What do the Methodists believe about eschaology?

[SuperBunny]

Do they believe in the post-trib theory or are some of the pre-trib. Do they have an "official" position?

 

[countrymousenc]

United Methodists are traditionally post-millenial, although recently writers such as Tim Lahaye have become popular with the laity.

 

[SuperBunny]

Is post-millenial the same as post-trib? What is the difference? Tim LaHaye wrote fictional books about a pre-trib rapture? How much are they influenced by this? I am post-trib, and I believe in God's protection for some in times of hardship but I cannot make out or lie to myself about what the woman going to the wildnerness for a few years really means. That is not saying a definite mid-trib rapture. I don't know what it means. Maybe some do know. But I don't.

 

[countrymousenc]

Is post-millenial the same as post-trib? What is the difference? Tim LaHaye wrote fictional books about a pre-trib rapture? How much are they influenced by this? I am post-trib, and I believe in God's protection for some in times of hardship but I cannot make out or lie to myself about what the woman going to the wildnerness for a few years really means. That is not saying a definite mid-trib rapture. I don't know what it means. Maybe some do know. But I don't.

Post-mil is not the same as post-trib. Post-millenialists and amillenialists do not literalize the "rapture" passage found in 1st Thessalonlans chapter 4. Instead, they see the "catching up" as a spiritual reality describing the same king of change that Paul wrote about in 1 Corinthians 15, in which he described this change as being clothed in immortality. Also, amillenialists view the Great Tribulation as having been Nero's persecution of the Church rather than as something to happen in the future. I'm not sure whether post-millenialists agree with that, but I think they do. Neither believe, as dispensationalists (or premillenialists) do, that the millenium is a literal 1000 year period in which Christ returns to a physical temple in the geographical city of Jerusalem to reign before destroying and replacing the physical creation. That belief is historically called "chiliasm" and was rejected by the apostle John himself and condemned as heresy in one of the early Church councils. It was resurrected in the 19th century by the Irvingites and John Nelson Darby, whose influence trickled down to the 20th century here in the U.S. through men such as C.I. Scofield and Lewis Sperry Chafer.