6.3 — Christ's Second Coming (1 of 3)

In one sentence: is Christ's return still a literal, still-future event in some form, or did it already happen, in judgment, when Jerusalem fell?

The dispensationalist case. Two separate future events remain entirely ahead of us on this reading. First, a secret rapture, in which living believers are suddenly caught up to meet Christ in the air. Later, a visible, glorious, public return to earth that ends the tribulation, defeats the Antichrist, and inaugurates the millennial kingdom described in Part Three of this book. On this reading, both events lie entirely in the future relative to every generation of the church that has yet lived, including the disciples who first heard Jesus speak the words about His own return.

This reading rests on more than a general expectation of a future return. It rests on a specific case that deserves to be stated at full strength. Paul tells the Ephesian church that the church itself — Jew and Gentile united as one body in Christ — is "a mystery," a plan "hidden for ages in God" and only now revealed (Ephesians 3:4-6, 9, NET). Dispensationalism reads this as evidence that the church age was not the subject of Old Testament prophecy at all, and therefore cannot simply absorb the promises those prophecies made to Israel by name. Paul makes Israel's own future explicit in Romans: "a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved" (Romans 11:25-26, NET). Dispensationalism reads this as language pointing to a specific, still-future, national restoration — not merely individual Jews trickling into the church alongside everyone else. And Paul distinguishes, within the same letter to a single congregation, two different comings with two different characters. One coming arrives "like a thief in the night," catching the world unprepared (1 Thessalonians 5:1-4, NET). The other, described one chapter earlier, is a coming for the church that Paul explicitly tells believers should comfort them, not catch them by surprise (1 Thessalonians 4:18). On this reading, Matthew 24 itself is addressed by a Jewish rabbi to Jewish disciples asking a question about the Jerusalem temple and "the sign of your coming and of the end of the age" (Matthew 24:3, NET) — a discourse about Israel's specific future, not a description of the church's own hope. Dispensationalism locates that hope instead in the separate rapture teaching Paul later supplies to Gentile congregations, congregations who had never asked Jesus about the temple at all.

The partial preterist case. Jesus makes one specific, dated promise about a coming within His own generation. Then, in the very next breath of the very same discourse, He deliberately refuses to date a second, different coming altogether. "I tell you the truth, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place" (Matthew 24:34, NET) is Jesus's own timestamp, attached explicitly to the judgment He has just spent the preceding verses describing in vivid, specific detail. Armies surrounding Jerusalem. The temple's massive stones thrown down one from another. Desolation falling on the city Jesus wept over on His way into it. That judgment happened, historically, verifiably, within the lifetime of the very people Jesus was addressing when Roman legions destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in AD 70. But the very next sentence in the same discourse marks an unmistakable change of subject: "But as for that day and hour no one knows it — not even the angels in heaven — except the Father alone" (Matthew 24:36, NET). A speaker who has just given his listeners a firm, generational deadline for one specific event, and then immediately states that nobody — not even the angels, not even the Son Himself — can know the timing of the next thing about to be described, is not repeating himself. Nor is he hedging his own prior claim. He is marking a seam in his own teaching: the precise place where the subject shifts from the near, dated judgment on Jerusalem to a second, undated, genuinely still-future event.

The near side of that seam also carries vivid cosmic imagery — the sun going dark, the moon losing its light, stars falling from the sky (Matthew 24:29) — and the partial preterist case reads that imagery exactly the way Isaiah reads the identical imagery painted over Babylon's own fall: "the stars in the sky and their constellations no longer give out their light... So I will shake the heavens, and the earth will shake loose from its foundation" (Isaiah 13:10, 13, NET). No one supposes Babylon's literal sky went dark when Babylon fell; on this reading, Jerusalem's did not either. It is the prophets' own vocabulary for a nation under judgment, not a claim about astronomy, on this account, and that same idiom is applied to Matthew 24:29 without hesitation — the same near, dated event Matthew 24:34 has just fixed to Jesus's own generation, described in the same covenant-collapse language the Old Testament always reaches for at a moment like this one.

That second event was described in the plainest possible terms at the moment of the Ascension, to eyewitnesses of exactly the kind who would go on to write the documents that make up the rest of the New Testament. As the disciples stood staring into the sky where Jesus had just disappeared into a cloud, two angelic messengers told them: "This same Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come back in the same way you saw him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11, NET). This is not loose, symbolic theophany language — the visible-appearance-of-God vocabulary Part Four already introduced — borrowed casually from Old Testament poetic idiom. It is two disciples being told, in the plainest terms the language of eyewitness testimony offers, that the visible, bodily departure they had just personally watched would someday be matched by an equally visible, equally bodily return. It is the same kind of event, witnessed the same kind of way. That has not happened yet. And Paul, writing decades after the resurrection to a congregation actively, anxiously waiting and grieving members who had died before the promised return arrived, describes that same still-future coming in language every bit as physical and embodied as the language surrounding the Ascension itself: "For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first" (1 Thessalonians 4:16, NET). That is not the language a pastor uses to console a grieving congregation about an event he believes is already safely behind them.

Where the partial preterist case pushes back. Each piece of the dispensationalist case above gets a direct answer from partial preterism, not a general appeal to already/not yet. Romans 11:25-27 is a real and important text, and the partial preterist case does not read it away — a future, large-scale turning of ethnic Israel to Christ is a live expectation many partial preterists hold, one they argue needs no restored temple, no rebuilt sacrificial system, no geopolitical timeline to make sense of it. Whether that is a fair reading of Paul's own expectation, or whether it quietly relocates a promise dispensationalism reads as more concrete, is part of what divides the two camps. The mystery of Ephesians 3 gets a similar answer: partial preterism argues what Paul calls hidden is the specific shape of Jew and Gentile united as one body, not the existence of a coming kingdom itself, which the Old Testament prophets describe repeatedly — while a dispensationalist reader may find that distinction thinner than the text requires. And on the two-comings question in 1 Thessalonians 4-5, partial preterism points to Paul's own words binding the two chapters together: "you are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of the darkness" (1 Thessalonians 5:5, NET), addressed to the very congregation just told, one chapter earlier, that they would be caught up together with the Lord — one people, one coming, described first from the side of hope and then from the side of warning, on this reading, rather than two peoples meeting two different returns. A dispensationalist reader will weigh whether that grammatical link outweighs the audience and mystery arguments above. This particular disagreement — one coming or two — holds regardless of where a given dispensationalist reader lands on the rapture's own timing, whether classic pretribulational or one of the mid- or post-tribulational positions some progressive dispensationalists hold instead.