A Question to Paul of Tarsus: Why the Delay?
by Ervin Taylor, February 4, 2015: Question to Paul: “You expected that the return of Christ would occur in your own lifetime. We know now that you were wrong about that. You were off by two thousand years and counting. Does that mistake bother you, Paul?”
Answer from Paul: “No, not really . . . I always knew the difference between faith, which is a life’s commitment, and theology, which is a mind’s speculation. I never thought that believing what God would do meant knowing how and even when it would happen. Besides, it is my experience that whatever details we give about the human future are usually wrong, but whatever details we give about the divine future are always wrong. Have you noticed that?”
The above quotation was taken from a section entitled “Two Thousand Years and Counting” in a book by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed titled In Search of Paul (New York: Harper, 2004, p. 177).
The belief in a Second Coming of Jesus is embedded in half the name of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The 19th-century American origin of this Protestant denomination is associated with a mistake made in the interpretation of biblical prophecy having to do with the timing of the Second Coming. Jesus was supposed to return sometime around 1844, but there was a “Great Disappointment.” There was no Second Coming. However, all was not lost. A new denomination was born. According to the standard explanation of a small group who gathered around a young, charismatic visionary, Ellen Harmon (later Ellen White), the error was not in the timing, but in the identification of the event. A highly innovative theological adjustment was made in the interpretation and a brand new theological concept, the “Investigative Judgment,” was created on the basis of one rather ambiguous biblical text, the interpretation of which was then validated by the young visionary.
As Adventists, we should not feel that we are unique in having to explain a mistake in addressing the topic of the Second Coming. The history of the Christian Church, going literally back to the beginning, is littered with predictions about the timing of the return of Jesus that failed to occur. Why should we Adventists feel we are so special? We are in a long line of Christians whose predictions about the Second Coming did not come to pass. We are also in a long line of Christians who came up with a number of very creative explanations why their predictions had been mistaken and/or reinterpreted what “return” actually meant.
One of my granddaughters has a saying: “Nothing is wrong, but something is not right!” With regard to this topic, at the very least, something is not right about the conventional classical or traditional Christian and current official Adventist understanding being advocated by our current General Conference president, namely, that we are living in the “End Times” and the Second Coming is very near. The problem is that we don’t know what is not right, probably because we are mere humans trying to figure out something totally beyond our “pay grade.” To quote the imagined response of Paul, “whatever details we give about the divine future are always wrong.” That’s the nature of so-called predictive prophecy; it’s always wrong. So why do we call it “predictive”?