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Among all the church fathers, though, whether the premillennialist minority or the amillennialist majority, unity ruled in the call to believers in the light of Christ's imminent coming. John Chrysostom, for example, archbishop of Constantinople in the late fourth century, firmly believed that Jesus' return to Earth was soon to take place. He identified the preaching of the gospel throughout the world as a sign of Jesus' imminent return. Chrysostom warned, though, of the dangers of an eschatological curiosity divorced from a life centered in the gospel. He reminded his listeners that with the consummation of the age would come the consummation of their own lives. Were they prepared to greet their Lord? Had their words and lives faithfully reflected the life of the One they so eagerly awaited? A life of Christian integrity far outweighed the value of a detailed prophecy chart. "Is not the consummation of the world, for each of us, the end of his own life? Why are you concerned and worried about the common end? … The time of consummation took its beginning with Adam, and the end of each of our lives is an image of the consummation. One would not be wrong, then, in calling it the end of the world."

The great divorce
Over a period of years, the energy of the Jesus movement spent itself, I think, largely because of the failure to develop structures to accommodate and nurture the thousands coming into the kingdom. Also, significant moral confusion characterized the movement as a whole in its waning years. We had spent countless hours analyzing and identifying the time of the Tribulation, the identity of the Antichrist, and whether the church would be raptured before, during, or after the Tribulation.

Important questions all, but deadly if contemplated ahistorically or in the midst of moral confusion. What was most significant, we had cut ourselves off from the very community—Christ's body the church—that could teach us how to live wisely and sanely as we waited for our Lord and provide the social context necessary for the developing, nurturing, and shaping of Christian character. We wanted our cake (Jesus to return) and to eat it too (to live however we wanted until he came back). Finally, this divorce between eschatology and ethics blew up in our faces.

Some walked away from the experience deeply conflicted and disillusioned. A few rejected the faith entirely. Others, after the healing of time, were able to recognize God's grace in the midst of our many mistakes and frequent hubris. Some, pastors such as Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel and Ray Stedman at Pennisula Bible Church, reaped lasting fruit, notably because of their commitment to the church built as the hub of biblical exposition and moral development.

I, for one, will always be grateful for the ex-tugboat captain who cared enough to take a wounded bird under his wing to share God's grace with him, even if I would later turn to other teachers and models—many from the earliest years of the church's history—to learn how to live in light of Christ's imminent return.

Chris Hall is associate professor of biblical and theological studies at Eastern College, Saint Davids, Pennsylvania, associate editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, and author of Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers (InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Read more about these related topics:
—End Times
—Apocalypse
—Y2K
—Christian Fiction

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October 25 1999, Vol. 43, No. 12