So when Paul said :”1Thess 5: 16-17 says “The Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the middle of the air”...
are you saying that Paul was incorrect and was speaking blasphemously? Did Paul make all that up based on the ethos you are deriding in your posting?
Or is your position one in which this occurs post tribulationally “at the end of the age”?
I don’t think you are actually anti Scripture so how does your position square with what the Apostle Paul says above?
It is pretty plain it means a carrying off of believers both the raising of the dead in Christ and then those who are alive and in him at the time of the “loud command”!
Is your main disagreement with Protestants over this issue simply about “when” this event is to occur?
1 Thess 5:16-17 is not what you quoted. 1 thess 5:16-17 is
“ 16 Rejoice always. 17 Pray without ceasing
You probably mean 1 thess 4
St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonian Christians because they were worried about those who died before Christ’s return. Many in the ancient world believed that a person simply ceased to exist upon death, as do many modern unbelievers. There seems to have been a rumor in Thessalonica that the dead Christians had lost out on any chance of a physical resurrection. St. Paul assures them that it was not so. In fact, “the dead in Christ will rise first” to meet Christ, and those still alive at the second coming will immediately follow them. But all will meet Christ at that time.
Rapturists make a point of the fact that we will “meet the Lord in the air”—the Lord who has come “in the clouds.” They infer from this that Christ will not actually touch down on terra firma and that we will go back to Heaven with Christ for the duration of a seven-year Great Tribulation. If so many people did not accept this explanation, I would dismiss it immediately as silly. The word St. Paul uses for meeting the Lord “in the air” is aer, the Greek word for atmosphere. This same word is used to describe Satan as “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). Yet no one would claim that, because of this word, Satan has no influence over people who keep their feet firmly planted on earth. A consistent rapturist reading of this word here would mean that only astronauts, balloonists, pilots, and airplane passengers are influenced by Satan’s power. No, when Christ returns to the earth’s atmosphere, He has returned to earth. Read the verses again! We will meet Christ, but it will be at His second coming to earth. Any other use of the language stretches credibility.
Furthermore you are conflating the Revelation of john with the writings of Paul.
Furthermore, different non groups outside orthodoxy have different concepts of this. Not all who call themselves “protestant” are rapturists.
Anglicans, lutherans, adventists, jehovah’s witnesses etc all have differing beliefs on this.
Also note that the original poster of this article is an Evangelical. He just sees the pre tribulation rapture as the 19th century invention that it is.
“Belief in a pre-tribulational rapture . . . contradicts all three chapters in the New Testament that mention the tribulation and the rapture together (Mark 13:24–27; Matt. 24:26–31; 2 Thess. 2:1–12).
. . . The theory is so biblically bankrupt that the usual defense is made using three passages that do not even mention a tribulation (John 14:3; 1 Thess. 4:17; 1 Cor. 15:52). These are important passages, but they have not had one word to say about a pre-tribulational rapture. . . .
Pre-tribulationism is biblically bankrupt and does not know it”
(The Word of Truth, 556–7).