The  Crisis of Advent: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD

The  Crisis of Advent

Yesterday was the first Sunday in Advent. It has been said that Advent is the most subversive season of the Christian year. It reminds us—quietly but insistently—that history is not a straight line of our own making, and that the God who came once in humility will come again in judgment. Yet most congregations, and most of us, treat that promise with polite indifference. We acknowledge it liturgically, perhaps even theologically, but often without existential urgency. The early Christians, however, lived as if the veil between this world and the next might be torn apart at any moment. Their expectation was not metaphorical. It was a crisis they believed could break in upon them before the oil in their lamps ran dry.

The Church has periodically rediscovered this sense of crisis. The obscure monastic chronicle known as the Liber Exspectationis, written among the desert monasteries in the fifth century, records that the brothers “prayed each evening as though the Lord might stand among them at dawn.” The chronicle is little read today, tucked away in the back corridors of specialized patristic scholarship, yet its aspiration is unmistakable. They believed judgment was not an abstract future but a living possibility. Their liturgy formed their imagination, and their imagination shaped their conduct.

If we believed—as they believed—that the Advent crisis would come again, perhaps sooner than we expect, what difference would it make?

First, it would alter the posture of our lives.

Most of us move through our days with the assumption that tomorrow will look like today. Yet the early medieval homilist Wulfstan of York, preaching in the shadow of Viking invasions at the turn of the eleventh century, insisted that Christians must live “with the Last Day ever leaning over their shoulders.” Wulfstan was not speculating about eschatology; he was trying to teach a frightened people how to live with courage and repentance in an age of upheaval. His time was violent. Ours is anxious. His world was threatened from without. Ours is threatened from within. However, his counsel remains sound.

If we expected that the Lord might indeed return, not in the soft glow of Advent candles, but in the shattering brightness of judgment, our priorities would shift. Conversations long postponed would be undertaken. Old resentments would be relinquished. The idols we defend—status, control, reputation—would be revealed for the shadows that they are. Advent would no longer be an aesthetic four-week prelude to Christmas. It would be a summons.

Second, our churches would be transformed.

It is easy—even for seasoned clergy—to treat church life as a collection of tasks: budgets, meetings, pastoral appointments, and the ecclesiastical equivalent of housekeeping. Yet if we believed the Advent crisis was real, our ecclesial life would become less managerial and more sacramental. The Reforming bishop John Jewel once remarked in a sermon that the Church should be “a people made ready, as those who await their master’s voice at midnight.” The image is unsentimental. Jewel was writing during the instability of Elizabeth’s early reign, when the shape of English Christianity was still perilously uncertain. The Church, in his mind, should never grow comfortable in the world’s good graces.

If our churches recovered that vigilance, our worship would deepen. Our preaching would recover its urgency. Our pastoral care would cease being a soft blanket thrown over our spiritual malaise and would instead become honest accompaniment in the midst of real spiritual conflict. The Church would begin, perhaps for the first time in a long while, to believe its own prayers.

Third, our ethical lives would acquire a sharper clarity.

The seventeenth-century Moravian bishop Jan Amos Comenius—best known for his educational theories—once wrote that Christians should behave “as those who know they will give account not only for their actions, but for their hopes.” That final phrase is arresting. Advent, if taken seriously, interrogates not only how we live but what we long for. Are our desires shaped by the reign of God or by the quiet seductions of cultural comfort?

If judgment is real—and if it is not defanged by sentimentality—then our commitments must reflect a kingdom not yet fully revealed. Our use of time, our generosity, our fidelity to the poor, our handling of conflict, our refusal to despise those unlike us: all these would come under new scrutiny.

Finally, we would recover hope—fierce, eschatological hope.

It is a strange thing that talk of judgment can lead to hope, yet that is precisely what the Church once understood. When the sixteenth-century Coptic patriarch John XIII wrote his treatise On the Consolation of the Last Day, he insisted that judgment is “terrible only to those who imagine themselves sufficient.” For the weary, the wounded, the faithful who limp forward with little more than a whispered prayer, judgment is not a threat. It is the promise that injustice will not have the final word. It is the assurance that our tears will not be wasted. It is the reminder that the world’s cruelty is not eternal.

Moreover, it is the affirmation that Christ, who once came in vulnerability, will come again in glory. Not to annihilate creation but to heal it. Not to crush the humble but to right what has been wrong for far too long.

Advent asks us—quietly, persistently—whether we believe this.

If we did, truly did, then our churches would be less anxious about their survival and more concerned with their holiness. Our lives would be less dominated by fear and more marked by courage. Our moral vision would be clearer, our worship more grounded, our discipleship more authentic.

Advent, after all, is not merely preparation for Bethlehem. It is preparation for the return of the One who has never ceased to love His creation and who will come again to redeem it fully.

The crisis is real. The hope is greater. And if we lived as though both were true, we might rediscover the Church we were always meant to be.

Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD