What Happened to the Second Coming? | Fr. Richard Ounsworth, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2020

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This talk was given as part of the Thomistic Institute's Quarantine Lecture series. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: thomisticinstitute.org.

Speaker bio:

Fr Richard teaches scripture and New Testament Greek in the Studium. He is the Dean of Degrees at the Hall: he presents students at University matriculation and graduation ceremonies. From Michaelmas 2018, Fr Richard will be teaching The Letter to the Hebrews for the University in the Theology and Religious Studies Faculty.

Fr Richard studied theology at Oxford at both undergraduate and graduate level; he studied history at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the Provincial Bursar of the English Dominicans.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the creed, we say that he will come again in glory to judge the dead.
0:07.5	And you probably noticed by now that that has not as yet happened,
0:12.4	which need not be a problem for us.
0:14.7	Everything happens eventually, except that it does appear in some passages in the New Testament, in the Gospels especially,
0:25.5	that not only the early Christians, but Christ himself thought that the second coming was pretty imminent.
0:34.9	Although in Mark 13 and Matthew 24, Christ says no one knows the day or the hour,
0:42.1	there are other passages where it does very much sound as though Christ knows and is promising
0:47.8	that it's coming soon. And that has been central to the hope of the early Christians, and the second coming remains central
0:57.8	today to Christian hope. In Mark chapter 9, Christ says there are some standing here who will not
1:05.7	taste death until they see the son of man come in power. And in chapter 13 of the same gospel, he tells us that
1:14.2	this generation will not pass away until Christ has come in glory. Well, how do we get around that
1:22.9	problem? You might say, well, it's perfectly straightforward. We simply read the second letter of St. Peter,
1:29.2	in which the apostle tells us that to God, one day is as a thousand years. I just realized in my notes,
1:37.4	it says the other way round. One year is like a thousand days, which is not so much of a dramatic
1:41.5	difference, is it? One day is like a thousand years, and so, you know,
1:45.9	well, there we are. Will that do? Many people think that it really won't. They asked the question,
1:54.2	was Christ wrong when he made the promises he seems to have been making? Or was he lying,
2:00.3	or at least was he deliberately
2:02.4	misleading his apostles? In his book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer
2:10.7	showed, to my satisfaction and to that of many, that Christ was an eschatological prophet. He was more than that, of course,
2:20.8	but he was at the very least a prophet, an apocalyptic prophet, one who spoke in apocalyptic terms,
2:29.0	and an eschatological apocalyptic prophet, one who spoke about the coming of the end of the world.
	...

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