In fact, the New Testament uses quite a variety of language and imagery to express the truth that Jesus and his people will one day be personally present to each other as full and renewed human beings. It is perhaps an accident of history that the phrase “the second coming,” which is very rare in the New Testament, has come to dominate discussion. When that phrase is identified, as it has often been in the United States, with a particular view of that coming as a literal downward descent, meeting halfway with the redeemed who are making a simultaneous upward journey, all sorts of problems
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