The Second Coming of Christ within the Age of Nuclear Armageddon

A Reflection for the Thirty-third Sunday in Atypical Time

Readings: Malachi 3:19-20a 2 Thessalonians 3:7-12 Luke 21:56-19

A tactical nuclear weapon is deployed in Ukraine. Its strategic consequences on the battlefield are limited. Indeed, the immediate carnage is small in comparison with the uncontrolled flight of population in its aftermath. The borders of the European Union collapse under the onslaught, and all of Europe is drawn into battle. Perhaps Armageddon is avoided, possibly not. If not, life on earth as we’ve got known it ends.

The theological issue, our concern, is that this: Did the tip of time come? Would this be “the second coming of Christ,” the moment he himself told us to expect?

To reply that query, begin by noting the secular use of the biblical term “Armageddon.” The Book of Revelation does speak of a final battle between the forces of excellent and evil (16:16), nevertheless it is simply within the atomic age that we’ve got come to make use of the word “Armageddon” for a final agony wrought by humanity itself.

Would a possibly imminent nuclear Armageddon be the second coming of Christ?

Previous generations imagined the kind of fireplace a nuclear conflagration would produce, but they didn’t discover using their very own armaments with this annihilation. Their technique of destruction were just too paltry. As they saw it, their actions can be the formal reason behind their undoing: That they had merited punishment for his or her sins. But these deeds wouldn’t be the efficient cause because humanity was not yet able to destroying all of life itself.

Linking the rationale for our world’s destruction with our modern means is a recent phenomenon. Unlike our forebears, we now think that we understand how Armageddon could occur. It needn’t be caused through a rare intervention on the a part of heaven.

And to be fair, our forebears in the religion never read the Book of Revelation or other biblical prophecies as many contemporary believers do. The fathers of the early church were Platonists. They saw sacred Scripture as a skein of symbols, demanding prayerful pondering and perception. Biblical literalism, the idea that the meaning of Scripture is straight away evident to everyone, is a contemporary phenomenon.

We cannot simply discover a post-apocalyptic world—our secular use of a biblical term—with the reign of Christ.

Back to the query. Would a possibly imminent nuclear Armageddon be the second coming of Christ?

Hard to say. The planet would remain. There should not enough nukes to remove it from space. On the market, whether observed from the moon or the sting of our galaxy—to say nothing of the vast reaches of space beyond—nothing would have fundamentally altered.

If the cosmos continued, could we speak of our Armageddon as being the tip of history? Yes, it might be that. Whatever might still live to tell the tale earth would collapse back right into a prehistoric age, a time when humans did nothing that needed to be noted as history. Nothing they did altered their future on the planet. That stasis would return, and what we call history would have been only a transient interlude between two vast silences of earth.

So, no. We cannot simply discover a post-apocalyptic world—our secular use of a biblical term—with the reign of Christ. There may be nothing to preclude that God might determine that ages should pass and that a recent human species should arise, though that raises the interesting query of how this recent humanity would encounter God’s own revelation of self in Jesus Christ. Archaeology?

Will Christ manifest himself and end history? Assuredly yes, when you imagine in him and what he said. When will this occur and the way? Even on this atomic age, we still have no idea.

What ultimately constitutes the second coming of Christ is his definitive manifestation as Lord. A moment when he is not any longer accessed through faith. As a substitute, Christ’s presence would so imbue existence that our relationship to him would stand fully revealed. Faith would now not be needed to know that he’s the meaning of existence. That will be self-evident.

What is actually fascinating is the way in which through which God has constructed the act of religion to foreshadow its own completion. At the tip of time, Christ will probably be self-evident. But as we live in time, we’ve got faith in Christ because we’ve got encountered him. He has undeniably, at the least for us, manifested himself to us. The difference between our current acts of religion and the tip of history is certainly one of measure, not kind. Faith is a confidence of the center. The apocalypse is a conviction wrought in history. In each, Christ is self-evident, first to a person after which to all.

Will Christ manifest himself and end history? Assuredly yes, when you imagine in him and what he said. When will this occur and the way? Even on this atomic age, we still have no idea.

Whatever might occur on earth, there may be a heavenly component that must come into play, just as there was within the Incarnation. God selected to enter our history and to say it. God chooses the moment of the Apocalypse—unveiling within the Greek—when history is consummated, dropped at completion in Christ. In each instances, Incarnation and Apocalypse, the God who created our world to face free in its own, proper existence lifts it into divine life, reveals it as ordered to a completion outside its own act of existence.

We now have every reason to fear what might occur in Ukraine or Taiwan or some unsuspected place through an act of terrorism. It would indeed be the tip of life as we understand it. But we’ve got no reason to fear the second coming because at that time, whatever we can have fabricated from the planet and its life, Christ will clearly manifest himself as our mandatory and, at the least for some, glorious and joyful completion.