On the verse "Little children, it is the last hour: and as ye heard that antichrist cometh, even now have there arisen many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last hour." (1 John 2:18)
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"But in what sense was it 'the last hour'? John may have thought that in fact the last decade of the century was five minutes to midnight on the clock of destiny: that he and his fellow-Christians were witnessing the onset of the great revolt which would immediately precede the parousia. Nothing that he knew precluded such an expectation; much that he knew encouraged it. But if 'the last hour is to be dated between AD 90 and 100, what terminology can be applied to AD 1970 [2008]? The truth is, as John Henry Newman put it last century, that:
'though time intervene between Christ's first and second coming, it is not recognized (as I may say) in the Gospel scheme, but is, as it were, an accident. For so it was, that up to Christ's coming in the flesh, the course of things ran straight towards the end, nearing it by every step; but now, under the Gospel, that course has (if I may so speak) altered its direction, as regards His second coming, and runs, not toward the end, but along it, and on the brink of it; and is at all times near that great event, which did it run towards it, it would at once run into. Christ, then, is ever at the doors.'
In the Christian era it is always five minutes to midnight. But as 'the course of things' runs along the edge of the final consummation, the edge at times becomes a knife-edge, and at such times the sense of its being 'the last hour' is specially acute." John Henry Newman,"Waiting for Christ, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vi (London, 1896) 241, in F.F. Bruce, The Epistles of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1970) 65.
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