Is the End Near?

Jerusalem has been recaptured by the Jews. Soviet power threatens the Mideast. Communist China is working on an H-bomb delivery system. Nine nations are now in the Common Market. To growing thousands of U.S. Christians, these political facts are portents of doom, part of a detailed scenario for the Apocalypse. While most Christians were concentrating last week on the First Coming--Jesus' nativity at Bethlehem--these believers were concerned with Christ's Second Coming at the end of time, which they are convinced is at hand.

The believers are young and old, longtime Apocalypse buffs and recent converts. The newer ones include many members of the Jesus Movement. Bumper stickers (GUESS WHO'S COMING AGAIN!) proclaim Christ's return. Jesus rock bands throb with it. A small shelf of luridly written, fiercely dogmatic books purport to document and explain it. The Second Coming Bible, a warmed-over 1924 chestnut, has sold 50,000 copies since August; The Beginning of the End has sold 81,000 since March. Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, a compendium of apocalyptic prophecies, has sold more than 1,500,000 copies since its publication in 1970.

Images. Many of the earliest Christians believed that the end of the world would come in their lifetimes or soon after. When Christianity's first millennium drew to an end, many believers thought that they were on the brink of the seventh day of Creation, and trembled in expectation of the Second Coming. German and Flemish painters of the 15th century turned eschatology, the study of "last things," into high art, epitomized by Jan Van Eyck's Last Judgment. The 19th century was rife with Second Coming excitements: one movement, the Millerites, eventually became the Seventh-Day Adventists. The "Millennial Dawn" group expected the end in 1914; they are now the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Most Christians have to deal somehow with the Second Coming because tradition and Scripture seem to be so certain of it. Both the Apostles' and the Nicene creeds attest belief in a returning Christ who will judge the living and the dead. There are mentions in all four Gospels, many of them tied confusingly to prophecies of Jerusalem's destruction. The Old Testament abounds with related prophecies in Isaiah, Daniel and Ezekiel. Most important, there is the Revelation of St. John, that stunning piece of apocalyptic biblical literature that has fascinated and frustrated interpreters for nearly 19 centuries. It is Revelation that has given art and literature the most vivid images of mankind's terrible last days: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Scarlet Beast and Whore of Babylon, the monster Antichrist and, in Chapter 20, the vision of Christ's 1,000-year reign, the Millennium. Oxford Scholar G.B. Caird, a modern interpreter of Revelation, calls Chapter 20 "the paradise of cranks and fanatics."

In modern times, much of mainstream Protestant scholarship has virtually dismissed the idea of a real Second Coming, preferring to view the apocalyptic literature as a metaphor, a prefiguring of an eventual victory of Christ's redemptive power over the forces of evil. Roman Catholicism, in whose theology the Second Coming is known as Parousia, generally tends to accept the ancient creedal statements at face value but in interpretation holds a multitude of views, ranging from the transcendent visions of Teilhard de Chardin to literal belief in the final terrors.

For those who believe in a literal Second Coming--most noticeably conservative, evangelical Protestants --there are roughly three schools of competing thought.

> The Post-Millennialists, as they are called, assert that the Second Coming will occur after the Millennium. To them, the Millennium itself is not a personal 1,000-year reign of Christ but rather the golden age of his church under which mankind would know unusual peace and prosperity. In the optimism of the 19th century, when this interpretation was most popular, many Christians felt that they were already in the Millennium. World history since then has convinced most of them otherwise, but a kind of modern Post-Millennialism has recurred among a few theologians who foresee mankind moving toward an era of greater secular perfection.

> The Non-Millennialists are mostly those Lutherans and Calvinists who consider themselves closest to the founding reformers. They believe that the 1,000 years of the Millennium are symbolic, either of Christ's eternal heavenly reign or of the period between the First and Second Advents, in which the kingdom of God exists but is only partly realized. Non-Millennialists believe in an actual Second Coming that may occur at any time.

> Pre-Millennialists are the most inclined to take prophecies literally. They generally believe that certain events such as Christ's coming will occur before the golden age of his 1,000-year reign on earth. Some, including the "Dispensational" school, hold that a phenomenon called the Secret Rapture (a plucking of God's saints out of the mass of mankind to rule with Christ) will occur before the series of calamities known as the Tribulation. They even have a dashboard sticker that warns passengers: IF I'M RAPTURED, TAKE THE WHEEL.

The Dispensationalists, who have as their doctrinal fortress the Dallas Theological Seminary, are at the core of the Second Coming brouhaha these days. They take their name from a belief that God acts differently in different periods, or "dispensations" of history. Planet Earth Author Lindsey is a Dallas graduate, and his book predicts that the end will likely come within the "generation" (40 years) of those who were alive for the 1948 founding of Israel.

Lindsey's book is typical of the Dispensationalist view that the events of history are inevitable guideposts on the road to the end, foretold with unerring accuracy in the Bible. In Lindsey's chronology, the restoration of a homeland to the Jews was the first step, and the recapture of Jerusalem in 1967 a second step. This makes the rebuilding of the Temple possible, and Jesus predicted sacrilege in the Temple as a sign of the end. Meantime, a ten-nation confederation will form under the aegis of Rome, as prophesied in the ten-horned beast of Daniel and Revelation. To followers of Lindsey, this sounds ominously like the Common Market, even though it is not yet under the aegis of Rome. Israel will sign a pact with Rome, but the universally hailed Roman leader will turn out to be Antichrist and show up in Jerusalem to proclaim himself God. Lindsey's scenario goes on to forecast that Egypt, leading an Arab-African alliance, will attack Israel, and the Soviet Union, the "king of the north" mentioned in Daniel 11:40, will enter the act. The final conflict, of course, will be Armageddon (Revelation 19), and Christ will appear just in time to rescue earth from the ashes.

Even moderate evangelical Christians like the Rev. James M. Boice, minister of the Tenth Presbyterian Church in downtown Philadelphia, believe that there may be prophetic significance in such phenomena as the refounding of Israel and the rise of vice and demonism. But Boice warns: "The danger in prophecy is that you think about it all the time and neglect everything important; we can waste a lot of time on it while the rest of the world is going to hell spiritually and socially. It also leads to spiritual snobbishness--catering to a strong desire to be on the 'inside.' "

The weightiest objection to the Second Coming speculations is made by Protestant Theologian G.C. Berkouwer of Amsterdam in his volume on church dogmatics called The Return of Christ. The New Testament, argues Conservative Berkouwer, "rules out any attempt at calculation. To be curious on this score merely proves that one does not understand the events of history. The coming salvation can only be awaited in a state of complete preparedness." That would seem to be good advice. After all, the Gospels carry Jesus' own warning about expectation of the end: "Of that day or hour no one knows."

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