After This Life: What Catholics Believe About What Happens Next by Groeschel Benedict

Author:Groeschel, Benedict [Groeschel, Benedict]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Published: 2009-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Second Coming of Christ

“He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” These are words we repeat often at Mass during the Nicene Creed, the Profession of Faith, and they are words that have stirred the imagination of countless Christians for many centuries. We know them to be true; they come to us as part of the deposit of faith, but we have no idea when the truth contained in these few words will come to pass. When will Jesus come? No one can ever answer that question, for only God has that knowledge. Emphatically, our Savior tells us: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matthew 24:36).

Unfortunately, over the centuries these very unambiguous biblical words have not stopped people from speculating, nor have they stopped people from attempting to devise ways to determine the date of the end of the world, the Second Coming of Christ, and the Last Judgment. Many Protestant groups such as the Seventh-day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses have made definite predictions, which fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your point of view) did not take place. Presumably both groups were disappointed when they got out of bed on the morning after the day on which the world was supposed to end.

The fascination with the Second Coming of Christ is usually paired with a belief in millennialism, the assertion that the coming of Christ will be in two stages: The first will begin with the great battle of Armageddon, the cataclysmic conflict between good and evil in which Christ will destroy the Antichrist. This will be followed by a thousand-year-long reign of Christ on earth — an earth peopled now only by the virtuous and pure. Yet another cataclysm will then occur, a great struggle in which Satan is defeated forever; it is this that leads to the Final Judgment.

The Church, along with most traditional Christian bodies, rejects such teachings, which come from a too-literal reading of the Book of the Apocalypse, and maintains that Christ’s words in the Gospel of Matthew are to be believed, that the end of time will occur at a moment and in a way we can never know.

The ideas of millennialism may be hard for the average Catholic to grasp. Part of the reason for this may be that despite our conflicts in the Middle East and several other parts of the world, we are at comparative peace. When we rise in the morning, we do not fear destruction and chaos; we are relatively assured that we and our loved ones will be okay once bedtime rolls around again. But this was not always the case. Only a few decades ago, a time certainly within the memories of at least some of my readers, there was no shortage of candidates for the Antichrist. The horrors of World War II, the uncertainty of the future, and the presence of evil on an immense scale, capable of seemingly endless and senseless devastation, were with us all.

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