The second Article of the Christian Creed is, in the version of the Creed we call the Apostles’, “and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord”. The next five Articles after this one, comprise a lengthy clarifying statement of Who this Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, in Whom we confess our faith, is. Together these make up six of the twelve Articles, or half the Creed. The seventh Article, which is our subject today, is the last of these.
The seventh
Article pertains to a matter which has proven very controversial and divisive
among Christians especially in the last century and a half. The controversy and division is not usually
over the content of the Article, which is a fairly simple assertion, but about
the very complex systems of interpretation that theologians have built up
around it.
The Article
in the Apostles’ Creed is inde
venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos.
Our Book of Common Prayer
renders this in English as “From thence he shall come to judge the quick and
the dead.” The inde or “From thence” points back to the previous Article in which
Jesus is confessed to have ascended to Heaven where He sits at the right hand
of God. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan
version of this Article is καὶ πάλιν ἐρχόμενον μετὰ
δόξης κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς· οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται τέλος. In the Book
of Common Prayer this is translated as “and he shall come again, with
glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have
no end.” As you can see, the Article is
quite simple in both Creeds. In most
cases the extra words in the conciliar Creed simply make explicit what would
already be understood in confessing the material common to both Creeds, i.e.,
that the predicting coming is πάλιν –again – and μετὰ δόξης - with
glory. The longest piece of additional
material in the conciliar Creed - οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται τέλος – whose
kingdom shall have no end – is an assertion implicit in calling the Son of God
by the title “Christ” for this is precisely what “Messiah” or “Christ” means,
the predicted “Anointed One” who would arise from David’s seed to rule as king
over Israel and all the earth forever.
This is about as basic as a confession of faith in the
Second Coming gets. The First Coming of
Christ was in humility, to submit to arrest, false accusations, unjust
condemnation, torture, and death on the Cross, to accomplish our
salvation. The Second Coming will be in
judgement on both those living at the time – it just doesn’t sound right to refer
to these in English in any other way than the expression used in the Book of Common Prayer here and in the
Authorized Bible “the quick” – and the dead.
This is precisely what the New Testament says about the Second Coming
and so we find in this Article about the Second Coming the entire Quattuor
Novissima (Four Last Things) – Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell – encapsulated.
It is when eschatology goes beyond a simple assertion of
belief in the Second Coming, the Final Judgement and by implication the Four
Last Things, and the eternal Kingdom of Christ that matters get controversial.
The writers of the New Testament speak of the Second Coming
as an event they expect to live to see.
This is not because they had been misled about the timing of the event,
as liberals who reject the infallibility of the Scriptures claim, much less
because they were right about the timing and it took place two millennia ago as
preterism, a deadly heresy of our own day claims. It is because they paid heed to what Jesus
Himself had said about this event – that the timing was a total mystery,
unknown to anyone but the Father, and
that rather than unprofitably looking into this, they should maintain an
attitude of watchfulness, expecting His Coming at any moment, because it will
come like a thief in the night. These
instructions, clearly, were not just for the Apostles, or even for all of
Jesus’ first generation disciples, but the entire faith society that Christ
would establish through the Apostles, the Church. The instructions were intended to show us how
to avoid the opposite errors we were most likely in our fallen human nature to
fall into the further away we got from the Ascension without the Second Coming
having occurred, the error of abandoning our watchfulness on the assumption
that it having been so long it will be still longer until He comes if He does
at all, and the error of thinking that the closer we get to the Second Coming
the less the warnings against date-setting apply.
Attempts to develop a more detailed eschatology than what we
find in the Creed inevitably involve attempts to decipher and interpret the
Book of Revelation, the last book in the published order of the New Testament,
taken by nearly everybody to be the last book of the Bible to have been written
– it is usually dated to the 90’s of the first century – and the last book of
the New Testament to be accepted as canonical by the Church. It is also the hardest book of the New
Testament to interpret or rather the easiest book to misinterpret. It is written in vivid allegorical imagery,
the meaning of some of which is explained in the text, for example, that the
dragon refers to Satan, while much of it is left without such explanation, and
all or nearly all of it, makes allusion in one way or another to something in
the Old Testament. There has never been
a true consensus as to its meaning. The
terms premillennialism, a-millennialism, and postmillennialism, denoting the
three major competing systems of eschatology, pertain to the interpretation of
the thousand years of the twentieth chapter of the Book of Revelation. None of these can truly claim to be the
small-o orthodox, or small-c catholic view, if we use the Vincentian canon as
the standard of what is small-o orthodox and small-c catholic. The tests of the Vincentian canon are
antiquity, universality, and consent.
Premillenialism passes the test of antiquity. It was the view held by the Apostolic Fathers
or at least the Apostolic Fathers whose views on the matter can be determined
from their extent writings – St. Justin Martyr, St. Polycarp of Smyrna, St.
Papias of Hierapolis, the author of the Epistle
of Barnabas – and by many of the most important second century Fathers,
including St. Irenaeus, St. Hippolytus of Rome and the apologist
Tertullian. It fails the test of
universality, however, having virtually disappeared for most of Church
history. If any of these views passes
the test of universality it is a-millennialism, but it arguably fails the test
of antiquity, for while very old, there is no evidence of it prior to the
second century, and the earliest evidence for it is among heretics like Marcion
of Synope. The version of
a-millennialism that grew to become near universal arguably owes its influence
in the orthodox ancient Churches to St Clement of Alexandria and especially his
protégé Origen. Origen’s reputation as
a doctor of the ancient Church – he was her first real systematic theologian –
helped a-millennialism to overcome the bad reputation of its early heretical
associations around the time that the premillennialism of the Apostolic Fathers
and the succeeding generation fell into disrepute through association with the
Montanist sect. Postmillennialism
passes none of the tests, none of the three interpretations pass all three. In this, perhaps, we see the wisdom of the
Lutheran tradition in taking the same position with regards to the antilegomena
– the books of the New Testament whose canonicity was disputed in the early
centuries – that all orthodox Protestants take with regards to the
deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books of the Old Testament, i.e., leave them
in the Bible instead of removing them like hyper-Protestants, but do not apply
to them to establish a doctrine. (1)
Nothing in the Creed requires support from the antilegomena for its
establishment. Neither premillennialism
nor a-millennialism nor postmillennialism can be established without
interpreting the most difficult of the New Testament antilegomena.
Contrary to a claim that is often heard, chiefly among
Eastern Orthodox theologians, the phrase “whose kingdom shall have no end” was
not added to the conciliar Creed to condemn chiliasm, as premillennialism was
called in the early Church. The phrase
was added to the Creed by the Council of Constantinople (381 AD), and one of
the heretics condemned at that Council was Appollinaris of Laodicea, but
Appollinaris was condemned for denying the full humanity of Jesus Christ, not
for his eschatology. It was the third
Article of the Creed, not the seventh, that was expanded to counter Appollinaris. The phrase “whose kingdom shall have no end”,
taken from the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary in the first chapter of the
Gospel According to St. Luke was added to counter a different heretic,
Marcellus, who taught that the Trinity was a temporary arrangement, that
Christ’s Kingdom would end when the Son handed the Kingdom back to His Father,
and dissolved His Personhood into that of the Father. (2) By the time the Second Ecumenical
Council rolled around, chiliasm had become a minority viewpoint, but it was
certainly not condemned by the Council.
It was still taught by the leading Western theologian of the day, St.
Augustine of Hippo, who did not renounce it for a-millennialism until early in
the next century amidst the events that led him to write The City of God.
Indeed, the beauty of the simplicity of the seventh Article
of the Creed is precisely that it does not speak to matters such as these one
way or another but simply affirms what is essential to the Christian Faith with
regards to the Second Coming.
One of the reasons for the shift away from chiliasm and
towards a-millennialism in the centuries leading up to the first Ecumenical
Councils was the growing idea that the premillennialists were repeating the
mistake of the first century Jews. The
first century Jews were looking for the Messiah to come as a Conqueror Who
would deliver them from the rule of Gentile empires like the Roman, restore
David’s Kingdom, and establish that Kingdom over all the earth so that the
tables were turned and the Gentile nations would come pay homage to the Son of
David in Jerusalem. Those who rejected
Jesus as the Christ, did so because His Coming was very different from that, He
came and submitted to the injustice of being tortured and crucified, to offer
Himself up as the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world. Those who held to chiliasm believed that the
mistake of these Jews was to fail to recognize that Christ would come twice and
to miss Him because they were looking for Him as He would appear at His Second
Coming. The a-millennialists came to
believe that the mistake of the Jews was deeper than this, that they were wrong
to look for a political deliverer rather than a spiritual Saviour, and that the
chiliasts were wrong to borrow Jewish apocalyptic millenarianism and apply it
to the Second Coming of Christ.
In our day that reasoning has been pressed to an extreme
that goes much further than the a-millennialists would allow for into a denial
not just of premillennialism but of the Second Coming as we confess it in the
seventh Article of the Creed. The
origins of this heresy go back to the Counter Reformation in which Jesuit
theologians in response to certain Protestants who misapplied various negative
characters in the Book of Revelation to the Roman Communion and its leadership
argued that the passages these Protestants were misapplying referred to first
century individuals and institutions and so were long-fulfilled. Later, this sort of argument would catch on
in response to the revival of premillennialism in the nineteenth century. The revival of premillennialism was itself a
response to the spread of the apostasy of liberalism throughout
Protestantism. Many conservative
Protestants looked to premillennialism to help understand this apostasy and in
the hopes that it would provide them with a means of combatting it. While some turned to premillennialism in
basically the same form that it had in the early centuries of the Church, newer
forms of premillennialism were also developed.
The one that gained the most influence among evangelical and
fundamentalist Protestants is the dispensationalist premillennialism taught by
John Nelson Darby, the Church of Ireland curate who became one of the founders
of the hyper-separatist sect the Plymouth Brethren and popularized among other
Protestants by the Scofield Reference
Bible. This form of premillennialism
is characterized by a hermeneutic that makes hair-splitting distinctions and consequently
multiplies events – it divides the Second Coming in two, His Coming for the
Church then at a later date His Coming in Judgement, it divides the Final
Judgement into at least two Judgements, usually more, and so on.
The most important flaw in its theology, however, is that it interprets
the present period – the Church Age or the Age of Grace, between Pentecost and
The Rapture – as a parenthesis in the Age of Law, which will be resumed and
wrapped up after the Rapture. One of the
implications of this, that has become more explicit in dispensationalist
theology over time, is that it treats the God of the Bible as being basically a
tribal deity, Who only really cares about national Israel, and Who has allowed
other nations to worship Him in the present for the purpose of making national
Israel jealous. This contrasts heavily
with the strong Old Testament emphasis that the God Who made a Covenant with
Israel was the God of the whole world Who made His Covenant with Abraham and
his descendants in order to bless all the nations of the world. Similarly, the idea of the Age of Grace as a
parenthesis in the Age of Law is a direct contradiction of St. Paul’s third
chapter in his epistle to the Galatians in which the Law is the parenthesis in
God’s program of salvation based on Promise and Grace. One error breeds its opposite, and in response
to this departure from historic, traditional, and Scriptural orthodoxy, several
theologians adopted the old Jesuit preterism and flushed it out into the claim
that all Biblical prophecy has been fulfilled, that the Second Coming and the
Final Judgement and the Resurrection all took place in the first century, in
the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD 70.
Dispensationalism thought up multiple versions of the Second Coming, the
Final Resurrection, the Final Judgement, and every other simple eschatological
concept, needlessly complicating it all, in order to fit everything into its
idea of a Divine Program of History that is ultimately all about national
Israel. The preterists, by contrast,
collapsed every prophesied event – the Second Coming, the Final Resurrection, and
the Final Judgement – into a single event, the divine Judgement on national
Israel in the destruction of the Temple, also making everything about the
national Israel. It is quite obvious
from the standpoint of historical, traditional, orthodoxy that
dispensationalism and preterism share the same unhealthy obsessed fixation on
national Israel, albeit approaching it from opposite perspectives. Preterism, however, takes it to the point of
denying an Article of the Creed. For
all the flaws of the dispensationalist version of premillennialism, it does not
do this. Saying that there will be a
temporary earthly version of the Kingdom of Christ on this earth before it is
translated to the New Earth is not a denial that the Kingdom of Christ will
have no end.
Preterism in its denial of the seventh Article of the Creed
is heresy. While all heresy is serious
this is a particularly deadly one. Every
heresy contains a germ of truth for that is the nature of heresy, to take a
truth and twist it and distort it until it becomes a denial of other
truth. In this case, the truth is that
Jesus spoke prophetically about the destruction of the Temple and the events of
AD 70 in general. Several of His
parables refer to these events and a plainer prediction of the destruction of the
Temple was what promoted His disciples to ask Him about when this would occur
and when His Coming would be. He
answered both questions in the Olivet Discourse. Preterism takes this truth, and twists it to
claim that the judgement upon Israel for rejecting Christ in the destruction of
the Temple was the Final Judgement and fulfilled all prophecy of the Second
Coming including the prophecy of the Final Resurrection which nothing that took
place on AD 70 even remotely resembles. (3)
This repeats the error of Hymeneaus and Philetus that St. Paul warned
St. Timothy against: “whom concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection
is past already; and overthrow the faith of some”. (II Tim. 2:18). It
tells Christians not to take the attitude of watchfulness that Jesus Christ
enjoined upon His followers. By telling
Christians that there is no future Second Coming to look for they tell them to disregard
what St. Paul wrote to St. Titus that the “grace of God that bringeth salvation”
and which hath “appeared to all men” i.e., in the First Coming of Christ,
teaches us “that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live
soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; Looking for that blessed
hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;
Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify
unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works”. (Tit. 2:12-14). By denying to Christians what St. Paul calls
our “blessed hope” preterism leaves Christians with no hope. Hope is essential to Christianity, being
linked forever by St. Paul with the faith by which we trust in the grace of God
and the charity, or Christian love, from which all good works must flow, in the
final verse of his much beloved chapter on that love (1 Cor. 13). Preterism, however, essentially takes the
words Lasciate ogne speranza, voi
ch'intrate (Abandon all hope, ye that enter here) that Dante inscribed on
the entrance to hell in his Inferno,
and writes them over the door of the Church.
Against the preterist heresy small o-orthodox Christians
profess our faith that the same Jesus Christ Who visibly ascended to Heaven forty
days after His bodily Resurrection will just as visibly return from Heaven in
the same Resurrected body. The first
time He came, He came to be the Saviour of the world. In His Second Coming He comes as Judge of
the world. The Final Judgement is a Judgement
of the whole world – not just of the generation of Israel that rejected Him-
but of everybody, “the quick” – those living at the time - and “the dead” –
everybody who had ever lived and died (2 Tim. 2:1). The dead will be raised for this Judgement,
as prophesied, both in the Old Testament (Dan. 12:2) and the New (Jn. 5:28-29). The Judgement will be of everyone’s works, everything
they had done including their thoughts and words (Matt. 12:36), because that is
the nature of judgement. Since the
Judge of the whole world is Perfect in His Justice, we know that this Judgement
will not be as depicted in some pagan mythologies, where one’s good deeds are
weighed against one’s bad deeds, with the outcome determined by which side is
heavier. Imagine if earthly temporal human
courts dispensed judgement in this manner, and murderers were let off the hook
because all the people they didn’t kill outweighed the few that they did. It would not resemble justice at all. While the idea of a Final Judgement where we
are held to account for our every thought, word, and deed, and where whatever
good we have done does not offset whatever evil we have done, is a sobering
one, especially since “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”
(Rom. 3:23) it is not something the believer need look forward to with dread
and trepidation because the One Who will be the Judge on that Day is the One “that
died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God,
who also maketh intercession for us” (Rom. 8:34) and from His love we can never
be separated (Rom. 8:38-39). (4)
Trusting that He Who is the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the
world” has saved us by His grace, we look forward to His Coming and the
Judgement, knowing that after this comes the ultimate manifestation of His
Kingdom, the life of which we have begun to live even now in this life in the
Church, and that His Kingdom shall have no end. As John Newton put it:
When we've been here
ten thousand years
Bright, shining as the sun
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we first begun
(2) See Francis X. Gumerlock, “Millennialism and the Early Church Councils: Was Chiliasm Condemned at Constantinople?” Fides et Historia, 36:2 (Summer/Fall 2004), 83-95.
(3) What I just call “preterism” in the text of this essay is sometimes called “full preterism” or “hyper-preterism” to distinguish it from what is sometimes called “partial preterism” which interprets much of the Olivet Discourse and the Book of Revelation as having been fulfilled in AD 70 but affirms a future literal Second Coming, Final Resurrection, and Final Judgement. Since “partial preterism” does not deny an Article of the Faith it is not a heresy and in my opinion it is best not to call it by the same name as the heresy that denies a literal future Second Coming, Final Resurrection, and Final Judgement.
(4) In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus talks about the Final Judgement when the world will be divided into “sheep” and “goats”, each judged by their works, the “sheep” being rewarded for the works of mercy they did to others which the Judge takes as having been done to Himself, the “goats” being punished for their neglect of such works. Real people, of course, are not divided into people who consistently do good at every opportunity and people who never do good. In the goats part of Jesus’ parable we find people who are punished for the evil they have done with the good not being brought in to offset the evil, demonstrating God’s Justice, that He is not like some insane judge who lets a murderer off because of all the people he did not kill. In the sheep part of the parable we find people who are rewarded for the good they have done, with none of the evil they have done being held against them. Both are judged for what they had done, because nobody can be judged for anything other than what they have done. The radical difference in the way in which the works of the one are judged from the manner in which the works of the other are judged is due to the one being “sheep” and the other being “goats”. While it is not spelled out what the basis of the distinction is there is a hint of it in the parable. The Judge accepts the good works the sheep did to others as unto Himself, and takes the goats’ neglect of good works to others as a neglect of Himself. He Who comes at the end of time as Judge, had already come before as Saviour. Those who accept Him as He came in His First Coming are the sheep who will be accepted by Him at His Second Coming. Those who reject Him as He came in His First Coming are the goats who will be rejected by Him at His Second Coming as Judge.
