and-a-half-year Tribulation, he definitely saw the Rapture occur before the Tribulation. What is even more interesting is that he claimed he had written the same thing as early as
He may have been influenced by John Gill before him or even others whose writings or teachings were available at that time but have not been preserved.
In terms of the earlier convoluted mish mash about Pseudo-Ephrem . . . I don't recall any of that 'pretzel-pseudo-logic' as removing the very early mention of Pre-Trib Rapture from the record. The efforts were largely to be dismissive and minimizing of the relevence of that point. Might have been a slick strategy if it weren't so clunky and obvious.
It is amazing to me . . . that sane Calvinists . . . at least presumeably . . . WHO NORMALLY HAVE THE GOOD SENSE TO TAKE VIRTUALLY ALL OTHER SCRIPTURES LITERALLY WHEN REMOTELY POSSIBLE/PROBABLE-- suddenly turn lilly livered, shakey kneed and muddle-headed when it comes to prophecy Scriptures.
Now the psychologist part of me finds that very puzzling. I wonder what the explanation is. There's all this pontification and stridency about election, NONMarian understandings of Scripture etc. etc. etc. etc. all VERY LITERAL interpretations of Scripture.
But SUDDENLY, when a prophecy Scripture pops up-- ALL HAS TO BE QUICKLY, CONVOLUTEDLY, PRETZEL-PSEUDO-LOGICALLY SPIRITUALIZED, RATIONALIZED, HOMOGENIZED, TWISTED, SLICED, DICED AND NEUTERED in the seemingly vain, arrogant, insecure and fearful defense against the plain literal understanding that God said what He meant and meant what He said. Maybe we should call this perspective by those typically literalists EXCEPT FOR PROPHECY . . .
I realize that actually it's probably a function of some joker's personal psychology and political influences amongst Calvinists et al way back when. But it's still sad to observe at this critical era in history.
Also, Margret Macdonald did not have visions of a pre-tribulation rapture, but rather a posttrib one. Ryrie states,
As for the very young and chronically ill Margaret Macdonald, we can only truthfully label her as a 'confused rapturist' with elements of partial rapturism, posttribulationism, perhaps midtribulationalism, but never pretribulationism' ( Charles C.Ryrie, What we Should Know About the Rapture, p.72, cited in The Orgins of Dispensationalism, The Darby Factor, Larry V. Crutchfield, p.191)