The Fifth Fundamental The Second Coming
The last of the Five Fundamentals claimed by American Protestant Traditionalists as the irreducible essence of Christianity has to do with the second coming of Jesus. To modern ears it is the most bizarre of the five and is based, I believe, on a misunderstanding of the Christ experience that was later literalized. However, that misunderstanding has found a place in the gospels themselves, and so the distortion echoes through the ages. This fifth fundamental stated that Christians are required to believe that Jesus will return to the earth in a bodily form on the last day for two purposes. He will come, first to inaugurate the Kingdom of God and second to carry out the final judgment. This ancient concept involved pictorial images of Jesus coming physically out of the sky, which made sense only in a pre-Copernican world. It forces contemporary believers to affirm the literalness of a place called heaven, where great and eternal rewards are handed out and of a place called hell where great and eternal punishment must be endured. It also implies that the "Day of Judgment" has to be regarded as an event that will occur inside history at the end of time. For most modern people all of these concepts fall somewhere in between gobbledygook and complete non-sense. That is at least part of the reason why there is in our time a rush into secularism and why our modern world produces popular books espousing atheism. Yet, the fact remains that even in this generation those who predict the specific date for the second coming of Jesus still get media attention - though maybe only the kind of attention that one gives to the theater of the absurd. Occasionally, some person will actually claim that they are in fact the Jesus who will come again. The last one of these to gain major attention in the media was from Texas - enough said. Devotees of the second coming quote the Bible literally to justify their convictions. Perhaps we ought to start by looking at these biblical ideas.
Apocalypticism, or concern with the end of the world, is indeed a note found first in the Hebrew Scriptures and later in Paul and the gospels. Apocalypticism appears to enter this tradition as a sign of the decline of hope among the Jewish people that their vindication would ever occur inside history. That despair was born after the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C.E. That defeat for the Jews dispersed the citizens of the Northern Kingdom into the DNA pools of the Middle East, never to be isolated, identified or heard of again. These people are referred to today as "The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel." The Assyrians also reduced the last remaining Jewish state called Judah to vassal status and inaugurated a policy of collecting tribute, which left the Jews in poverty and allowed hopelessness to become their daily bread. It was out of that hopelessness that the Jews began both to dream of God's restoration and to envision exactly what would occur at the end of history when the Kingdom of God would be established. Apocalypticism also fed the messianic dreams of the Jews, for one aspect of the messiah who would come, was that he would reestablish the Jewish nation, restore the Jewish throne and usher in the Kingdom of God at the end of time.
These hopes grew in direct proportion to the rise of Jewish despair. After vassalage to the Assyrians, the Kingdom of Judah was defeated and destroyed by the new power of the Middle East, the Babylonians. This time Judah tried to hold out against this foe, fighting a brilliant defensive battle for two years before the walls around Jerusalem were breached and the victorious Babylonians poured in. The city was laid to waste, the Temple destroyed and all the able bodied citizens were deported to exile in Babylon never to see their holy land again. Some two generations later, the Persians overran the Babylonians and let the captive people finally return to their homeland, where they discovered that the nation of Judah was little more than a rock pile and that Jerusalem was so crippled that it would never again inspire grand dreams. In that climate apocalyptic thinking thrived. Someday messiah will come, they said, and draw history to a close. Messiah will usher in the Kingdom of God, judge the people of the world and begin the time after time and beyond history when God's will is done "on earth as in heaven."
It was not long, however, before the Persians were overrun by the Macedonians and the Jews became again a conquered province now in the empire of Alexander the Great. Upon Alexander's death, the Jewish state became a pawn between the Syrians and the Egyptians until Rome's might once again united that part of the world under Roman domination. So when the Jews looked at history they saw it only as an arena of their constant victimization. In response they created apocalyptic fantasies that anticipated the end of the world. In that alone they found both comfort and hope. The promised one, they said, would descend out of the sky at the end of time and usher in the new age of peace under the dominance of these oppressed people. Many definitions floated around the idea of messiah in Jewish circles. He would be the Son of David, and thus the heir to David's throne. He would be the new Moses and the new Elijah, the Son of Man and even the Son of God. Much of the gospel material in the New Testament was designed, not to describe things Jesus actually said and did, but to attach various images to him in order to demonstrate his claim to be the messiah. They believed that when messiah came he would be recognized because the signs of the kingdom would be the marks of his life: the blind would see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing. When Jesus was identified by his disciples as the messiah all of these images were attached to his memory. When Matthew attributed to him the parable of the Judgment in which the sheep and the goats were separated and dispatched, one to eternal life, the other to outer darkness, messianic thinking was clearly operative.
Messiah would come out of the sky because that is where God lived. The "City of God" would descend out of heaven; living water would flow from above when the Kingdom dawned. All of these images assumed a three-tiered universe with heaven, the abode of God, just above the sky. Christianity's incarnational language reflected that mentality. Jesus was the human form of God above, entering human history through a miraculous virgin birth. His life was filled with Godlike acts and people said that he was destined to return to the God above the sky through the miracle of a cosmic ascension. Those were the interpretive symbols used to tell the Christ story. Interestingly enough, however, these traditional story lines do not appear to be original to Christianity. The Virgin birth, for example, did not enter the Christian tradition until the 9th decade. Paul who wrote between 50-64 had clearly never heard of it. Neither had Mark, the first gospel, written in the early years of the 8th decade. The story of Jesus' ascension, as something separate from the resurrection, is a 10th decade addition to the Christian story and try as we may, we find no evidence of miracles being associated with Jesus until the 8th decade.
Something occurred, an experience that cannot be described, causing the disciples to identify Jesus with that promised messiah and immediately these "end of the world" images were wrapped around him, It quickly became obvious, however, that neither the life nor the death of Jesus had established the Kingdom of God. So echoes in the teaching of Jesus appeared suggesting that he would come again to complete the messianic task before "this generation has passed away." He was called the "first fruits of the Kingdom of God." A crisis developed in the church at Thessalonica when Jesus did not return immediately and Paul had to address this anxiety in his first Epistle to the Thessalonians. Two thousand years have now passed and the Kingdom has not yet dawned. Increasingly most people just assume that this was a misunderstanding that got incorporated into Jesus. In Luke's gospel and in his second volume that we call the book of Acts, it begins to look like the hope for the second coming has already been replaced by the idea that the church has the universal mission to convert the world. Some have suggested that the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was really the second coming and that the church, presumably born in that Pentecost experience, was now the "Body of Christ." That idea transforms the second coming symbol somewhat.
Others have said that Christ's second coming is in the lives of his faithful disciples, our commitment to live the Christ life. These explanations may be helpful to some but they are not to me. Neither are they to those almost to be pitied people, who fail to live now because they spend their lives getting ready to welcome Jesus in his second coming.
All of the apocalyptic language, out of which talk of a second coming of Jesus arises, is mythological language expressing hope that is not bound by the pain of this world. It was never meant to be literalized. The classical fundamentalists, who wrote the Five Fundamentals of Christianity, are thus not the true interpreters of the Christ story but the ones, who by literalizing the interpretive myths have actually falsified the Christ experience so totally that 21st century people find it increasingly difficult to call themselves Christian.
So our analysis of the Five Fundamentals of Christianity is now complete. Every single one of them is intellectually bankrupt in the light of modern knowledge. The Bible is not the inerrant word of God. The Virgin Birth has nothing to do with biology. The idea of substitutionary atonement is a barbaric idea that makes God an ogre, Jesus a victim and you and me the guilt-ridden causes of Jesus' death. The resurrection of Jesus is not a physical, bodily resuscitation. The second coming is nothing more than a mythological way to express the human yearning for fulfillment. It has nothing to do with an event that might occur in time.
So what is Christianity all about if none of these "fundamentals" are literally true? That will be my topic next week.
John Shelby Spong .
Wadday'all think? Could be truth conquering?? Warm regards, Roger