The Return of Christ

Before the disagreements, the agreement, and it is larger than the disagreements. The New Testament expects Jesus Christ to come back personally, visibly and bodily. Acts 1:11 says he 'will come back in the same way you have seen Him go into heaven', and the comparison is to a departure that was watched by witnesses. Revelation 1:7 says every eye will see him. Matthew 24:30 has the tribes of the earth mourning and seeing the Son of Man coming on the clouds. 1 Thessalonians 4:16 has a loud command, an archangel's voice and a trumpet. Titus 2:13 speaks of waiting for 'the blessed hope and glorious appearance of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ'. Hebrews 9:28 says he 'will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await Him'. And 1 Corinthians 11:26 puts it in the church's central act: you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

The creeds put it where nothing can be quietly dropped. The Apostles' Creed has him coming from thence to judge the living and the dead. The Nicene Creed, in the form settled in 381, says that he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and that his kingdom will have no end. Every communion in this course says those words aloud, most of them weekly. There is no orthodox Christian tradition, East or West, Catholic or Protestant, that treats the return as optional or as a figure of speech for something else.

Which means the boundary here is real, and a student should be able to state it without heat. Two kinds of reduction have been proposed and both have been judged to fall outside. The first is the reading that the return was wholly fulfilled in the events of AD 70, usually called full or consistent preterism, which holds that the second coming, the resurrection and the judgement all happened then. Every confessional tradition rejects it, because a resurrection that has already occurred is what 2 Timothy 2:18 names as the error of Hymenaeus and Philetus, who 'have deviated from the truth. They say that the resurrection has already occurred'. Note carefully that partial preterism, which holds that much of the Olivet Discourse was fulfilled in AD 70 while the bodily return remains future, is a different position entirely and is held within orthodoxy by serious people.

The second reduction came from the academy. Albert Schweitzer, in The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1906, argued that Jesus expected the end of the age within his own generation and was mistaken, and that the church has been managing that mistake ever since. C. H. Dodd answered with a realised eschatology in which the decisive event has already arrived in the ministry of Jesus. Rudolf Bultmann proposed demythologising the whole apparatus into a call for authentic existence in the present. Do not dismiss these; understand why they were persuasive, because the question they pressed is a real one and it is the subject of the next two sections. The mainstream answer, worked out by Joachim Jeremias, Oscar Cullmann, George Ladd and many since, is the already and not yet: the kingdom has genuinely arrived and has not yet arrived in full, and the New Testament holds both without apology.

So here is the shape of what follows. On the fact of a personal, visible, bodily return the church is united and has been from the beginning. On when it happens relative to the thousand years of Revelation 20, on what must occur first, and on whether the gathering of believers described in 1 Thessalonians 4 is one event or two, the church has never agreed, does not agree now, and has orthodox, careful, praying people on every side. Those are two different kinds of statement and the whole honesty of this lesson is in keeping them apart.

Parousia is the commonest of the three and the least dramatic in ordinary Greek. It means presence or arrival, and the New Testament uses it of perfectly ordinary human arrivals: Paul is glad at the coming of Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus in 1 Corinthians 16:17, and at the coming of Titus in 2 Corinthians 7:6. Outside the New Testament, in inscriptions and papyri from the Hellenistic and Roman world, it is the standard term for the official visit of a king, an emperor or a governor to a city, an event for which a city would strike coins, repair roads and send a delegation out to meet the arriving ruler and escort him in. When Matthew 24:27, 1 Thessalonians 4:15 and James 5:7-8 use the word of Christ, that is the field of association it brings: not a disappearance but a royal arrival at a place, with the population turned out.

Epiphaneia is appearing or manifestation, the becoming-visible of what was there but unseen. Its natural home is the language of a god or a ruler showing himself, and it is the noun behind the church's feast of Epiphany. The Pastoral Epistles like it: 1 Timothy 6:14, 2 Timothy 4:1 and 4:8, and Titus 2:13, which calls the blessed hope 'the blessed hope and glorious appearance of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ'. 2 Timothy 1:10 uses the same word of the first coming, which is a useful corrective against treating these terms as technical labels for separate events. And 2 Thessalonians 2:8 stacks two of them together: the lawless one is annihilated, in the BSB's words, 'by the majesty of His arrival', where the Greek is epiphaneia tes parousias, the appearing of the arrival. The English hides it, but two of the three words stand side by side in that phrase, which is one of the more important small facts in this whole argument.

Apokalypsis is an uncovering, the removal of whatever was concealing something. It is the first word of the book of Revelation. Applied to the return it carries a particular theological force: what happens is not that something new is created but that something already true is disclosed. The one who is already Lord is revealed as Lord. 1 Corinthians 1:7 has the Corinthians eagerly awaiting the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ; 2 Thessalonians 1:7 has the Lord Jesus revealed from heaven with his mighty angels; 1 Peter 1:7 and 1:13 set the believer's hope on the grace that will be brought at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Romans 8:19 uses the same root of the revelation of the sons of God, which is worth noticing: the unveiling of Christ is also the unveiling of who his people were all along.

Behind all three stands the Old Testament's day of the LORD, yom YHWH, which the prophets use of a decisive divine intervention that is both salvation and judgement. Amos 5:18-20 is the passage to know, because it warns people who want that day that it will be darkness and not light, which is a prophet telling his own congregation that they have misunderstood what they are asking for. Joel 2, Zephaniah 1 and Isaiah 13 develop it. The New Testament takes the phrase over and attaches it to Jesus: the day of the Lord in 1 Thessalonians 5:2 and 2 Peter 3:10, the day of Christ in Philippians 1:6 and 1:10, the day of our Lord Jesus Christ in 1 Corinthians 1:8. A student who has done the Old Testament Survey should hear how large a claim that transfer is.

Now the lexical caution, because these three words get pressed into service by both sides of the rapture argument in section 5 and the pressing is usually overdone. The words are not technical labels for separate stages. All three are used of the same event in the same letters, and 2 Thessalonians 2:8 puts two of them in a single phrase. Those who hold to a single return use that fact as an argument, and it is a fair one. Those who hold to two stages reply that a word with a general meaning can be used of either stage without the vocabulary itself settling anything, which is also fair, since nobody claims that parousia means only a public arrival. The honest conclusion is that the word study alone does not decide the question. It rules out the claim that the New Testament has a fixed technical vocabulary distinguishing the stages, and it does not rule out the stages.

Two columns of texts, both of them plain. In the first column, things that must happen before the end. 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4: that day 'will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness - the son of destruction - is revealed. He will oppose and exalt himself above every so-called god or object of worship.' Mark 13:10: 'And the gospel must first be proclaimed to all the nations.' Romans 11:25-26 speaks of a hardening in part that has come to Israel until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and then that all Israel will be saved, a passage read very differently by different traditions and read by all of them as pointing at something not yet complete. The Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21 supplies wars, famines, earthquakes, persecution, false messiahs, the abomination of desolation and a tribulation.

In the second column, texts that treat the coming as liable to happen at any time. Matthew 24:42-44: keep watch, because you do not know the day on which your Lord will come, and the Son of Man will come at an hour you do not expect. 1 Thessalonians 5:2: the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. James 5:8-9: the Lord's coming is near, and the Judge is standing at the door. Revelation 22:20: 'Yes, I am coming soon.' And 1 Corinthians 16:22 preserves the Aramaic prayer marana tha, our Lord, come, which tells you that the expectation was in the church's prayers before it was in anybody's system.

Before you reconcile the columns, notice that the Olivet Discourse has its own interpretive problem which is prior to all of this and which you met in the New Testament Survey. Matthew 24:34 says 'this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened', and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70 falls inside a generation of the saying. So a reader has to decide how much of the discourse is about that event and how much about the end, and the proposals run from almost all of it being AD 70, through a two-stage reading in which the fall of Jerusalem prefigures the end, to almost all of it being future. That decision is made before the millennial question is reached, and it quietly determines a great deal of what follows. Any teacher who reaches Revelation 20 without having told his students that he made that decision has concealed a step.

The standard reconciliations of the two columns are these, and each belongs to a family of positions rather than to one. First, that the signs are general conditions of the whole period between the ascension and the return rather than a countdown, so that wars and famines and false messiahs have marked every century and mark this one, and none of them permits a calculation. Second, that the signs precede the visible return while a prior gathering of believers has no preconditions at all, which is how a pretribulational scheme preserves a strict imminence. Third, that the signs are real preconditions and that imminence means certainty and nearness rather than the possibility of any given moment, so that 'soon' is a statement about the shape of the age and not about the calendar. Each of these is a real answer, each is held by people who read the same Greek, and the choice between them is largely made by the wider scheme rather than by the two columns on their own.

Then the church's record on date-setting, which is not a digression, because the pastoral half of this doctrine lives here. Montanus and his prophetesses in the second century expected the New Jerusalem to descend on a town in Phrygia. Joachim of Fiore's twelfth-century scheme set off centuries of calculation. William Miller's followers in the United States concluded the return would come in 1843 and then in October 1844, and the day that followed is still called the Great Disappointment. Harold Camping named 1994 and then May 2011, on the radio, to an audience who sold what they had. In every case the calculation was made by devout people from the biblical text. Against all of it stand two sentences that are as plain as anything in the New Testament: Matthew 24:36, that no one knows about that day or hour, not even the Son, but only the Father, and Acts 1:7, that it is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. Notice what Jesus puts in place of the knowledge in Acts 1:8. Not a chart. A commission.

Everything in this section is an attempt to combine Revelation 20:1-6 with material from elsewhere, because those six verses are the only place in scripture that speaks of a thousand-year reign, and they do not say where it happens, who is on the thrones, why Satan is released, or what kind of world contains it. The New Testament Survey module on Revelation worked the passage itself and set out the four schemes for reading the book as a whole, and this lesson does not relitigate that. Here the question is doctrinal rather than exegetical: given the whole canon, what is the shape of the end. Read all four before judging any, and read them at the same speed.

Historic premillennialism holds that Christ returns bodily, and that after his return he reigns on the earth with his people for a period the text calls a thousand years, at the end of which Satan is released, the final rebellion is crushed, the dead are raised and judged, and the new creation comes. Its first argument is narrative order. Revelation 19 has the rider on the white horse, Revelation 20 opens with the binding, and nothing in the text signals a return to an earlier point; if the chapters are read in the order they are written, the return precedes the reign. Its second is the double use of one verb. In 20:4 the souls of the martyrs 'came to life' and in 20:5 the rest of the dead 'did not come back to life until the thousand years were complete', and the one aorist verb ezesan stands behind both. Note that the BSB has added the word back in 20:5 only, so a reader of this English cannot see the sameness of the Greek verb on which the argument rests; whether the added word shows that 20:5 means a bodily rising while 20:4 means something else is the very question between this position and the amillennial one in the next paragraphs. Henry Alford's protest in his New Testament commentary of 1861, that if the first can mean a spiritual rising while the second four words later means bodily resurrection, then all significance is gone from language, is the classic statement of the point. Its third is that this was the earliest reading we can document. Justin Martyr states it in the Dialogue with Trypho 80 and 81, Irenaeus sets it out at length in the closing chapters of Against Heresies book 5, and Papias is reported to have held it; Justin also notes in the same passage that there were right-minded Christians of his own day who did not share it, which is honest evidence that the disagreement is nearly as old as the position. Its fourth argument is that a bodily, earthly, public vindication of Christ in the world where he was crucified fits the whole direction of biblical hope better than a reign located elsewhere, and that Romans 8 expects the creation itself to be set free. Its modern defenders include George Eldon Ladd, whose Crucial Questions about the Kingdom of God appeared in 1952 and whose A Theology of the New Testament followed in 1974, and more recently Craig Blomberg and Michael Bird. What it strains to explain is a whole doctrine resting on six verses in the most symbolic book of the canon; what kind of world contains resurrected saints and mortal nations at the same time; and why, after a thousand years of Christ reigning visibly, a released Satan finds nations like the sand of the sea ready to follow him. Its defenders answer that a doctrine stated once is still stated, that the Old Testament kingdom passages describe exactly such a mixed world, Isaiah 65:20 among them, where the restored age still contains death, and that the final rebellion is the point rather than the embarrassment, since it shows that evil is a condition of the heart which no environment cures.

Dispensational premillennialism shares the sequence and argues for it on different ground, and it needs its own hearing rather than a footnote, both because its reasoning is distinct and because it is what most students in English-speaking churches have actually been taught. Its governing conviction is that God has made promises to Israel, of land, of a throne and of a kingdom, which were unconditional and have not been transferred to the church, and that a God who keeps his word must keep those promises to the people to whom they were made. Genesis 12 and 15, 2 Samuel 7, Jeremiah 31:35-37 and Ezekiel 36 and 37 are the texts, and the exegetical rule is that a promise is fulfilled in the terms in which it was given unless the New Testament says otherwise. The thousand years is then the period in which that happens: a real kingdom, in the land, with Christ on David's throne, which is what the prophets described and what has never yet occurred. The scheme's chronology comes from Daniel 9:24-27, where seventy weeks of years are decreed, sixty-nine of which run to the Messiah, leaving a seventieth unfulfilled, which supplies the seven-year tribulation of the system; and its distinction between Israel and the church is argued from Romans 9 to 11, where Paul keeps speaking of Israel as a continuing entity with a future, and from 1 Corinthians 10:32, which names Jews, Greeks and the church of God as three. Acts 1:6-7 is pressed as well: when the disciples ask whether he will at this time restore the kingdom to Israel, Jesus corrects their timing and says nothing at all against their premise, which he had ample opportunity to do. J. N. Darby worked the system out from the late 1820s among the Plymouth Brethren; the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 carried it worldwide; Lewis Sperry Chafer, John Walvoord and Charles Ryrie gave it academic form at Dallas Theological Seminary. It has also revised itself in public: the progressive dispensationalism of Craig Blaising, Darrell Bock and Robert Saucy, set out from the early 1990s, holds that Christ has already begun his Davidic reign and softens the two-peoples distinction while keeping a future for ethnic Israel. What it strains to explain is Daniel 9, which says nothing whatever about a gap between the sixty-ninth week and the seventieth, and the New Testament's habit of applying Israel's promises to the church, as at 1 Peter 2:9-10, Galatians 6:16 and Romans 9:24-26. Its defenders answer that gaps between prophetic events are common in the prophets and are visible in Isaiah 61:1-2, which Jesus stops halfway through at Luke 4:18-19; and that the church's participation in Israel's blessings is one thing and the cancellation of Israel's promises another, which is precisely what Romans 11:1 and 11:29 deny.

Postmillennialism holds that the thousand years is a long period within history, during which the gospel largely succeeds, the nations are substantially discipled, and the world is brought into a condition of righteousness and peace, at the end of which Christ returns to a world that has been won rather than to one that has collapsed. Its first argument is the shape of the kingdom parables: a mustard seed that becomes the largest of garden plants, leaven that works through the whole lump, in Matthew 13:31-33, which are images of gradual and total permeation and not of a remnant rescued from a ruin. Its second is the Psalms and the prophets taken at their word. Psalm 2:8 gives the nations as an inheritance and the ends of the earth as a possession; Psalm 72:8-11 has all kings bowing down to him and all nations serving him; Isaiah 2:2-4 has the nations streaming to the mountain of the LORD and beating their swords into plowshares; Isaiah 11:9 says the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the sea is full of water; and Daniel 2:34-35 and 2:44 have a stone cut out, but not by human hands, that breaks the statue and then becomes a great mountain filling the whole earth, which is growth within history and not a sudden replacement of it. Its third is 1 Corinthians 15:25, that he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet, which reads as a process completed before the end rather than as a single blow at it. Its fourth is the Great Commission understood as a promise as well as a command, since all authority has already been given and the disciples are sent to disciple the nations, plural, not to collect individuals out of them. On Revelation 20 it holds that the binding of Satan, stated in 20:3 for the specific purpose that he might not deceive the nations any longer, is precisely what makes the worldwide mission possible. Its pedigree is serious: Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield held it, it was the dominant Anglo-American Protestant expectation through much of the nineteenth century, and it was restated by Loraine Boettner in 1957 and more recently by Kenneth Gentry, Keith Mathison and John Jefferson Davis. What it strains to explain is the twentieth century, which is a blunt way of stating a real difficulty, and the order of Revelation 19 and 20, which on a natural reading puts the return before the thousand years rather than after. Its defenders answer that the position was largely abandoned for historical rather than exegetical reasons, that losing confidence in a doctrine because the news is bad is not an argument against it, and that a promise about the outcome of the whole age cannot be falsified by a bad hundred years.

Amillennialism holds that the thousand years is the present age, running from the resurrection and ascension of Christ to his return, that the number is symbolic as every other number in Revelation is, and that there is one return, one general resurrection and one judgement, followed immediately by the new creation. Its first argument is that the binding of Satan is what the Gospels say the ministry of Jesus accomplished: Mark 3:27 has the strong man bound before his house is plundered, Luke 10:18 has Satan falling like lightning, John 12:31 has the prince of this world cast out, and Colossians 2:15 has the powers and authorities disarmed and made a public spectacle. The binding in Revelation 20:3 is stated for a limited purpose, that he should not deceive the nations any longer, which describes exactly what changed when the gospel went to the Gentiles rather than a total restraint. Its second is that the people who reign in 20:4 are called souls, the same noun as the souls under the altar in 6:9 who are plainly in heaven, so the first resurrection is the believer's passage at death into reigning life with Christ. Its third is that the New Testament everywhere expects one resurrection of the just and the unjust together: John 5:28-29 has all who are in their graves hearing his voice and coming out, some to the resurrection of life and some to the resurrection of judgment, in one hour, Acts 24:15 has a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked, 2 Peter 3 has the day of the Lord and the new heavens and new earth with nothing between them; and 1 Corinthians 15:23-24 moves from 'those who belong to Him' at his coming straight to 'Then the end will come', leaving no reported interval. Its fourth is that Revelation recapitulates constantly, so a new vision at 20:1 restarting rather than continuing is what the book has trained its reader to expect. Augustine set it out in City of God book 20, chapters 7 to 9, and was candid that he had once held the millenarian view himself; through Tyconius before him it became the standard Western reading and stands behind the Reformation confessions. Modern statements include Geerhardus Vos, Louis Berkhof, Anthony Hoekema's The Bible and the Future in 1979, G. K. Beale and Sam Storms. What it strains to explain is the double use of one verb in 20:4-5, which is the premillennial objection and is a real one (the BSB's added back in 20:5 does not remove it, since the Greek verb is the same, though amillennialists can fairly say the added word shows the translators read 20:5 as a bodily rising and 20:4, whose subject is souls, as something else, which is their own point), and the claim that Satan is now bound, which is hard to hold beside 1 Peter 5:8 and beside the experience of the church in most centuries. Its defenders answer that the binding is limited by its own stated purpose rather than total, which they take 20:3 to say in so many words and which premillennialists reply is not what a pit shut and sealed over him pictures; and some of them dislike the label, preferring to speak of a realised millennium, since they are not denying the thousand years but locating them.

Now the honest report, and it runs in the other direction so that nobody gets the last word by arriving last. Amillennialism has been the majority reading of the Western church since Augustine and is confessed by the largest communions in the world. Postmillennialism was the standard Protestant expectation of the English-speaking world for much of the nineteenth century and has never disappeared. Dispensational premillennialism is the youngest of the four as a system and by some distance the most widely taught at congregational level in the English-speaking world today. Historic premillennialism is the earliest position we can document in the surviving sources, and Justin's own remark shows that it was disputed almost immediately. Every one of the four has been held by people who read Greek carefully, who suffered for their faith and who loved the scriptures; none of them is a mark of orthodoxy and none is a mark of compromise; and the creeds that the whole church confesses say that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and that his kingdom will have no end, and say nothing at all about the schedule. This course will not hand you a verdict. What it asks is that you be able to state all four in words their own defenders would recognise, and that you notice when somebody presents one of them as simply what the Bible says.

Start with the word, because the word is not the disputed part. 1 Thessalonians 4:17 says that we who are alive and remain 'will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air'. The Greek verb is harpazo, to seize or snatch away, used of Philip at Acts 8:39 and of Paul at 2 Corinthians 12:2. The Latin Vulgate renders it rapiemur, from rapio, and the English noun rapture comes from there. So every Christian tradition in this lesson believes in a rapture in the only sense the text supplies: living believers at the coming of Christ are caught up to meet him. Nobody disputes that. The dispute is whether that catching up is a distinct event, separated from the public return by a period of tribulation, or the same event described from another angle.

The pretribulational case, stated by its defenders. Believers are promised exemption from wrath, and 1 Thessalonians 1:10 calls Jesus our deliverer from the coming wrath while 5:9 says God has not appointed us to suffer wrath but to obtain salvation; if the tribulation is the outpouring of that wrath, the church is not in it. Revelation 3:10 promises the church at Philadelphia to keep her from the hour of testing that is about to come upon the whole world, and the preposition is read as removal from rather than preservation through. The word for church, ekklesia, runs all through Revelation 2 and 3, is absent from chapters 4 to 18, and returns at 22:16. A strict imminence requires that no predicted event stand between now and the coming, which a pretribulational gathering supplies and the other schemes do not. And the underlying distinction between Israel and the church, argued in the last section, gives the seventieth week of Daniel 9 a purpose: it is God resuming his dealings with Israel, which requires the church to be elsewhere. Beside it sit two related positions: the midtribulational view, which places the gathering at the middle of the seven years, and the prewrath view set out by Marvin Rosenthal in 1990, which places it after the great tribulation but before the day of the Lord's wrath.

The posttribulational case, stated by its defenders. The word Paul uses for the meeting in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 is apantesis, and in the ancient world it names a delegation going out of a city to meet an arriving dignitary and escorting him back in; Luke uses it in exactly that sense at Acts 28:15, where the brothers travel out as far as the Forum of Appius and the Three Taverns to meet Paul's party, and on the usual reading they then accompany him into Rome. On that reading the caught-up church turns round and accompanies the arriving Lord, which is one arrival and not two. Matthew 24:29-31 puts the gathering of the elect by angels with a loud trumpet call 'immediately after the tribulation of those days'. 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3 joins the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him in a single phrase and then says the day will not come until the rebellion comes first. Revelation 13:7 has the beast making war on the saints and conquering them, which puts saints on earth in the period. And John 17:15 has Jesus praying not that they be taken out of the world but that they be kept from the evil one. Its defenders include George Ladd, Robert Gundry in The Church and the Tribulation in 1973, and Douglas Moo.

Now the history, which is a matter of fact and should be stated as one. The pretribulational position as a worked system is recent. It is documented from John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren from the late 1820s and the 1830s, alongside the prophetic circle around Edward Irving in the same years; it spread through the Niagara Bible Conferences, was fixed in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909 and its 1917 revision, was taught at Dallas Theological Seminary through the twentieth century, and reached an enormous popular audience through Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970 and the Left Behind novels from 1995. Claims of earlier anticipations exist and are genuinely contested: an essay by the Baptist Morgan Edwards published in Philadelphia in 1788 is cited by some as an eighteenth-century instance, and a tract known as Pseudo-Ephraem is cited by others as a much earlier one, and specialists disagree about whether either says what is claimed. A separate claim by Dave MacPherson, that the doctrine originated in a charismatic utterance by Margaret MacDonald at Port Glasgow in 1830, has been rejected by historians on both sides of the argument and should not be repeated as though it were established.

Say plainly what that history does and does not prove, because it is abused in both directions. It does not prove the position false. Novelty is not refutation, and the charge of novelty was levelled at the Reformers by people who thought it settled the matter. A doctrine is established or overturned by exegesis, and a nineteenth-century reading of Daniel 9 is not worse for being nineteenth century any more than a fourth-century reading is better for being fourth century. What the history does establish is narrower and worth having: the pretribulational scheme is not the ancient or universal teaching of the church, and any presentation of it as the plain apostolic expectation that Christians held until liberals came along is false to the record. Teach it if you are persuaded by it. Do not teach it as though the first eighteen centuries agreed with you.

What is settled, then, and what is not. Settled: Christ will return personally, visibly and bodily; he will raise the dead and judge the world; his kingdom will have no end; the day is certain and its date is not ours to know; and the New Testament's own response to that expectation is holiness, endurance, mission and hope rather than calculation. Not settled: the millennium, the tribulation, the sequence, and whether the church passes through what is coming or is taken out of it. Some traditions have taken a side and a student should know which. Article XVII of the Augsburg Confession, having taught that Christ will appear for judgement and raise the dead, condemns those spreading the opinion that before the resurrection the godly shall take possession of the kingdom of the world, the ungodly being everywhere suppressed; the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 had an article against the millenarians which was dropped when the Thirty-Nine Articles were drawn up in 1563; and the Catechism of the Catholic Church at 676 rejects a millenarianism that expects a this-worldly messianic triumph within history. The Westminster Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Orthodox tradition leave the question open. No ecumenical creed adjudicates it at all, and the last time the whole church spoke on the return of Christ together it said only that he is coming.