February 25, 2021
As early as the turn of the 20th century, Christian writers began to produce novels about the Rapture of the righteous, the rise of the Antichrist, Tribulation, Armageddon, and final judgment. In 1905, an Ohio physician named Joseph Burroughs published one of the earliest known Rapture novels,
Titan, Son of Saturn. The title’s Titan refers to the now easily recognized Antichrist character, “a young Greek, who is to unite the radical Socialists and lead them in a world-wide effort to destroy the Christian Church.” Burroughs’s preface states that the novel was not the mere product of his imagination, but that it threw “a searchlight out over the consecutive distant events that are surely coming to the Church.”