The Leftovers — what the Rapture is, and isn't

What the work does

Tom Perrotta published The Leftovers in 2011. HBO adapted the novel as a series (Damon Lindelof and Perrotta, 2014-2017), with Perrotta also co-creating the show. The premise is set out in the first minutes of the pilot: on a single day in October, approximately two percent of the world’s population vanishes simultaneously, without warning, leaving clothes and belongings behind. The series follows the surviving population three years later, attempting to live in a world whose meaning has been broken.

The premise deliberately invokes Rapture iconography while undercutting it. Departure is the key event; the rest of the show is about what cannot be explained.

How the show undercuts the Rapture frame

The series stages several explicit destabilisations of the standard Rapture narrative:

• The departed are not chosen by belief. Among those who vanish are atheists, the indifferent, criminals, and infants. The pattern is statistical, not theological.
• No theological explanation is offered. Various religious movements emerge in the show’s diegesis, each claiming an interpretation. None is endorsed by the narrative voice.
• The remaining population includes faithful Christians. Including clergy whose congregations were departed in disproportionate or proportionate numbers. The series follows one such clergyman, Reverend Matt Jamison, whose attempts to fit the event into a moral frame are part of the show’s argument.
• The event’s name is deliberate. The show calls it the Sudden Departure, not the Rapture. The vocabulary distance is part of the project.

The show is not arguing for or against the Rapture. It is arguing that the categories the Rapture vocabulary supplies do not map onto the event as the show depicts it.

The biblical text the Rapture doctrine is built on

The pre-tribulation Rapture as a distinct event — Christians being taken from earth before a coming tribulation — is built primarily on a particular reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17:

“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord.” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, BSB)

The decisive Greek verb is harpazō (ἁρπάζω), translated caught up in the BSB. BDAG s.v. harpazō: “to seize, to snatch (suddenly), to take by force, to catch away.” The Latin Vulgate translates the verb as rapiemur — we shall be snatched — from rapio, the same root that gives English rape, ravish, and (eventually) Rapture.

The passage itself is Paul addressing the Thessalonian church’s pastoral concern about believers who had died before Christ’s return. Paul’s answer is that the dead and the living will be together at the parousia (coming) of the Lord. The passage describes a single event in Paul’s vocabulary: the descent of the Lord, the resurrection of the dead in Christ, the joining of the living to the dead.

The reading of this passage as referring to a distinct Rapture event prior to a separate second coming requires the further interpretive move of distinguishing two comings — one for the saints, one with the saints — separated by a tribulation period. This distinction is not in the Thessalonians passage itself. It is supplied by an interpretive framework.

Where the framework comes from

The pre-tribulation Rapture as a distinct event from the second coming is a 19th-century theological development.

John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), an Irish Anglican-turned-Plymouth-Brethren minister, articulated the dispensationalist framework that includes the pre-tribulation Rapture. Darby’s premillennial dispensationalism distinguished seven dispensations of divine dealing with humanity, with a future tribulation period (seven years, based on Daniel 9) preceded by the Rapture of the Church.

The Scofield Reference Bible (1909), edited by Cyrus Scofield, transmitted Darby’s framework to the American evangelical mainstream by printing the dispensationalist reading in its notes.

The Left Behind series (Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, 1995-2007) brought the framework to a wide popular audience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries — and is the proximate cultural background against which The Leftovers writes.

The pre-tribulation Rapture has not been the position of:

• The Eastern Orthodox tradition, which does not distinguish a Rapture from the second coming.
• The Roman Catholic tradition, which holds a single second coming.
• Most Reformed traditions, which read 1 Thessalonians 4 as referring to the single parousia.
• Most mainline Protestant traditions, comparably.

The pre-tribulation Rapture is held primarily within American dispensationalist evangelicalism, where it has been mainstream for roughly a century.

For the standing entry on Left Behind and Darbyite eschatology, see Left Behind — Rapture theology and its history. For the underlying Greek of apocalypse, see Apocalypse — the underlying Greek.

To read 1 Thessalonians 4 in other translations:

• 1 Thessalonians 4 — NIV →
• 1 Thessalonians 4 — ESV →
• 1 Thessalonians 4 — NLT →

What this entry does not argue

This entry does not argue against the pre-tribulation Rapture doctrine. The doctrine has its serious proponents and a serious lineage in American dispensationalism. It documents that the doctrine is one interpretive framework among several within historical Christianity, that it is 19th-century in origin, and that The Leftovers uses its iconography while explicitly destabilising the doctrinal claim.