This paper explores the possibility and promise of bringing the Christian doctrine of the parousia of Jesus Christ into explicit dialogue with the contemporary sciences of physical cosmology.  Showing that such a conversation is possible will require attending to the ways in which this doctrine has been formulated in different ways in church history through critical dialogue with the cosmological assumptions of each era.  Demonstrating that such a project is promising will require engaging some of the philosophical categories underlying late modern shifts in our understanding and interpretation of the universe.  My goal is reforming Christology – a reformulated presentation of the Christian understanding and experience of the risen Christ that is articulated in such a way that opens us up to being reformed in response to the promising presence of God.  

In the New Testament, the Greek word parousia itself can mean either (or both) “presence” and “coming” (par-ousia; being-with).  The semantic range of this concept allows us to hold together the ideas of a personal, dynamic presence and a confronting, effective advent.  The task of the doctrine of parousia is to explicate the Christian experience of hopeful well-being in relation to the coming of Jesus Christ who mediates the promising presence of the eternal Creator to, with, in and for creatures.  By physical cosmology, I mean those sciences that aim to explicate the principles and patterns of the dynamic structure of the universe in all its complexity.  In other words, we are dealing here with the physis (nature) of the cosmos. 

Every formulation of the doctrine of parousia throughout church history has been shaped by engagement with those conceptions of the cosmos that prevailed in its context.  This was true already in Scripture, but continues through the patristic, medieval, Reformation and early modern periods.  The problem is not that these theologians engaged the physical cosmologies of their era, but that many theological treatments of the parousia today fail to do so.  Too often we continue to rely uncritically on particular cosmological assumptions that are no longer plausible in light of contemporary science. 

Our understanding of the concepts of space and time, cause and effect, as well as matter and energy, have been radically altered by empirical discoveries and theoretical developments such as relativity theory, quantum indeterminacy and the sciences of emergent complexity.  As physicist Frank Tipler poignantly observes, “the central problem with contemporary theology and indeed most of late-twentieth-century religion is not that it is separated from science but that it is separated from modern [contemporary] science” (The Physics of Immortality, 1994, 329).  Tipler suggests that theological research in the 21^st century will require a Ph.D. in particle physics.  Whether or not an actual degree is required, his point is well-taken.

The reconstructive task of theology that is passed on to every new generation involves giving an account of our hope for well-being in relation to the presence of Christ in a way that conserves the intuitions of the biblical tradition by liberating them for transformative dialogue within the plausibility structures of contemporary attempts to interpret the human experience of coming-to-be in the cosmos.  

One way to do this is to begin with the existential concerns and philosophical categories shared by both disciplines.  What do the doctrine of parousia and physical cosmology have in common?  Both are interested in what I will call aesthetic desire, and both use philosophical categories like space and time, cause and effect, matter and form, to explicate this experience.  As one resource for helping us in this reconstructive task, I point briefly to T. F. Torrance who has explicitly explored the philosophical implications of relativity theory for this doctrine.

I conclude by making some brief suggestions for reforming questions about the promising presence of Jesus Christ.  The doctrine of parousia has to do with the way in which the Creator is present to and for and in and with human spatio-temporal creatures, and how Jesus Christ mediates this presence.  The use of the concept of the presence of Jesus Christ offers us a helpful starting point for reconstruction because it connects immediately to parousia, but allows us to render it in the broader sense of the whole experience of the advent of God that is intensely presented in the holistic Christ event. 

We are no longer required to imagine heaven as a place (near or far), where Jesus is watching and waiting for the right time to return.  If the experience of space-time is relative to each conscious observer, we may think of the mediation of new life disclosed in Jesus’ resurrection as already bearing upon us in each and every now, opening up the future to us in our own particular tracks of space-time, freeing us to relate to one another in the presence of Eternity.  Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth has been raised up bodily into a redeemed space/time in and through the Spirit.  However, the way in which we articulate this belief will be shaped by our understanding of what it means for a (material) body to be energized in space/time. 

Jesus’ way of being in the world introduces a new understanding of the liberating presence of God, who invites us to share in an experience of life beyond the threat of death.  Jesus’ experience of the reception of and reliance on the life-giving Spirit came to fully mediate his sense of hope in the promising divine countenance, so that he was freed from the ontological anxiety of being crushed or abandoned by the finite energized material forces of his spatio-temporal neighbors.  This liberated him to face those whose aesthesis in the world was painful and annihilating, and to mediate to them a new sense of the promising presence of God.  This mediation of the Eternal overflowed the bounds of temporal being, and so could not be crushed even by the death of Jesus.  The Spirit of the one who raised him from the dead now dwells in us, transforming our experience and interpretation of space and