Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

SECOND COMING

Pre-Christian Jewish tradition uses the metaphor of God’s “coming” for special moments God has chosen to judge humanity, or events which reveal God’s powerful presence and plan for Israel as God’s covenant people. A vivid sense of God’s active presence emerges in graphic images such as “the day,” “the time,” or “the year” of the Lord, the ark of the covenant, the meeting tent, the holy place, the cloud, the Spirit, the Hand, or the Word of God. The memory of Israel enduring covenant relations with God from the time of Abraham stirred abiding trust in God’s protective intervention. The major refinements of this covenant conviction under Moses and David themselves arose in the face of grave impending moral and political crisis for Israel. The same is true for many crucial moments in Israel’s history, as its prophetic tradition shows. Visions about future reassertion of covenant rights recur in the classic oracles of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, exilic and postexilic Isaiah, and Zechariah.

Despite dramatic rescue from past threats, their stubborn recurrence challenged Israel’s confidence, spurring hope for a full and final intervention by God. Emerging Jewish hope for God’s “second” coming represents a potent metaphor for long-awaited, definitive divine confirmation of the covenant. God’s accumulated acts in Israel’s history dictated there could be only one “second” coming, whose dimensions grew in proportion to the success and failure of past “comings.” Eventually God’s latter coming merges with the end of all present time and history, marking the boundary between this world and all that lies beyond. Such tension drives the apocalyptic imagery that colors the oracles of Daniel, the Qumran community, John the Baptizer, and Jesus of Nazareth. Although various scenarios of how this would occur abounded in late Jewish and early Christian writing, some shared features shine through, i.e., a chain of woes climaxed by assertion of messianic authority, the raising of the dead, and divine judgment on humanity, marking the start of a new age.

This tension between past and future deliverance recurs in the oldest levels of the Jesus tradition, which both presume and proclaim an imminent, final change in Israel’s fate. The awaited shift fuels a deep ambivalence in the teaching of Jesus, reflected in views of John the Baptizer as unsurpassed, and yet a prelude of much more to come (Matt. 11:9-15; Luke 7:26-28; 16:16; cf. Gos. Thom. 46). The main streams of earliest Christian apostolic written tradition variously portray Jesus’ own mission as prefacing still greater events at hand. Jesus’ teaching clearly evoked differing messianic expectations, positive and negative, from his audiences. From early on, his disciples suffer public scrutiny for the unusual behavior evoked by their trust in him as God’s final messianic agent. Early Christians thus invested the tension between God’s former and latter coming in Jesus himself, whose life becomes a basic Christian key for interpreting Israel’s past and future history. In adapting older Jewish notions and scenarios for God’s second coming, early Christianity generated a distinctive eschatology which concretizes Jewish apocalyptic symbols while apotheosizing the specifics of Jesus’ own person and story.

The trend toward logocentric, timeless, vertical Christology that flourished as 2nd-century Christianity diverged from rabbinic Judaism gradually eclipsed older Christian views about Jesus’ second coming. Such belief gradually shifted to a more individual, transhistorical, spiritual key. But the vigor of 2nd-century Montanism shows that vivid hope for Jesus’ imminent, tangible, majestic return remained vivid in many Christian circles. Intermittent, powerful resurgence of such hope betrays enduring Christian ambivalence on this matter. Amid changing Christian fortunes from Constantine to Charlemagne to the Crusades, from Joachim of Fiore through the late Middle Ages to the Reformation and beyond, the awesome prospect of Jesus’ impending return has remained a flame easily fanned by threat of famine, plague, war, moral scandal, or foreign invasion.

Modern idealism, secularism, and rationalism have pushed such hope in a second coming to the margin of acceptable public discourse and visibility. Academically, the scientific view of time as a linear, uniform train of discrete moments has burdened our rediscovery of Christian eschatology in this century with undue stress on the temporal side of Jesus’ return. Recent biblical study, however, has begun recasting such discussion in more spatial, interpersonal, and rhetorical terms. Popularly speaking, apparitions, oracular disclosures, and urgent calls for moral reform, driven by deeply rooted Christian belief in Jesus’ eventual return, still persist. The vitality of dipensationalist, revivalist, and adventist Christian movements in our own time reflects an enduring Christian need for closure concerning God’s moral claim on humanity as invested in Jesus’ second coming.

Bibliography. J. D. G. Dunn, “He Will Come Again,” Int 51 (1997): 42-56; L. J. Kreitzer, “Eschatology,” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, ed. G. F. Hawthorne, R. P. Martin, and D. G. Reid (Downers Grove, 1993), 253-69; D. C. Allison, Jr., “Apocalyptic,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, 1992), 17-20; “Eschatology,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, 206-9.

F. Connolly-Weinert

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

SECOND COMING

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)