from thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead

The Text

The end of the second article and the hinge of the creed. Having confessed the conception, birth, suffering, crucifixion, death, burial, descent, resurrection, ascension, and present session of Jesus Christ, the church confesses the one event still outstanding: he will come again, and when he comes he will judge. The clause refuses two equally bad escapes. It refuses any version of the gospel in which the story of Jesus is finished. It refuses any version of the gospel in which the moral seriousness of human life has been quietly retired. The risen and ascended Lord is not finished with the world. He will return. He will judge. The living and the dead alike will stand under his discriminating gaze. This is the clause from which the church has always drawn its insistence that history is going somewhere and that nothing done in the body falls outside the reach of grace.

Translation Notes

Inde. “From there.” The adverb names the place: from the right hand of the Father where, in the previous clause, the church confessed that Christ is now seated. The clause therefore reads as a movement from the place of his present authority to the place of his final adjudication. The early creeds insist on this directionality. The judge does not arise out of the earth like a hero of legend; he comes from above, with all the executive authority of the seated Lord behind him. The English phrase from thence (BCP) preserves the directional force; the modern he will come again (ICET, ELLC) drops the whence but keeps the when.

Venturus est. A periphrastic future construction: the future active participle plus the auxiliary verb. The construction in classical Latin carries a sense of certainty and intention — he is going to come, he is on his way. It is not a vague hypothetical; it is a settled fact of the future. The Greek participle erchomenon (present middle, “coming”) has the same register: he is already on his way.

Iudicare. “To judge.” The Latin verb is from ius (law, right) + dicare (to declare): to declare the right. To judge is to render the verdict that names what is in fact the case. The Greek krinai (from krinō) is broader still: to discriminate, to separate, to discern. Behind the English judge there is a strong note of seeing rightly — of finally telling the truth about what has been done. The judgment is therefore not arbitrary; it is the unveiling of what has been the case all along.

Vivos et mortuos / zōntas kai nekrous. “The living and the dead,” a pairing whose closest New Testament parallels are Acts 10:42, 2 Timothy 4:1, and 1 Peter 4:5 — apostolic preaching about the universal reach of Christ’s judicial authority. The phrase names two classes simultaneously: those who will still be physically alive at his coming, and those who will have died beforehand. No one is exempt by virtue of being on the wrong side of death. The dead will be raised; the raised will be judged. The older English translation the quick and the dead preserves the older sense of quick as living (still preserved in idioms like cut to the quick); the modern the living and the dead removes a beautiful archaism but gains clarity.

The earliest forms of the creed have only iudicare vivos et mortuos; the longer Greek formula erchomenon meta doxēs krīnai (the Nicene-Constantinopolitan form) makes the with glory explicit. The Apostles’ Creed leaves the with glory implicit in venturus est — the same one who ascended now will come; the glory in which he sits is the glory in which he returns.

Historical Context

The expectation of the parousia — the coming, the arrival, the public appearing — is at the heart of the earliest Christian preaching. Jesus himself, in the Synoptic apocalyptic discourses (Mark 13; Matthew 24–25; Luke 21), foretells a coming of the Son of Man with the clouds of heaven, drawing on Daniel 7:13–14. Paul’s earliest preserved letter, 1 Thessalonians, is suffused with parousia expectation; the resurrection of the dead and the judgment seat of Christ are at the heart of the gospel he preached (1 Thess. 4:13–18; 5:1–11; cf. 1 Cor. 15:23–28; 2 Cor. 5:10). Peter’s Pentecost preaching closes with the judgment Christ now exercises (Acts 2:33–36; 10:42). The judgment is not a marginal element of New Testament Christianity; it is the eschatological horizon of the entire gospel.

The early creedal expansions of the clause make explicit what the Apostles’ Creed leaves implicit. The Nicene Creed: “He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” The phrase no end (in echo of the angel Gabriel’s promise to Mary in Luke 1:33) is anti-subordinationist: this is not a temporary rule; the Son’s kingdom is eternal. The Athanasian Creed expands the judicial clause into a vivid two-stage scene: “At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies, and shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.”

The question of when the parousia would happen was a live one from the first generation. Some at Thessalonica had stopped working in expectation of an immediate return (2 Thess. 3:6–13); some by the second generation were beginning to scoff at the delay (2 Pet. 3:3–10). The apostolic answer was twofold: the day will come, and it will come unexpectedly (Matt. 24:36–44; 2 Pet. 3:10); the appearance of delay is itself part of the divine patience that gives time for repentance. The church has held this answer ever since, against periodic outbreaks of date-setting on the one hand and of skeptical demythologization on the other.

The political force of the clause has always been considerable. Early Christian refusal of Kyrios Kaisar (Caesar is Lord) drew its theological backbone from the conviction that the executive verdict on history belongs to the returning Jesus, not to any emperor. Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) had already given the church the song of this conviction: “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree.” The judgment named in the creed is the judgment Mary sang. Every subsequent attempt to make the Christian gospel underwrite an imperial or national order has had to reckon with this clause.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Augustine, City of God XX (on the last judgment); Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 15; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job esp. XVII–XVIII

The patristic reading insists on three features of the coming judgment together. First, the judgment is universal — the living and the dead, every nation and tongue, all together at once; no one is judged in private. Second, the judgment is christological — the judge is the same Jesus who was crucified; the wounds are still visible; the criterion is not abstract justice but the actual person and work of the Son of God. Third, the judgment is manifesting rather than information-gathering — God does not learn anything at the judgment; the saints and the lost alike see, openly and publicly, what has been the case all along. Augustine devotes the whole of Book XX of the City of God to this clause, and his account remains the major patristic treatment in the West.

The patristic tradition was also remarkably restrained about timetables. Augustine famously refuses to speculate about the date of the parousia and devotes a long section of City of God XX to the importance of not knowing. The early church taught vigilance, not chronology.

Strengths

• Universal scope, christological criterion, manifesting purpose held together cleanly
• Patristic restraint about dates is a permanent rebuke to date-setting movements in every generation

Weaknesses

• The patristic discussions of the modes of the final fire and the details of the final reunion of body and soul went into speculative territory the later tradition has been right to leave alone
• Some patristic writers (not all) lean further toward fear-based pastoral application than the New Testament texts themselves warrant

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Supplement, qq. 88–99 (on the last judgment); Dante Alighieri, Commedia (poetic synthesis of the medieval doctrine)

Aquinas, in the Supplement to the Summa, treats the last judgment in twelve questions: the time, the place, the judge, the persons to be judged, the matter of the judgment, the sentence, and the consummation of the world. The framework is exhaustive but not speculative — Aquinas is at every point careful to distinguish what is taught by Scripture and what is merely fitting opinion. His central claim is that the judgment will be both general (the public manifestation of all hearts) and particular (the verdict on each individual person), and that the coming of Christ in glory is the occasion of both at once.

Dante’s Commedia is the great vernacular synthesis of the medieval doctrine. The three-part architecture (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) renders, in concrete imaginative form, the medieval church’s account of the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. The poetic synthesis was extraordinarily influential on Western Christian imagination of the judgment, for better and for worse.

Strengths

• The scholastic precision about what is and is not biblically taught is a permanent resource against speculative excess
• The medieval Christian imagination of the four last things, at its best, refused to let any of them be ignored

Weaknesses

• The Supplement to the Summa was assembled after Aquinas’s death and is not always at his level
• Dante’s poetic power was so great that it sometimes substituted for, rather than illuminated, the simpler biblical account

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Last Sermons (1546); Augsburg Confession, Article XVII

The Lutheran reading subordinates everything to the doctrine of justification by faith. Christ will return; he will judge; the verdict on the believer is already announced in the gospel — not guilty, on the basis of Christ’s righteousness imputed to faith. The believer therefore comes to the judgment seat not in fear of a verdict yet to be reached but in confidence of a verdict already known. The Augsburg Confession (Art. XVII) names this in confessional form: “Christ will return at the consummation of the world for judgment, and will raise up all the dead; to the godly and elect he will give eternal life and everlasting joys, but ungodly men and the devils he will condemn to be tormented without end.”

The Lutheran tradition has historically maintained that the doctrine of the last judgment is a terror to the unbeliever and a comfort to the believer — a feature, not a bug, of the gospel. The same coming that gathers the saints is the coming that exposes every refusal of Christ.

Strengths

• The doctrine of justification by faith provides the believer’s stable footing under the prospect of judgment without trivializing the judgment itself
• Augsburg XVII keeps the universal and the personal scope together

Weaknesses

• The strong forensic framework can produce caricatures (the judgment as a courtroom verdict only) that the New Testament texts themselves resist
• Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheran preaching of the judgment sometimes leaned into fear-based application in ways the New Testament itself does not

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes III.25 (“On the Final Resurrection”); Heidelberg Catechism Q. 52; Westminster Confession Ch. 33

Calvin treats the judgment in the Institutes III.25 as part of his treatment of the final resurrection. The judge is the same Christ who was crucified; the criterion is the gospel he preached; the judgment is the public manifestation of the kingdom that is already in some sense established. Calvin is at pains to distinguish the Christian doctrine of judgment from any species of works-righteousness: the verdict on the believer is grounded in the work of Christ, but the life by which the believer is judged is the life into which the believer has been brought by union with Christ. The faith that justifies is not a faith without works; the works are the public form of the justifying faith.

The Heidelberg Catechism puts the pastoral application memorably. Q. 52: “What comfort is it to you that ‘Christ shall come again to judge the quick and the dead’?” A. “That in all my sorrows and persecutions I lift up my head and look for the very same one who has before offered himself for me to the judgment of God, and has taken away all curse from me, to come as Judge from heaven; who shall cast all his and my enemies into everlasting condemnation, but shall take me with all his chosen ones to himself into heavenly joy and glory.”

Strengths

• The Reformed insistence on the unity of the judge’s two comings (the Lamb who was slain is the Judge who returns) is doctrinally precise and pastorally rich
• The Heidelberg’s account turns the prospect of judgment into a source of comfort without dulling its edge

Weaknesses

• The forensic register, when isolated, can underplay the cosmic-transformative dimension of the final judgment (Rom. 8:18–25; Rev. 21:1–5)
• The strong stress on the assured verdict can occasionally make moral seriousness feel unmoored from the gospel that anchors it

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Byzantine iconography of the Deēsis and the Last Judgment; Maximus the Confessor; Symeon the New Theologian

The Eastern tradition has held the judgment most powerfully in its iconographic and liturgical life. The west wall of the traditional Orthodox church bears the icon of the Last Judgment; every worshipper, leaving the building, passes beneath the seated judge. The Orthodox Sunday of the Last Judgment, late in the Lenten cycle, makes the doctrine an annual liturgical confrontation. The theological character of the Eastern account is theotic rather than forensic: the judgment is the moment at which what humans have been becoming is finally made manifest. Those who have lived in the light see the light as light; those who have refused the light see the same light as fire. The judgment is the unveiling of two kinds of love.

Maximus the Confessor is the major theologian of this account. The fire of judgment is, for Maximus, the same fire as the love of God; what differs is the disposition of the human person who meets it. The judgment is the moment at which one’s capacity to receive love is finally tested by the love itself.

Strengths

• Refuses to caricature the judgment as the verdict of an arbitrary external authority; locates the judgment in the human encounter with God’s love
• The liturgical and iconographic embedding of the doctrine keeps it from becoming an abstract dogma

Weaknesses

• The Orthodox account, taken alone, can underplay the novum of the parousia — the new public event in which Christ comes from outside
• The theotic register requires careful balancing with the New Testament’s robust judicial vocabulary

Wesleyan

(See the Wesleyan Voice section below for the full treatment.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3 §73; Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God (1995); N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (2008)

Karl Barth’s treatment in Church Dogmatics IV/3 §73 (on the prophecy of the parousia) is the major 20th-century retrieval of the doctrine. Barth refuses both the older liberal Protestant evaporation of the parousia into general moral progress and the literalism of modern apocalyptic predictionism. The parousia is the public coming of the same Jesus who is already present in the church by the Spirit; the coming is the unveiling of what is already the case in Christ. Moltmann’s The Coming of God (1995) recovers the eschatological reading of the doctrine for the late 20th century, with attention to the cosmic and political dimensions. N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope (2008) is the most influential recent popular treatment, especially the argument that the New Testament’s vision of the judgment is cosmic restoration (the new heaven and new earth) rather than rescue from the world.

Strengths

• Refuses both predictionism and demythologization
• Recovers the cosmic-restorative dimension that earlier forensic accounts sometimes underplayed

Weaknesses

• Some modern reconstructions, in their right reaction against fear-based caricatures, leave the personal judgment underdeveloped
• The cosmic-restoration emphasis must hold carefully alongside the New Testament’s clear personal accountability language (Rom. 14:10–12; 2 Cor. 5:10; Rev. 20:11–15)

Liberation

Tradition: Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation; Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator; Latin American base-community readings of Matthew 25 and the Magnificat

The liberation reading treats the coming judgment as the verdict of God on history’s victors and victims. The Magnificat is the song of the doctrine: God has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly. Matthew 25 is the criterion of the doctrine: the nations are judged by what they have done to the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. The judgment is not abstract; it is the public reversal of the world’s verdicts. For the poor of every age — those whose worth has been denied, whose labor has been stolen, whose lives have been treated as expendable — the parousia is the day on which the truth is finally told.

Strengths

• Restores the political and historical force of the doctrine
• Reactivates Matthew 25 as the canonical criterion of judgment, against speculative or moralistic substitutes

Weaknesses

• The strongest forms can press the political register at the cost of the personal-eschatological
• Must hold carefully that the reversal is real but not yet complete (the until of Ps. 110:1, the not yet of Rom. 8:24)

Evangelical / Dispensational

Tradition: Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism Today; Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970); the Left Behind novels (Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, 1995–2007)

The dispensationalist reading subdivides the parousia into multiple stages — the rapture of the church, a seven-year tribulation, a millennial reign, and a final judgment — and devotes considerable energy to mapping current events onto a prophetic timeline. The framework is a 19th-century innovation (J. N. Darby) made popular through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) and dominant in 20th-century American evangelicalism.

Strengths

• Takes the New Testament’s eschatological texts with full seriousness against a liberal Protestant tradition that often did not
• Preserves a robust expectation of Christ’s personal return

Weaknesses

• The detailed dispensational timeline lacks support in the pre-19th-century history of Christian doctrine, including throughout the patristic and Reformation periods
• The recurrent date-setting and current-events mapping has repeatedly embarrassed itself and damaged the credibility of Christian preaching on the judgment
• Jesus himself said no one knows the day or the hour (Matt. 24:36), and the dispensational instinct to know more than this strains the text

Wesleyan Voice

The Wesleyan tradition has held the coming judgment with sober confidence and considerable preaching weight. The Articles of Religion (1784), Article III, includes the session and the return as part of the same article: Christ “sitteth until he return to judge all men at the last day.” John Wesley’s Notes on the New Testament, especially on Matthew 25, on Romans 2, on 2 Corinthians 5:10, and on Revelation 20, take the judgment with full theological and pastoral seriousness. Wesley’s Standard Sermons treat the judgment in several places; Sermon 15, “The Great Assize,” preached at the assizes (judicial sittings) in Bedford in 1758, is one of the great Wesleyan sermons on the parousia — a sustained meditation on the universal scope, the christological criterion, and the moral urgency of the coming judgment.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the connection between the doctrine of the judgment and the doctrine of grace. Wesley’s ordo salutis — prevenient grace, justifying grace, sanctifying grace, glorifying grace — is the architecture by which the coming judgment becomes a hope rather than a terror without becoming a trivial event. Prevenient grace means that no soul comes to the judgment having been left to fend for itself; God has been at work in every life from before any awareness of it. Justifying grace means that the believer comes to the judgment in the righteousness of Christ, not in their own. Sanctifying grace means that the life under judgment is the life into which the Spirit has been transforming the believer — go on to perfection, Wesley urged again and again, because the judgment is not a moment to be passed but a person to be encountered. Glorifying grace names the final consummation: the believer made fit for the presence of God.

Wesley’s preaching of the judgment is therefore neither the fire-and-brimstone caricature his critics imagined nor the moralism his defenders sometimes settled for. It is the announcement that the same Jesus who saves now is the Jesus before whom all stand at the last; that the saving and the judging are not two events but one; that the daily Christian life of repentance, sanctification, and works of mercy is the form the final judgment is already taking in those who walk the Wesleyan via salutis. The Methodist instinct, at its best, has been to keep the eschatological horizon vivid without letting it become speculative — and to insist, in the spirit of Matthew 25, that the criterion of the coming judgment is not theological correctness or religious performance but love made visible in works of mercy.

Hymnody

The Wesleyan hymnody on the judgment is concentrated, sober, and pastorally astute.

Charles Wesley’s “Lo! He comes with clouds descending” (1758) is the most enduring Methodist hymn on the parousia and a fixture of Advent worship across the English-speaking world. “Every eye shall now behold him / Robed in dreadful majesty; / Those who set at nought and sold him, / Pierced and nailed him to the tree, / Deeply wailing, / Shall the true Messiah see.” The hymn refuses to soften the coming, refuses to soften the wounds the church has put on the body of the coming Lord, and refuses to soften the universal scope of the every eye.

“Rejoice, the Lord is King” (Charles, 1746), already cited under the previous clause, ends each verse with the eschatological refrain “Lift up your heart, lift up your voice; / Rejoice, again I say, rejoice.” The reign and the return belong to a single song.

“Christ is coming!” (John Ross Macduff, 19th c., not Wesleyan in origin) is in the standard Methodist repertoire: “Long thy exiles have been pining, / Far from rest and home and thee.”

“My Lord, what a morning” (African American spiritual, 19th c., adopted into Methodist hymnals): “You’ll hear the trumpet sound / To wake the nations underground.” The spiritual carries the doctrine in a register the official theological tradition could not have produced on its own — the judgment as the dawn that the long night of slavery had been waiting for.

“Soon and very soon” (Andraé Crouch, 1976, in the UMC supplement Songs of Zion and later hymnals): “Soon and very soon we are going to see the King.” The eschatological hope, sung in the cadences of African American gospel, has reanimated the doctrine for late-20th-century Methodism in a way few official hymns have managed.

The Advent hymnody especially carries the doctrine. “Come, thou long-expected Jesus” (Charles, 1744) opens Advent; “Lo! he comes with clouds descending” closes it. The two-meanings-of-Advent (the coming in the manger, the coming in glory) is woven through the Wesleyan Advent tradition and is among the most theologically valuable features of Methodist liturgical inheritance.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The Greek root behind iudicare is illuminating. Aisthēsis in Greek is judgment in the broadest sense — the capacity to discern, to tell one thing from another, to perceive a difference. The English derivative aesthetics names this capacity at the level of beauty (telling a beautiful painting from an ugly one); the English derivative anesthesia, etymologically, names the suspension of this capacity (the surgeon’s anesthetic is precisely an an-aesthesia, an absence of judgment — the patient cannot tell that the body is being cut). To confess that Christ is coming to judge is to confess that the great anesthesia of human history is going to be lifted. The truth will be told. The discernment will happen. What we have done to each other will finally be seen for what it is.

This is the side of the clause that the modern church has had the hardest time hearing. Judgment is a word that polls badly. To call someone judgmental is a uniformly negative description in the English of the moment. And yet the Bible’s witness is the opposite: Mary, conceiving the Lord, sings the judgment of the Lord (Luke 1:51–53); the psalmist cries out, “Rise up, judge of the earth! Pay back the arrogant exactly what they deserve!” (Ps. 94:2); Paul ends every major letter with reference to the coming day of Christ when each will give account (Rom. 14:10; 2 Cor. 5:10). The biblical hope is not that God will not judge but that God will judge — that the executive verdict on every act of cruelty and theft and silencing will eventually be pronounced by the one whose hands still bear the marks of the cross. To resent the doctrine of judgment is, in the end, to side with history’s perpetrators and against its victims.

But this is also where the Wesleyan grammar of grace is so necessary. The Christian confession is not that we judge — Jesus is unsparing on this point: “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matt. 7:1). The Christian confession is that Christ judges, and that his judgment is the only one that can finally tell the truth. The four graces — prevenient, justifying, sanctifying, glorifying — are the architecture by which the believer is brought through the encounter with the judge without being undone by it. Prevenient grace assures us that the same Christ has been at work in every life from before any awareness of him; no one will be judged on a position they were never offered. Justifying grace assures us that the verdict on the believer is the righteousness of Christ, freely given. Sanctifying grace assures us that the life by which the believer is judged is the life into which the Spirit has been transforming us. Glorifying grace assures us that the encounter ends in the fitness for the divine presence that grace itself has been preparing.

This grammar makes possible something the modern church has often surrendered: a non-anxious confession of judgment. The believer comes to the judgment seat already known by the judge, already named by him, already loved beyond exhaustion. In all my sorrows and persecutions I lift up my head and look for the very same one who has before offered himself for me to the judgment of God (Heidelberg Q. 52). The same hands that will judge are the hands that were nailed to the cross for the one being judged. This is not the soft sentimentalism of a god who refuses to judge; it is the hard joy of a Judge whose verdict is grounded in his own blood.

And yet — and this is where the clause keeps its teeth — the criterion of the judgment is given. The criterion is not theological correctness or religious performance. The criterion is given in Matthew 25, in the parable of the sheep and the goats. I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothes. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me. And to those on the left: the same six items, in the negative. The hungry person you did not feed was the Christ who is coming to judge. The stranger you did not welcome was the Christ who is coming to judge. The prisoner you did not visit was the Christ who is coming to judge. This is the only place in the Gospels where Jesus describes the scene of the final judgment in any detail, and the criterion he names is not what we believed but what we did with the bodies of those in front of us. When you have done it for one of the least of these, you have done it for me.

It will not do, here, to pretend that the criterion is easy. It is not. The temptation of the church in every generation has been to substitute a more manageable criterion — to be more concerned with what people wear than with whether the hungry are fed, more concerned with where people come from than with whether the stranger has been welcomed, more concerned with discrete moral rules than with the systemic conditions that make the poor poor. To substitute a manageable criterion for the one Jesus actually named is what the Bible calls idolatry. The clause of the creed is, in part, the church’s permanent rebuke of its own habit of idolatry.

For the preacher: do not lose the texture of the doctrine. Preach the judgment as good news. Preach it as the announcement that history is going somewhere and that nothing — no cruelty, no theft, no act of love unheralded by the world’s recognition — falls outside the seeing of the returning Lord. Preach it with the Heidelberg’s confidence: I lift up my head and look for the very same one who has before offered himself for me. Preach it with Matthew 25’s criterion intact, and with the works of mercy concrete and named. We may leave judgment for Christ, and then hold each other accountable for love beyond what is comfortable, which we can only do through grace. The judgment is the horizon of the Christian life, not its anxiety; the judge is the friend of sinners, not their enemy; the verdict is grounded in the cross. Come, Lord Jesus.

Further Reading

• Daniel 7:9–14 — the Son of Man receives the kingdom and judges
• Matthew 24–25 — the Olivet Discourse and the parable of the sheep and the goats
• Luke 1:46–55 — the Magnificat as the song of the coming judgment
• John 5:22–29 — the Father has given all judgment to the Son
• Acts 10:42; 17:30–31 — apostolic preaching of the coming judgment
• Romans 2:1–16; 14:10–12; 2 Corinthians 5:10 — Pauline accounts of the judgment seat of Christ
• 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18; 5:1–11; 2 Thessalonians 1:5–10 — the parousia in earliest Christian preaching
• 1 Peter 4:5; 2 Peter 3:1–13 — the patience of God and the coming day
• Revelation 19–22 — the apocalyptic vision of the coming Lord, the great white throne, the new heaven and earth
• Augustine, City of God XX (the major patristic treatment in the West)
• Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 15
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Supplement, qq. 88–99
• Dante Alighieri, Commedia (poetic synthesis of the medieval doctrine)
• Martin Luther, Last Sermons (1546); Augsburg Confession, Article XVII
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.25
• Heidelberg Catechism, Question 52
• Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 33
• The Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church (1784), Article III
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 15, “The Great Assize” (1758)
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on Matthew 25, Romans 2, 2 Corinthians 5
• Charles Wesley, “Lo! He comes with clouds descending” (1758)
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3 §73 (the prophecy of the parousia)
• Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (Fortress, 1996)
• N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008)
• Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (Orbis, 1971)
• Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator (Orbis, 2001)