Writer Sees Exploitation in Second Coming Preaching

1918

SECOND COMING OF CHRIST

Among certain classes of people there is being revived today a discussion of the Second Coming of Christ. We are told that there is only one interpretation of the great cataclysm now upon the world, namely, that it portends the second coming of the Lord and the ushering in of the Millennium.

Such views are always apt to float up to the surface in a time of serious crisis: but they rest on a treatment of Scripture which the historical scholarship of the world has made obsolete, which the moral principle of the kingdom of God antiquates, and which turns the Bible from a grand sacrament to a millstone round the neck of the Gospel.

To all men who know the Bible on a higher level than this, who find its inspiration not in apocalyptic prediction, but in the eternal spiritual truth it unveils, there comes today no higher duty than to help to free the church from these puerilities of magic and superstition into which it has been so easily led by the motion incident to the war. The advocates of the millenarian doctrine have taken advantage of the mood of the time to wage their propaganda with the vigor of a veritable crusade. Mankind is so sick at heart, so staggered by the war, so bewildered and anxious, that clear thinking on religious themes is difficult. Multitudes are thus left an easy prey to all sorts of vagaries if only so be they come tied up to a text of Scripture.

A book like the Bible, so Oriental, rich with imagery, lends itself to this of exploitation. Especially the books of Revelation and Daniel, written in times of stress and suffering and war like our own time, provide figures of speech and cryptic allusions which lend themselves to vague application to the events of today.

The Bible is not history written in advance. That does nothing for a religion of moral redemption. There is undoubtedly to be a grand consummation of history in a kingdom of God organic with history. But about the times, seasons and scenery of it we have no information whatsoever, any more than we have a census of the land beyond death, or a scheme of town planning of the New Jerusalem.

All that type of religion belongs to sight and not to faith.

It is visionary, and not moral in its note. To expatiate on it deflects faith, and robs it of historic sense and public effect.

It tends to sap in apocalyptic dreams the moral fortitude which is the first thing religion should supply at such a time as this.

C. H. HOOD.

-The Coshocton Tribune, Coshocton, Ohio, June 29, 1918, page 2.