Objection:
By preaching the soon coming of Christ, you are falsely creating hope and excitement. Misguided people through the centuries have repeatedly thought His coming was at hand. That fact is best illustrated by the enthusiasm spread throughout Europe in A.D. 1000 when multitudes waited in fanatical zeal for Christ’s coming.
Answer:
One of the most common substitutes for logic and evidence is ridicule and scorn. Many persons call themselves Christians who think it a mark of superior religious understanding to heap ridicule on the whole doctrine of the literal soon coming of Christ. Such persons are sure that those who preach this doctrine are misguided visionaries and that those who give ear to the preaching most certainly become a ludicrous fanatic. To prove their point beyond any debate, they make the sweeping statement, found in this objection, that the centuries, most notably the year A.D. 1000, have witnessed deplorable incidents of fanatical excitement regarding this doctrine.
The facts are that during the long, and generally dark, centuries, the great masses of the people were grossly ignorant of the Scriptures and thus unaware, even, of what its inspired pages say on the Second Advent. True, there were at times scholars who, from their study of the Bible, expressed particular views as to the nearness of the Advent. But such opinions were generally expressed in language not too exact. Nor did these views, except in rare instances, have any currency beyond the walls of a monastery, the usual abode of theological scholars in medieval times.
The story that Europe witnessed wild excitement in anticipation of the Advent as the year 1000 drew near is a groundless legend; how critics of the doctrine of Christ’s coming have loved to believe it. Their love for it has been as strong as their love for the story that the Millerites in 1844 draped themselves in ascension robes in fanatical Advent expectancy. In fact, these two stories have been the chief “proofs” that the preaching of Christ’s soon coming can result only in false hope and fanatical excitement. The wild stories about what allegedly happened in A.D. 1844 have been proven false, and the stories about the year A.D. 1000 can be just as undoubtedly refuted. For those who wish to examine a summary of the evidence that exposes these stories, we suggest reading the article “The Year 1000 and the Antecedents of the Crusades,” by George Lincoln Burr, in the American Historical Review, April 1901, pages 429-439. (This journal is the official organ of the American Historical Society.) After summarizing some of the investigations of eminent nineteenth-century historians who have examined the events of the year A.D. 1000, Burr observes:
In fine, then, the sole contemporary evidence for a panic of terror at the year 1000 proved to be a statement that forty years earlier one Paris preacher named it as the date of the end of the world. A preacher whose prophecy was at once refuted, and, for ought we can learn, at once forgotten.
Page 434
Still further on in his article Burr quotes approvingly these words of one of the historians who has investigated the legend:
The terrors of the year 1000 are only a legend and a myth.
Page 435
It would be far more accurate to say that the vast majority of Christians have had little interest in the doctrine of the personal second coming of Christ all through the centuries. The reasons are two:
- All through the Dark Ages and virtually up to Reformation times, only the clergy and a few intellectuals had copies of the Scriptures. Hence Christians at large could hardly become particularly concerned about the doctrine. That was the long period of papal dominance in religious thought.
- In the eighteenth century, certain Protestant leaders began to teach. Their view has been increasingly accepted, that the coming of Christ will be spiritual, invisible, the entrance of the Divine Spirit into human hearts, gradually turning all men to righteousness. Hence there would be no occasion for anyone to look forward with intense feeling to a specific moment ahead.
It would also be equally accurate to say that the long centuries fail to support any general charge that those who have believed in the doctrine of Christ’s personal appearing have deported themselves in an irrational, fanatical fashion.
