When are the Last Days?

Imagine if you knew that Jesus was coming back to judge the world and bring in his kingdom in exactly 17 months.  What would you do?  You might quit your job and cash out your retirement.  No sense saving for what’ll never happen!  Some people have done that.  You might get all serious about your faith, thinking that maybe you need to make up for some missed masses and some gaps in your devotion!  Some people have done that, too.  You might join some sort of special religious group focused on spirituality, communal living, daily praise worship, and an overall sense of seriousness.  Some people have done that, also.  You might consider all the bloody reports about the Last Days and take the military route, prepping for Armageddon, fortressing yourself in the mountains or else preparing for an urban guerilla war.  Some people have done that, even.

You might wonder who all these people are who have thought that the Last Days were imminent and jumped into all these fantastic forms of preparation.  And you might be surprised to find out that these groups began to emerge while the original Apostles of Jesus were still alive!  Saint Paul, Saint Peter, and Saint John all responded to movements of this kind that were launched whenever they happened to be away in another city.  Why?  Because Jesus said he was coming back.  But he didn’t say when.  So . . .

Sooooo . . . we want to believe the person who seems to have insight into the date and the time.  So much hangs on it.  Just imagine if you knew.  If.  Big if.

Why is it a “big if”?  Because any time you want to believe something, you are ripe for manipulation by the religious schemer happy to provide you with what you want to believe.  And if we look at the history of the Church, we find an endless stream of these cultic schemers, claiming that they are in on the biggest secret of all time, when Christ will return to set up his kingdom.  Let’s survey these movements to see if we can identify a pattern.

We generally classify the first century Christian groups that claimed either that Jesus had already come back and people had been “left behind” (yes, this idea goes back that far) or that he was set to return on X date as Gnostic cults.  Gnostic cult groups—both within and outside of Christianity—usually lay claim to some sort of secret knowledge, esoteric knowledge (see my Question, “What is Esoteric Knowledge?” for a full treatment of this subject, https://www.jeffreytiel.com/podcast/episode/1a665cd6/what-is-esoteric-knowledge), known only to them.  Jesus and St. Paul both differentiated themselves from Gnostic groups by emphasizing that what they taught was public and available to all.  But Gnostics claim to know the secrets.  How?  Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it?  The only way for a cult group to possess secret information is if someone in the group claims prophetic power, claims the ability of a seer, to see into the future or the mind of God.  And that’s what we’ll find as we sketch this history of gnostic last days cults—an unending but totally spurious claim to prophecy available only to their group and superseding the apostolic authority of the Church.

The last apostle, St. John, had just died when one of these groups emerged in Phrygia (now called Turkey).  A fellow named Montanus and his two female prophetesses, Prisca and Maximilla, began to fall into trances and utter ecstatic speech supposedly employing the renewed “gift of tongues,” claiming the imminent arrival of the new Jerusalem in Phrygia.  Naturally, credulous people heard about this and flocked to the region.  These Montanists taught that people should prepare for Christ’s coming by restricting the behavior and dress of women and girls, requiring virgins to wear veils.  Extreme fasting and other ascetic practices were emphasized to separate the serious and tough from the weak and illegitimate followers.  Marriage was frowned on to the point that Montanist converts were forbidden to remarry after the death of a spouse.  Montanus also disparaged the Church, denouncing the priesthood and insisting that any Christian could perform the Mass.  The real Church eventually condemned the Montanists, and, of course, Jesus did not send the “new Jerusalem” down into Phrygia during the second century or any century after that time either.

In spite of the Church’s denunciation of Montanus, his beliefs spread into North Africa, leading to another movement known as Donatism.  As the persecution of Emperor Diocletian proved particularly severe in the North African imperial provinces, people felt that maybe the Last Days really had arrived, that the emperor was the Antichrist.  Perhaps the “great tribulation” had fallen on them and Christ was soon to appear with his armies from heaven to rescue them and usher in a thousand years of divine peace.  One of the sects of the Donatists called the Circumcellions took these apocalyptic predictions social, behaving bizarrely in public, some throwing themselves from cliffs, still others actively taunting the Romans to capture and martyr them.  The churches in North Africa even took to calling themselves “The Church of the Martyrs” to emphasize this death-loving cult.  Of course, Jesus had emphasized loving one’s neighbor, something requiring normal life and social connections, so, when the Diocletian persecution ended with no Jesus descending from heaven, the luster of the Church of the Martyrs faded quickly.

But not for long!  Through the collapse of the Roman Empire and into the turbulent years of the early Middle Ages, people desperate for hope far too easily turned toward groups promising divine relief in the form of the imminent Kingdom of God.  St. Peter had tried to warn off Christians thinking this way in his time by reminding them that divine time and human time are considerably different.  For the eternal God, he explained, a day and a thousand years pass by alike.  So, don’t think that Jesus must return in your lifetime.

Well, this mention of a “thousand years” as well as the millennium referred to in the Book of Revelation got people thinking.  Maybe what St. Peter was really saying was that God would send his son back one thousand years after the incarnation!  The Archbishop of York named Wulfstan proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Last Days, and in fire and brimstone sermons urged his followers to prepare themselves for the King’s return in AD 1000.  When that didn’t occur, they recalculated that probably the millennium should be judged from Jesus’s death and ascension instead of his birth, shifting the date to AD 1033.  Nothing happened in AD 1033 either.  But during all of this hysteria and focus on the seeming “spiritual world,” the Normans across the English Channel were preparing to conquer England.  (You can read about this sorry debacle in Tom Holland’s Millennium.)

A hundred years later brings us to Joachim of Fiore who insisted that a new age was dawning to replace the age of Jesus, the Age of the Holy Spirit, to be initiated in AD 1260.  In this new age the Church hierarchy and the Sacraments were to be replaced by a near universal monasticism.  Claiming the ability to perform miracles, the monks and friars who embraced this gnostic vision began to demonstrate the rejection of the physical world in favor of the incoming spiritual world through flagellation parades, where they would march through towns hammering their bodies with chains and whips, thinking that God (and, no doubt, the curious crowds) would be impressed by their supposed seriousness about their faith.  If sin couldn’t be overcome by love of neighbor, the apocalyptic flagellants insisted, then best to beat it out of one’s body.  More than one Pope condemned this behavior and the doctrines that produced it.  But as the Black Death proved intractable, more and more people joined these apocalyptic movements, desperate to avert what they saw as clear evidence of the wrath of God and the imminent End of Days.

One of the often-seen social results of these apocalyptic movements was a tendency toward peasant revolts and the embracing of communal forms of living.  The Taborites in the 1400’s, for example, initiated total social and economic equality, called one another “brother” and “sister,” announced the beginning of the Millenium, prohibited taxation, and eliminated all private property.  Their impulse was to identify the millennial reign of Jesus as a quasi-spiritual Edenic state of innocence.  It took twenty years but the Taborites were finally annihilated at the Battle of Lipany in 1434.

Another peasant revolt occurred in response to Martin Luther’s rejection of the Church, known now as the Münster Rebellion.  Martin Luther had already initiated an apocalyptic interpretation of his repudiation of the Church, calling the Pope the antichrist and the Church itself the “whore of Babylon.”  Pushing Luther’s ideas so far that even he condemned them, these peasants led by Melchior Hoffman and his purported prophet, Jan Matthys, taught a de-sacramental “Christianity” that rejected infant baptism and the Eucharist, demanded adult re-baptisms, and sought to replace the state with a communist collective that even embraced polygamy.  Hoffman taught in 1532 that Jesus would return to earth at Strasbourg in 1533 to establish a thousand-year reign around their purified sect.  In spite of the absence of apocalyptic events in 1533, Matthys declared the city of Münster as the New Jerusalem in 1534.  The people of Münster overthrew their mayor and joined Matthys and his “twelve disciples.”  A Lutheran Prince eventually led an army to besiege Münster, but Matthys prophesied divine deliverance just before he was captured sallying from the city to lift the siege with a mere thirty men and “God’s help.”  Matthys was executed and his head set on a pike.

Another apocalyptic militant was named Thomas Müntzer who, believing himself to be communicating directly with God in his dreams, formed an armed force he called the Eternal League of God.  A great white flag emblazoned by a rainbow led this host.  Joining the Peasant War on the losing side, Müntzer’s force was slaughtered by Lutheran armies, and after he was found hiding in a shack after the battle, he, too, had his head removed and set on a pike.  Apparently, his “divine dreams” were less than truthful.

Meanwhile, down in Italy, the apocalyptic preaching of Girolamo Savonarola galvanized Florence.  Convinced that he was gifted with prophetic powers, he warned of the impending “Sword of the Lord” and rallied the people toward an austere “spiritual” lifestyle that compelled them to abandon the arts and traditions of the high renaissance.  Huge “bonfires of the vanities” were constructed in one of the main city squares, Piazza della Signoria, where Florentines brought their fancy clothing, jewelry, furniture, and artworks to be burned.  After he persuaded the invading French to move on quickly from Florence and declared this to be divine deliverance, he prophesied that God had saved Florence like Noah’s Ark and would remake it into a new Rome.  Accordingly granted political power by the Florentines, Savonarola and his acolytes took over the government.  After being condemned by the Pope, Savonarola claimed miraculous powers that he claimed would vouch for his divine mission.  But when a religious rival arrived in Florence and challenged him to walk through fire, Savonarola demurred.  When his devoted friend Domenico da Pescia volunteered to do the trial by fire for him, Savonarola was trapped by his own lies.  All the city came to watch the event, to see if God would deliver da Pescia or not.  But a massive squall drenched the spectacle and forced its cancellation.  The enraged crowd blamed Savonarola and attacked the convent of San Marco where he had holed up.  After breaking in and capturing him, he was tortured and confessed that he had made up all his visions.  He and his fellows were hanged and their bodies burned in the same Piazza della Signoria where they had compelled the Florentines to burn their “vanities.”

Meanwhile, in France, a succession of radicals and reformers kept the land alive with apocalyptic visions and drama.  From the infamous anti-marriage zealots—the gnostic Cathars—all the way down to the Camisards in the 17^th century, claims to divine insight merged with dire prophetic apocalyptic warnings occurred.

England, too, found itself at the heart of many of these Renaissance to Enlightenment Era apocalyptic cults.  A whole succession of millennial movements occurred around the English Civil Wars.  The Fifth Monarchy Men predicted the next and last great monarchy to be Christ’s millennial reign, set a precise date for the rise of antichrist, determined that their acolytes were the real saints, and committed to a violent political overthrow of all “carnal” government in order to usher in the Kingdom of God, but when their rebellions in 1657 and 1661 failed, they disbanded. The Ranters thought the Kingdom of God excused Christians from being bound to any law—not traditional, ecclesiastical, familial or civil law—and so they lived excessively libertine lives and were roundly condemned by all.  Another group, the Quakers, claimed to experience direct mystical revelations from Jesus to restore a pure Church, and so they emphasized plain dress and teetotalism.  But the craziest group has to be the Muggletonians begun in 1651 when two London tailors announced they were the two prophets foretold in the Book of Revelation, bringing in the millennium and the second coming of Christ.  Muggletonians rejected all church liturgy and preaching, and took an egalitarian and apolitical view of the world around them.  They taught that Jesus alone is God, so that when Jesus died, there was no God in heaven (fortunately, Moses and Elijah were up there to handle things.)  They precisely identified heaven’s location as six miles above the Earth.  Finally, the extremely influential Southcottian Movement (1792-1814) was led by a self-acclaimed prophetess, Joanna Southcott, a Wesleyan convinced that she had spiritual gifts and was carrying the new messiah.  Her followers numbered nearly 100,000 people.  When she died before giving birth—her large abdomen was due to disease not pregnancy—her followers kept her body under the assumption that she would rise from the dead.  She didn’t.

Meanwhile, the uneducated Ann Lee worked at a textile mill and at age 22 joined the Shaking Quakers, so named because of their tendency to shake and dance during worship.  While jailed by English authorities in 1770, she claimed to experience visions that provided her with unorthodox religious ideas including that all sexual desire was lust, so that only through celibacy could spiritual growth occur.  After her release from jail, she left England for America with a handful of followers and settled in the woods near Albany.  Her Shaker movement spread to thousands throughout New England.  Her followers insisted that she had brought on the millennium, since she was the incarnate female half of God’s dual nature (Jesus apparently being the masculine half).  Her followers accordingly called her Mother Ann.  She died in 1784 at the hands of a mob.

In 1835 Joseph Smith, leader of the Mormons, reportedly offered the prophecy that Jesus would return to earth within 56 years, launching the End Times.  That didn’t happen, but he, too, was killed by a mob.

In New England a local farmer named William Miller predicted that the world would end on April 23, 1843.  Tens of thousands of people came to believe him.  They sold or gave away all their worldly possessions.  What followed after April 24, 1843 is now known as The Great Disappointment.  Remnants of this group formed the Seventh Day Adventist movement.

In 1980 televangelist Pat Robertson informed his 700 Club audience of the end of days: “I guarantee you by the end of 1982 there is going to be a judgment on the world.”  There wasn’t.

Coincidental with the second millennial apocalyptic movement and the Y2K terror, Nostradamus interpreters noted that he predicted a 1999 disaster from the heavens.  None arrived.  Fortunately, when his prophecies fail, his followers always manage to reinterpret them.

“God’s Church” minister and self-acclaimed prophet Ronald Weinland predicted in 2006 that by 2008 hundreds of millions would die and the United States would collapse, as God wreaked judgment upon the earth.  No one is waiting on that prediction to come true now.

John Darby of the Plymouth Brethren taught premillennialism, the idea that Jesus will arrive on the earth to inaugurate his thousand-year kingdom, but only after a time of terrifying turbulence called the Tribulation.  His ideas eventually spread far and wide within American evangelicalism, as prophecy conferences obsessed 1970’s fundamentalist and evangelical American protestants, already reeling from the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race.  In 1970 Hal Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth that dominated End Times thinking within these groups, offering contemporary interpretations of apocalyptic literature from the Hebrew Bible’s books of Daniel and Ezekiel, as well as from the Christian Revelation.  Then Tim LaHaye took it mainstream with the Left Behind series of first novels and then films, terrifying audiences that they might miss Christ’s coming.

It might seem that apocalyptic millennial gullibility had moved from Catholicism to Protestantism with the proliferation of these Last Days Protestant sects in America, but let’s not be so quick to point the finger.  For though in many sectors Protestants and Catholics had firmly landed on opposite theological sides, when it came to experience-focused believers, theology offered less cult-defensive muscle.  Thus, we find in the mid-to-late 20^th century, not just a proliferation of Protestant evangelical, Pentecostal, and fundamentalist apocalyptic millennialism but also specifically Catholic varieties, built upon Protestant prophetic modes from Pentecostalism.  For example, in Rome on Pentecost in May 1975, two self-described “charismatic Catholics” advanced new alleged prophecies.  These men were Bruce Yocum and Ralph Martin.  Claiming to be speaking directly with God’s voice, Martin predicted that “days of darkness, days of tribulation” would shortly be coming to the world, but that God “would pour out on you all the gifts of my spirit.”  Bruce Yocum added to this, again directly in God’s voice about the “dawn of a ‘new age’ for my church,” with a call to “prepare yourselves for the action that I begin now, because things that you see around you will change; the combat that you must enter now is different; it is new.”  Yocum continued, calling on his followers to move away from the world around them and join God who was “forming a mighty army.”  God, said Yocum, had chosen them—Yocum and Martin—to be his new shepherds to renew his people, to renew the church, and to “free the world.”  Further alleged prophecies followed in July of 1975 indicating, again in the divine voice, “that the day is fast approaching when fire shall be cast upon the earth, when every valley shall be filled with burning embers and only those who have moved to the high ground of my truth shall be saved.”  At the same time further prophecies indicated that God was allegedly planning to “go to war,” and he had called them and the communities of their followers to join him “in anger and in love to go to war.”  The prophecy continued that God was allegedly establishing a “covenant” with these people in a new outpouring of the Spirit.  This new covenanted group would function as a “bulwark to defend against the onslaught of the enemy those who are not prepared.”  Finally, Bruce Yocum called on his followers to “Lay down your lives now for the things that I have revealed to you.  Commit yourselves to them so that in the day of battle you can stand fast and prove victorious with me.”  These alleged “bulwark” prophecies kept coming, for in 1976, always in God’s voice, Yocum has God allegedly stating that they must become a ready bulwark “for the combat that lies ahead,” for they “will be an army, a wall of defense to preserve my Church.”  Yocum and Martin’s followers debated among themselves just how spiritual, physical, or spiritual/physical this impending “war” was going to be, but the general trend was to silo their faith by forming semi-communal living organizations outside the world’s influence and to prepare under the leadership of their prophets.  For some, the preparation was what we would now describe as apocalyptic and military “prepping.”  One of their early members explained in an interview that they were specifically prophesied a year for when the “three days of darkness” were to be unleashed on the world and Christ would return: 1990.

After reviewing this brief history of Christian apocalyptic movements with their oft-prophetic predictions of the impending return of Christ and an impending calamitous judgment in the Last Days or the End of Days, we can discern certain insightful commonalities.  First, nearly all of these groups were led by someone or some small group of people who claimed prophetic power to speak directly for God.  None of these people were examined by the Church and found to be credible.  Most of them avoided any such ecclesiastical examination.  Occasionally, these leaders claimed miraculous powers and until the 19^th century very rarely the Pentecost outpouring of the Spirit in the Gift of Foreign Languages, sometimes called the Gift of Tongues.  The American Pentecostal movement made claims for the gift of tongues commonplace.  None of these supposed signs have been verified, though some were directly challenged and falsified.  All prophecies predicting specific time frames for the return of Christ were proven false by subsequent events.  Second, nearly all of these groups emphasized both impending world-wide doom and the return of Christ with one specific purpose being to save their group.  It followed that salvation depended on group-conformity and obedience to the prophet.  Accordingly, salvation from the impending calamity required changing one’s lifestyle, often dramatically in favor of mourning, self-deprecation, abandonment of the physical world and its traditions, end times prepping, strong ascetic practices, and sometimes communal religious lifestyles that replaced the various functions of the family, the state, and the Church with the new cult group.  Third, in some further cases, direct action against the state was advised and/or taken, nearly always with disastrous results.  Fourth, in virtually all cases, the actual Catholic Church (or existing state church in the English cases) was subjected to severe criticism and denunciation, not just for this or that questionable practice, but for its very apostolic structure, authority, and sacramental life.

So, what are we supposed to make of all of this?  When will the Last Days begin?  When is Christ going to come back?  What are we supposed to be doing in the meantime?  Should we be prepping in socio-political-military alternative forms of life?  Should we form new communal groups under self-proclaimed prophets that subvert the liberties awarded by God to our families and states?  Why can’t we just be normal?

Well, I think we can be normal.  And, I think we should be normal.  No one who claims to be a prophet like this is authentic.  They are all con-artists or delusional quacks.  And we can prove that not just by the fact that their predictions about Jesus’ return were all proven false, but by an even stronger statement on such predictive knowledge that Jesus made himself: “But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24:36.)  God the Father has reserved to himself the moment at which the Day of the Lord, the final judgment, the return of Christ will occur.  As such, neither the Holy Spirit nor the Son of God can reveal this information to anyone, alleged prophet or not.  Anyone who says otherwise stands in opposition to the principles Jesus is explaining in that text, that because no one knows or can know or will know, we should always live our lives in the moral sobriety and love of God and neighbor that are fitting.

Jesus’ teaching here does not mean that people should not do their jobs, play with their kids, enjoy shows with their neighbors at the theaters, or go fishing.  On the contrary, Jesus was completely human in his life on earth.  He ate and drank and talked and did all the things that normal people did.  So important is this point that I want to reference St. Paul on this in his second letter to Thessaloniki, where he emphasizes the normal mode of living that is expected of Christians.  Remember that St. Paul had barely managed to stay three weeks in the city before he was chased away by his enemies.  The infant teaching he had left with them had since gotten badly garbled, especially about the end times, and he talks about this in both of his letters.  It seems that some of the church members had taken to acting strangely, trying to live off other people’s food and wealth, while abandoning their own professions.  They were apocalyptic freeloaders, content to await the return of the King while feasting off their neighbors!  St. Paul put the matter to rest with this famous command: if you are unwilling to work, you don’t get to eat either.

So, what can we know about the Last Days?  Well, the Church has long taught that the Last Days are now, and have been now since the Day of Pentecost in the 1^st Century!  According to the authentic Jewish prophet Joel, in the Last Days God would pour out his Spirit onto Israel and enable them to perform signs as proof that the Last Days had come.  St. Peter specifically cites this prophesy in his great sermon on the Day of Pentecost, explaining that this is its fulfillment, that what his audience sees and hears in the prophecies and miraculous foreign languages (what the “gift of tongues” actually is, see my Question, “What is the Gift of Tongues?” https://www.jeffreytiel.com/podcast/episode/57c255c5/what-is-the-gift-of-tongues) is the sign to Israel that the Last Days have come.  Thus, the Last Days is not something that we are waiting for, because we are already in them.

Why then has it been two thousand years since St. Peter spoke those words if it’s supposed to be the last days?  This is the real question, but St. Peter took it up himself in his second epistle, where he talked about scoffers who would mock Christianity because of the absence of the promised return of Jesus.  St. Peter explained that God set the time for the return of Jesus much later than people expected in order to provide more time for the Gospel to be spread world-wide to offer the forgiveness of sins.  Why?  Because God doesn’t want anyone to perish but for all to come to repentance, so universal is his love.  Plus, for the eternal God, a day and a thousand years are exactly alike, so the Last Days may well be years or even, as we now realize, millennia.  St. Peter continued that it is assured that Jesus will return when the Father sends him, and that the promised judgment of the Last Days will come.  As such, we’d best prepare how Jesus taught us, living good lives, in peace.

Intriguingly, in the same letter St. Peter also severely chastises false prophets:

There were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will introduce destructive heresies and even deny the Master who ransomed them, bringing swift destruction on themselves.  Many will follow their licentious ways, and because of them the way of truth will be reviled.  In their greed they will exploit you with fabrications, but from of old their condemnation has not been idle and their destruction does not sleep (2 Peter 2:1-3.)

St. Peter recognizes that people will always be showing up, claiming to be teachers of the Faith and issuing “prophecies” that are nothing but lies.  They will prove to be motivated by licentiousness, power, and greed, as they seek to exploit and abuse the people who foolishly follow them.  But they will pay for what they have done.

In conclusion, since we now know that the Last Days is the entire age of the Church, and since God created the family, the state, and the Church as the three establishments for natural and spiritual life, we should live normal lives within them, hoping that Jesus does indeed return soon, but making no predictions or life-decisions on that basis.  Our jobs, our housing, our educations, and our retirement planning can all be rationally based on the likely lifespans of our family members.  There is no need for a second outpouring of the Spirit like at Pentecost, because that event already occurred and as St. Peter explained, its purpose was directly tied to proving to the Jews in Jerusalem that Jesus was their Messiah, just as the many sign gifts deployed by the Apostles in the years immediately following Jesus’ resurrection were also given to vouch for their foundational authority to unpack and properly teach what Jesus had deposited with them (cf. Hebrews 2:1-4).  What is especially instructive is how rather than supporting and establishing the actual Church, so many of the spurious prophecies we have reviewed sought to pit the Spirit against the Church, as though the Church isn’t enough but somehow also needs their tiny antiestablishment cult group to effect his work.  Jesus himself made the point, too, when he told St. Peter that not even the gates of hell could withstand the power of his Church to accomplish his mission.  God gave us the family, the state, and the Church.  There is no fourth entity, no bulwark that needs to be added to what God has already authenticated and established.  The self-important hubris of these false prophets really should be obvious to their followers, but as St. Peter said, they employ cult-like religious tactics to take control of the gullible.  The purpose of the Faith is not to believe oneself part of the spiritual elite few—that’s always the gnostic lure—but to recognize that you are just like everyone else, all equally loved by God, and all needing to just get back to the business of loving God and your neighbors in peace.