Concept

The Second Coming

The Christian expectation that Christ will return in glory to judge the living and the dead and complete the world — the Parousia, awaited as imminent and repeatedly recalculated.

The Second Coming is the Christian expectation that Jesus Christ, having lived, died, and risen, will return at the end of the present age — visibly and in glory, to judge the living and the dead and to bring history to its appointed close. The Greek word for it in the earliest texts is parousia, “presence” or “arrival,” the term used in the Hellenistic world for the official visit of a king or emperor to a city.

The expectation is older than the doctrine. The earliest Christian writings — the letters of Paul, composed in the 50s of the first century, before the gospels — already assume a return that is near. Paul tells the church at Thessalonica that the Lord will descend “with a shout,” and that the dead in Christ will rise first, in language so immediate that some readers stopped working to wait. The synoptic gospels carry the same charge in the discourse on the Mount of Olives, where the Son of Man comes on the clouds; the Book of Revelation closes the New Testament canon with it, “Surely I come quickly.” That this return did not arrive within the first generation became, for the early church, a problem to be reckoned with — what scholars call the delay of the Parousia, and the reason later texts begin to caution that no one knows the day or the hour.

How the return is understood divides the tradition along one fault line: its relation to the millennium, the thousand-year reign named in Revelation. Premillennialists hold that Christ returns before that reign and inaugurates it; postmillennialists, that he returns after a golden age the church helps bring about; amillennialists read the thousand years as a symbol of the present church age rather than a coming epoch. These are not minor distinctions. They have organized whole movements, and they shape whether believers expect the world to worsen toward a rescue or to be gradually transformed.

The history of the doctrine is also a history of failed datings. From the Montanists of the second century through the Anabaptists at Münster, the Millerites whose 1844 expectation became known as the Great Disappointment, and a long line of twentieth-century announcements, particular dates have been set, awaited, and survived. Joachim of Fiore belongs nearby but a little apart: his twelfth-century scheme of three ages forecast not a day but an era — the third age of the Spirit calculated to dawn around 1260 — and that era too came and went unmarked. Each failure has tended to refine rather than dissolve the expectation; the conviction that the return is certain has proven more durable than any calculation of when.

What the texts themselves hold steady, beneath the disputes over timing, is the shape of the hope: that the present order is not final, that justice deferred will be delivered, and that the figure at the center of the faith will be seen again. The traditions disagree about almost everything except the conviction that something is owed and will come.