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by Steven L. McAvoy

    Author, educator, Bible teacher, student evangelist, and organizer, Rene Pache (1904-1979) served as vice-chairman of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) from 1947 to 1963, director of Emmaus Bible and Missionary Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland from 1947 to his retirement in 1971, and as a frequent lecturer at Aix-en-Provence Theological Seminary (France).

   Pache (pronounced posh) was raised in a Christian home by a godly mother. His father died when he was ten. Pache received a doctorate in law at Lausanne. As a lawyer, he joined the business staff of CIBA (a large chemical works) at Basle, Switzerland. It was there he was converted at the age of twenty-four through reading a Bible that he had purchased. With only one year of Bible school (at age twenty-seven), Pache was largely self-taught. He was significantly influenced by the Scofield Reference Bible and instrumental in its publication in French.

   His Christian ministry began with pioneer evangelistic work in the suburbs of Paris while he attended Nogent Bible School in France. He organized student evangelistic training camps during the early 1930s, which took on international character in 1936 when IFES was established in Switzerland and in France due largely to Pache. His work with IFES took him to western and central Europe, the Balkan States, and North Africa. He was closely associated with a number of missions, and he sometimes fellowshipped with the Plymouth Brethren. After his retirement, he served as chairman of the Emmaus Publications Committee. He was instrumental in the French publication of the New Bible Dictionary and New Bible Commentary. He had close associations with Scripture Union in London. Pache is said to have possessed a brilliant mind and phenomenal memory. The story is told that Charles E. Fuller was once visiting the Institute, speaking to the student body. He remarked, "Do you know, I've traveled all over the world and I can always find someone who can quote Galatians 2:20, but I've never found anyone who can quote Galatians 2:19." Whereupon, Dr. Pac he promptly brought the house down by quoting 2:19 from memory.

   Pache authored fourteen books that appeared in at least ten languages. Four of his works were translated and published in English by Moody Press: The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, translated by J. D. Emerson, 1954; The Return of Christ, translated by William Sanford LaSor, 1955; The Future Life, translated by Helen I. Needham, 1962; The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, translated by Helen I. Needham, 1969, which is still used as a text in many Bible schools and seminaries.

   In his theological views, Pache was conservative, dispensational, premillennial, and pretribulational. But Pache's pretribulational view of the rapture of the church differed somewhat from that of mainstream pretribulationism as held by Scofield, Gaebelein, Gray, Moody Bible Institute, Chafer, Walvoord, Dallas Theological Seminary, and others. Though uncertain whether Pache would have accepted the label, his view of the time of the Rapture could be labeled midweek pretribulationism. Pache understood the Tribulation period to be three and one-half years in length. What relationship he saw between Daniel's Seventieth Week and the Tribulation period is not disclosed. In his writings, he neither refers to nor discusses Daniel's prophecy of seventy weeks (Dan. 9:24--27). Apparently, Pache understood only the last half of Daniel's Seventieth Week, as consisting of the Tribulation period. For Pache, the event that marks the beginning of the Great Tribulation is the rapture of the church. Also distinct from mainstream dispensational, premillennial, pretribulationism was Pache's view that the woman of Revelation 12 refers to the people of God, consisting of both Jew and Gentile.

   On most other eschatological issues, Pache was typical of mainstream dispensational, premillennial, pretribulationism. He adopted and used what he called a literal and symbolic method of interpretation that called first for the literal, simplest, plain sense of Scripture.

   He distinguished between Israel and the church, saw a future for national Israel, and took a futurist view of Revelation 4-22.