Are you ready for the second coming?

Jesus said, "No one will know the hour or the day," of his return, but that doesn't keep people from speculating.

It was a man in central Wisconsin who said it. "I have enough trouble handling the First Coming, never mind the Second."

He was speaking of the Second Coming of Christ, which is promised in scripture and so much a part of Catholic eschatology - the theology of last or final matters.

The Wisconsin man has a point. Except that the world is moving toward a new millennium, and, like it or not, for many people the turn of centuries and millennia - the first millennium of the Christian era being an example - excites exotic thoughts, including that of a Second Coming.

To be sure, the first millennium was a special case, what with the Book of Revelation being so specific in Chapter 20 of all that would occur when 1,000 years were over. The anti-Christ was to appear and create havoc, then "the One" would come on a large white throne, judge the living and the dead, and hurl into a pool of fire all whose names were not inscribed in the book of the living.

Neither Revelation nor scripture says anything about the end of a second millennium, only five years away, so one might expect notions about a Second Coming of Christ and its scriptural correlatives, benign or dire, to be completely out of mind. Not so, however.

Two polls by the surveying firm Yankelovich Partners for Time and CNN show 36 percent of Americans expecting the Second Coming of Christ will occur some time in the 21st century and 20 percent believing it will happen around the year 2000. In the long view of history, that's virtually tomorrow. Those polls, incidentally, were taken in 1992 and 1993, with adult samplings of 800 and 1,000, respectively.

Granted that 36 and 20 are not majority percentages, yet they are sizeable. Do the percentages mean anything? Not to Sister Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., author and theologian at Fordham University in New York City.

"People make a big fuss out of the approaching millennium, but those who link it to the Bible and a Second Coming are really off the track," she says.

Their expectations are "ungrounded and unfounded."

Johnson allows, of course, that the idea of a Second Coming is biblically based. "But biblical scholars whom I read and to whom I speak say those texts ought not to be taken literally. They're poetic imagination written by a people under persecution."

They belong to the "apocalyptic genre," and she says the images they project are "stage props."

There's nothing particularly unusual about this kind of writing, Johnson says. "The more persecuted a people become, the more they turn to God. One sees that also in the Old Testament. The more persecuted the Jewish people were, the more they hoped for God's coming to set things right."

The difference between the Christian and Jewish approaches, she says, is that Christians speak of a Second Coming - the first being the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity assuming human form in the person of Jesus Christ.

But if the Second Coming is not to occur at this or another millennium, when might it? Not even Jesus knew the answer to that, Johnson says, calling attention to the Gospel of Mark 13:32: "As to the exact day or hour, no one knows it, neither the angels in heaven nor even the Son, but only the Father.

"I take it from that," she says, "that it is not given to us to know when the day [of the Second Coming] will be. It's not revealed."

Yet some Christian groups have professed to own the secret. The Michelians in the 18th century and the Plymouth Brethren in the 19th both preached a second and proximate coming of Christ. Their expectations proved idle, and the sects went into eclipse.

With such histories as those on the books, one might expect notions of an imminent Second Coming to be remote from Christian sensibilities. But they aren't, at least not entirely. In fact, for some the idea of a Second Coming is as seductive as it was for Saint Paul in his lifetime.

For a time Paul not only believed that the Second Coming was imminent, but he was also so sufficiently direct on the point in his first letter to the Thessalonians that he had to write a second letter to quell the turmoil he created the first time around.

Nor was Paul alone in his thinking when he wrote First Thessalonians. Many of the early church leaders were likewise persuaded that if the Second Coming weren't imminent, it was only a relatively short while away - maybe 50 years, maybe 100.

So why waste time systematizing a code of canons, laying the foundations of an institution, and defining such particulars as the elements of a Christian marriage? The church leaders got busy about these tasks only as likely return dates passed and thoughts receded that the risen Christ, since ascended to heaven, would be back soon to claim his own.

It developed that the expectations of many in the early church were only deferred, however. Some of the expectations were to resurface with the approach of the year 1000. The ominous predictions of the Book of Revelation leapt back to mind, and not a few were fearful that this time it was surely auf Wiedersehen!, au revoir!, adios!, hasta la vista! Some historians have suggested that millennialist worries may have contributed to a kind of intellectual ennui that prolonged the Dark Ages.

Well, nothing happened at the first Christian millennium, as we know, so Catholic folks got about the business of living in a world - and a church - that they concluded would be around, not forever perhaps, but certainly for a long, long while.

Now the year 2000 nears, and old impulses seemingly have a way of reenergizing themselves. Take those sightings of the Virgin Mary allegedly taking place at a farm in Conyers, Georgia since 1990. The Archdiocese of Atlanta has tried to discourage the idea that these are authentic Marian apparitions, but it hasn't entirely succeeded. Emory College anthropologist Charles Nuckolls took students to visit the farm and remarked to USA Today that the Conyers events didn't surprise him. They can be traced, he said, to millennialist notions.

Is there really such a phenomenon?

Father Ronald J. Gariboldi, professor of pastoral theology at St. John's Seminary in Boston for 12 years, pastor on Cape Ann, and lecturer at interdenominational Andover Newton Theological Seminary, tells of his grandmother from the old country: "She used to say to my mother, 'We won't reach the year 2000.'" Was that hunch, religious conviction, or superstition? "It's a peasant thing," he says.

But if some are asking: Is 2000 going to be it? Will there be a Second Coming? Are things going to come to an end?, they are a distinct minority across Christendom. Most Christians are preoccupied with other matters.

In fact, most Catholic Christians tend to consign millennialist worrywarts to the fringes of religious relevance. "They're free to believe what they want," says Maurice Adelman, Jr., a semiretired lawyer living in Savannah, Georgia.

"I don't happen to share their ideas. I may be proved wrong, though thus far the number of their successes has been minimal."

Adelman's joshing aside, there is a serious element to the question of the Second Coming. No one may know when it will be, but most Christians expect it to occur some time or another.

Protestants are more emphatic in their convictions about this than Catholics. A 1993-94 report by the Barna Research Group of Glendale, California found that 74 percent of Protestants "agree strongly" and 9 percent "agree somewhat" with the statement "Jesus will come back." That's a total of 83 percent of Protestants believing Christ's return to be likely. The respective figures for Catholics are 49 and 20, for a total of 69 percent - a large number, but still quite a bit lower than that for Protestants.

The Barna Report did not probe into factors that might account for the difference between Protestant and Catholic thought on Jesus' return, but Jesuit Father Daniel J. Harrington, a New Testament professor at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers an idea. He suggests the figures reflect the more serious interest that Protestants - particularly evangelical groups - take in the subject.

"Catholic preaching and teaching have downplayed or ignored" the subject of the Second Coming, Harrington says. It's as if there were "a certain embarrassment in the apocalyptic imagery" presented in scripture.

As for new theological thought on the subject, there has been "some movement" on the Catholic front, he says, but not a whole lot. One reason, he believes, is that one cannot delve very deeply into the question of the Second Coming "without getting into the old evangelical debate of premillennialism and postmillennialism." At that point many Catholics tend to become dismissive. It's as if they're saying, "There are people who get excited about all that, but we're not among them."

Gariboldi adds that a repressant of sorts might be at work on the Catholic psyche. He illustrates in terms of an eight-foot carving of the crucifixion recently installed in the church where he is pastor, St. Joachim's in Rockport, Massachusetts. The carving is graphic, displaying a flesh-toned, bloodied Christ in excruciating agony. Some parishioners objected to its installation. "We want to see the glory and the hope," they said.

Gariboldi understands where they're coming from. "There's so much suffering going on in people's lives, it affects the way people think about death," he says. But it is also true, he says, that people "don't want to face death and finalization. We're a death-denying culture."

Second guesses

Yet a more basic problem may exist in coming to grips with the idea of the Second Coming. Neil Lehane of Boston, a retired Catholic journalist, pinpoints it in terms of language. "The Second Coming is a great mystery," he says.

"It's not something that's going to be neatly solved or understood like some Agatha Christie mystery. It's a mystery, just as our whole existence is a mystery, from our creation by a loving God to our death and resurrection."

Lehane draws a comparison to a painting. "The more you contemplate it, the more you see beyond the canvas and the oils. You draw a mystical understanding of what the work represents."

Lehane defers, therefore, on the specifics of a Second Coming and questions such as whether the course of events will follow the script of Revelation and scripture. Will the Son of Man, for instance, come in his glory, escorted by all the angels of heaven, as Matthew predicts in chapter 25:31? Will the sun be darkened, the moon not shed its light, and the stars fall from the skies, as Mark forecasts in chapter 13:24-25? Will there be great earthquakes, plagues, and famines, as Luke foretells in chapter 21:11? Will there be a Last Judgment? Then, will Jesus take the faithful back to the place he has prepared for them, as John 14:3 proclaims?

And that's only the beginning. What of scriptural statements about the Son of Man returning to raise the dead and judge all peoples from all nations in a Last Judgment? If that is to happen, what of the Particular Judgment that presumably is to occur right after death? Doesn't that make a second and Last Judgment redundant?

"Again we're into human terms," says Lehane. "But whatever the case, the judgment on each of us is really made by ourselves and how we live out our baptismal vows. To the degree that we are faithful to those vows, we will have judged ourselves."

Gariboldi agrees on the difficulty of language, but on the issue of divine judgment he says: "We will be judged once. We're trying to put our concept on God. There is no such thing as time for God; everything is eternal, everything is now for God. There's not going to be a second Judgment."

But what of all the testimony on the subject? "We have to talk in anthropomorphic terms because of our human condition," he says. "We envision God in the way we look at ourselves; we understand God in the way we understand ourselves. It might not turn out to be that way at all."

For most people the question of two judgments - a particular and a last - seems to be of no special concern. A Particular Judgment on one's death belongs to every Catholic's expectations. As for then being grouped once again into an all-inclusive Last Judgment, that seems no special problem. In fact most Catholics appear not have given the idea any great thought.

Or, like Johnson, they minimize the question of redundancy. "A human being is part of a society, part of a whole, and so the idea of a judgment of everyone together is good," Johnson says. "It brings out the social connections of what we do right and what we do wrong."

Lehane, who fully expects to see and be judged by God when he dies, says, "At the Second Coming all of us - that is, society itself - will be judged together according to how we have been faithful." He likens the two judgments to the examination of conscience common to the Christian experience. "The concept of Particular Judgment corresponds to the examination of conscience that spiritual directors recommend for the end of the day, and the Last Judgment corresponds to the examination of conscience for a general confession."

Then there are those, such as Adelman, who have a nebulous view of what a Second Coming and Last Judgment will involve. "Any attempt to define God's authority or power by words is a limitation," Adelman says, "because any definition is a limitation; it implies some sort of boundary, and God is without limit. As is said in the Book of Wisdom, 'Who shall know the mind of God?' To try to understand the transcendence of God, we have to use words, and as I said, every word that is used becomes a limitation."

Does that make thought and wonder about a Second Coming and Last Judgment academic exercises? "Not academic," says Adelman, "but they are unknowns, and to try to define what is unknown either in scholastic terminology or any other is a futile process."

He says that the scriptural descriptions of the coming of the Son of Man in glory are attempts to put into words, probably allegorical words, what is not and will not be known to the huge majority in their lifetimes. And as for a person's judgment, particular or last, "you simply have to have faith in the underlying principle that you will be judged by a merciful and just God," Adelman says.

The new Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori Publications, 1994), the most authoritative, up-to-date source on the subject, devotes four pages to the Second Coming and a Last Judgment in Article 7 of the profession of faith, "from whence he will come again to judge the living and the dead."

Christ already dwells on earth in his church, so that in a real sense the "last hour . . . the final age of the world" is actually with us, and all that remains are for certain scriptural details to be fulfilled - a last assault by the powers of evil, a triumphant return of Christ in glory, and the judging of the living and the dead.

Apropos to what Harrington said earlier, it is interesting that not even the new catechism can escape the notion of millennialism. The catechism departs from an essentially scriptural exegesis on the Second Coming to cite Pope Plus XI's 1937 encyclical Divini redemptoris rejecting the idea that messianic hope can be made "within history," stating that it can only be made "beyond history through the eschatological judgment." It then recalls Plus XI's words that "even modified forms of this falsification . . . [coming] under the name of millenarianism" are to be rejected.

More to come

Some have proposed that there are "new ways" of looking at the Second Coming, venturing the thought, for instance, that the Second Coming happens in small, incremental ways each time a prophetic person emerges to lead people on a path of justice and right, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did.

Harrington, who is also editor of New Testament Abstracts, discounts that concept. For the latest in "new thought" on the Second Coming he recommends Father Raymond Brown's Introduction to New Testament Christology (Paulist Press, 1994).

There Brown describes Christianity as "a religion of hope," and in the context of Second Coming Christology, he says that "what God has yet to do in and through Jesus remains an important component of its theological outlook.

"Nevertheless," he continues, "the substance of the Christian proclamation to the world is what God has done in Jesus. If the gospel, or Good News, is put on the scales, that aspect outweighs insistence on what God will do. 'Who, in faith's eye, Jesus already is' outweighs in the balance 'Who, in hope's anticipation, Jesus will be.'"

One might conclude from Brown that one is better off concentrating on the Jesus of the Incarnation and on the inauguration of God's reign.

As for the Second Coming, it's going to happen, but the when and whereof are so uncertain that it should not consume religious concerns inordinately. And this seems to be the prevailing zeitgeist among Catholic Christians.

What does that translate to? It means that the Second Coming is not a consuming Catholic issue now, nor is it soon likely to become one. Certainly it is not being pumped up as such, not even in the seminaries.

"Naturally we learn about the Second Coming," says Joseph F. Keville of Lowell, Massachusetts, a seminarian doing a "pastoral year" after completing his third year of theology at St. John's Seminary.

"We learn of it through scripture courses, the Doctrine of God course, Saint Paul, Christ in the gospels, and subjects with an eschatological theme. We learn it as a general Catholic theme, but," he adds, "it is not something that is focused upon with great intensity."

People in the pews can credit those comments. As our man in Wisconsin says rhetorically, "When's the last time you heard a sermon on the Second Coming?"

Though not on the front burner of theological issues and private religious concerns, the Second Coming is basic to Catholic belief. If that point is not drilled into people from the pulpit, well maybe that's as it should be.

Watching and waiting in the scriptural sense is fine, but as the new catechism says, "the present time is the time of the Spirit and of witness." It is a time of challenge.

Gariboldi sums it up succinctly: "The world will be changed. The Second Coming will come. It will be here when the reign of God is here. So we work towards the alleviation of hunger and homelessness, and we try to bring about that peace that means the reign of God."

John Deedy, veteran Catholic journalist and former managing editor of Commonweal.