A Theology of Escape
By Dennis P. Allan
May/Jun 26
In the early morning hours of Saturday Feb. 28, United States President Donald Trump posted a video to his social media platform, Truth Social, announcing that the U.S., in partnership with Israel, had launched an attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the initial attack, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, his immediate family, dozens of military leaders, over 180 schoolgirls, and hundreds of civilians across the country were killed.
A few hours later, John Hagee, founder and chair of Christians United for Israel and the pastor of an evangelical megachurch in San Antonio, Texas, delivered a sermon to his congregation while standing in front of a large graphic that read, “God’s Coming: Operation Epic Fury.” In his message, he declared the attack against Iran to be a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
That evening, Sean Feucht, another well-known evangelical leader, posted a YouTube video celebrating the attack against Iran for opening “end time doors” that could lead to millions of Iranian citizens coming to faith in Jesus while dismissing reporting of the schoolgirls’ deaths as Iranian propaganda.
How did we get here? How did a significant portion of American Christians get to a place where the bombing of another nation can be celebrated as a worship event?
Because even though Hagee and Feucht exist at the far-right fringe of Evangelical Christianity, the theology that informs their thinking isn’t a fringe position held by a handful of extremists. Instead, it’s the framework that, for the past century, has most prominently shaped the imagination of Evangelical Christians in the U.S. regarding the end times and Jesus’ Second Coming. Today, this philosophy operates at the highest levels of the nation.
Defining Dispensationalism
The rise of this philosophy began in the 1830s with John Nelson Darby, a British preacher, who sought to address an age-old problem facing fundamentalist Christians and their literalist reading of the Bible. To reconcile what appear to be contradictions between the Old and New Testaments, Darby postulated seven distinct “dispensations,” or distinct ages, of God’s grace in history. Evangelical Christians, who hold to this Dispensationalist theological framework, believe we’re in the sixth “dispensation,” and they’re waiting with eager anticipation for the transition into the seventh and final “age” referred to as the end times.
In Darby’s framework, in the transition from the sixth “dispensation” to the seventh, Christians will be physically removed from the earth in an event called the Rapture, caught up to Heaven before a seven-year period of catastrophic global tribulation. During this seven-year period, nations from all over the world will converge on Israel in a final war. Then, after unimaginable suffering and death, Jesus will return, defeat the nations at war against Israel, and establish a thousand-year reign on Earth.
In 1909, the Oxford University Press published the Scofield Reference Bible (SRB), which included Darby’s Dispensational framework as study notes alongside the biblical text. More than 2 million people purchased the SRB in the first decades after its publication, and more than 10 million copies have been sold in total. Over time, Scofield’s notes became the dominant interpretive lens for reading and understanding the Bible for millions of Americans.
In 1995, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins published the first novel in their Left Behind series which dramatized the Rapture and its aftermath. The series, which has a total of 12 novels, has now sold over 80 million copies. For many evangelicals, Left Behind became their primary education on the “end times.” By the late 20th century, the theological system Darby innovated over a century earlier had become the default framework embraced by much of American Evangelical Christianity. Darby’s model provided an understandable timeline, easily identifiable enemies, and ultimately, for evangelicals, an escape from suffering.
It is important to understand, though, that Dispensationalism isn’t representative of historic, Orthodox Christianity. It has no roots in the first century Christian church, nor in any of the foundational doctrinal creeds developed by the church in the fourth and fifth centuries. It would have been unrecognizable to the early church fathers like John Chrysostom or Augustine, or to the Reformers, such as Martin Luther or John Calvin, or, for that matter, to most Christians throughout the last 2,000 years.
Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant faith tradition has ever taught that Christians get to escape suffering while the rest of the world endures hardship and pain. Darby’s invention, and what modern figures like Hagee and Feucht teach, is a theological novelty that isn’t supported by Christian scholars or theologians who engage with the Bible seriously.
The Bad Fruit of Dispensational End Times Theology
The reason this theological framework produces a specific kind of support among Evangelical Christians for war with Iran is exegetical. In the Old Testament, the prophet Ezekiel describes a coalition of nations led by “Gog, of the land of Magog” against Israel (Ezekiel 38:2, NIV). Dispensationalists read this passage as a literal prediction of a future invasion of modern-day Israel. Among the nations included in Gog’s coalition is Persia, which Dispensationalists identify as modern-day Iran. When read this way, real-world military conflict between Israel and Iran is not a geopolitical crisis, it’s a prophetic signal. This is how Hagee and Feucht can broadcast to their followers that the United States’ military operation against Iran is actually evidence of God’s unfolding plan.
According to this Dispensationalist framework, any Muslims who die are not cause for grief, but are instead confirmation that God’s timeline is advancing on schedule, and Jesus’ return is imminent. The violence, then, isn’t tragic, but functional. Women, children, and even entire cities become instruments that bring the end times closer, when Evangelical Christians are delivered up to Heaven and everyone else is damned.
What Dispensationalists fail to reckon with is what their theological framework means for the rest of the world. Only Christians get to escape suffering through the Rapture. Everyone else is left behind to face tribulation, pain, and ultimately eternal judgment. When Evangelical Christians who ascribe to this particular “end times” theology express excitement about wars they believe will bring about Jesus’ return, they’re instrumentalizing the suffering of every non-Christian in the world as the collateral damage of their own salvation.
Reclaiming the Way of Jesus
Christianity and Islam both affirm that Jesus will return. In the Quran, ‘Isa (alayhi as-salaam) is spoken about as a sign of the Hour. The Bible affirms that Jesus will return and when He does, He’ll make all things new.
But none of the biblical authors present Jesus’ return as a means of escape from this world. Instead, Jesus’ return is always depicted as the renewal of it. The apostle Paul, in a letter he wrote to the ancient church in Rome, described all of Creation as “groaning” in anticipation of redemption (Romans 8:22). According to Paul, Jesus would never rescue those He most likes and abandon everyone else. Then, in Revelation, the final book in the Bible, Heaven is depicted as coming down to earth, a city that descends from the heavens, and where God dwells with humanity and wipes away every tear (Revelation 21:1-4). The end of the biblical narrative is not escape, but restoration.
On July 21, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian, wrote a letter to his friend, Eberhard Bethge, from inside a Nazi prison. In it he wrote, “During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. . . I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.” For Bonhoeffer, faithful Christian practice meant entering into suffering as a way of participating in Jesus’ own life. For Bonhoeffer, escape from suffering while others endure pain is not Christianity.
A theology that rejoices when another nation is bombed, interpreting that military action as a step toward one’s own escape and exaltation has abandoned Jesus. Jesus, Himself, wept over Jerusalem. He didn’t instrumentalize its destruction as a necessary step towards His crucifixion and resurrection (Luke 19:41). Jesus took on pain and suffering on behalf of others, including His enemies. When Jesus/‘Isa returns, it will signify the return of a prophet whose posture towards the world has always been one of self-sacrifice and self-emptying, not triumphant abandonment.
As followers of Jesus, Christians are meant to share in their neighbors’ successes and failures, joys and sufferings. The people who are being killed by the United States’ bombing of Iran are human beings made in the image of God. Their lives, and the lives of their families are sacred. No human being is meant to be reduced to an instrument used to bring about another person’s exaltation. Any Christian theology that cannot see this has lost the plot of its own holy text.
Dennis P. Allan is a pastor at Garden City Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and was a 2025 Public Life Fellow at the Center for Christianity and Public Life in Washington D.C.
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