Christianity and the Advent.
By E. V. Gerhart
Looking backward, Christianity includes the person, the personal life, the work, and the perfection of Christ in his glorification, as antecedent to the proper founding of the church on the day of Pentecost. Looking forward, Christianity takes in teleologically, as being essential to the completeness of divine revelation, the second coming of Christ and all the last events, among these the passing away of the present mundane order, the resurrection, the destruction of death, and the transition of the church from the state militant to the state triumphant. This transition implies an organic change in her constitution—a change in kind and in degree like that which her living Head underwent in passing from his state in the flesh to his state in glory. Now the church is in her true state. This is intermediate between the ascension and glorification of her Head, and his coming again to judge the quick and the dead. She is indeed his mystical body, the actual Christianity, the established economy in which Christ lives and reigns on the earth. But the church is the actual Christianity only in a relative, not in an absolute, sense. It is self-evident, that the actualization can not be more complete than the objective truth which is actualized; that the economy can not be more perfect than the mystery which originates, warrants, and fills the economy. Christianity is itself only relatively complete. The second advent is still a future fact, not yet a reality; but though not yet real, it is nevertheless the culminating fact of divine revelation. It is the final grand event. This event will not be superadded, externally, to all previous acts of Jesus Christ, assuming that these are in and for themselves final and whole; but, being inwardly and dynamically related to the church, to Pentecost, and the ascension, it will come as the full ripe fruit of all antecedent revelation, and thus be the perfection, not only of Christianity, as to its general idea, but at the same time also of every necessary fact and element that enters into its constitution. So mysteriously is the second advent related to every previous fact of revelation, that to deny it is to resolve the entire Christian faith into a delusive, empty dream; or to ignore it, and yet endeavor whilst ignoring it to form a true conception of the church or of our Lord, is to be so far forth necessarily disqualified for the attempt. Every conception of Christianity formed in the light only of what has thus far been brought to pass in the actual history of the world, will be so defective as was the conception which the unbelieving Pharisees formed of Moses and the Mosaic economy, whilst they refused to recognize in the incarnate Word, or in the first advent of Christ, the true end and fulfillment of the ceremonial economy which God established by Moses. Or, it is like an attempt to pass judgment on the meaning of the “blade” whilst we leave out of view the relation which the “ear” and the “full corn in the ear” bear to the blade. There is another analogy that is still closer and more pertinent. The second advent is related to the antecedent revelation like the resurrection of Christ from the dead to his crucifixion, his life in the flesh, and holy nativity. The force and meaning of these mysterious facts became manifest by his victory over death. Until then, their virtue was in abeyance—was not an actual power of redemption. Being thus concretely related, we can form no Christian conception of his death but in the light of his resurrection. Could we suppose that Christ did not really rise from the dead, we would by the supposition at once resolve his life into a delusion or imposture, and reduce his crucifixion to the character of a heroic or merely tragical event. So does the second advent fulfill and make real the sense and purpose of Pentecost, or the true nature and virtue of the church. Sin still prevails, though it is the mission of the church to save men from sin. Death still reigns over all men, saints and sinners, notwithstanding the promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. There is in her bosom forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Yet the law of sin is not abolished, and eternal life is still only possible and potential, not a realized fact. The possible and potential will become a glorious reality when Christ shall consummate the mystery of grace in his second coming; and in the consummation of his revelation also consummate with himself his mystical body. Until then the true nature and full meaning of the present, militant, interimistic period of Christianity, can as little manifest and authenticate itself perfectly, as could the victory of Christ, achieved in his death, be made manifest before he came forth in triumph from the state of the dead. In the second advent, accordingly, Christianity will become the absolutely complete divine revelation.—E. V. GERHART, D. D., in Prophetic Times.