THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST.
The Rational Appeal of May 15, 1880, publishes a lengthy article on this subject, entitling it, “An argument respectfully submitted to the clergy of the United States.” The argument, based on certain expressions made use of by the writers of the New Testament, which speak of the coming of Christ as at hand, which declare that there were some standing there who should not taste of death till they should see the Son of man coming in his kingdom, and that this generation shall not pass till all shall be fulfilled, is, that the coming of Christ was expected by them in their own day; and as Christ did not come, it is demonstrated that they made a radical mistake in this matter, and hence their writings are uninspired and unreliable. And on the strength of this argument the clergy are called upon to give up the idea of the inspiration of the Bible, renouncing the whole theory of the fall of man and the plan of salvation through Christ, and settle down on the doctrine that to love and do good to our fellow-beings is the sum total of religion. This strikes us as rather a broad and bold claim to make on the strength of the argument presented. The writer speaks like one who has first made the discovery that such phraseology as he quotes is found in the New Testament. But it has all along been there, and men have read these passages carefully and critically for the past eighteen hundred years; and if there is such an utter failure involved therein, the critics and scholars of all these years have been remarkably stupid, or the present age is blessed with a wonderful prodigy. Of the texts quoted, the following, Matt. 16:27, 28; Mark 9:1; Luke 9:27, refer to the transfiguration, the account of which immediately follows in each instance. On this point let us hear Peter, who was one of the eye-witnesses. He certainly must be admitted to be a more competent witness in regard to the meaning of the words of the Lord, “There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom,” than any man at the present time can be. But in his second epistle (1:16) he says: “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eye-witnesses of his majesty, . . . when we were with him in the holy mount.” Verses 17, 18 show conclusively that he refers to the scene on the mount of transfiguration. This he calls an exhibition of the power, majesty, honor, and glory of the Lord, such as will be exhibited at his coming. Those who saw this saw a representation of the coming and kingdom of Christ. Some of those to whom Christ spoke the words above quoted, saw it. It was the fulfillment of his promise. But Peter does not claim that that was the real coming of Christ; for he speaks of that coming and the end of all things as still future when he wrote his epistle. It was, however, an accurate representation of the coming kingdom, as he refers to it in proof of what will be when the power and coming of Christ is really revealed. The passages referred to, therefore, were not spoken of the actual second coming of Christ, but were fulfilled in the transfiguration which shortly followed. As to the other passages, such as “this generation shall not pass,” “we which are alive, and remain unto the coming of the Lord,” “we shall not all sleep,” etc., it is sufficient to remark that by an interchange of tenses, a marked and legitimate characteristic of all prophetic writings, the first person is used for the third, and the present tense for the future. See Isa. 9:6: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” This is a prophecy of the incarnation, then more than 700 years in the future; yet the pronoun is in the first person, and the verb in the present tense. The child was not then born, and was not to be seen by those then living. Divested of this use of language, the passage would read, “Unto them a child shall be born.” We have said that this style is a characteristic of prophetic writings, but it is not peculiar to them. In historical works, how frequently, in animated description, we meet with the present tense used for the past. We open to Merivale’s History of the Romans, vol. v., p. 281, and there read: “We are arrived at a period when the personal character of their ruler has come to exercise a decisive influence on the sentiments no less than on the welfare of the Roman people.” Again, “Caius, now in the middle of his twenty-fifth year.” This is not a description of the situation in 1872, when the book was published, but away back in A. D. 37. An American writer, speaking of a famous Irish orator of the past, says: “Now he stands bolt upright like a grenadier. Now he folds his arms upon his breast, utters some beautiful sentiment, relaxes them, recedes a step, and gives wing to the corruscations of his fancy, while a winning smile plays over his countenance.”—Matthew’s Oratory and Orators, p. 297. No one misunderstands or criticises such forms of speech when found in ordinary books. Why, then, take exceptions to them or misinterpret them when found in the Bible? The article under notice says, “We should read that book [the Bible] as we read all other books.” So say we. And the failure to do this, both by believers and unbelievers, is just the thing that we deprecate. How natural for the prophets to pass along down the stream of time in their prophetic discourse, and speak as if contemporaneous with the events which they foretell. So when, in a long series of successive events, the seer comes to the time when certain great signs have appeared, showing the proximity of the end, he says, “This generation [which has seen these signs] shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.” When he comes to the last generation, he says, “We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord.” The overlooking of this principle of interpretation, the plainness of which makes the confident tone of the Appeal seem somewhat surprising, gave to the thought of the writer in question a false turn on the very start, and led him to produce an article that is wholly wrong.