The Seventh Article – The Second Coming

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

 

 

 

 

 (1)   See the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion for this position with regards to the ecclesiastical books.   “Ecclesiastical books” is the designation the Church Fathers gave to the books and portions of books found in the Greek Septuagint, the Christian Old Testament, that were not found or at least were not extent at the time in the Hebrew Tanakh of the Jews.   The Roman Church calls these “deuterocanonical”, the Eastern Orthodox Church does not give them a separate designation.   They are called “the Apocrypha” in the sixth of the Anglican Articles of Religion and in orthodox Protestant Bibles like the original Authorized Version and Luther’s Bible in which they are placed in their own section between the Testaments.   This is an unfortunate designation because this term was used by the Church Fathers to designate a completely different set of writings.   Dr. Luther, Martin Chemnitz, and other Lutheran Reformers, thought that the seven New Testament books designated as antilegomena should similarly not be applied to in order to establish doctrine – and Dr. Luther similarly segregated them from the homolegoumena, the undisputed books of the New Testament, in his German Bible – but this position was never articulated in the Lutheran Confessions of the Book of Concord.

(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.

 

The Book of Revelation and the Present Situation

 

If someone were to take a poll of orthodox theological historians about which book of the Holy Bible, Old and New Testament, we ought to approach with the greatest amount of humility and the least amount of dogmaticism with regards to its interpretation, I suspect that the Book of Revelation would win hands down. It might even be a unanimous vote. 

The Apocalypse – Greek for “revelation” – of St. John is considered by most Biblical scholars to have been the last book of the New Testament to have been written. It was certainly the last book to be received into the canon by the Church. Its author identifies himself as “John” and traditionally he is believed to have been the St. John who was one of Christ’s Twelve Apostles and also to have been the author of the fourth Gospel and the three Johannine epistles. I have no quarrel with the traditional view and find the so-called “higher critical” arguments against the traditional ascription of authorship for these, or any other of the canonical Scriptures for that matter, to be utterly unconvincing. In the ninth verse of the first chapter he mentions that he was in exile for his faith on the isle of Patmos. The persecution that put him there is usually believed to have been that which occurred in the reign of the Emperor Domitian in the last decade of the first century, although some have argued that it was that which occurred in the reign of Nero. If the latter are correct, this would place the composition of the book around the same time as that of the book of Acts.

The book begins with St. John having a vision in which Jesus Christ appears to him in His heavenly glory and gives him seven messages to be sent to the Churches in Asia – Asia Minor, that is, which is now Turkey – to whom St. John also addresses the book as a whole. These occupy the second and third chapters, after which he has a vision in which a door opens in heaven and an angelic voice summons him up to the throne of God. There he has an extended vision of events filled with vivid imagery taken from the various prophetic books of the Old Testament. These begin with Jesus Christ, depicted as both the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” and the “Lamb that was slain”, taking the scroll that is in the hand of God, being the Only One worthy of doing so, and opening the seven seals one at a time. After this seven angels blow their trumpets. The final trumpet introduces the next seven angels who have the seven bowls of the wrath of God, but before they are poured out upon the earth there is an interlude in which a drama plays out involving a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and crowned with twelve stars, the Son to Whom she gives birth, the seven-headed, ten-horned, red dragon who is “the devil and Satan” and who seeks to devour the Child and wages war against St. Michael and the angels in heaven before being cast out, a beast which rises out of the sea having the same number of heads and horns as the devil and who receives great power and authority from the devil, and a second beast who arises out of the earth with horns like a lamb but who speaks like a dragon, and who makes a great idol of the first beast, makes the whole world worship it, and forces them to bear the mark of the beast. The bowls of wrath are then poured out upon the world, the harlot “Babylon” who rides the beast is destroyed, the armies of the world gather to fight at Armageddon, at which Jesus Christ, leading the armies of heaven, returns to the earth, casts the beast and the false prophet (the second beast) into the Lake of Fire and binds the devil for a thousand years. After the thousand years the devil is released, wages one last war against God and His saints, is judged and cast into the Lake of Fire, after which the Final Judgement of the dead takes place before Christ’s Great White Throne and the lost are cast into the Lake of Fire. This all culminates in a vision of the new heavens, the new earth, and the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city which descends to the earth to be the eternal home of the redeemed.

Apart from the thousand years of the twentieth chapter, which is the subject of debate between the amillennialists (that it is figurative of the period between Christ’s two comings), the premillennialists (that it depicts a future Golden Age to be inaugurated by the Second Coming) and the postmillennialists (that it depicts a future Golden Age which will culminate in the Second Coming), the final chapters of Revelation largely pertain to the elements of eschatology about the substance of which, albeit not necessarily the details, there has been a general consensus among orthodox and traditional Christians – the Second Coming itself, and the Quattuor Novissima (Four Last Things – Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell).

 It is the part between the letters to the Churches in the second and third chapters and the Second Coming in the nineteenth that causes most of the trouble. Do the colourful images in these chapters depict people and events from the first century when the book was being written as the Preterists say? (1) Are they a picture of the whole of human history between the First and Second Comings as the Historicists say? Or do they refer to events and persons yet to come in the period immediately prior to the Second Coming as the Futurists say? Is it, perhaps, a combination of all three options? (2)

The reason that I suspect the Book of Revelation would win our hypothetical poll is that throughout the Church’s history there has been no lack of individuals who have both held to the Futurist interpretation of the book and read the people and events of their own time into it, saying that those people and events are the final fulfilment of those prophecies. This has frequently been accompanied by date-setting for the Second Coming – despite the clear warnings against this in the Olivet Discourse – even if it is of the evasive sort that tries to get around said warnings by saying “Jesus said we don’t know the day or the hour, but He said nothing about the week, month, year, decade etc.” This has given the Futurist interpretation a bad name among many theologians, although the majority of Futurists have not been this irresponsible.

Having said all that, I do not wish to make the case for any particular interpretation of Revelation here, but to make the point that the eerie correlation between what is going on at present and the thirteenth chapter of Revelation ought to be sounding warning bells regardless of how we interpret Revelation.

To illustrate my point, allow me to note that there are people out there who deny the existence of evil spirits. Such people may be rationalist, materialist, unbelievers, or they may be the kind of “Christian” who likes to cherry-pick everything that is positive from the Christian worldview and omit the negative. Either way, how would such people regard a Satanic temple or any other religion dedicated to the worship of evil spirits?

The answer is that they are not likely to regard such cults significantly differently from those of us who affirm the existence of evil spirits. To join such a cult is to make the conscious choice to side with evil. This ought to be a problem even for people who deny the existence of spiritual entities personifying that evil. 

Half a year ago, almost the whole of the world was shut down in order to “flatten the curve” of the spread of COVID-19, an experimental new strategy that in many ways resembled past Communist revolutions albeit on a global scale. Everyone was placed under a sort of house arrest, with day passes allowed for business arbitrarily deemed to be “essential.” The basic freedoms that we have long regarded as fundamental to our civil order in the Commonwealth Realms and most other Western countries such as the American republic were clearly classified by the “powers that be” who dictated this whole “lockdown” as “non-essential.” A glance at what was considered to be “essential” and “non-essential” tells us what we need to know about the spirit moving those powers. Businesses that produced and sold the goods necessary for maintaining our physical lives were declared to be essential, but libraries, art museums, symphony orchestras and everything that elevated those lives from that mere physical level were regarded as non-essential. Abortuaries, marijuana shops, and plenty of other businesses that promote vice and self-destructive behaviour were labelled essential, but Churches where the Word of life is proclaimed and the Sacrament of life distributed were at the top of the non-essential list. Family gatherings, real life social interaction, community, and basically everything traditionally regarded as good, were treated as crimes and outlawed. When the restrictions began to be eased, Churches were left closed longer than almost anything else. Clearly, the spirit moving the powers behind the lockdown is that which the Book of Revelation describes as a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns.

We are now several phases into the re-opening in most places. There has now arisen, however, a demand for a new restriction. Our governments are being pressured to make it mandatory for people to wear masks over their lower faces in public places. Many of the businesses that remained open during the lockdown required their employees to wear masks, especially if they were involved in directly serving customers. Now some of these same businesses, even in the absence of public orders, are requiring their customers to wear masks. Last week, for example, Walmart made mask-wearing mandatory at all of their Canadian locations. The World Health Organization, which pooh-poohed the efficacy of masks at the beginning of the pandemic, has thrown its weight behind mask-wearing, and the public health officials such as Dr. Theresa Tam in Canada and Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States who seem incapable of thinking independently of the WHO, have likewise done an about-face on the matter. Celebrities have been enlisted as part of a massive media campaign to shame people into wearing masks. If those who would make masks mandatory get their way, nobody will be able to buy or sell unless he wears a mask. The similarity between this and Revelation thirteen, noting especially verses sixteen to seventeen, is remarkable, even if the present situation involves a mask and that in the book involves a mark. Regardless of whether one reads Revelation thirteen as being about the first century Roman Empire (Preterist) or about the empire of the Antichrist who will rule just prior to the Second Coming (Futurist) this is cause for alarm. For even if the beast of Revelation is a figure of the past whose time has long come and gone, he is hardly an example worthy of emulation. In Revelation he and all who take his mark end up in the lake of fire.

One does not have to believe that we are seeing the final fulfilment of Revelation thirteen according to the Futurist interpretation, or even hold to the Futurist interpretation, to have a deep, spiritual, theological, and ethical problem with the totalitarian spirit of the present day and with mandatory masking. Revelation thirteen is grounds for opposing such things regardless of one’s interpretation of Revelation.

(1) Full Preterists would apply this to the entirety of Revelation including the last four chapters. Full Preterism is the claim that all Scriptural prophecy was fulfilled in the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. Full Preterism is not an interpretation available to the orthodox for it denies that Christ “will come again to judge the quick and the dead”, which, being affirmed by all of the Creeds, has clearly been regarded by the Church as belonging to the esse of the faith rather than to the adiophora since the earliest centuries. 

(2) Another interpretive option is the Spiritual/Allegorical interpretation in which the events of Revelation are regarded as depicting the spiritual conflict in each believer’s life – think John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

The Coming(s) of Christ and Some Misconceptions Thereof

We are rapidly approaching Christmas which, as has often been observed, is now two distinct holidays occupying the same space on the civil calendar. One the one hand there is the secular Christmas – or X-mas, as it is known to people who are either politically correct, lazy spellers, or both. This holiday, sacred to the pervasive cult of Mammon, has long been a celebration of two of the Seven Deadly Sins, Avarice and Gluttony, and in more recent years has increasingly added Lust as well. It is preceded by an anticipatory period the length of which is decided by the engines of commerce and which begins when the first decorations and advertisements appear in the stores. While many have opined that it seems to get longer and longer each year, in reality All Saints’ Day is the earliest it can begin. Any earlier and the advertising campaign would clash with that of the secular version of All Hallows’ Eve.

On the other hand there is the Christian Christmas – the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It too is introduced by a preparatory period, which in Western Christendom we call Advent, but this is much shorter than the season leading up to the secular holiday. It always begins on the Sunday closest to St. Andrew’s Day (November 30th), which is always the fourth Sunday prior to Christmas, and so is never longer than a lunar month. Like Lent, the season leading up to Easter, the liturgical season of Advent is supposed to be a period of sober reflection and repentance. This too is a sharp contrast with the hurly-burly of running around and shopping interspersed with party after party that characterizes the season’s secular counterpart.

While the contempt that such fictional curmudgeons as Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch displayed towards the commercial holiday before their changes of heart is, perhaps, understandable, it is much harder to comprehend the problem that many soi disant Bible-believing Christians seem to have with the religious holiday. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan dictator of the 1650s, was the spiritual ancestor of these types, as he was of political liberalism and all the various hues and shades of Mrs. Grundyism. You have probably encountered their arguments. The most familiar of them are that December 25th was originally a pagan holiday, that Jesus was not born on December 25th, and that we ought to be keeping the holy days God established in the Bible rather than man made ones. I have dealt with this matter in depth previously and so will provide only a short answer to each of these here.

First of all, yes the date on which the Church chose to celebrate Christmas coincides with a pagan festival. It also coincides with a Jewish festival and while that Jewish festival is also “man made” in that it is not instituted by God anywhere in the Bible, even in the Books of Maccabees that relate the events it commemorates, it was kept by Jesus in the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John. The fourteenth verse of the first chapter of Genesis gives, as God’s stated reason for creating the sun, moon, and stars in addition to dividing day from night and lighting the earth that they might be “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” so it should come as no surprise that different religions would have important festivals at approximately the same time, in this case around the winter solstice.

Secondly, since the Scriptures do not tell us the day on which Jesus was born, they neither tell us that He was born on December 25th nor that He was not born on December 25th. The absence of a positive assertion does not constitute a denial. The same principle applies to the argument that because the Book of Hebrews does not identify its author, St. Paul did not write it, an argument that a Judaizing acquaintance recently made in a bizarre attempt to bolster his argument that we ought to keep the Old Testament feasts rather than man-made ones like Christmas. (1) At any rate, the question of the actual date on which Jesus was born is moot. Christmas is not necessarily Christ’s “birthday” but a liturgical feast day commemorating His birth. It occurs at the beginning of the liturgical year because that year is organized to take us through the most important events of Christ’s life chronologically. (2)

Finally, the position that Christians ought to be keeping the Old Testament holy days rather than Christmas, Easter, and other feasts appointed by the Church can only be maintained by disregarding the authority of Christ’s Apostles and the New Testament Scriptures. For the New Testament is absolutely clear on this matter. Christians are neither required to keep the feasts, rituals, and ceremonies of the Old Covenant nor forbidden from doing so. The first Christians were Jews who believed in Jesus. When God sent St. Peter to preach the Gospel to a Gentile, Cornelius the centurion, He gave Him a vision in which the dietary laws of the Old Covenant were abrogated. When Gentiles came to be converted in large numbers, a controversy arose as to whether or not they should be circumcised and made to follow all the rituals of the Old Covenant. The Apostles convened a church council in Jerusalem to settle the controversy which ruled against placing these obligations on the Gentile converts. The Book of Acts records that while the original Jewish Christians continued to participate in worship at the Temple and in the synagogues until they were driven out, the Church was already developing its own worship, meeting, for example, on the first day of the week. St. Paul in his epistles encourages these trends and reserves his harshest words for those who would impose the Old Testament rituals on the Church. (3)

This attitude of looking down one’s nose at ordinary Christians for keeping Christmas rather than the Old Testament feasts bears a resemblance in some ways to both of two opposite errors regarding the Second Coming of Christ that have plagued the Church from time to time and which have undergone significant revivals in the last century. For traditional Christian believers the Second Coming is as much in view at this time of year as His first coming. Indeed, while the emphasis of Christmas itself is on the events of His First Coming at Bethlehem a little over two thousand years ago, the emphasis in Advent is on the Second Coming. Whereas the focus of penitent reflection in Lent begins with contemplation of our own mortality on Ash Wednesday and ends with the vicarious suffering and death of Christ on Good Friday, in Advent the focus could be summed up in the words of St. Peter “But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer” (I Pet. 4:7) and of his Master and ours “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.” (Matt. 24:42) For this reason, lectionaries traditionally assign readings that pertain to the Second Coming to this period and the two comings are joined in the Collect for Advent Sunday (4) which is repeated with the other Collects for the duration of Advent.

In their disregard towards the ruling of the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, the clear teachings of St. Paul, and Apostolic authority in general, the legalistic Judaizers who would deny to Christians the freedom to celebrate, as they have traditionally done, the Person and events of the New Covenant of eternal redemption and bind them back in chains to Mt. Sinai, resemble the date-setters, who have a very similar approach to such statements of Christ as “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” and “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” and “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.” (Matt. 24: 36, 42, 44). Despite these clear warnings, every time a society collapses, a significant period of time such as a millennium passes, or some other such momentous event occurs, out trot the date-setters with their arguments for why Jesus will return on such-and-such a date. Those among them who are wise guys, despite lacking wisdom, rely on an ultra-literal interpretation of the above verses (only the “day” and “hour” are not mentioned, not the “year” or “decade”) to justify their obvious evasion of the spirit of the text. Needless to say our own era in which Western civilization as a whole has been giving every sign of being on the verge of imminent collapse for a century (5) and the second millennium AD came to an end has had more than its fair share of date-setters.

In their arrogant attitude of superiority towards other Christians, however, the Judaizers more closely resemble the preterists, the hubris of whom make the ancient Gnostics look humble in comparison. Preterism derives its name from the Latin proposition praeter. Praeter means “besides, except for”, “contrary to” and “beyond” but it can also mean “before” in both its spatial and temporal senses. It is in the temporal sense of the meaning “before”, i.e., “in the past”, that the preterists use this word to identify their views. For their doctrine is that all Biblical prophecies – including the prophecies of the Second Coming and the last three of the Quattuor Novissima (6) have all been fulfilled in the past. It is an ancient heresy, having been first taught by Hymenaeus and Philetus in Ephesus towards the end of the sixth decade of the first century AD, and rebuked by St. Paul in his Second Epistle to Timothy:

But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some. (II Tim 2:16-18)

Contemporary preterists attempt to elude the obvious application of these verses to their own doctrine by arguing that at the time St. Paul wrote those words – early in the seventh decade – the resurrection was not yet past but that it happened shortly thereafter, at the very end of that decade, a couple of years after St. Paul’s martyrdom. For contemporary preterists teach that the Second Coming, the Final Resurrection, and the Last Judgment all took place in the year AD 70.

This was the year in which Titus, the son of the newly elevated Roman emperor Vespasian, after a seven month siege of Jerusalem, lay waste to the rebellious city, destroying the Second Temple and apart from the handful of leftover zealots who would be wiped out at Masada three years later, essentially crushed the revolt. The truth in preterism – for heresy is not pure error but begins with a truth being twisted out of shape – is that these events were frequently predicted in the New Testament, sometimes in passages that also discuss the Second Coming. The Olivet Discourse contained in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of the Gospel According to St. Matthew is the obvious example. The discourse begins when Jesus tells His disciples that the Temple will be destroyed and they ask Him “Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” Orthodox Christianity has always taken the position that the disciples had mistakenly associated the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem with the Second Coming of Christ and the end of time and thus asked Jesus two questions, thinking they were asking one. Jesus answered both questions without directly correcting their mistake, knowing that just as the disciples would not be able to grasp that there would be a Second Coming separate and distinct from the First until after His Resurrection and Ascension so the unfolding of events would eventually make obvious the distinction between the destruction of the Temple and His Second Coming. Accordingly the three ancient Creeds which express the consensus of the early, undivided, Apostolic Church as to fundamentals of the orthodox, Scriptural, kerygma all include an affirmation that Christ will “come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.” (7)

Orthodox Christians have disagreed on other aspects of eschatology, both in the early centuries and down through the years. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian all taught a form of what is now called pre-millennialism, while the Alexandrian Fathers and St. Augustine taught the a-millennialism that became the dominant view down until modern times. Regardless of where they stood on these matters, however, orthodox Christians joined in the Creedal affirmation of the Second Coming as a literal, future, event that will involve the judgement of the entire world, including both the living and the dead. The preterist teaching that the sack of Jerusalem fulfilled completely the prophecies of the Second Coming and the Final Resurrection and Judgement obviously requires an interpretation of these prophecies that exceeds in its non-literalism what was allowed for by even the most allegorical of the orthodox Fathers. It also requires that the events prophesied be reduced from a global scale and made to pertain only to national Israel. Ironically, since the recent spread of preterism can be partially attributed to a reaction against dispensationalism, preterism shares dispensationalism’s obsession with national Israel, giving it, of course, the opposite negative spin. (8) To both alike, all Bible prophecy is about God wrapping up His dealings with national Israel. To the dispensationalists, this is a future wrapping up that will involve the total restoration of the nation. To the preterists, it is a past wrapping up that involved the total rejection of the nation in judgement for its unbelief. The dispensationalists, at least, affirm the passages in which Christ comes back for His faithful believers, albeit by making it a prelude to the main event. (9) Consistent preterists must insist that passages which speak of the believer’s hope in the coming of the Lord were all fulfilled by the judgement of national Israel. This fact alone ought, in itself, to be sufficient to refute this obviously false doctrine.

The late Lutheran theologian John M. Drickamer once remarked that responding to preterism is like taking out the trash – it is an unpleasant, smelly, task but one that needs to be done from time to time. What better time to do it than Advent, the time in which we traditionally look forward in penitent reflection to Christ’s Second Coming, was we prepare to celebrate His First Coming?

Merry Christmas, every one, and Maranatha (the Lord is coming)!



(1) Actually this case may not be an exact parallel. While the Book of Hebrews does not identify its author, St. Peter may very well have identified St. Paul as its author in II Peter 3:15. In this verse he reminds his original readers, who are the same as those of his first epistle (3:1), that St Paul had written to them something to the effect of “the longsuffering of the Lord is salvation.” All of the “signed” Pauline epistles are addressed to particular churches which were predominantly Gentile. St. Peter’s epistles, on the other hand, are “catholic” or “general” epistles (I Peter 1:1), and his original readers seems to have largely consisted of believers of Jewish ancestry (2:12). Since St. Peter goes on to identify St. Paul’s words as Scripture, Hebrews is the only epistle that seems to qualify as the one to which he is referring. It is part of the New Testament canon, written to the same addressees, with content that matches the allusion by St. Peter (see the ninth and tenth chapters of Hebrews).

(2) See, however, William J. Tighe’s arguments in Touchstone Magazine, that the early Church calculated December 25th and January 6th (Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, celebrated in Western Christendom as the Feast of the Magi, in the East as the eve of Christmas itself) as the dates of Christ’s birth by adding nine months to March 25th and April 6th respectively. According to Tighe there was a widespread belief at the time that Israel’s prophets died on the same date as their conception, and so March 25th and April 6th were identified as the dates of conception through attempts to calculate the calendar date of Christ’s death. Tighe also maintains that the Church had done these calculations and started celebrating Christmas on December 25th prior to AD 274 when Emperor Marcus Aureleus declared the same date to be the “Birth of the Unconquered Sun.”

(3) He develops a theological argument for this doctrine of Christian liberty throughout his corpus, but especially in the epistles of Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Hebrews. The Old Testament Law in its ceremonial aspect pointed to and foreshadowed Christ, now that Christ has appeared and instituted the New Covenant with His blood we, having the substance, ought not to cling to the shadow. Under the Old Covenant, Israel was to be a holy nation. She was supposed to remain untainted with the paganism and idolatry of the tribes and nations surrounding her, and the ceremonial aspects of the Law, including the dietary and clothing restrictions, contributed to her distinct and separate identity. Under the New Covenant, however, believers of all nations are united spiritually in the Church, and this unity is symbolized by the Church’s standing under grace rather than Law.

(4) “ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.” Collect for First Sunday in Advent, Book of Common Prayer.

(5) It is one hundred years since the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes – The Decline – more accurately “Downfall” of the West – was published.

(6) Four Last Things – Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell.

(7) This is the wording of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as translated in the BCP. The Apostles’ Creed and the Quicumque Vult both introduce the Second Coming by saying that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father after which the Apostles’ Creed adds “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead” and the Athanasian Creed adds “from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies: and shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.”

(8) Interestingly there are other parallels. Both doctrines in their contemporary forms can be traced back to sixteenth century Jesuits (Luis de Alcasar in the case of preterism, Francisco Ribera in the case of dispensationalism) through nineteenth century Protestant popularizers (James Stuart Russell’s The Parousia: a Critical Inquiry into the New Testament Doctrine of Our Lord's Second Coming in the case of preterism, John Nelson Darby and C. I. Scofield in the case of dispensationalism).

(9) The main problem with dispensationalism, from the standpoint of orthodox theology, is not their elaborate eschatological scheme but the significance attached to certain of the events. The rapture (from the Latin equivalent of the Greek ἁρπάζω used by St. Paul to mean “caught up” in I Thess. 4:17) is said by dispensationalists to the be the end of the Church Age which began at Pentecost, and the entire Church Age is described by dispensationalists as a parenthesis in the Age of the Law. This is the opposite of inspired Apostolic doctrine in which the Law is the parenthesis in the unfolding of God’s promises of grace (Gal. 3:6-29, NB especially vv. 17, 19, 23-25).

Last Things

Some people, it would seem, do not learn from experience.

I remember the year 1994 quite well. I graduated from high school in the spring of that year and in the fall I began my theological studies at Providence College in Otterburne. For me it was a year of memorable experiences. Those experiences did not include the end of the world and Judgment Day.

That should come as no surprise to you since I am writing this seventeen years later in 2011. At the time, however, it came as a surprise to at least one man. That man was Harold Camping, the president of Family Radio, who two years previously had published a massive volume entitled 1994? In that book he speculated that Christ would return in September of the year mentioned in the title.

Camping’s speculations proved to be false and you would think he would have learned his lesson. Camping, however, has adjusted his calculations, and now predicts that the rapture will occur on May 21, 2011.

The 24th chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, begins with Jesus’ disciples coming to Him to show Him the architecture of the Temple. Jesus then says to them “See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” From our vantage point, two millennia later, we realize that Jesus was predicting the destruction of the Temple that would occur when the Romans sacked Jerusalem later that century. At the time, however, His disciples naturally took His prediction to be referring to something that would take place at the end of time. They therefore came to Him privately, when He was sitting on the Mount of Olives, and asked Him “Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?”

The disciples did not realize that their questions pertained to two different events that would be separated by a great length of time. We know that now, however, because it is almost two millennia since the Temple was destroyed and Christ has not yet returned “to judge the quick and the dead”. We therefore have the advantage of knowing that Jesus’ answer to the disciples, which has come to be known as the “Olivet Discourse” and which covers the rest of the chapter and all of the next, addresses both the events of AD 70 and His future Second Coming.

In the course of the Olivet Discourse Jesus says:

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

Is this referring to the destruction of the Temple or to His second coming?

We know that it refers to His second coming because Jesus goes on to exhort His disciples to an attitude of watchfulness telling them “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come”.

Mr. Camping is not the only one who has ignored these words of Christ. In the last half-century there has been a great deal of date-setting, some of it brought on by the end of the second millennium, some of it brought on by historical events like the re-birth of Israel. Nor are Bible teachers, or even Christians, the only ones talking about the end of the world. Hollywood has taken advantage of the end of the millennium, astronomical predictions of an asteroid colliding with earth, speculation about life on other planets and the possibility of an invasion from outer space, the upcoming end of the current b’ak’tun cycle of the Mayan Calendar, Nostradamus’s prophecies, and Al Gore’s environmentalist hysteria to produce a wide array of apocalyptic movies. On occasion some of them were even interesting and entertaining.

The word “apocalyptic” that is used to describe this movie genre is also used to describe a genre of sacred literature. The term is derived from the New Testament where where the Greek title of the last book of the New Testament written, and the last found in the canonical order, is Apokalypsis Ioannu, which transliterated into English becomes “The Apocalypse of John” and translated into English becomes “The Revelation of John”. The word in Greek means the uncovering or the unveiling of that which was hidden or secret. The Book of Revelation is the book that features the seven seals, trumpets, and bowls with their accompanying plagues upon the earth, the unleashing of demons from the bottomless pit, the war in heaven between St. Michael and the dragon who is the devil and Satan, the rise of the twelve headed beast ridden by the Babylonian harlot, the return of Christ, the final judgment, the lake of fire, and the end of the world, which is replaced by new heavens, a new earth, and the New Jerusalem. It is easy to see why it has lent its name to literature and movies discussing the end of the world. The name of the location in the Holy Land that the Book identifies as the place where the armies of the world will gather to wage war against the returning Christ has also become synonymous with “the end of the world”. That place is Har Megiddo or Armageddon.

In theology, the interpretation of the Revelation of St. John and similar literature such as the Book of Daniel, falls under the category of eschatology. Eschatology is a term derived from the Greek word for “last” and is the theology of “last things”. Since the middle of the 19th Century a great deal of theological literature on the subject of eschatology has been published. Some of it is scholarly and academic, much of it is written at a popular level. There is an unfortunate tendency among the writers of popular eschatology towards sensationalism and speculation about how current events might be precursors of eschatological events indicating that the end is near. This tendency is what leads to foolish predictions like those of Mr. Hocking.

There is, however, another eschatological error that has been growing in popularity in recent years. Errors are like the vices Aristotle wrote about – they tend to come in pairs of opposites. The plethora of popular “Bible prophecy” writings whose authors purport to know far more than can actually be known about the end of the world and how close we are to it repels many towards an opposite error which asserts that we can know nothing at all about such matters, that we have no revelation from God whatsoever about what the future holds.

This error currently goes under the name “preterism”. Preterism should be carefully distinguished from pre-millennialism and pre-tribulationism, for while all three are eschatological positions and all begin with the prefix “pre”, the one is very different from the other two.

Preterism holds that all predictive prophecy in Scripture including the prophecies of the Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection, and the final judgment, have already been fulfilled and that nothing is predicted beyond the sack of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple by the Romans. Pre-millennialism, on the other hand, is one of the two major eschatological positions that have vied with each other throughout Church history. The other is a-millennialism. There is a third position called post-millennialism but it has never been as widespread as the other two and has only ever had a significant influence in North America (although certain forms of progressive liberalism could be considered to be a secularized version of post-millennialism).

Pre-millennialism, which was the leading view of eschatology in the pre-Augustinian Church and which has enjoyed a comeback in the 19th and 20th centuries (albeit in a very different form than the chiliasm of the early Church) holds that in Revelation 19, 20, 21, you have a fairly straightforward depiction of what will happen at Christ’s return. Jesus will come back and defeat His enemies (19), will raise His Church from the dead, bind Satan in the bottomless pit, and establish His kingdom on earth, then after a thousand years (the millennium in pre-millennialism, although pre-millennialists may not necessarily believe the number “thousands” to be literal) Satan will be released to lead one final rebellion, that will be instantly crushed, Satan is then sent to his final doom, where he is soon to be joined by those whose names are not written in the Book of Life (20), after which God creates new heavens and a new earth, and the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city with twelve pearly gates, will descend to earth where God will dwell in the midst of His people forever (21).

A-millennialism, on the other hand, holds that the thousand year kingdom described in Revelation 20 is the spiritual kingdom of God that is present on the earth in our own age. The thousand years, therefore, is not something that takes place after Christ’s second coming as a straightforward reading of the last chapters of Revelation would suggest, but is symbolic of the time period between the Ascension and the Second Coming. This is the interpretation of Revelation that St. Augustine expounded and following St. Augustine it came to replace the chiliasm (early pre-millennialism) of the ante-Nicene patrists as the dominant view within the Church. It remains the most widespread view today, although pre-millennialism has become the majority view among evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants.

The term “pre-tribulationism” is a variation of modern, as opposed to early, pre-millennialism. It is particularly associated with the “dispensationalist” school of pre-millennial thought that originated among the Plymouth Brethren and was spread among evangelical/fundamentalist Protestants through the popular Scofield Reference Bible. The term “pre-tribulationism” refers to the timing of the event dispensationalists call “The Rapture”. This term comes from the Latin word rapio, -ere which means “catch up”. This is the Latin word used by St. Jerome to translate the Greek word harpazo in 1 Thessalonians 4:17. “The Rapture” is the event described in this chapter of St. Paul’s epistle, in which living believers are “caught up” together with the resurrected dead in Christ, to meet the returning Christ in the air. Pre-tribulationists believe that this is a separate event from the Second Coming of Christ proper. They believe that the Rapture will take place prior to “The Tribulation”. The word “tribulation” means suffering and distress. Dispensationalists use the term to refer to the period of time, immediately prior to Christ’s return, in which the ultimate Anti-Christ rules the earth.

It sounds awfully complicated doesn’t it? It gets more so. Just as pre-millennialism’s big rival is a-millennialism, so pre-tribulationism comes with its set of rivals. These are post-tribulationism in which the Rapture and Second Coming are identical and mid-tribulationism in which the Rapture takes place after the Anti-Christ has risen to power. There are also some extra creative variations that we need not go into here.

In contrast, the preterist system seems rather simple doesn’t it? The Rapture, Tribulation, Second Coming, Millenium, Final Judgment, and everything else are old news. They all took place by the year AD 70.

Is there support for the preterist position in Scripture?

As mentioned earlier, some parts of the Olivet Discourse have to be interpreted in a preterist way, because Jesus was answering His disciples’ questions about both the destruction of the Temple and His Second Coming. The former event took place in the first century. It seems rather a stretch, however, to reason from this that the Second Coming must have taken place in the first century also.

Preterists can also point to language in the Book of Revelation and argue it is clearly talking about first century institutions and personages with whom the first readers of the book would have been familiar. While this might very well be the best way to read those parts of the book it would seem that the preterists are going too far when they read the events of Rev. 19-22 into the first century as well.

Preterists will argue that futurists (which includes a-millennialists, post-millennialists, and pre-millennialists of all stripes – everyone who believes in a future Second Coming) are making the same mistake that 1st Century Jews made, who were anticipating a Messiah who would be a political liberator who would deliver them from the rule of Rome and re-establish the throne of David in Jerusalem. The kingdom of God is not a literal, earthly kingdom, they argue, it is a spiritual kingdom. Here a number of texts would seem to support them. “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Lk. 17:21). “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence” (John 18:36)

It is significant that the verses quoted above were not spoken by Jesus to His disciples in response to their own expectations that He would literally establish a kingdom on earth. Indeed, whenever they asked Him about His kingdom, giving Him the opportunity to correct them on this point, He did not do so. Instead He told them to watch because they know not the day nor the hour, and that the places of honour at His right and left hand were reserved for those whom the Father had appointed to them.

In contrast, there were others in 1st Century Judea who held erroneous eschatological views, that Jesus corrected rather bluntly. The Sadducees, for example, denied the resurrection of the dead, hinted at in some passages in Psalms and Job, and predicted outright in the Book of Daniel. These came to Jesus hoping to trip Him up. Here is St. Matthew’s account of it:

The same day came to him the Sadducees, which say that there is no resurrection, and asked him, Saying, Master, Moses said, If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother. Now there were with us seven brethren: and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife unto his brother: Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh. And last of all the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her. Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. (Matt. 22:23-32)

The Sadducees denied the resurrection outright and Jesus confronted them on it. Later on, St. Paul would confront a different error concerning the resurrection. The Thessalonian Church kept getting disturbed by false teaching about the resurrection. First they were worried about members of their church who had passed away. St. Paul wrote the following to allay their fears:

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words. (1 Thess. 4:13-18)

But then, shortly after writing this epistle, the church was again shaken, and St. Paul had to write them a second epistle in order “that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.” (2 Thess. 2:2). Now why would a report that the “day of Christ is at hand” trouble the church?

We find the explanation in St. Paul’s second letter to Timothy. In the second chapter of this epistle he writes about a Hymenaeus and Philetus. What does he say about them?

Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some. (2 Thess. 2:18)

It would appear that we have here encountered the founders of preterism.

A virtue, Aristotle said, lies between two opposing vices. Likewise we often find truth between two opposite errors.

What truth lies between those who think we can decipher every little detail about what is going to happen at the end of time from Scripture and those who think that the Scripture says nothing about the future whatsoever?

Pre-millennialism and a-millennialism both have excellent arguments in their favour from Scripture. Pre-millennialists have the most straightforward reading of the text and the support of the earliest Church fathers. A-millennialists, however, have the bulk of orthodox theologians down through the centuries on their side and once we have ruled out the preterist position that there will be no future Second Coming, some of the better of the preterist arguments would seem to support the a-mill position.

Pre-millennialism and a-millennialism, at least in their most basic forms, would therefore both seem to fall within Christian orthodoxy. If we are looking therefore, for a definite doctrine about “last things”, something that could be said to define Christian orthodoxy on the subject, we must look at a more basic level of doctrine where pre- and a- millennialists both agree.

Here we come to the basic certainties about the future, affirmed by Scriptures, in line with the Creeds of the undivided Church, and held by the body of Christ in every time and place in which it has been found down through the centuries, the Four Last Things.

Death

There is an old saying that there is nothing certain in life except death and taxes. Scripture would definitely support this saying, for the first of the two certainties at least. The author of Hebrews tells us “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27) We all entered this world through birth. We will all leave it through death. There are exceptions in Scripture that prove this rule – Enoch and Elijah seem to have been translated into the next life without dying and St. Paul, in both 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4 indicates that believers who are alive at Christ’s return will also pass into the resurrection life without going through death first.

For the vast majority of us, however, death will claim us at the end of our lives. What lies after death? This question has made death a terrifying and sobering reality to mankind down through the ages. The author of Hebrews, in the verse quoted above, has told us what immediately comes after death.

Judgment

The last judgment is one of those themes in sacred art, that all the great masters seem to have attempted at least once. The most famous is Michaelangelo’s fresco rendition on the altar wall of the Sistene Chapel, but other examples abound throughout Europe. It was a favorite subject among the early Flemish masters. Rogier van der Weyden created a well-known polyptych version which can be found in the Musée de l'Hôtel-Dieu, Beaune, and there are famous versions by Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch.

The renditions vary but in each the dead are depicted as standing before Christ and being divided into two groups, one which is led by angels into everlasting bliss, the other of which is dragged down by demons into everlasting woe.

Do these paintings accurately portray Scriptural truth?

The concept of a final judgment occurs repeatedly in the teachings of Jesus Christ. In His Sermon on the Mount He speaks of the day when many will come to Him pointing to great works done in His name as evidence of their intimate relationship with Him, to whom He will turn away with a disavowal of the relationship “I never knew you”. Elsewhere in the same sermon He warns than an angry word is enough to endanger a person at this judgment and that it is better to mutilate oneself, if needs be, than to sin. Outside this Sermon He warned that men would have to give an account of every word spoken idly.

In the Olivet Discourse Christ describes the Final Judgment as occurring at the end of time, with the angels gathering the nations of the world before Him, where they will be separated into “sheep” and “goats”. The sheep will be rewarded for acts of mercy done to Christ, the goats condemned for not doing such acts of mercy to Christ, with each group being surprised at this judgment and told that the actions in question were done (or not done) to “the least of these my brethren” which Christ counts as being towards Himself.

St. Paul writes that we will all be judged by our works, and in St. John’s Apocalypse the Final Judgment is depicted as taking place before the Great White Throne of Christ, on the basis of the books containing their deeds. The deciding factor is the Book of Life. Those whose names are not written in that book are cast into the Lake of Fire.

It is clear, therefore, that the entire New Testament teaches that we will give an account to our Maker after death for all of our thoughts, words and deeds in this life. This event is closely connected in Scripture to two other events, the General Resurrection and the Second Coming.

Some of the paintings of the Last Judgment can be misleading, however. The Last Judgment by van der Weyden and that of Hans Memling both show the dead being weighed in a scale by the Archangel. In both cases it is a dead saint being weighed against a dead sinner but the introduction of scales can create the popular misconception that the standard at the Judgment will be whether or not one’s good deeds outweigh one’s bad deeds. That is not, however, the standard God judges by. He demands perfection, and a single sin is enough to tip the scales in favour of damnation.

That is why the only way to survive this judgment is to have your sins removed by the blood of Jesus Christ. When Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was dying upon the Cross at Calvary, He bore the sins of the whole world upon Himself and was judged for those sins. The Gospel message proclaims the remission of sins, through His blood, to all who believe in Him for it. The sinner who trusts in Christ can face the judgment with confidence, knowing that his sins will not be brought against him there, because they have already been judged and paid for at the Cross. Those who do not believe in Jesus, He warned, will die in their sins and will be condemned by those sins at the Judgment.

Heaven

Each of the Gospels records that the night before the Crucifixion, Jesus and His Apostles celebrated the Passover together. Some of the things which Jesus said to His Apostles at this seder which we call the Last Supper are mentioned by all four Evangelists. These include the prediction of Judas’ betrayal and the prediction that St. Peter would deny Christ three times that very night. The Synoptic Gospels – those of Sts. Matthew, Mark and Luke, record the commissioning of the sacrament of the Eucharist at this supper. St. John does not talk of this but he does record a lengthy discourse that Jesus gave at the supper. In that discourse Jesus said the following:

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. (John 14:1-3)

What Jesus calls “My Father’s house” here is commonly referred to as “Heaven”. Jesus Himself refers to His Father’s house as “Heaven” in the model prayer He gave His disciples which we call The Lord’s Prayer. The prayer begins “Our Father, Which art in Heaven”. This use of the word “Heaven” should be distinguished from other ways in which the word is used in Scripture. Today, we refer to the place where clouds are and where birds fly as “the sky” and we refer to the place where the sun, moon, and stars are as “outer space”. The Bible calls both of these places “heaven” or “the heavens”. The 21st chapter of the Book of Revelation begins with St. John describing his vision of a new heaven and a new earth – the old heaven and the old earth had passed away. The heaven referred to here is the heaven we can see – the sky and outer space. The Heaven which is God’s house will not pass away.

It should also be noted that when the King James Bible uses the word “mansion” in John 14 it is not using it in the way that Ira Stamphill used it in his gospel tune “Mansion Over the Hilltop”. Stamphill understood the word “mansion” the way it is commonly used today – a very big house on a large estate. Some kinds of dramatic productions used to be performed on a long stage on which several booths or tents would be set up to represent a different location within the story being performed. The actors would move from tent to tent as the story dictated. These tents were called “mansions” and this is what is being alluded to by the use of the word “mansion” here. The Greek word translated “mansion” is “monai” and it means “living place” or “abode”.

In Revelation 21, the Father’s house of which Jesus speaks in John 14, is depicted as a great city, the New Jerusalem:

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Rev. 21:2)

Christ’s bride is His Church, and the holy city is her dwelling place. When the Book of Revelation describes the holy city descending to earth it is saying that following the Judgment Heaven and earth will be one place. Here in Rev. 21 we find the twelve gates each made from a single pearl, and the streets paved with gold. The final chapter of Revelation describes a crystal clear river of the water of life, flowing down the street of the New Jerusalem, from the throne of God and of the Lamb. On the banks of the river the tree of life grows.

Here, the Book of Revelation closes where the Book of Genesis began. The tree of life, which grew in the midst of the Paradise in which man was placed when first created, was denied to man because of sin. In the New Jerusalem, he may eat of it freely, for:

there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. (Rev. 22:3-5)

The Paradise which man lost through sin, Christ has regained for man through His redeeming sacrifice, so that man may experience the Beatific Vision of God.

Hell

In the midst of its description of the new heaven, new earth, and the Holy City, the Book of Revelation warns that not everybody will arrive at this state of blessedness:

But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. (Rev. 21:8)

The point of this verse is not that “murderers”, “whoremongers” and “sorcerers” belong to special categories of evildoers who are far worse than the average sinner and therefore deserve this fate. This is the fate that all people have earned by their sinful actions. The only way to avoid it is through Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world. Christ came to bear the sins of the world upon Himself in order that man might be redeemed, justified, and forgiven. He promises everlasting life to all who believe in Him. Those who believe in Him have their names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and this second death cannot touch them.

Those who do not believe in Jesus, who do not trust in Him as the sin-bearing redeemer, must bear their own sins eternally, including the sin of having finally rejected the provision God made for forgiveness and salvation.

As Dr. Larry Dixon (1) has put it this is the “Other Side of the Good News”.

Hell is not a very likable doctrine but that is no argument against its truth. Unless one completely shuts one’s eyes to reality, it is difficult to ignore the fact that sin, evil, and suffering abound in the world around us. These things are unpleasant but they are an undeniable part of reality.

Human sin is a reality, and a just God must judge and punish sin. That same just God is a merciful God and has freely given the world of fallen men a Savior in the person of His Only Son Jesus Christ. The salvation Jesus accomplished for man on the cross is available to all who will trust Him for it.

If we don’t trust Him, if we reject the Savior and the salvation God has freely given us, the only option left to us is to bear the wrath of God upon ourselves for all eternity.

Death and Judgment are universal certainties. Heaven and Hell, on the other hand, are mutually exclusive. We either accept the salvation God has freely given in Jesus Christ, or we will receive what we have earned for our sinful rebellion against God.

“The wages of sin is death”, St. Paul wrote, “but the gift of God is everlasting life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:23)

Or as Baptist evangelist John R. Rice paraphrased that verse “if you go to Hell, you pay your own way. You go to Heaven on a free pass”.

The day and hour in which Jesus Christ will "come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead" is not revealed to us and will not be revealed until it happens. It is not important for us to know that. What is important is that we know where we will stand at that judgment.

Whether Christ comes back today or ten thousand years from now, the important thing is that we chose Him today.

(1) Dr. Larry E. Dixon, who is professor of Systematic Theology and Church History at Columbia International University Seminary and School of Missions in Columbia, South Carolina was formerly the professor of theology at Providence College in Otterburne, Manitoba. He is the author of a number of books, including The Other Side of the Good News: Confronting the Contemporary Challenges to Jesus Teaching on Hell, first published by Victor Books of Wheaton, Illinois in 1992, reprinted by Christian Focus Publications of Tain, Scotland in 2003. He was my faculty adviser at Providence and my professor for systematic theology, 1st year NT Greek, and a number of other classes.