{"id":10974,"date":"2024-02-22T17:12:19","date_gmt":"2024-02-22T11:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/22\/jesus-and-the-delay-of-the-second-coming\/"},"modified":"2024-02-22T17:12:19","modified_gmt":"2024-02-22T11:42:19","slug":"jesus-and-the-delay-of-the-second-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/22\/jesus-and-the-delay-of-the-second-coming\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesus and the Delay of the Second Coming"},"content":{"rendered":"


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A few months back I watched Simon Schama\u2019s gripping 5-part video series\u00a0The Story of the Jews<\/a>, <\/em>which takes us from the reign of David to\u00a0contemporary Judaism. The series is highly acclaimed and I can\u2019t recommend it enough.<\/p>\n

Episode 2, \u201cAmong Believers,\u201d covers Judaism in the medieval period and its difficulties with Christianity and\u00a0Islam.<\/p>\n

Schama recounts the famous debate, known as the \u201cBarcelona Disputation,\u201d which took place over three days beginning on July 20, 1263. The debate, organized by the church, pitted the Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, Pablo Christiani, against one of the towering intellectual figures of medieval Judaism, philosopher Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, better know as Nachmanides.<\/p>\n

Christiani set out to show from the Torah and Talmud that Judaism\u2019s own sacred texts predicted Jesus as the messiah who was to come. Nachmanides\u2019s task\u2013surrounded by ecclesiastical and royal power\u2013was to show that this was not the case.<\/p>\n

Schama, together with Leon Wieseltier, recounts the debate, summarizing some of Nachmanides\u2019s points and (it seems) elaborating a bit on those points themselves.<\/p>\n

Christiani\u2019s argument, they say, was unconvincing and has fallen on deaf Jewish ears ever\u00a0since. They make two main points (you can get a fuller picture of the\u00a0debate here<\/a>), one I am\u00a0very familiar with (having read\u00a0Paul\u2019s letters, especially Romans) and a second that I have\u00a0not given nearly as much thought to.<\/p>\n

First: If Jesus would have been the messiah, there would have been a mass Jewish following.<\/p>\n

Of course, this is the very problem Paul addresses in Romans\u2013I would even say \u201cstruggling with\u201d in Roman. His own Jewish brothers and sisters are not following Israel\u2019s\u00a0messiah but Gentiles are. Paul reasons that the Gentile conversion will make Jews jealous, but that in time (very soon from Paul\u2019s point of view), the time of the Gentiles would come to a close and Jews would stream in.<\/p>\n

Instead, what happened is this Jewish movement\u00a0of Jesus followers becomes a separate religion by the 2nd century and made up increasingly of Gentiles while Jews remained Jewish.<\/p>\n

Second: The messiah of the Jews was to fulfill Old Testament\/Jewish Bible prophecies of universal peace, but, as Nachmanides argued, the world was still full of war and injustice, most\u00a0of it perpetuated by Christians.<\/p>\n

As Schama and Wieseltier put it, the Jewish messianic problem is that they wait and wait and wait for the messiah but he doesn\u2019t come. The Christian\u00a0problem is that he came and it made no difference.<\/p>\n

Of course, Christians will bristle at the thought that Jesus \u201cmade no difference,\u201d and I certainly understand why\u2013Jesus is raised and that conquers death and now all who believe on his name will be saved.<\/p>\n

But Schama and Wieseltier\u2019s second point still stands and\u00a0I don\u2019t think we should let it go\u00a0too easily.<\/p>\n

If Jesus is the messiah, why the 2000+ year delay after the inauguration of the \u201cmessianic age\u201d (Christ\u2019s first coming)?<\/p>\n

Why all this time of no peace, of warfare, suffering, and injustice,\u00a0much of it by the followers of the Prince of Peace<\/em>?<\/h2>\n

I understand that much of that suffering by Christians have been at the hands of various versions of the Christian \u201cstate\u201d throughout history (which is one reason why I have no interest in seeing it resurrected by the American political hard Christian right), but that simply delays the question one step: why does God allow the corrupt Christian state to remain in power after the messianic age has been inaugurated.<\/p>\n

Does eschatological inauguration make so little difference\u2013at least little enough that no one other than Christians notices and have to convince others of it?<\/p>\n

For me, one of the intellectual challenges to Christianity is this delay of the parousia<\/em>\u2013the Greek term meaning \u201cpresence, arrival, visit,\u201d i.e., Second Coming. I wonder whether Christians\u00a0may not have something to learn from this Jewish critique.<\/p>\n

Similar to how Jews in the 1st century were concerned that failure to remain faithful to the covenant\u00a0not only caused<\/em> the exile a half a millennium earlier but perpetuated the half-millennium delay<\/em> of the messianic age, perhaps the\u00a0parousia<\/em>\u00a0is delayed because Christians haven\u2019t yet figured out how to be the body of Christ.<\/p>\n

Just riffing here, but maybe the problem of the delay of the parousia\u00a0<\/em>isn\u2019t simply a theological conundrum to be solved through closer exegesis or theological alchemy.<\/p>\n

Maybe\u00a0the \u201cbody of Christ\u201d isn\u2019t being the body of Christ. Maybe Jesus is too embarrassed to be seen with us.<\/p>\n

This blog was originally posted in April 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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A few months back I watched Simon Schama\u2019s gripping 5-part video series\u00a0The Story of the Jews, which takes us from the reign of David to\u00a0contemporary Judaism. The series is highly acclaimed and I can\u2019t recommend it enough. Episode 2, \u201cAmong Believers,\u201d covers Judaism in the medieval period and its difficulties with Christianity and\u00a0Islam. Schama recounts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[]},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10974"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}