Rev dear Rev: A Quaesitum from Bath – If it be true that Jesus died once and for all for us and for sin, why do we believe in a Second Coming and then a Final Judgement? Surely these are superfluous concepts if the sacrifice is all sufficient?

So, as before with these Questions from the Deep South of Cornwall and environs, we could analyse the assumptions of the Question, as does the great mind of the old KGB, Vladimir the Golden. And what could we say primordially about the 7 Assumptions lying below such a Question?

-All of us in the Christian evangelical world, especially evangelical Catholics, accept that Jesus died once and for all for sin;

-We also assume with such a generalised and pan-galactic faith statement like this that the sacrifice on Golgotha was all sufficient and self-sufficient, that nothing else is needed in the ongoing march of time – this is a very firm and strong evangelical dogma;

-In sum that his sacrifice on the Cross was an immolation of a sin offering or scapegoat messiah, thrown to the wolves by the powers that be to assuage the rage and anger of the Father toward the human race and its many gross sins;

-So the crucifixion-immolation of the messiah was not just for angels or whatever but for humans and chiefly for those humans who are obsessed about the centrality of their gross sins in the universe, itself a mass formation psychosis as Dr Robert Malone puts it so radically – more Luther than Jesus;

-It is for these evangelical reasons that many trained SAGE psychologists and MIND sociologists often lament the rise of Christianity against the clear indicators and intents of their Founder-Christ as a mass formation psychosis event;

-So the progress of Christianity consists in a forensic and merely didactic role for the Church – passing on the good news but engaging no action for the realisation of something that has already happened – in this sense the other doctrines of the Second Coming and Final Judgement would logically be superfluous;

-Moreover there is no point to a Final Judgement either, either an individual final judgement of the solitary believer or even a general Final Panorama for all believers to see how things went over time in the struggle against the Forces of a Renegade Rebellion.

All of this remote evangelical catholicist background duly noted, we might indulge the lady in question by entertaining the Question more deeply. I once put a not dissimilar question to a bishop, a bishop now retired happily in the hills of the Sussex Downs near a Rolls Royce Factory, by asking him very directly and adroitly – Is all of this Second Coming business that we have desumed and extracted from the early Christian gospels really a psychosis or is there something at the heart of it all, like a phased repeat Advent Series at the end of each distinct Age, when Christ re-appears in the bodily form of some angel or some bhoddisatva or some Dalai Llama or whatever and calls the planet back to its early roots in the Garden of Eden like a stronger but actually masculine version of the inspirational young schoolgirl Greta the Great? The Bishop drew up to his full height and stature as a Doctor Fidei or a Doctor of the Faith, showing forth his DF ring as a successor to the apostles, and chided me for my lack of faith in the old doctrine of the Second Advent as I was sitting by the kitchen table at the presbytery vicarage, echoing the words of a young ballerina in the village one morning over coffee – “Have you no faith?” she wickedly said. But he noted the new impostazione and thought about it for a while afterward, realising that a slimmed down version of the Second Coming or Second Advent was actually more manageable to deal with and to control in terms of popular parlance. This approach is sometimes called End of Age thinking. Not that this means the older notion of the End of the World or anything like that, but more like the beginnings of a TGR or The Great Reset, pioneered by able bodied financiers in London and Hong Kong, in their search for more and more fresh beginnings of a tired old and flagging system. The Second Coming feeling and its attendant notion of the End of the World has produced many aberrations down the long cracked tune of Chronos and so it might be time, he conceded, to have our own Christian TGR ourselves on this subject. Millenarianism a menace.

So, to respond in more detail to the Question as tabled above. The older classical doctrine of the Second Coming or Second Advent was never intended to cancel out or annul the antecedent notion of the freedom of the children of God or the self-sufficiency of the sacrifice of Jesus. The forensic absolution of Jesus on the sins of mankind and humankind is a notion in potentia, all of that forgiveness still has to be appropriated physically and individually by believers in later times. The notion of the all-sufficiency of the sacrifice of Jesus does not obliterate the faculty of free will itself or the capacity of humans to sin; it merely is there in the teachings of the Lutheran reformers for polemical purposes - indeed St Paul himself denigrates such a magical or forensic notion of the sacrifice when he states that there are sufferings of the messiah which still have to be made up by the Christian believers, as he puts it in his own writings on the subject in his Pastoral Epistles, especially the “Letter to the Romans” and the “Letters to the Thessalonians.” Now if the Salvation that Christ won for us in potentia has yet to be appropriated by each individual that is born and raised in the world then the history of humanity is an unfinished unwritten book of life – much remains to be done.