Ben Carson tells interviewer of his Christian understandings of End of The World

www.washingtonpost.com/ (Sally Quinn, interviewer)


There are things Carson, a Seventh-day Adventist, does not believe. He dismisses the “Rapture” — the idea, embraced by many evangelicals, that at some point before the last days described in the book of Revelation, many Christians will literally be, as predicted in the New Testament, “caught up together … in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
Carson doesn't share that view. “I don’t see any evidence for that in the Bible,” he says.
He also does not believe in hell: “I don't believe there is a physical place where people go and are tormented. No. I don't believe that,” he says.
But Carson does believe in God — though he can't quite describe the divine. “There’s no man who can explain God, or he would be God. ... He’s a force that doesn’t believe in dictating and gives you a choice: whether you want to be associated with Him or not. It can provide enormous strength and power if you do. And He has been an integral part of my life. There are many things I would have never taken on in the medical had I not felt that He was behind me.”
And he believes in the idea of heaven a physical place. “The Bible says when you die, you know, there is no soul that kind of floats away. But essentially, when you die, the next thing you know is the coming of Christ because you don’t know anything when you’re dead. If you’re dead for a second or a thousand years, it’s the same. But when he comes, according to the book of First Corinthians, that the sound of the archangel will rise and that’s when things happen.”