Coming soon?

It is almost universally believed among evangelicals that Jesus is coming soon. This conviction is obvious among those who think that Jacques Chirac or Vladimir Putin might be the Antichrist. But even evangelicals saner eschatologies cling to the belief that Jesus could be returning any day.

In his excellent commentary on 1 John, Gary Burge of Wheaton goes through what appear to me to be a series of gymnastics moves to make John's statement about "the last hour" translate into "Jesus is always at the door." John, he says "may be speaking theologically rather than chronologically." Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, Christians "were experiencing the last days or that last times, as if to say, all that was left for history to culminate was for Jesus to return a second time." The era after Jesus would be characterized by "a cascade of falsehood and evil putting the church on the extreme defensive." Citing Newman (whom he oddly identifies as "a nineteenth-century pastor" - perhaps Zondervan is chary about favorable citations of Catholic converts!), Burge suggests that history changed direction at the time of Jesus; history got right to the edge of the end, and then took a left turn so that from now on it runs "not towards the end, but along it, and on the brink of it."

The New Testament teaches that Christ is coming "soon," but the New Testament was written 2000 years ago, and the Parousia spoken of by the apostles was imminent for that generation. The apostles were not mistaken, and the only "delay of the Parousia" was a delay of years or decades. I believe these prophecies were fulfilled in the events surrounding the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

Further, many of the biblical descriptions of the future kingdom seem to assume a lengthy period of growth – time for the seed to grow into the largest tree of the field (Matthew 13), for the stone to grow into a mountain that fills the earth (Daniel 2), for the earth to become filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11). I expect that before He returns the Lord will take the time to bring blessing on "thousands of generations" of those who love Him and keep His commandments.

Finally, and drawing not from specific texts but from the "penumbra" of Scripture, it would seem odd if the Lord gave Adam a commission to rule and subdue the earth, sent His Son to die and rise again as the Last Adam to restore humanity to that task, and then ended the whole process after a couple thousand years, just when we were beginning to make a few meager advances in achieving dominion over creation. Humanity – I say it with reverence – would feel more than a little cheated, like a teenager never given a chance to grow up.

Most editions of the Book of Common Prayer has a table for calculating the dates for feast days, and the table can be used up to about the year 6000 AD. I'm with those guys.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, November 05, 2006 at 07:43 AM

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