(When the Son Of Man Didn't Come" by Christopher Hays new book)
The delay of the parousia, the return of Christ in glory and the resurrection of the dead to salvation and judgment, is one of those white elephants in the Christian life. On the one hand, Christianity seems to have at its core this longing for Christ’s return (marana tha was one of the earliest Christian sayings cf. 1 Cor 16.21) and the idea that the earliest Christians thought it was going to happen in their lifetime (cf. the farewell discourses of Mk 13 and Lk 21). That imminence of the end was what (as has been argued by people like Albert Schweitzer) grounded the radical ethic of the community and was the driving force behind their missionary fervor.
However, we stand 2000 years away from those days and the parousia seems farther away than ever. Although some people will emphasize that we never know the ‘time of the end’ just as Jesus himself didn’t or that ‘a thousand years are like a day in the eyes of God’ following the temporary answer of 2 Peter 3, these seem like smokescreens to the real issue at times. The fact that we are still waiting for Jesus, still waiting for the end, after 200 years is a pretty big deal. And those well meaning solutions offered by the pious are kiddy bandaids slapped on a wound we tend to overlook. Even as I sit in seminary, this question as been deflected time and again by professors when it is pressed that if the disciples (and possibly Jesus, depending on who you ask) thought the end was coming SOON and it didn’t, doesn’t that mean that Christianity is faulty?
While I’m not sure that the end was so fervently thought of and expected by the early Church in the way often painted by scholars or End Times speculators, I stumbled upon this quotation in Wolfgang Pannenberg’s Jesus-God and Man that is giving me a new way to conceive of the question. He explains, about the delay of the parousia and the possibility that the early Church was wrong:
“When we speak today of God’s revelation in Jesus and of his exaltation accomplished in the resurrection from the dead, our statements always contain a proleptic element. The fulfillment, which had begun for the disciples, which was almost in their grasp, in the appearance of the resurrected Lord, has become promise once again for us. The unique significance of the apostles’ witness for all subsequent church history, however, is connected with the fact that at that time Jesus’ resurrection and the end of the world could be seen together as a single event under the impression f the imminent expectation of the end. To that extent the eschatological future was nearer then than at any time since. All subsequent church history lives from that, even though the truth of seeing the resurrection and the end together has become more problematic again in the meantime than it was for the first community, and will be completely confirmed only in the future.” (108)
I gathered three insights from this that are helpful in negotiating the delay of the parousia.
First, the delay is difficult and frustrating, to be sure. But this delay is grounded in the nature of the constantly unfolding future, of that which is still expected and has always been that way. Resurrection faith has always been proleptic, always waiting for fulfillment even after the firstfruits of Jesus. We are in no different place than the early Church in this respect. Or for that matter the generations of slaves in Egypt longing for freedom, the years Job spent longing for God to act, or the exiled Israelites scattered abroad. Longing is part of what we, as people of YHWH, do.
Secondly, the fervor in waiting for and expecting the end has no bearing on how soon it will come, but rather it is an expression of how we live and conceive of time. The early Christians lived expectantly because their conception of time had been relativized by Christ’s sudden resurrecton. In explaining his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein captures this notion of time in dialogue when he explains, “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours; that’s relativity.” For the early Church, the reality of Jesus’ resurrection was so vivid and recent that their conception of how you live in time was different, and the lifestyle followed. Jesus’ resurrection relativized time so the dawn of the new age was already anticipated and lived into in real, substantial ways with the practice of non-violent love of enemies, sharing of goods, and worship of the risen Lord. And as Pannenberg explains, this meant that the eschatological future for the early Church was nearer than it ever has been in church history, not because it was more likely to happen but because they lived into a lifestyle that knew it was happening.
(excerpt from an article written by Alex Thompson)
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