Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 68:272 (Oct 1911)
Article: The Second Advent And Modern Thought
Author: Thomas Valentine Parker

BSac 68:272 (Oct 1911) p. 600

The Second Advent And Modern Thought

Thomas Valentine Parker, Ph.D.

The second Advent of our Lord has ever been a topic not only productive of interest, but provocative of disagreement. About it there has gathered so much of folly, fantasy, and fanaticism that the very mention of it moves many to derision and more to impatience. Many who have claimed by right divine exclusive proprietorship of the entire truth of the doctrine have made it seem like a ship without ballast, rolling in crazy fashion upon a sea of ignorance, superstition, and absurdity. Notwithstanding all the fortunes of war, the advent of the Master, with the eschatology that clusters about it, must ever remain a subject of importance to the Christian.

Formerly the church was divided into two camps — pre-millenarians and postmillenarians. At present, because of a shifting of the center of interest and of a division of opinion concerning the sense in which Christ will return, these terms are obsolescent; instead we might express the antithesis of more modern judgment by referring to those who believe that the Kingdom of God will be ushered in by evolutionary processes as opposed to those who hold that the Divine Kingdom will rather come as the result of cataclysmic forces. It is because the writer believes that the accretions of absurdity may be torn away and a sane examination of these problems undertaken that he has made bold to pen this paper. The paper

BSac 68:272 (Oct 1911) p. 601

is born in the belief that more than is usually supposed may be said for the catastrophic view and that furthermore, unless pressed to the extreme, there is no necessary antagonism between the two positions. Scripture, science, and history may be levied upon to instruct us concerning the nature of God’s processes in the world. Such an investigation here must be cursory in the extreme if it is not to transcend the exceedingly moderate limits of this paper. Nevertheless I believe that sufficient illustration may be gleaned to elucidate the position taken.

The thinking world — and the world that fancies it thinks, but does not — lies under the spell of Darwinian influence. Yet evolution has another meaning than that of biology, and there is a sense in which a theory of development long antedates the great Englishman. The Greeks’ view of the world was one of progress and development. They broke through the crust of conservatism and the system of repression that lethargized the ancients in general. If their mythology painted their golden age upon the canvas of the past, they did not seek to regain it by a policy of stagnation, but welcomed changes which might be steps to a higher plane of opportunity and achievement.

Likewise the dawn of the mo...