The End: What We Know, What We Don’t

There are two times a year when I, growing up in the Church, and now as a Priest for several years, have seen Priests generally fumble at a Sunday Mass Homily: The Sunday of the Holy Trinity (which some more cynical observers have called “Heresy Sunday”), and the final Sundays of the Liturgical Year which deal with the Second Coming of Christ.  

Many people have observed that one of the chronic problems of secularization is that it has almost completely erased any sense of eschatology: that is, in a world that no longer believes in heaven, hell, the Last Judgment, or the Immortality of the Soul, it is easy for the average person to get caught up in a sense of purposelessness.  Perhaps more dangerously, the loss of a transcendent eschatology invites false eschatology to fill the vacuum.  We see this everyday.  In the absence of a worldview which sees this world as essentially good yet fallen while we await the arrival of a better one, what is left is for people to try to do the impossible: to undertake the Sisyphean effort of making this world absolutely perfect.  It is the same root problem behind the hydra-headed, multiform philosophies which dominate the public discussion.  Usually these solutions involve a techno-political synthesis.  Hence the various evangelists of utopia speak of fantasies like the “post-human” or the “trans-human” in an almost diabolical perversion of the Dominical Counsel, that one must lose one’s life to save it.  According to the postmodern eschatologist, humanity, and the individual human, must be destroyed before it can be remade.  Enter everything from eugenics to the inquisitorial climate at most modern universities today, which are dutifully policing thought-crime far better than our brute, primitive totalitarian ancestors would have thought possible. 

As the celebrated Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami noted in his three part novel 1Q84, “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”  This reality is born out by experience, which reminds us that each man is essentially an eschatological being, that he has within himself a transcendent horizon that can not be completely subdued by focusing on the quotidian.  We cannot destroy eschatology: we can merely “punt” it, or sublimate some transient object, however noble, into an object of devotion.  Or, more dangerously, we can take an ideal, however noble, and make it the fixed point of adoration, the altar on which all else is sacrificed.  

Most depictions of the Christ in glory in art are full of the transcendent and the cosmic.  Even Saint Paul adopts such language in his Epistles, as does Saint John.  Often times the triumphant Christ is in the center of the work of art.  Above I placed one I particularly enjoy, which is similar to ancient Wheel of Fortune motif.  In it, Christ the King of the Universe creates an almost center of gravity upon which the whole created universe, visible and invisible, rotates.  For the believer, to place Christ as the center of one’s eschatology (indeed, the truest center) is to fix one’s mind and soul on a great anchor.  Curiously, I find that even the great natural religions, such as Buddhism, adopt similar “centripetal” imagery, such as the dharmachakra.

After this prologue, which is more rightly a short philosophy of eschatology rather than an eschatology proper, I would like to focus now on the details of Christian Eschatology, especially General or Universal Eschatology.  Most people, especially Priests in the Apostolic Churches (Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, etc.) tend to sidestep the issue because it seems more practical to talk about Individual Eschatology, which is the discussion of the final end of persons: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.  

Yet to do this without talking about General Eschatology I feel is a mistake, since all three Synoptic Gospels dedicate extensive time to Christ’s discussion of his Coming, as does the rest of the New Testament.  Moreover, most theological manuals in the Catholic Tradition dedicate time to the theme, as do some of the greatest Patristic Theological works.

What do we know?

There are generally nine signs, taken from the Sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Earliest Fathers, which are taken to be the proximate signs of the Coming of Christ.

• First, the “General” preaching of the Gospel.  That is to say, that the Gospel must reach all nations before the end will come, as Christ himself said in Matthew 24:14.
• Second, the conversion of the Jews, as foretold by Saint Paul (Romans 11:25-26).  
• Third, the return of Enoch and Elijah as the two witnesses mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments.
• Fourth, the so-called “Great Apostasy”, which is the general loss of faith and the abandonment of Christianity by many of the nations.
• Fifth, the Reign of the Antichrist.  Although there is much that is obscure and disputed among commentators on this, all agree that he is the prime adversary of Christ and his Kingdom in the Last Days, and that he will seduce many peoples and nations by great signs, and will persecute the Church grievously.  This too is mentioned in the present Catechism of the Catholic Church.
• Sixth, extraordinary disruptions of nature, which are far more than pestilence, famine and war, but also include extreme derivations from the natural order.
• Seventh, the “Universal Conflagration”, which as St. Peter prophesied (2 Peter 3:10-13) is the consuming of the physical reality by some sort of fire.  It is unclear whether this is natural or supernatural, but I favor the latter, as do most theologians.
• Eighth, the Trumpet/Voice of Resurrection, an announcement prophecied by Saint Paul and even by Christ himself (John 5:28) which will cause all the dead to rise again, their souls to be reunited with their bodies.
• Ninth, the sign of the Son of Man in the heavens.  Some consider this to be the appearance of the Holy Cross, visible to all people, which will appear shortly before his Return.

What Don’t We Know?

Principally, we do not know the “day or the hour” of the Lord’s return.  I am by turns amused, annoyed and alarmed when I hear some preacher (typically on TV, and usually Protestant) announce that they have “decoded” or “discovered” the exact date and time of the Coming of Christ.  It puzzles me how any person who takes the words of Christ seriously can make such claims, especially when Christ is so emphatic that the exact of time of Christ’s Second Coming cannot be known by men.  

However, I also have seen people commit the opposite error.  Just because Christ says that the exact time of the Second Coming cannot be known by men, this does not mean that Christ did not give indications as to when it is near.  Hence, the famous parable of the fig tree.  Christ told us these signs for a purpose, to increase our vigilance and fidelity to him.  

General Eschatology, Here and Now

One of the axioms of prophecy is that no prophecy is fully understood until it is perfectly fulfilled.  Moreover, all the prophets, including Saint John in his Apocalypse, are very accustomed to utilizing types and motifs to help us understand many of the themes of General Eschatology.  For instance, the Prophet Daniel speaks of a “Little Horn” which is generally considered to be historically the King Antiochus IV “Epiphanes” of the Seleucids, a successor kingdom of Alexander the Great’s Empire.  This observation drives Biblical literalists wild, because they have a tremendous difficulty reconciling how a strictly intertestamental figure like Antiochus could be an eschatological figure, when he clearly existed in the 2nd century BC.  

A similar problem exists when people discuss the Olivet Discourse of the Synoptic Gospels, which discuss at length the Destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple.  Many people (I believe rightly) believe that much of Christ’s prophecy was fulfilled by the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 AD.  Yet people struggle to understand the tension between the universal and particular themes exposited by Our Lord in his Olivet Discourse.  

Old Testament prophecy has been widely acknowledged by the great Ancient Christian commentators as multivalent, Christocentric, and archetypal.  That is not to say they are not historical: on the contrary, they are super-historical, belonging to every time, as well as belonging especially to the “Last Time,” all the while not ceasing to be things which happened in a point in past time.  I do not see why New Testament Prophecy should be understood differently.  For instance, the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb has been universally (until Harnack and the German Rationalists, at least) as a prophecy of the sacrifice of Christ, even though no one at the time of the Exodus would ever have conceived of such a thing.  Why can’t the themes and types mentioned by Christ, Saint Paul and others be repeated throughout time, while having a prime analogue in the future?  

Saint John in my opinion clearly endorses this line of reasoning in his discussion of the Antichrist.  While acknowledging as a settled point that his readers have already learned about the Antichrist (an assertion also borne out by his appearance in the last chapter of the extremely ancient document, the Didache, speaking of the “World-deceiver”), he mentions that there exist at present other “antichrists” who participate in that eschatological reality.  Thus, a Christian may rightly see the reality of Antichrist as both a once and future historical reality, but also a trans temporal theme.  In this vein, I believe he speaks of the ‘spirit of antichrist’ continually at work in the world.  

So too, I believe we can say that there are many echoes of General Eschatology in every time and space.  This is part of the reason why so many believers tend to see their own times as the End Time.  John Henry Cardinal Newman in his series The Patristical Idea of Antichrist states this clearly and cogently; for instance, we may clearly see the Rome of the First Century as the Woman as Babylon, the one who rides the Beast.  Yet we may just as well see the historical Rome as a precursor and participant in the great eschatological type of the worldly powers which align themselves with the forces of darkness.  Just because a type is historically instantiated, or rather an historical instantiation is used to describe the type, does not mean either can be completely collapsed into one moment in history.  I see this as consistent with the Catholic understanding of the Inspiration of Scripture, which both acknowledges divine operation in the intellect and form of expression and the human idiom of the author.

To take another philosophical angle of approach to the problem, let’s say you were a being experiencing four dimensions trying to describe something to a being working on two dimensions.  You may try to communicate this by pointing to analogues across the plane of the two dimensional being.  One may say, for instance, “a sphere is like a circle”, and then identify all the points on the circumference of the circle.  The two dimensional being may be able to then identify in its experience all the points along the circumference, but something bigger may yet elude it; hence, such a being may be tempted to say that one point along the line is the circle, and he may be right in part.  But the true reality is far greater than that.

God of course is trying to communicate to man through his Word something which he is going to accomplish through a mysterious interplay of human freedom and his inexorable Providence.  I cannot imagine explaining to a time bound person something when you by nature see all times, all places, and are present mysteriously in them all, working in them all.  Imagine explaining physics to an earthworm; yet even if you and I could explain physics to an earthworm, or feel it worth the effort (as God does, because he loves us and wants to save us), we would probably start with metaphors and ideas close to its experience.  

Summary

What can we take away from this discussion?  First, every Christian needs a robust eschatology, both personally for their own salvation, but also cosmically to make sense of the universe and of history.  Second, Christ and his Apostles have made known to us certain signs of the Second Coming of Christ in order that we should be always attentive and watchful in whatever time we find ourselves. Third, by seeing a foreshadowing of such signs in our own times, we can both prepare ourselves to resist the evils of our day, as well as equipping those who come after us with a witness of fidelity. 

Finally, by taking a “global” approach to eschatology, by reconciling the historical with the archetypal, we can avoid facile and destructive eschatologies which put the faith of many people in peril.  We will be less tempted to deny the Inspiration of Scripture, or make claims that most of the Eschatology that Christ or the Apostles describe is by now fully past. 

A Priest preaching about General Eschatology, as I mentioned earlier, may want to do so by focusing on perennial “once and future” themes.  For instance, one may speak of the need of every Christian to resist apostasy, because certainly the temptation belongs to every age.  One may speak of the spirit of Antichrist that works in the world, those powers which seek to replace or remove Christ from the hearts and minds of men.  Maybe a Priest may want to speak about the grace of martyrdom, or the nobility of self-sacrifice.  Perhaps a good Priest may just want to remind the faithful that it is dogma that all human history will have an end, and so we ought to be humble about our exploits, and seek those which will have eternal reward.  

For those of us who attentively listen to the readings of the Liturgical Year, this is a good time to ask ourselves the same questions, so that all of us may be imbued with the same Spirit which closes Sacred Scripture: Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus.  Come in glory at the end of time, and make yourself present now, in our time.  Amen.