When Is The End?

When Is the End?

In the ABC special aired April 5, 2004 called Jesus and Paul: Word and Worship, host Peter Jennings and the scholars he interviewed assert throughout their report that central to the apostolic message was the belief that the end of the world would come about within their lifetimes—that Jesus would return to transform the world into paradise, ending starvation, suffering, and death. For Paul, as Jesus rose from the dead and was the firstfruits of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20,23), so the Kingdom of God would break forth in the resurrection of all God’s people and the complete renewal of the earth. According to ABC, the uniform belief was that Jesus would come to end the world as we knew it at any moment. Clearly, this did not happen.

Those assertions, however, were not defended, nor did Jennings allow for an important distinction that would have radically changed the discussion. No one clearly distinguished, as do the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and the other Apostolic writings, between apocalyptic events that were to take place in the near future within this time-space continuum and those events associated with the Second Coming of Christ at the end of all human history.

Concerning events that were to happen in the very near future, Jesus had predicted, for example, that he would die and then rise again from the dead (John 2:2:18-22). He also predicted that the people who condemned him to crucifixion would experience his wrath in judgment in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, which occurred in AD 70 (Matthew 23:35-24:44; 26:64). Yet, Jesus also prophesied that in the future, after an unspecified duration of time—at the end—he would return and judge all people who ever lived (John 5:28-29).

Paul used similar apocalyptic language and distinguished between those events that were to happen in the near future, or have already happened, within this time-space continuum and those that were to occur in the temporally unspecified future at the end of time. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, for example, to correct false teachings going around regarding the resurrection of believers. The resurrection of believers is guaranteed to happen in the distant future at the end of time, Paul avers, on the basis of Christ’s resurrection, which happened within time. Paul also wrote to warn Timothy that false teachers were spreading the unfounded notion that the resurrection of believers had already taken place (2 Tim. 2:18). N. T. Wright offers a very helpful discussion of this sort of distinction in Paul’s writings:

It is often assumed that Paul’s horizon was dominated by the expectation that the space-time universe was about to come to an end. The apocalyptic passage in 1 Thessalonians, and the warning about the present time been ‘constrained’ in 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, have been pressed into service to suggest that Paul believed something which…neither first-century Jews at large nor Jesus and the earliest Christians in particular believed. The twentieth-century world of New Testament scholarship, not least those parts that have inveighed against ‘literalism’ of the fundamentalist sort, has all too often insisted on a literal reading of that regular Jewish language -- the sun and moon being darkened, and so forth -- which, from its biblical context, we ought to know was intended, and understood, as powerful metaphor.

Paul expected great, cataclysmic events; there is no doubt of that. He was urgent about his work, knowing there were things to be done before those events happened. He also believed that at some stage in the future the God who had made the entire cosmos would ‘set it free from its bondage to decay’ (Romans 8:21). At the end, God would be ‘all in all,’ having subjugated all rival powers (1 Corinthians 15:23-28). But we should not too quickly confuse this larger horizon of expectation with the immediate crisis that Paul knows is about to break upon the world. Jews of his day, as of other days, were used to ‘seeing’ space-time, political events in terms of ‘the Day of the Lord.’ Otherwise, why would he tell the Thessalonians not to worry if they received a letter, supposedly from him, saying that the Day of the Lord had already arrived (2 Thessalonians 2:2)? If ‘the Day of the Lord’ meant the end of the space-time universe, one might suppose that the Thessalonians would not need to be informed of this event by mail. We have for too long allowed ourselves to be boxed in, in our reading of Paul, by the end-of-the-world agenda. It is time to see Paul as he understood himself: as someone living already in the beginning of God’s new age, the age which began on Easter morning. (N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997],141-142)

Without clarification from Wright, Ben Witherington III, or Paul Maier, the implication is that Paul and the other apostles were false prophets. At best, we are left thinking that the apostles were forced to change their teachings as time progressed without the expected fulfillment.

On the contrary, the evidence of the New Testament texts themselves make clear to us that certain events necessarily had to happen before Jesus could end human history. Those events were not recorded as having happened in the New Testament documents, thus the writers could not have expected the end “at any moment.” For Jennings to skew this important distinction castes unfair doubt on the authors and their claims to know the truth revealed to them by God.