Coleman manages to take boring sounding technical words like "eschatology" and explain them in everyday language. In this essay he looks at modern and historical ideas about the end times and helps us understand how the New Church perspective may fit within the common categories of thought on the subject. And just how does Nicholas Cage feature? -Editor

Will you be left behind at the rapture? If you live in North America—and quite possibly further afield—chances are you have at least a vague idea of what that question means. It calls to mind visions of a literal apocalypse, with the “saved” being taken up into the sky while the world descends into 7-year tribulation, at the end of which 144,000 more are saved and the world is destroyed. This is perhaps the most influential view of “end times” in modern western culture, popularized especially by Hal Lindsey in the 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth and in more recent years by the “Left Behind” series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins—soon to be a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage! (No, really.)

But what many people do not realize is that this particular theology of the end times—or to put it more formally, this “eschatology”—is less than two hundred years old, and has been popular for significantly less time than that.