Aright you have really opened a Pandora's box here, and let me refer you again to my Defenders
lectures. In the final section of the class it's on doctrine of the last things, and we deal with
these various questions, including N.T. Wright's view. I do not agree with N.T. Wright's view of
the second coming of Christ. N.T. Wright has this very peculiar view that the Son of Man returned
in AD 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem, and that this was not predicting a sort of worldwide,
cataclysmic event that would be publicly visible to everyone. Instead it's the Son
of Man entering into the throne room of God in heaven and being enthroned there as the
authority. And he thinks with the destruction of Jerusalem that these prophecies that Jesus
made about the return of the Son of Man were fulfilled. I think that that is erroneous;
it seems to me that's a mistake, and I think the principal reason would be this.
The return of Christ in the New Testament is associated with the resurrection from the dead,
and the resurrection of the dead did not occur in any sense in AD 70. Jesus has yet to return,
and it will not be until Christ returns that the dead will be raised and we will receive
these new resurrection bodies that will be fit for an immortal, bodily existence forever. And
there that's quite right; that's going to be the new heavens and the new earth, a renewed creation
with resurrection bodies, but that doesn't take place until sometime in the far future. There
isn't within the New Testament I believe any differentiation between a coming of the
Son of Man in AD 70 and the coming of Christ at the end of the world. They are the same event,
and Paul still is looking forward to that event in his epistles; he's not looking back on it,
or thinking that it's something that already occurs. And so I would say that the truth
of what he's saying is that when we die we do not go immediately to our final state. There is
an intermediate state of disembodied existence which Paul describes as being with the Lord. He
says to be away from the body is to be present with the Lord in 2nd Corinthians 5, and then
when Christ returns, the resurrection will happen, the disembodied souls of the dead in Christ will
be reunited with their resurrected bodies, those alive at the time will be similarly transformed,
and then we will be taken into the final state, which is the new heavens and the new earth. Let
me just say one other thing about this that is interesting scientifically, and that is this. It's
hard to believe in the second coming of Christ. It's an event that is so strange, so overwhelming,
that it's hard to believe that say next Wednesday the world might come to an end and Christ is going
to return. It's just so hard to believe something like that. But what's interesting is that in
modern science, physical cosmology predicts an exactly similar cosmological end of the world,
so that in modern cosmology, there is a field of cosmology that discusses not the beginning of the
universe, that's cosmogony, it discusses the end of the universe, and you know what that field is
called? Eschatology. It is now a field of science, not just theology. Physical eschatology discusses
the end of the world. And what scientists tell us is that if the world is hung up in a kind of
unstable quantum position, the entire universe could undergo a quantum transition to a lower
energy level, and if it does, in the blink of an eye this would spread across the universe
at the speed of faster than the speed of light, transforming the entire universe,
resulting in a new set of laws and a new universe, and no one would know that it was coming. It could
happen next Wednesday and no one would know that it was coming, utterly unexpected. It will
come like a thief in the night. Now this is remarkable, because it reminds one of
what one reads in 1 Peter where it says that the heavens and the earth will melt away like a great
cataclysm and there will be this new heavens and new earth inaugurated. Now I'm not saying
that Peter is predicting physical eschatology, but I am saying it's very very similar. So if
you can believe in what modern science says about physical eschatology, I think that makes it a lot
easier to believe in Christian eschatology about the return of Christ and the end of the world.