From Amanda Marcotte in Salon yesterday:
The day of "The Storm" keeps moving for QAnon, the loosely-affiliated cult that sprang up online with Donald Trump as its god-like savior figure. At first, the belief was January 6 was the prophesied day when Trump would supposedly ascend to his true power and have all their political enemies, who QAnon adherents believe are blood-drinking pedophiles, arrested. After all, Trump himself repeatedly signaled that January 6 was "go" time and the faithful did as they were told, storming the Capitol in an effort to turn the prophecy into reality.
That failed and many QAnoners found themselves in handcuffs while their leader, Trump, escaped without consequence. But while some got disillusioned and dropped off, many more just did what cultists do and moved the day of the prophecy down the calendar, to March 4 as the new day for Trump would ride into town and kick Joe Biden out of the White House, kicking off "The Storm" for real.
As Giovanni Russonello reports in the New York Times, however, as March 4 grew closer, the QAnon ringleaders started to get cold feet, knowing as they did that "reports" that Trump would take the White House that day were pulled directly out of their nethers. Many of them "started throwing cold water on the March 4 idea, though it had been theirs in the first place," he reports. They realized "it might not be wise to bring a group of fervid supporters to Washington for the arrival of a leader who doesn't show up," and started instead to float conspiracy theories blaming "antifa" — which is the bogeyman they blame most things on — for stirring the pot around the March 4 date in the first place.
(Read the whole article here).
The QAnon conspiracy "theory" is patently absurd. Not only is its description of the bogeymen (bogeypersons?) ridiculous on its face; its portrayal of Donald Trump―the amoral, narcissistic, profoundly ignorant and incompetent Donald Trump!―as the hero of the story would cause uproarious laughter were it not so pathetic … and damning to the so-called "Christian" nationalists who comprise an outsize number of its adherents. Marcotte's article was sobering in its reinforcement of the realization that the most personally invested of these adherents will, instead of using the theory's failure to materialize as evidence of fraudulent wishful thinking, instead reinterpret the prophecy, either altering the date of its hoped-for fulfillment or allegorize it in some fashion.
What also struck me, amazingly for the first time, is how the QAnon theory of Trump's coming vindication and subjugation of his enemies looks like a secularized and transferred version of the Danielic vision of the "coming of the Son of Man" on "the clouds of heaven" to receive an everlasting kingdom from the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:13-14). This vision, which promised ultimate vindication of the oppressed and exiled people of Israel/Judah, was of course taken up by Jesus, who used the expression "Son of Man" as an enigmatic self-referent and who spoke of the future "coming of the Son of Man" in his famous Eschatological Discourse during the last week of his life before he was "crucified under Pontius Pilate" (Mark 13:26 et par.). This prophecy, of course, became the basis for the early Christian hope of a second "coming" or parousia of Christ at the end of the age to establish his kingdom "on earth as in heaven."*
The earliest record of Jesus' prophecy is found in Mark's Gospel, written (most likely) either immediately before or after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In Mark's version of the Eschatological Discourse, Jesus says, somewhat to the surprise (and disregard) of many later Christians: “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" Mark 13:32, NRSV).** That ostensibly clear statement hasn't stopped intrepid preachers from confidently setting dates for Christ's return, whether in the 19th century (famously, the Baptist preacher William Miller, who set the date for some time in 1843; after the so-called "Great Disappointment" precipitated by its failure to materialize, Millerism spawned a family tree including the evangelical, orthodox, and Millenarian Advent Christian sect, the unorthodox Seventh Day Adventists and, further down the line, among others the infamous Branch Davidians) or the 20th/21st (e.g., the erstwhile Christian Reformed radio preacher Harold Camping). Camping is especially instructive. Just like QAnon believed Trump would be vindicated on 6 January and later postponed the date to 4 March, Camping did likewise. After initially predicting Christ would return on 6 September 1994, and then, what it didn't happen, 29 September and then 2 October, Camping finally settled on 21 May 2011. He died in 2013, needless to say without the parousia having come. I wonder, how do folks indoctrinated in such ways respond when these predictions are demonstrated to be false (see here for a short discussion on the matter)?
This inevitably brings up the question about the doctrine of Christ's return itself. When I was studying New Testament in graduate school, one hoary notion, perpetuated in critical studies for generations, concerned the generative effect of the so-called "Delay of the Parousia." Hermann Samuel Reimarus*** in the 18th century and Albert Schweitzer**** at the beginning of the 20th, the bookends of the first so-called "Quest of the Historical Jesus," each saw Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet who forecast his own imminent return and the end of the world. Of course, if he did so he was definitively shown by subsequent events to have been mistaken (Of course, the two scholars came to different conclusions about the significance of this: Reimarus viewed later, apostolic Christianity to be a fabrication; Schweitzer famously viewed Jesus as a hero to be emulated, leading to his own missionary work in Africa). In the 20th century, the notion that the delay of the parousia caused a massive re-think and reformulation of developing/evolving "Christianity" dominated the academy, particularly in Germany.***** The result of this postulated "delay of the parousia," so the theory goes, was the development of what they referred to as "Early Catholicism." In this scenario, the "church," which was initially characterized by "charismatic" leadership in the short interval before the parousia, later supplanted this Spirit-directed structure with a more formal sacramentalism and an "official" ministry geared for the long haul. Such "Early Catholicism," so the theory goes, is already evident in later New Testament texts as Ephesians, the Pastoral Epistles, and 2 Peter, and came to its full flowering in the early 2nd century letters of Ignatius of Antioch.
Now, it is of course plausible to see something of a development in the Apostle Paul's outlook regarding Christ's return. In one of his earliest letters, 1 Thessalonians, written ca. 50 CE, when discussing the parousia with a young community worried that dead believers would miss out on Jesus' return, Paul attempts to comfort them by speaking of himself and the Thessalonians as "we who are alive (hēmeis hoi zōntes [present tense]), who are left (hoi perileipomenoi [present tense]) until the coming (parousian) of the Lord" (1 Thessalonians 4:15). From this one could perhaps surmise that the apostle fully expected to live straight through to that event. In later epistles, however, he seems to allow for the possibility that he might pass from the scene in the interim (e.g., 2 Corinthians [ca. 56 CE] 5:1-10; Philippians [ca. 55 CE {if written from prison in Ephesus} or 62 CE {if written from prison in Rome}] 1:19-26; note also the valedictory recorded [posthumously?] in 2 Timothy 4:6-8). Yet, despite the plausibility, which anyone who has been a Christian for decades can relate to, one wonders whether we are reading too much into his early word of consolation to the Thessalonians. An imminent expectation, to be sure, but one can hardly exclude the distinct possibility that all he was expressing was the hope of still being alive when the saints meet (apantēsis) the Lord in the air. After all, even in the later Philippians he can affirm that "the Lord is near" (ho kyrios engys).
The same can be said regarding the even more difficult saying of Jesus about the "coming" of the Son of Man. What may seem the "clear" meaning of this text to 21st century Christians, especially those raised in apocalyptic, millenarian circles, is anything but clear or easy to interpret. To begin with, the original prophecy in Daniel speaks not of a "coming" of the representative Son of Man figure down to earth, but rather up to the throne of God to receive authority to reign and judge. This "coming" was the act of vindication of the people of Israel who had been under the thumb of Gentile powers for centuries. Jesus, by referring to himself in this way, was implicitly claiming the role of Messiah―the representative Israel-in-miniature, if you will―whose reign would bring the nation's history to its climax. But questions remain: When did/will this "coming" occur? What will this "coming" look like here on earth? Would it arrive in the events preceding the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE within a generation of his uttering these words? Would it come at the end of the age, when he returns visibly and in person to consummate the kingdom inaugurated in his death and resurrection? Or is the answer, "Both," with both initial and ultimate fulfillments intended, even if the human Jesus, like the prophets of old, did not distinguish the two? The issues are far too complex to settle in a short blog post (or even in a book!). The point is that dates were not set, either by Jesus or Paul, for the return of the Lord.
I will let the recently departed James D. G. Dunn have the last word:
Most intriguing, however, is the continuity/discontinuity between the expectation of Jesus himself and that of the post-Easter believers. To be sure, as already noted, it could be argued that Jesus' expectation was at least in part fulfilled by what Christians believe happened to Jesus (his resurrection and exaltation). But the whole issue of the first Christians' imminent expectation of the return (parousia) of Jesus from heaven remains unclear, both as to its origin (did Jesus himself expect to return?) and as to the effect of its disappointment ('the delay of the parousia'). In fact, there is little indication in the literature of the first generation that 'the delay of the parousia' was regarded as a problem: a degree of imminent expectation seems to have been a sustained feature of Paul's own Christ-devotion to the end (e.g., Phil. 4.5), and James is remembered as warning that 'the Judge is standing at the doors! (Jas. 5.9). But to what extent did the disasters of the 60s change things? The deaths of the three first-generation leaders and the disaster of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE must surely have influenced Christian eschatological thinking in at least some measure ― particularly if Jesus' own prediction of the temple's destruction and the coming of the Son of Man were already seen in Christian circles as heralding the end time.******
One of my earliest memories is of listening to my dad preaching (from 1 Thessalonians 4, as it so happens) and saying. "We're not looking for signs; we're looking for the Savior!" That's as it should be, if one wants to be a "biblical" Christian. So-called "imminence" does not imply immediacy. It simply means that there are no definitive signs of its coming, which could occur at any time. It will come, as Paul wrote, "as a thief in the night" (1 Thess 5:2), as people go about their business in seeming normalcy. Jesus himself claims not to have known when the "coming" of the Son of Man would occur. It would be presumptuous for any of us to claim such knowledge, would it not?
**Note that many later manuscripts of the later, literarily dependent (and more widely-used) Gospel of Matthew, including the so-called Byzantine "Majority Text," omit the phrase "nor the Son" (oude ho huios) in its version of the saying, likely due to "embarrassment" over the claim to ignorance on the matter. The inclusion of the phrase by Aleph, B, D and Irenaeus is almost certainly a sign of its originality.
***C. H. Talbert, Reimarus Fragments (Philadelphia: Fortress/London: SCM, 1970-71).
****Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (trans. John Bowden et al.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001 [1913]).
*****Cf., inter alia, Hans Conzelmann, The Theology of St. Luke (trans. Geoffrey Buswell; London: Faber, 1960).
******James D. G. Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem (Christianity in the Making, Volume 2; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2009) 1170-71 (emphasis mine).
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