Last days

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that … I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below … The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Acts 2, 17, 19, 20-21; quoting Joel 2).


A few years ago I spent some time studying the scriptures and doctrine of the Mormons, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At one point I even managed to insinuate myself into their London headquarters, and tried to engage them in dialogue, much to their bewilderment. They didn’t seem to know what to do when an Anglican came knocking on their door. Evangelism is, for them, very much a one-way street. I learnt many strange things in the course of my reading; but one thing has stayed with me, and that is how powerfully their faith is directed toward the future. Living, as they believe, in the latter days, it is the future that matters most, God’s final and complete revelation and the entry of believers into the glory that has been prepared for them.

These beliefs are, of course, not restricted to the Mormons; other groups in the 19th century show the same tendency to return to the millennial hopes of the Anabaptists and the Mennonites and other more extreme Reformation sects. Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses have similar beliefs, and these ideas have migrated into the tradition of evangelical Protestantism; they are even to be found at points in Anglicanism. In contrast to this orientation to the future, to the last days, the second coming, the millennium of Christ’s rule, what we continue to think of as the mainstream Christian tradition seems preoccupied with the past. Often in our churches the direction seems to be backward, to events of two thousand years ago. We suspect the present and fear the future, as the passage of time takes us further and further away from the defining events of our faith. But the creed reminds us that we live in expectation, looking forward to ‘the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’. We should draw our strength as much from what is to come as from what is past.

All of which should lead us to notice that the first Christian sermon of which we have record, Peter’s speech to the crowd on that first Pentecost, is about the last days. He quotes from Joel’s prophecy of the end, when all Israel will be healed and renewed. This, we need to remember, is where Christianity began—in expectation of the imminent end, the parousia, the presence of Christ returned to the earth and the overthrow of the powers of this world.

When we read such prophecy in the New Testament, when Jesus himself talks about the return of the Son of Man in glory, we soon have to engage with phrases such as the end of the world, the last judgment, which are a part of Christian language but which are at odds with our sense of how the world is, and of history. That is why we instinctively distrust people who fix dates to those events. It is not just that their predictions are implausibly precise, or that they have been wrong so many times, or that Jesus himself warned against calculating God’s intentions; it is rather that for us history doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t serve up dramatic, divine interventions; it goes on in its own generally hopeless way, to borrow Virginia Woolf’s words, one damned thing after another.

But we can’t, if we’re honest, quite ignore those prophesies as the marks of vulgar and stupid religion; we do, after all, proclaim week by week that ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.’ Christianity in the New Testament is shot through with impatient looking forward; St Paul spends many words in his epistles trying to confirm these expectations whilst at the same time trying to prevent them from distorting faith in the present. He has to find a balance between past, present and future—between Christ’s life, the life of the Church, and the life of the world to come. We need to find the same balance, both personally and as a Church; otherwise the world will be right to see us as a cult of the past.

So we have to come back to these visions of the last days, and ask what there is in them for us. When these writers take the risk of talking about the future; when they describe a world in which the generosity of God has transformed everything, natural as well as human; what are they trying to do?

At the back of all this is one of the most difficult questions for faith: what is the relationship between our history and God’s eternity? The first thing that these writers tell us is that there is a relationship: that history is not divorced from eternity, is not a wilderness from which God has withdrawn. This in itself is a bold assertion, given the way that history looks most of the time. Few of us would see the history of our own time, or of the last hundred years as having any discernable relation to God.

Yet through Joel and then through Peter God declares how it will be “in the last days”; and this declaration shows his engagement with the historical. History and eternity are not parallel lines that never meet. But what kind of engagement are we talking about? Is God about to invade history, to redirect it, so that history ceases to be history and becomes some kind of metaphysical drama? Is the conclusion of our wretched earthly politics to be the imposition (to think in Northern Irish terms) of Direct Rule from heaven?

That God takes human history seriously, that he is not about to abolish it, is clear from two elements of our tradition. First, it is through history that he reveals himself to the people of Israel. Second, the incarnation of his Son is into history, and it is within history that Jesus lives and suffers death. So history is not some age-long deplorable mistake; it is the field within which human beings come to know themselves and to know God.

But that still leaves the problem of God’s relation to the totality of history. Even if he shows himself at particular moments—the crossing of the Red Sea, the Resurrection—what about history as a whole, that great deluge of event through which human beings live, in knowledge or in ignorance of these faith-defining moments? Are Joel’s words just a dream, the deluded confidence of a group of first-century faith-heads (to use Richard Dawkins’ term) that the Resurrected Jesus was the Messiah who would defeat Israel’s enemies and bring all nations to Zion?

There was certainly an element of that. But for all the change of perspective between us and the early Christians, there are two things that we can still take seriously.

First: when Joel prophesies an age in which the faithful will know God’s salvation, when Jesus tells the High Priest that he will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, when St John the Divine describes the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven, they are saying the most important thing about history and eternity: they are saying that eternity comes first and last, that it surrounds and embraces the historical. They are saying that history is held within God’s eternity and that his eternity is the context for all that happens in our world. History emerges from God’s eternity and will return to it: it is in that sense that we can think of an end to history, we can say that all history looks toward its return to eternity. But because eternity is not time, the return of history to eternity is not an event in history. That is why it is pointless to try to fix dates: not because we don’t know the right date, but because, of its nature as eternity, it cannot have a date.

Second, these apocalyptic writers and speakers (and we can include Jesus with them) are saying that the relation between eternity and history is not just a neutral one. They are not separate concerns running according to their separate rules. The relationship between God’s eternity and our history is a redemptive relationship: history will be redeemed. If history is not redeemed, then God’s eternity, which is also his Kingdom, has been defeated; history has gained the primacy. But God’s eternity is the primal reality and his Kingdom is not to be defeated. Therefore history will be redeemed. The nations will come in peace to Zion and sing the praises of the God of Israel.

In these apocalyptic utterances there is a deep faith that God’s eternity surrounds all history and that history will be redeemed. But is that just for the end of time, the last days, the second coming? If eternity, God’s kingdom, has primacy; if it surrounds all of the historical life of humanity, and if it works to redeem that life, then that is true of all moments of history. Eternity is always with us; it is not an event at the end of time. The touch, the benevolence, of eternity reaches history at every point and the seeds of redemption spring up in every moment.

But surely that is not what we see? At every point? To be truthful: we don’t see it. But perhaps we don’t see it because the methods of eternity are different from the methods of time. Within history, victories are victories of power, of control, of possession, of will; but the victories of eternity start from an entirely opposite point—a point so different that to us historical beings they don’t look like victories at all. The victories of God’s kingdom are the victories of accepted weakness, of acknowledged loss, of giving, of surrender; in short, the victories of love. As the Crucifixion reminds us, these are the only weapons the Kingdom has; but through them, in often invisible ways, the primacy of eternity shows itself, and history is being redeemed.