The Second Coming

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When a Hellenistic king came to one of his cities — entering through a garlanded gate, met by the magistrates, his arrival dated on the local coinage and sometimes opening a new reckoning of the years — the Greek word for the event was parousia: presence, arrival, the formal advent of the one who holds the power. The same word the early churches reached for when they named the thing they were waiting on. The Second Coming is the Christian expectation that Jesus Christ, having lived, died, and risen, will arrive a second time — visibly, in glory, attended not by city magistrates but by the angels of heaven — to judge the living and the dead and to bring history to its appointed close. The loanword carried its civic weight intact. The one awaited is a sovereign, the arrival is public, and the city it visits is the whole world.

The expectation before the doctrine

The waiting is older than any worked-out teaching about it. The earliest Christian writings are letters, not gospels, and the earliest of those letters already lean their whole weight on a return that is near. Around 50 or 51 CE, roughly two decades after the crucifixion and a full generation before the gospels were set down, the First Epistle to the Thessalonians — on the usual reckoning the oldest surviving Christian document — answers a grief that has arisen in a young congregation: some of their number have died, and the others fear the dead will miss the arrival. The reassurance is concrete. The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s voice and the trumpet of God; the dead in Christ will rise first, and the living will be caught up to meet him. The verb for that meeting, apantēsis, is again a civic term — the citizens going out beyond the wall to receive an arriving dignitary and escort him in. The imminence is so palpable that, the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians reports, some in the community had stopped working altogether, and that later letter cools the fever, insisting that the day will not come until certain things happen first and warning against idleness dressed up as readiness.

The same charge runs through the gospels. On the Mount of Olives, across the valley from the Temple, the figure called the Son of Man — drawn from the night vision of Daniel, where one like a son of man comes with the clouds of heaven and receives an everlasting dominion — foretells his own coming on the clouds with power and great glory, the sun darkened, the stars falling, the elect gathered from the four winds. This discourse, the little apocalypse the synoptic gospels each preserve, fixes the return at the heart of what the tradition remembered Jesus teaching. And the New Testament canon shuts on the same note: its last book, a vision of the end couched in the symbolic grammar of apocalypse, closes with the promise, spoken in the first person by the risen Christ, that he is coming soon — answered in the next breath by the church’s own cry for him to come. The book gives the expectation its most influential single image, the thousand-year reign, and so sets the terms of a quarrel that has not ended.

This expectation did not fall from nowhere. It is the Christian inflection of a hope worked out across the late Second Temple period, when the literature of Second Temple Judaism had already filled with visions of a decisive divine intervention, a resurrection of the dead, and a judgment that would set right what history had left crooked. The wider architecture of those end-things — the resurrection, the judgment, the renewal of creation — belongs to eschatology as such; the expectation of a coming deliverer belongs to the long stream of biblical prophecy. What is proper to the Second Coming is the narrower and sharper claim: that the deliverer has a name and a face, has already been here once, and will be recognized when he returns. The arrival is also a re-arrival.

The delay

That the return did not come within the lifetime of those who first awaited it became, for the early church, a question it had to live inside rather than answer once. The technical name modern scholarship gives the problem — the delay of the Parousia — was coined in the early twentieth century, but the pressure is visible already in the New Testament itself. The cooling of the Thessalonian fever is one response. Another is the counsel, placed on Jesus’ own lips, that of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only — a saying that converts the failure of a timetable into a discipline of vigilance. A third, in one of the later epistles, reframes the lapse of time as the patience of God, for whom a thousand years are as a day. The expectation was not abandoned; it was re-housed. What had been a matter of months stretched into the open time the church still occupies, and the watchword shifted from soon to be ready.

The delay has carried a long scholarly afterlife. Albert Schweitzer made it the hinge of his portrait of Jesus, arguing in The Quest of the Historical Jesus that Jesus had genuinely expected the end within his own generation and that the whole inner history of Christianity proceeds from the non-arrival of that end. Later scholars have pushed back hard — questioning whether the early communities were in fact thrown into crisis by the delay at all, or whether the anxiety is a construct read back into them. The conditional shape of biblical prophecy, on one influential reading, was always built to absorb deferral: a forecast tied to repentance is not falsified when the repentance is slow. The argument over how much the first Christians felt the delay is itself a window onto how the doctrine works — an expectation robust enough to survive its own postponement, and to make the postponement meaningful.

The millennial fault line

How the return is figured divides the tradition along a single seam: its relation to the thousand-year reign, the millennium named in the canon’s last book. The three classic positions are not academic refinements but lenses that have organized whole churches and movements.

Premillennialists hold that Christ returns before the thousand years and himself inaugurates the reign — the world worsening toward a crisis from which the returning king rescues and rules. On this reading the kingdom arrives by intervention, breaking in from outside a history that cannot save itself; the posture is watchful, often expecting tribulation before deliverance. Postmillennialists reverse the order: Christ returns after a golden age that the church, by preaching and reform, helps to bring about — the gospel leavening the world until it ripens into the reign, and the return crowning a victory already substantially won. Amillennialists decline the literal thousand years altogether, reading the number as a symbol of the present age of the church, in which Christ already reigns with the saints, so that no distinct earthly millennium is awaited at all; the return brings not a thousand-year interval but the general resurrection and the final judgment together.

These are not minor distinctions, and they are not merely about chronology. They encode opposed estimates of history itself — whether the world is to be abandoned to ruin and snatched out of it, gradually transformed from within, or neither, the drama having moved to a register the calendar cannot track. The same texts feed all three; the difference is the shape of time each reads into them, and behind that, the relation each draws between the kingdom of God and the world as it stands.

A history of failed datings

Set against the long counsel that no one knows the day is a recurring impulse to know it anyway, and the history of the doctrine is in part a history of dates set, awaited, and outlived. The pattern is old. In the second century the Montanist movement of Asia Minor announced new prophecy and an imminent descent of the heavenly Jerusalem, expecting it near a Phrygian village; the church it unsettled eventually ruled against it. In 1534 a radical wing of the Anabaptist movement seized the city of Münster and declared it the New Jerusalem, awaiting the kingdom within its walls — a brief, violent theocracy crushed in 1535. In nineteenth-century America the Baptist lay preacher William Miller, reading the twenty-three-hundred days of Daniel as years, calculated the return for 1843 and then 1844; when the date his followers settled on — the twenty-second of October, 1844 — passed without event, the day entered their memory as the Great Disappointment. The Millerite movement did not vanish in the morning after; it scattered into new churches, recalculating not the certainty of the return but the meaning of the date.

Joachim of Fiore belongs near this company but stands a little apart from it. The twelfth-century Calabrian abbot did not name a day. His scheme of three status — the age of the Father, lived under the law; the age of the Son, lived under the grace of the Church and the New Testament; and a coming age of the Holy Spirit, a contemplative dispensation — forecast not an arrival but an era, a third age he calculated to dawn around 1260. He was careful about his own standing: he denied being a prophet, claiming instead a gift of spiritual understanding that let him read the concord of the two Testaments, and though he is venerated locally as a beatus he was never formally beatified. His third age, like the others, came and went unmarked, yet the structure he built — history read as the unfolding of the Trinity into time — proved one of the most fertile ideas in the Western imagination, descending through the current that bears his name, Joachimism, into eight centuries of expectation of a coming spiritual age.

What these episodes share is not credulity so much as the difficulty of holding a certain end in an uncertain calendar. And what they reveal is the doctrine’s peculiar resilience. Each failed date might have been expected to dissolve the hope; instead, with striking regularity, it refined the hope. The conviction that the return is sure has proven more durable than any reckoning of when, in part because the tradition long ago built the not-knowing into the expectation itself.

Texts, editions, and the scholarship

The Second Coming is reconstructed first from the New Testament texts that bear its earliest weight — the Thessalonian correspondence, the synoptic discourse on the Mount of Olives, and the closing visionary book of the canon — and these are read against the Jewish apocalyptic literature of the late Second Temple period, where the Danielic vision of one like a son of man supplied the gospels their central image.

The modern scholarly framing of the problem of timing begins with Johannes Weiss and reaches its sharpest statement in Albert Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906), translated as The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910), whose concluding chapters make the delay of the Parousia the engine of Christian history; the position is known as consistent eschatology. The counter-case — that the delay was less a crisis than a modern projection — is argued in Richard Bauckham’s The Delay of the Parousia (Tyndale Bulletin 31, 1980), which traces how the deferral was handled within the texts themselves. The doctrinal architecture as the older confessional tradition states it — the Parousia as the signal for the general resurrection, followed by the last judgment — is set out in the public-domain 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, both in its article on eschatology and in its treatment of the Epistles to the Thessalonians, where the question of whether the apostle expected the return in his own lifetime is met head-on. The three millennial positions are surveyed concisely in the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on premillennialism and in its longer treatment of millennialism within eschatology. For the modern dating episodes, the Millerite recalculation and its aftermath are documented in the scholarship on the Great Disappointment; and for the twelfth-century three-age scheme, Bernard McGinn’s The Calabrian Abbot (1985) and Marjorie Reeves’s The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (1969) remain the standard anchors, distinguishing the abbot’s authentic theology from the vast pseudonymous prophecy that later circulated under his name.

What stands beneath the timetables

Beneath every quarrel over schedule — before or after the millennium, in 1260 or 1844 or the open future — the texts hold one thing steady, and it is not a date. It is a claim about the present order: that it is not final, that the account is not yet closed, that justice deferred is justice owed and not justice canceled. The dead in Christ will rise; the one who was seen will be seen again; the king who came once to a backwater of empire will come the second time to the world entire, and the arrival will be public, the way an emperor’s arrival is public. The schools disagree about nearly everything in the picture except its governing conviction — that something is owed, and that it will come.

→ Related: First Epistle To The Thessalonians · Second Epistle To The Thessalonians · Beatification · Jesus Christ · New Testament · Eschatology · Apocalypse · Kingdom Of God · Prophecy · Second Temple Judaism · Book Of Daniel · Daniel · Joachimite Apocalypticism · Grace In Christianity