Robert Culver on the Rapture

In his book Daniel and the Latter Days, Robert D. Culver wrote:

I must assert that the precise relation of the rapture of the church to the coming Great Tribulation has been purposely veiled for moral reasons. I have heard and read the arguments of the pre-, mid-, and post-tribulationists, and have been much impressed by many of them, to say nothing of the evidence of Scripture that I have surveyed in preparing this book. I have the personally expressed opinions of the heads of at least three premillennial schools of higher learning that any just presentation of this subject by a premillennialist must recognize these three respectable opinions. E. S. English's series in Our Hope magazine entitled "Rethinking the Rapture" was, I think, a harbinger of more gracious understanding of our differences in matters of this sort.

My copy of Culver's book is the 1977 Revised Edition. Since then, of course, the Prewrath Rapture system has been formulated. I sometimes think of it as a Neo-Posttrib view. It is a modified posttrib system. Some will prefer to use the word "refined." Its proponents are currently more vocal than classic futuristic posttribbers and there is a strong affinity between these two camps.

No doubt proponents of the prewrath view would be tempted to think that had Culver been aware of this new system, he would have embraced it as the correct view. Yet Culver's hope of a "harbinger of more gracious understanding" hasn't been realized. Rapture timing discussions almost inevitably devolve into heated debates.