Second Coming

“Waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

— Titus 2:13 (ESV)

The Second Coming, also called the Parousia (Greek for “presence” or “arrival”), is Jesus Christ’s promised, personal, bodily, and visible return to earth in glory, to raise the dead, judge all people, and consummate his kingdom (Acts 1:11; Titus 2:13; Rev. 1:7).¹ Scripture also names the event Christ’s “appearing” (epiphaneia) and “revelation” (apokalypsis).¹ Christ ascended visibly into heaven and will return “in the same way” his disciples saw him go (Acts 1:9-11). Every major Christian tradition affirms this future return; they differ chiefly over its relation to the millennium, not over whether it will occur.

Confessional Witness

The Second Coming is not a Reformed or Baptist distinctive; it is an article of catholic Christian confession older than the Reformation itself. The Apostles’ Creed confesses that the ascended Christ, seated “on the right hand of God the Father almighty,” will come “from thence… to judge the quick and the dead.”² The Nicene Creed, framed against Arius at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) and completed at Constantinople (AD 381), states the same doctrine in nearly identical words: Christ “shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.”³

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states this catholic doctrine as its own, in its chapter “Of the Last Judgment”:

“God hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world in righteousness, by Jesus Christ; to whom all power and judgment is given of the Father; in which day, not only the apostate angels shall be judged, but likewise all persons that have lived upon the earth shall appear before the tribunal of Christ, to give an account of their thoughts, words, and deeds, and to receive according to what they have done in the body, whether good or evil.”⁴

The confession ties Christ’s coming to two ends: the “manifestation of the glory of his mercy” toward the elect and of “his justice” against the “wicked and disobedient,” so that the righteous “go into everlasting life” while the wicked are “cast… into everlasting torments.”⁵ On this reading, the Second Coming and the last judgment are a single appointed event executed by Christ himself, not two separate occurrences.

Biblical Basis

At the ascension, two angels told the watching disciples: “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Paul tells Titus that believers wait for “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13), naming Christ himself, not merely an event, as the object of that hope.

Paul describes the manner of Christ’s coming to the Thessalonians: “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thess. 4:16). In the Olivet discourse, Jesus ties his coming to universal visibility: “they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matt. 24:30). John’s vision states the same publicity: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him” (Rev. 1:7). Paul tells the Thessalonians that Christ’s coming brings relief to the persecuted church and “flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God” (2 Thess. 1:7-10). Scripture consistently describes the return as visible and public rather than hidden or partial; it “will nevertheless be visible for all human beings on earth, be like the lightning that flashes from one side of the sky to the other.”¹

Historical Development

Unlike doctrines the church took centuries to state with precision, the confession of Christ’s return was settled from the earliest creeds. The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, completed at Constantinople in AD 381, both confess that the ascended Christ will come again “to judge both the quick and the dead.”³ Amillennialism, postmillennialism, and premillennialism each place Christ’s return differently relative to the millennial kingdom and the tribulation, without disputing that he returns bodily and visibly.

The one historical departure from this consensus is preterism: the reading that some or all of the New Testament’s second-coming prophecies were fulfilled already, in the first century. Partial preterism locates the Olivet discourse’s language of judgment in Jerusalem’s AD 70 destruction while still awaiting a future, bodily Second Coming; full preterism teaches that Christ’s whole promised return, including the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment, already took place in AD 70.⁶ Full preterism emerged as a defined position in the seventeenth century and is best described, on one historical account, as “an eschatological perspective rather than a formal religion or denomination.”⁶

Opposing Views

Full preterism. Full preterism, sometimes called “hyper-preterism,” teaches that every New Testament promise of Christ’s second coming was fulfilled by AD 70 in and through the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple; on this reading, no future bodily return of Christ remains to come.⁶ Proponents lean on Jesus’s statement in the Olivet discourse that “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matt. 24:34), read as fixing a first-century deadline for the whole discourse, coming included.⁷

Full preterism is not the position of any historic branch of the church, ancient or Reformation-era; the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, received across Rome, the East, and the Reformation alike, confess a future bodily coming still awaited “from thence,” not one already past.² The New Testament itself names and rejects an earlier form of the same claim: Paul writes that Hymenaeus and Philetus “swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened,” a teaching that was “upsetting the faith of some” (2 Tim. 2:17-18).⁸

Objections and Responses

Almost two thousand years have passed since Christ ascended, so the promise of his return has failed or been delayed too long to trust. Peter answers scoffers raising the same objection in the apostolic era: “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:8-9). Bavinck reads the delay as a function of divine patience rather than divine failure: the Lord “uses another standard for measuring time than we and wishes in his patience that all should come to repentance.”¹

Jesus said “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matt. 24:34), so his whole Olivet prophecy, including his coming, must already have been fulfilled in the first century. A. A. Hodge distinguishes three questions bound up in the Olivet discourse, when the temple would be destroyed, what the signs of Christ’s coming would be, and what would mark the end of the world, and treats a reading that assigns the entire discourse to the fall of Jerusalem alone as untenable.⁹ The New Testament’s own description of the Second Coming, Christ’s visible descent on the clouds, attended by angels and seen by “every eye” (Rev. 1:7), raising the dead (1 Thess. 4:16), was not fulfilled by Rome’s siege of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 114. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 116. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 2. ↩
Charles R. Harrell, “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011), “The Second Coming and Millennium,” 451n10: “Preterism, from the Latin praeter, meaning ‘past,’ is the belief that the events prophesied in the New Testament have already happened… Preterism as a defined movement began in the seventeenth century. It is an eschatological perspective rather than a formal religion or denomination.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
James D. Tabor, “The Future,” 48, quoted in Harrell, 451n12. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769), book 6, chap. 15, “Of the Perseverance of the Saints.” ↩
Hodge, 566-567. ↩