End of the World

[FaithT]

According to Catholic teaching we’ve been in the ”end times” since Jesus was crucified. What does the RCC teach about it? What I’m getting at is this, could it be thousands or even millions of years from now? I know there are people who make all kinds of predictions and I know that Scripture says ”no one knows when” it’ll happen but CAN it be that far from now?

 

[Michie]

According to Catholic teaching we’ve been in the ”end times” since Jesus was crucified. What does the RCC teach about it? What I’m getting at is this, could it be thousands or even millions of years from now? I know there are people who make all kinds of predictions and I know that Scripture says ”no one knows when” it’ll happen but CAN it be that far from now?

There is no real set in stone teaching when it comes to Catholicism’s view of end times.

Yes, We're in the End Times

Not unlike our attitude toward death, we tend avoid ...

www.catholic.com

 

[Ave Maria]

Nobody knows for sure when Jesus will come again. Personally, I hope it's soon. This world just keeps getting more and more wicked by the day, and I am so tired of it.

 

[WarriorAngel]

According to Catholic teaching we’ve been in the ”end times” since Jesus was crucified. What does the RCC teach about it? What I’m getting at is this, could it be thousands or even millions of years from now? I know there are people who make all kinds of predictions and I know that Scripture says ”no one knows when” it’ll happen but CAN it be that far from now?

Every single day we face the end time of our life.
Live each day loving the Lord and people.
Pray.

IF you cover these bases, then you won't worry. ^^ right?

Even in the 1st century during the time of the Apostles, they were concerned with His return.
It's best we live life loving the Lord and others.

It could be whenever the Father above has had enough.

 

[RileyG]

According to Catholic teaching we’ve been in the ”end times” since Jesus was crucified. What does the RCC teach about it? What I’m getting at is this, could it be thousands or even millions of years from now? I know there are people who make all kinds of predictions and I know that Scripture says ”no one knows when” it’ll happen but CAN it be that far from now?

Only God knows. Period.

 

[RileyG]

Nobody knows for sure when Jesus will come again. Personally, I hope it's soon. This world just keeps getting more and more wicked by the day, and I am so tired of it.

Amen. I 100% agree.

 

[FaithT]

Thanks everyone!

 

[Sorn]

Thanks everyone!

Yeah, its not likely to be millions or thousands of years.
A very small chance it could be in the next decade or so, roughly in line with the 2000 yr mark of Jesus Crucifixion & resurrection, otherwise it could be anytime after that, possibly decades or 3 to 4 hundred years out yet.
My current extreme date would be after another 1000yrs, so 1000 years = 1 day and Jesus rose after 3 days so will return after approx 3 thousand years, but obviously just speculating here.

 

[Diamond72]

What I’m getting at is this, could it be thousands or even millions of years from now?

"This is how it will be at the end of the age.
The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous"
People use the word world, but we are talking about the end of the ages.
This is at the end of the 1,000 year reign of christ when there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

Isaiah 65:17​

Revelation 21:1​

Matthew 13:49​

Revelation 20:6​

 

[Sorn]

"This is how it will be at the end of the age.
The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous"
People use the word world, but we are talking about the end of the ages.
This is at the end of the 1,000 year reign of christ when there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

Isaiah 65:17​

Revelation 21:1​

Matthew 13:49​

Revelation 20:6​

The end times the OP is referring to is the period ended by the 2nd coming of Christ, not the end of the 1000yr period.

 

[Bob Crowley]

Rehashing old comments here, but my old pastor (him again) thought that God was going to drive us off the planet and out into the universe.

He postulated we'd learn to teleport, which would be presumably based on quantum entanglement.

He predicted that around 1990/91 as I left his church in 1991, and he died in 1992.

From an early experiment in 1996/97 in Austria, the scientists have been increasing distances between entangled particles ever since.

https://www.science.org/content/article/behold-quantum-teleporter

Record-setting quantum entanglement connects two atoms across 20 miles

Researchers in Germany have demonstrated quantum entanglement of two atoms separated by 33 km (20.5 miles) of fiber optics. This is a record distance for this kind of communication and marks a breakthrough towards a fast and secure quantum internet.

newatlas.com

There are also functioning "quantum computers" but they're plagued with issues of stability or decoherence.

https://tanishabassan.medium.com/decoherence-quantum-computers-greatest-obstacle-67c74ae962b6

We're a long way from teleporting human beings, or for that matter a fairly homogenous substance like a billiard ball. But I think we'll get there. I believe we'll learn to teleport material items a long time before we manage to move living beings as we'll have to move the spiritual component as well. But with technology having this uncanny ability to get around those sorts of problems, I think we'll get there eventually. If we do it will also be proof we have a soul.

I personally expect to see limited teleportation of material items in my lifetime (which is getting towards the count-down stage) but I don't expect to see living creatures being teleported.

In terms of interstellar snail mail, or old fashioned rockery, ever since the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 (that long ago!), the space race has led to moon landings, robots on Mars, and Voyagers 1 and 2 which have progressed past the solar system into near deep space. Mind you that has all taken place in 66 years.

In short God seems to be letting us fool around with the mechanisms which would be necessary for space travel - rocketry, robotics, artificial intelligence, space stations with subsequent space medicine, with the Webb telescope giving us unprecedented detail of far flung galaxies.

God also seems to be letting us fool around with mechanisms with which we could wreck our home planet - climate change due to super industrialisation, massive deforestation using huge machines, nuclear weaponry, biochemical and biological warfare, plus a population which has grown from about 2.5 billion when I was born to 8 billion today, increasing by about another million every 5 days.

If the pastor was right, then I think Christ's return will be a lot further off than most of our short sighted earth bound eschatological predictions allow. But that's just his and my opinions.

In short no man knows and the Catholic Church is silent on the issue. Even Christ didn't know.

Mark 13:32 NIV - “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

 

[Diamond72]

The end times the OP is referring to is the period ended by the 2nd coming of Christ

I believe the church age is 2,000 years and we are very close to that. Then we enter into the Kingdom age. Some people believe there are seven years in between the church age and the kingdom age.

The rapture is not the second coming. Jesus comes for His bride and then He returns with His Bride.

Matthew 24:31 (NIV): "And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other."

 

[Sorn]

I believe the church age is 2,000 years and we are very close to that. Then we enter into the Kingdom age. Some people believe there are seven years in between the church age and the kingdom age.

The rapture is not the second coming. Jesus comes for His bride and then He returns with His Bride.

Matthew 24:31 (NIV): "And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other."

I agree the rapture is not the 2nd coming, but it happens a few years after the rapture does however.
Israel / Jerusalem is the bride of Christ, the church is the body of Christ. Israel (the bride) stays on the ground, the birdegroom comes to her.

 

[Sorn]

Rehashing old comments here, but my old pastor (him again) thought that God was going to drive us off the planet and out into the universe.

He postulated we'd learn to teleport, which would be presumably based on quantum entanglement.

He predicted that around 1990/91 as I left his church in 1991, and he died in 1992.

From an early experiment in 1996/97 in Austria, the scientists have been increasing distances between entangled particles ever since.

https://www.science.org/content/article/behold-quantum-teleporter

Record-setting quantum entanglement connects two atoms across 20 miles

Researchers in Germany have demonstrated quantum entanglement of two atoms separated by 33 km (20.5 miles) of fiber optics. This is a record distance for this kind of communication and marks a breakthrough towards a fast and secure quantum internet.

newatlas.com

There are also functioning "quantum computers" but they're plagued with issues of stability or decoherence.

https://tanishabassan.medium.com/decoherence-quantum-computers-greatest-obstacle-67c74ae962b6

We're a long way from teleporting human beings, or for that matter a fairly homogenous substance like a billiard ball. But I think we'll get there. I believe we'll learn to teleport material items a long time before we manage to move living beings as we'll have to move the spiritual component as well. But with technology having this uncanny ability to get around those sorts of problems, I think we'll get there eventually. If we do it will also be proof we have a soul.

I personally expect to see limited teleportation of material items in my lifetime (which is getting towards the count-down stage) but I don't expect to see living creatures being teleported.

In terms of interstellar snail mail, or old fashioned rockery, ever since the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 (that long ago!), the space race has led to moon landings, robots on Mars, and Voyagers 1 and 2 which have progressed past the solar system into near deep space. Mind you that has all taken place in 66 years.

In short God seems to be letting us fool around with the mechanisms which would be necessary for space travel - rocketry, robotics, artificial intelligence, space stations with subsequent space medicine, with the Webb telescope giving us unprecedented detail of far flung galaxies.

God also seems to be letting us fool around with mechanisms with which we could wreck our home planet - climate change due to super industrialisation, massive deforestation using huge machines, nuclear weaponry, biochemical and biological warfare, plus a population which has grown from about 2.5 billion when I was born to 8 billion today, increasing by about another million every 5 days.

If the pastor was right, then I think Christ's return will be a lot further off than most of our short sighted earth bound eschatological predictions allow. But that's just his and my opinions.

In short no man knows and the Catholic Church is silent on the issue. Even Christ didn't know.

Mark 13:32 NIV - “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

True teleportation would require that you be scanned, the information that fully describes you is stored, you are then disassembled (ie killed) and the information collected by the scan transmitted to the other side where a new you (a copy) is assembled from the molecular level up.
This will never happen, no one will agree to stepping into such a machine.

We know that Jesus could materialize where He wanted. So this may be an innate ability of the resurrected body or something that God does for Jesus.

If man's rebellion is in part us saying that we can make it on our own then God may well wait until we have developed our technology as much as we can only to then see that we still can't live in a utopia of our own making as selfishness, self interest etc always leads to conflicts & division. To that end, advanced tech, the things that will make a difference would be the following:
1) Nuclear fusion - effectively safe limitless energy
2) Stopping and ideally reversing the aging process - people will then live hundreds or more years, plenty of time to have a meaningful self-actualized life & fully develop their abilities, relationships etc
3) The big kahuna - anti gravity - floating cities, easy access to the resources in the solar system, earth becomes a green paradise
4) some kind of way of travelling large distances quickly - for obvious reasons - opens up the galaxy

If God is right about our sin nature, even these amazing technical breakthroughs would not stop wars, conflicts, division & death (non-natural death)

Personally i think we may get #1 and some way to #2 but that's as far as we will get. Antigravity and really fast travel will be beyond us

 

[Diamond72]

There are also functioning "quantum computers" but they're plagued with issues of stability or decoherence.

Musk has already built a 30 exaflop computer which is 30 quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) floating-point operations in a single second. So we can process a lot of information very fast.

I bought some Microsoft stock when they came out with their GPT chatbot. I already made $8,000 in less than a year off of that investment. I told my son to buy $5000 worth of Tesla back when it was $60 a share. He wanted to buy a motorcycle instead that was stolen. He would have made $50,000 if he had bought the Tesla.

 

[Diamond72]

He postulated we'd learn to teleport, which would be presumably based on quantum entanglement.

I have had visions of what looks like fiber optics. I think they call them worm holes. Where you can travel very fast from one layer of the universe to another. The Jodie Foster movie contact written by Carl Sagan talks about this sort of thing.

 

[Diamond72]

True teleportation would require that you be scanned, the information that fully describes you is stored, you are then disassembled (ie killed) and the information collected by the scan transmitted to the other side where a new you (a copy) is assembled from the molecular level up.
This will never happen, no one will agree to stepping into such a machine.

This is an old story. "The Fly" was a 1958 movie.

 

[RileyG]

Just to be very clear, Catholics do NOT believe in the Rapture.

 

[Bob Crowley]

I referred to "my old pastor" again in my post above. Some may wonder why I keep referring to him but I developed a great deal of respect for the man. Even my father, when he appeared in my room the night he died, predicted that "you'll become a Christian" (I was atheist at the time) and that "you'll meet a pastor. You'll think he's great but all he'll do is discourage you even more".

It turned out he was referring to the pastor I'm talking about. I met him when I became Christian nearly four years later in late 1982. Sometime in 1991 The pastor apologised to me for discouraging me not long before we went our separate ways as I got married, and he died of cancer about four months later.

The pastor's name was Rev. Robert Missenden. Early on in my Christian walk I had a vision one night where "Somebody" appeared and said "I want you to stick close to Mr. Missenden. He'll discourage you, but you'll learn a lot from him."

Rehashing old comments here, but my old pastor (him again) thought that God was going to drive us off the planet and out into the universe.

Anyway I'll give a track record of some of the pastor's predictions, most of which took place circa 1990/91.

1. I'd become Catholic - 1996 or 97.

2. There'd be a conspiracy against me at my then work place. I'd make a silly mistake and they'd use that to get rid of me. They would then set about wrecking my reputation. That happened in 1995.

3. My sister wouldn't live very long as she would get leukemia. She died of Leukemia in 2005 aged 45.

4. His own eldest son would have a major health breakdown. His eldest son had a major stroke circa 1996 and hasn't been able to work since. He was a very capable man before that.

5. I'd become Diabetic and take up field hockey again for the exercise. I was diagnosed diabetic in 2005 and took up the game again in 2008 for the exercise. I really wasn't interested in playing hockey, but I needed to motivate myself for exercise. And I'm still going.

6. There'd be a Second Gulf War. His words were "I think there will be a Second Gulf War. The Americans will have had enough of Saddam Hussein and they'll get rid of him. But I think they'll lose a FEW men the next time!", with "few" being said in such a way as to make clear he meant more than a few.

7. China would become very powerful and they'd start throwing their weight around.

8. The Left in Australia would push for homosexual and LGBT rights, and abortion on demand. They're both quite obvious now. He added "I think God will judge the Labor Party for what they've done (or will do)." I need to bear in mind he was conservative himself, but even so I think there is a lot of trouble coming.

9. When he was dying of cancer he said to me "I think he (certain pastor) will get hold of this church after I'm gone and wreck it! But he can't touch the people!". Sure enough the said pastor got hold of the church after he died (the next day so I was told by one of the pastors sons! I'd already left as I'd gotten married) and wrecked it. But he "couldn't touch the people" as most of them left the Presbyterian Church altogether after they'd had a gutful of being screamed at.

There were others, a few of which I'm still waiting for, not necessarily good news either (actually some of it is quite negative).

But I found that if he said something it happened sooner or later. I think we'll learn to teleport down the track although it will probably be decades before we figure out how to get around the spiritual component of living creatures.

In the meantime I'll just go on believing what I do and no doubt the readers of this post will go on thinking as they do.

 

[Bob Crowley]

PS - Addendum to my post above - when he predicted I'd become Catholic he also said "After you join there'll be reports of child abuse in the Catholic Church. And I think there's going to be a LOT of them."

Once again he told me that circa 1990 and that was well before the news about pedophile priests became common knowledge. I wasn't thinking about his prediction when I became Catholic but when the stuff started hitting the media fan I wasn't surprised. Disappointed naturally, like most other Catholics (especially non-pedophile priests and bishops), but it didn't catch me by surprise.