6.3 — Christ's Second Coming (2 of 3)

The full preterist case, at its strongest. A serious full preterist argument does not treat "coming on the clouds" as a claim about literal cloud travel, and deserves to be heard without that caricature. The argument observes, correctly, that this phrase is well-established Old Testament theophany and judgment idiom. Isaiah says the Lord Himself "rides on a swift-moving cloud" to judge Egypt (Isaiah 19:1, NET), a nation whose sky never literally saw anything descend from it. Daniel's vision of "with the clouds of the sky, one like a son of man was approaching" (Daniel 7:13, NET) is, in its own context, a vision of ascent toward the Ancient of Days to receive a kingdom, not descent toward earth. When Jesus stands before the Sanhedrin and applies this image to Himself — "you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Matthew 26:64, NET) — He is claiming Daniel's vindication-and-enthronement scene for Himself. He does so on a near timetable His judges would live to see confirmed: the temple's destruction as the public proof that the man they condemned had been vindicated and enthroned. On this reading, Acts 1:11's promise that Christ will return "in the same way" need mean nothing more than manner matching manner within the same theophanic idiom — a cloud-veiled coming in judgment, not a literal descent. It resolved exactly when Jesus said it would, with nothing left for any later generation to watch for.

A more developed form of this same case, argued in some contemporary full-preterist circles, answers the eyewitness question directly rather than resting on idiom alone, and deserves to be heard on its own terms before the weighing below. On this account, the dead in Christ were raised out of Hades and the living were changed, both relocated into what its proponents call the unseen realm — not appearing visibly on earth, and therefore leaving no eyewitness report behind by the very nature of the event, rather than by coincidence or cover-up. The timing is tied to a specific passage in Josephus: priests entering the Jerusalem temple at Pentecost, roughly two weeks after the war's outbreak in AD 66, reported hearing "a great multitude" say "let us remove hence" (Wars of the Jews 6.5.3). On this reading, that is the resurrection of the dead leaving Hades, heard rather than seen, at the same "twinkling of an eye" 1 Corinthians 15:52 describes for the living being changed. This argument also points to something worth weighing honestly rather than dismissing outright: mainstream, non-preterist church historians, writing with no stake in full preterism at all, describe the period from AD 70 to roughly AD 110 as unusually silent in the historical record — "one of the obscurest portions of church history," in the historian Williston Walker's own assessment. A real silence exists in that stretch of the record. What is disputed is what best explains it.

Weighing the two cases directly. Both readings agree that "coming on the clouds" is genuine theophany idiom, and that Jesus deliberately claims Daniel 7:13's vindication scene for Himself before the Sanhedrin, on a near timetable His generation did live to see fulfilled. Where they part is whether Acts 1:11 belongs to that same idiom or to a different register of language entirely. The partial preterist case argues Acts 1:11 is plain eyewitness narrative rather than theophany idiom — Jesus lifted visibly upward before the disciples' watching eyes, a cloud receiving Him out of their sight, two men in white explaining what they had just witnessed — and that the promise attached to it, taken up this way, He will come back this way, describes a literal, still-future, equally physical return rather than a coded allusion to Daniel's courtroom vindication scene. A full preterist reader will weigh whether the eyewitness framing actually rules out symbolic "in the same way" language, given how much of Revelation's own eyewitness narration is itself heavily symbolic. That is the genuine crux, and it is worth reading both full treatments in this section before deciding where you land.

That crux sharpens once the unseen-realm argument above is weighed on its own evidence rather than only against Acts 1:11's plain sense. Two problems are worth naming directly. First, the Josephus passage is not new data; it is a reinterpretation of already-explained data. "Let us remove hence" is the last in a documented cluster of doom portents Josephus lists in the very same passage — a star like a sword, a comet lasting a year, a cow giving birth to a lamb inside the temple, the great eastern gate opening on its own — and every reading of that passage across roughly two thousand years, Jewish and Christian alike, treats the whole cluster as a set of omens signaling the temple's divine protection departing before its coming destruction, with a direct Old Testament precedent in Ezekiel 10-11's vision of God's own glory leaving the Jerusalem temple before Babylon's arrival. Nothing internal to Josephus's own text marks a shift, at that specific line, from doom omen to Christian resurrection. Second, and harder to answer: even granting a genuinely silent record among unbelieving neighbors and Roman historians, the silence would need to hold inside the church too, for a very long time. No subsequent generation of Christians, reading Paul's own letters addressed to "we who are alive and remain," shows even confused, secondhand awareness that something like this had already happened to the very people those letters were written to — not a claim of fulfillment, not a controversy about one, not even a garbled rumor. That is a harder silence to explain than persecuted neighbors staying quiet for a few decades, and a serious full preterist reader owes some account of it beyond the unseen realm's own built-in definition.

And Paul's language in 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17 points the same direction. Written to a congregation grieving over members who had already died, and anxious that they might somehow have missed the promised return entirely, it only makes genuine pastoral sense as the description of a still-outstanding, personally anticipated future event. "Then we who are alive, who are left, will be suddenly caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air" (1 Thessalonians 4:17, NET) places Paul himself — by his own chosen pronoun, "we" — among people who have not yet seen this happen. He is writing decades after the point at which full preterist chronologies insist every other New Testament promise had already, fully, closed. These are not, in the end, two competing readings of one identical body of evidence, with the choice between them simply a matter of taste. They are Jesus, and His own testimony recorded by His own followers, deliberately marking two genuinely different events with two genuinely different kinds of timestamp — one near and firmly dated, one still future and deliberately left undated. He does this within the very same breath, on purpose, so that no honest reader of His words would ever need to confuse the two.

A separate question worth answering directly: what full preterism says happens to you. You might be thinking, having just read the corporate argument above stated at its strongest, that full preterism has nothing further to add — that the case for AD 70 as the whole of "coming on the clouds" is the entire position. It is not. A consistent full preterist has a real, worked answer to a question the corporate argument alone does not touch: what happens to you, personally, now that nearly two thousand years separate you from AD 70 rather than the handful of decades separating Paul from it? The answer is not a loose end in the system. It may be one of the system's genuine strengths. The corporate, covenantal coming is finished. What remains for every believer since is not a second corporate event still pending, but the individual application of a victory already, fully won. "Just as people are appointed to die once, and then to face judgment" (Hebrews 9:27, NET) is not, on this reading, a preview of some later day of reckoning still on the calendar. It is the judgment itself, arriving on schedule, one believer at a time, for as long as believers keep dying. Paul's own confidence that to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord, and his desire to depart and be with Christ as "far better" (2 Corinthians 5:8, Philippians 1:23, NET), carries the same weight here — not a waiting room before a bigger event still ahead, but the whole of what "meeting the Lord" now means for anyone born on this side of AD 70.