I grew up in atmosphere charged with dread of “the end times.” My earliest nightmares—I can remember three of them distinctly—were of “the rapture.” I do not move in those circles now, but as a rule Pentecostals no longer live with that fear. That is all to the good. What is not good, however, is the lack of orientation to and desire for the End. For so many of us, “faith” has swallowed up both hope and love. There is no horizon of desire, no sense of longing for what is to come. The only thing that matters is our "personal relationship" with God. As if God were one person among many—and the only one we're truly meant to love! Not to put the point too sharply, but faith is far too often construed as a means to the end of achieving our best life, a form of currency to be spent in turning God’s will to our advantage.
Bulgakov, in his own time, faced a similar deadendedness. As he explains in an excursus at the end of his commentary on the Apocalypse:
Revelation teaches us to pray for Christ's new advent into the world. The infant Church knew this prayer and expected the Lord's coming “quickly,” meaning in a short space of time... One might say that she was inspired by eschatological hope. That hope may even have been sustained by the Lord's promise, depending of course on how it was understood: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom" (Mt 16:28; Mk 9:1; Lk 9:27). Whatever the true meaning of this text may have been, the first generation of Christians understood it in precisely that way... But gradually, as the first generation and others after it departed this life without having witnessed the longed-for and promised Parousia, eschatological hope grew less and less distinct, and then was extinguished altogether. Such, it may be said, is the condition of all historical Christianity to our very days. All that is left of that state of eschatological health is the fear of death and the reply that must follow it to judgement beyond the grave. This is how it is expressed in the prayer of the Great Litany: "for a Christian end to our lives [...] and a good answer at the Dread Judgement seat of Christ, let us pray.”
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