The End of the World As We Know It - Part 1: Growing Up

 A reader asks,

“Both Jesus and his followers seemed to believe his return and the last days were imminent. Yet here we are 2,000 years later and no Jesus in the flesh or end of the world. Was Jesus wrong? Is our record of what he taught wrong? If I am honest I can see how people can dismiss Jesus as an end times prophet anticipating a soon-coming final judgment that has not come soon. Growing up shaped by Pentecostal emphasis on the second coming I have heard many explanations of this that just seem to ignore the simple conclusion that Jesus was wrong. And if so, was he in fact divine like no other? And if he was wrong should I treat his teachings as authoritative?”

This is a question I have struggled with too. At its heart is a desire to see suffering and injustice come to an end, to see things made right. Those are good desires. However, it’s pretty hard to deny that 2000 years is by no definition “soon.” So what do we do about that? What do we do about the seemingly unavoidable conclusion that Jesus and his early followers’ hopes and expectations were apparently wrong? This brings us to the broader question of what do we do when we find that any part of the Bible is wrong. Does this cause our entire belief to collapse? Does this invalidate everything else?

If we have a faith rooted in authoritarianism and the way of unquestioning obedience, then the answer is, yes, it does. Because of this, many fundamentalist Christians convert to being fundamentalist atheists. That’s one possibility. Another possibility is to double down and argue that we are misunderstanding things and that everything is fine, and the Bible and Jesus are never wrong. That’s another possibility that is widely taken. I’ve heard lots of attempts at doing this in relation to eschatology, and I have to say they all left my heart still longing for a better answer. What my heart wanted was to see the world made right, and so somehow all explanations of why I should accept things as they are just rang hollow.

The way I see it, on a deeper level, this is an issue of growing into adulthood, and that is a painful and difficult passage. As children we idealize our parents and teachers. We place child-like trust in them. When we become parents ourselves, we are faced with the staggering responsibility of taking care of our children. We take on that seemingly god-like role in their lives, all the time painfully aware how inadequate and unprepared we are to live up to that. We try the best we can to keep them safe, but we know we cannot shelter them from everything. We try to do our best, but we know we will fail, we will make mistakes. It’s hard to know that our kids will get hurt in this world, but it’s harder to face that we will hurt them, we will fail them.

The same is true of anyone who is a position of authority in our lives, teachers, managers, mentors, politicians, and pastors... no matter how much they try not to, will all fail us. That can be devastating. Many people, when faced with the moral failings of their pastor, walk away from their faith altogether – just like many people do when they find that the Bible is not a flawless book.

Note that "authority" and "authoritative" are not the same as authoritarian. Adults have people in authority over them, and exercise authority themselves within their lives as parents and professionals. Adults also regard things as authoritative when they deserve to be regarded as such.  But authoritarianism is synonymous with a child-like and developmentally immature approach to life. To the extent that we are nurtured in an authoritarian church, people are conditioned to remain developmentally immature. We need to have a faith that allows us to be morally responsible intelligent adults.

So the question becomes, how can we come to terms with our own imperfections and failings, with the imperfections and failings of those we look up to, and the imperfections and failings of scripture, and still hold on to what is good in ourselves, in our mentors, and in the Bible? That is the core question of what it means to move from childish faith to an adult faith. An adult faith is not one that has all the answers. It is not a faith that is rooted in certainty. That is what a child imagines it is like to be a grownup. Those of us who are adults and parents know full well that the reality of adulthood looks very different.

This new perspective of adulthood does not have the perspective that says if someone is wrong about one thing, therefore we must reject everything. After all, you are wrong sometimes, and that does not mean you are always wrong. The same goes for me, and the same goes for the human Jesus (it’s important that we hold that Jesus was not just divine, but both human and divine!). That means that you cannot blindly and without thinking accept everything I say, or accept everything anyone else says for that matter, including Jesus. We need to seek to understand so we can follow well, not blindly obeying without understanding – which means we will (because we do not understand) follow wrong, leading to hurt.

From what I can see, Jesus was wrong about the timing of the end. He was also wrong in his understanding of medicine, which he (like everyone else at the time) attributed to invisible demons rather than invisible germs. I put all of this to the limitations that Jesus experienced in being a human being, and to be fair, Jesus himself does say “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mt 24:36). In the same way that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, the Bible as a whole is also both divine and human, too. It is possible to encounter God in its pages, to encounter a love and goodness that puts us in direct contact with the divine, the eternal, and the holy. The challenge for us as adult believers is to learn how to find and embrace the good parts so we can get to the holy, so we can get to the heart of Jesus.

Just because Jesus was misinformed about medicine does not mean that there is nothing for us to learn about how Jesus treated the sick. In fact, there is immense, profound, life-changing moral insight that we can learn from how Jesus sees and treats the sick. Similarly, just because Jesus (and Matthew) were wrong about the imminence of the end, if we dig a bit deeper to look at what the Gospels, and in particular the Gospel of Matthew, has to say about the end time, what we find is a life-changing message that we desperately need to hear in our time, right now. I’ll discuss that in detail next time.