"The rapture is a recent American concept" was what I caught from hearing a bit of a Fresh Air with Terry Gross interview with Jonathan Kirsch on this new book, A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization.

I want to listen to the whole interview because it reminds me of when I was a part of the Jesus Movement in the late 60's/early 70's. I began to be bothered that so many of the central teachings had a very tenuous relationship to anything biblical. The leaders held up the bible and quoted from it but the teachings that followed were not coming from those verses. They presented themselves as bible-based and so in the tradition of the early followers of Jesus. I knew many of the practices came out of the American religious movements of the early 19th century but I didn't realize how much of the teaching had been invented then also.

In this entry on Chuck Smith and his son of Calvery Chapel, it says that he "deemphasized theological sophistication ... But he remained an old-school biblical literalist." I feel so distant from the beliefs of these "biblical literalists."