- The End Time
a. All three religions agree on the Final Judgement.
b. This is supposed to take place in the Valley of Kedron, between
Jerusalem and Mount Olivet. This also happens to be a place where
many dead of all religions are buried.
c. Several things will happen here:
i. On the last day, Muslims believe that the Ka’ba will be miraculously
transported to this place.
ii. The dead will rise here.
iii. All will be judged.
THEATTRACTIONS ANDFEARSOFTHEMILLENNIALISM
John’s Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, was crucial
in shaping Christian ideas and images of the coming Messianic Era. All
notions of an earthly return of Jesus or of the historical restoration of Israel,
which are still visible in the Gospels, were by now discarded. [The setting of
Jesus’ Second Coming is now cosmic in the style of the Jewish apocalypses,
with liberal borrowings from the visions of Daniel and Ezekiel.] According to
John, the Second Coming of Jesus the Messiah will mark the beginning of
the thousand-year (Lt. millennium) reign of God’s justice (Rev. 20:4), when,
as Daniel had said, “his saints possess the kingdom” (Dan. 7:22), and at
whose completion the world itself would come to an end. From the third cen-
tury, the view began to prevail that Christ’s Incarnation might be the begin-
ning of the Messianic Millennium, which meant that the clock for the End of
the World was indeed running.
The Church early on took note of such a speculative theological calculus,
dubbed chilianism(Gk. chilias, “one thousand” = Lt. millennium), and it was
forcefully condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE. It did not put an
end, however, to the fascinatingly attractive notion of being able to figure out
God’s plan. By a very simple calculation, the year 1000 CE might very well
mark the end of the world. Many Christians believed that such would indeed
be the case, and the end of the first millennium of the Christian era was
marked by extraordinary manifestations of both piety and panic, from pious
depression to outright hysteria, from passive resignation to frantic means to
secure salvation at what was thought to be, quite literally, the eleventh hour
of the world.
The passage of that milestone year has not ended interest in the subject.
There have been new (revised) calculations and new predictions of the “day
and the hour which no man knows,” most recently, of course, the highly
provocative 2000 CE. So far, so good.LECTURE FOURTEEN