How Long Can We Keep Preaching Christ's Coming?

The “Preachers Who Cried Wolf.” Nice.

Really, if people have waited 100, 500, 2000 years, why not more? Glad you raised this as it’s timely to recent doubts of mine. Any suggestions from this blog community of good works dealing with this issue of second coming delay for a theologically curious yet unsophisticated reader?

Yes, I’m surprised Tony Jones isn’t open to different theological perspectives on this. It’s quite possible to retain a “concrete eschaton”—a final justice and renewal of all things—without having to cram the whole apocalyptic narrative into that package. It makes so much more sense exegetically and historically to recognize that Jesus was speaking about the impending war against Rome. If the Old Testament prophets could use the imagery of thieves breaking in, for example, to describe a coming invasion of Judea (Jer. 49:8-9; Obad. 5), I don’t see why Jesus couldn’t or wouldn’t (http://www.postost.net/2010/10/parables-delay-question-dual-fulfilment). The underlying theological issue is then the historical accountability of the people of God rather than modern end-time prognostication.

@ Courtney: It is hard to live in a vibrant today on a dollar a day, with disease, under oppression, wounded, broken, abused, and crushed. There are some people in this world privileged enough to consider a vibrant today possible, but that seems to emerge in a context of rare privilege as much or more than faith. The abuses of the concepts of a second coming or heaven do not discount whatever truth there is to it.

It depends on how you preach it. If you preach it in a John Hagee-esque, you’d better make sure your ducks are all in a row because Jesus is coming soon, type of way, then yes it could lead to preachers sounding like the preachers who cried wolf. But the promised return of Christ is not a day to be feared it is a day that gives us hope. So why not preach it over and over? We have to remember that Jesus did say that nobody, not even Jesus Himself will know the day and hour of His return. In my sermon yesterday I said there are two dangerous ditches to avoid when it comes to the promised return of Christ; there is the legalistic make sure you have your ducks in a row approach that reduces Jesus to a task-master lording over us (which also undermines the completed work on the cross), or the revisionist ‘we really don’t even need to talk about it’ approach which inevitably just leads to an overly spiritualized view of Christ. In other words, when we ignore the “not yet” in the “now and not yet” we end up with an over-emphasis on the “now” and thus a heremenutic that interpretes Jesus through the lens of the world and not the other way around. But then again Tony, you and Doug Padgitt, Rob Bell and the rest of the emergents fell into that latter ditch a long time ago.