1 Thessalonians 4:17 and the Meaning of “to Meet”: “Meeting the Dignitary” or “Retrieving the Bride”?

Almost every dispensational scholar who holds to the pretribulational rapture has had to face what Charles Ryrie identified over 40 years ago as "the intellectual attack." In brief this attack, in one form or another, suggests that serious, critical scholarship has, for sometimes rather vague and other times very technical reasons, abandoned the notion of a pre-tribulational rapture. This paper deals with one of those supposedly technical reasons...