Christian Eschatology

Christian eschatology grew out of Jewish expectation and then spent two thousand years renegotiating the question of when. Its core claim is that history is moving toward a climax: the return of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, the judgment of all, and the renewal of creation. How near that climax is, and what the signs of it are, has been the church's longest argument.

The imminent end

The earliest Christian writings presume the end is near. In the letters of Paul, written in the 50s CE, the "day of the Lord" is expected in the writer's own lifetime; Paul comforts bereaved believers with the assurance that "we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep." The Gospel sayings attributed to Jesus speak of "this generation" not passing away before the kingdom comes. The expectation of an imminent end shaped the first communities: they lived as if time were short.

When the end did not arrive, the tradition adjusted. The Gospel of John and the later strata of the Synoptics already soften the imminent expectation, and by the second century the church settles into a longer view: the parousia (coming) is certain but its timing unknowable. "About that day and hour no one knows," the saying runs.

The return and the resurrection

The central events of the end, in the creeds and the apocalyptic literature, are these. The writing of that literature's defining text is dated under The Revelation of John is written on Patmos. Christ returns "with power and great glory." The dead are raised. All are judged. The present world order passes away and is replaced by "a new heaven and a new earth," where "death shall be no more." The book of Revelation supplies the imagery: the antichrist or beast, the battle, the thousand-year reign (the millennium), and the descent of the New Jerusalem.

How to read the signs: the great debate

The question of how the end unfolds has split Christians into camps:

• Premillennialism holds that Christ returns before a literal thousand-year reign on earth. Within it, dispensational premillennialism (popular in modern America) reads Revelation as a detailed forecast of coming events, including a secret "rapture" of believers.
• Postmillennialism held, especially in the optimistic nineteenth century, that the church would gradually Christianize the world and usher in a golden age, after which Christ would return.
• Amillennialism, the historic position of much of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, reads the millennium symbolically: the reign of Christ is now, in the church, and the end comes at a single final return.

These are not mere academic distinctions. They have driven movements, political alignments, and, in the case of dispensationalism, a vast publishing industry of end-times fiction and prediction.

The deferred end as identity

Christian eschatology is unusual in that its defining event is one it has been waiting for, actively, for two millennia. This waiting has produced both quiet hope and repeated waves of alarm: the Millerites of 1844, the Witnesses' 1914, the 2012 fears, and countless "end is near" movements. Each used the same texts; each named a date; each was wrong, and the movement adapted rather than collapsed.

The durability of Christian eschatology lies precisely in its deferral. Because the end is certain but unscheduled, it can be perpetually near, perpetually relevant, and perpetually reinterpreted. The last day is the one appointment the tradition has never kept and never stops expecting.