1 Thessalonians 4:17
1 Thessalonians 4:1717After that, we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord.
Watchtower treatment of ("we the living who survive will, together with them, be caught away in clouds to meet the Lord in the air") understands "caught away" as a symbolic description of the anointed being gathered to the heavenly class without implying a visible bodily event. The verse is held together with the 1914 invisible-parousia framework: Christ's coming is already underway, discerned spiritually; the "meeting in the air" is a spiritual encounter for the 144,000, not a visible rapture of all believers.
Read 4:17 alongside and . The angels at the ascension told the apostles Jesus "will come in the same manner as you have seen him going into the sky" — visibly, bodily, with a cloud. in the NWT says "every eye will see him, and those who pierced him." sits inside that same picture: the Lord descending with a shout, a trumpet, the voice of an archangel (4:16), the dead raised, the living gathered, a meeting in clouds. None of that reads as a covertly-discerned presence. Whether a Protestant holds to a pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation, post-tribulation, amillennial, or postmillennial scheme — every tradition reads the final return as visible and public. The verse does not require a dispensational rapture to refute the 1914 invisible parousia; it requires only that the angels of meant what they said about "the same manner."