The heart warms to the message conveyed in the title of Dr. Bacchiocchi's book The Advent Hope. The colorful, striking cover portraying the visible coming of our Lord and the joy of the re deemed will find a ready response in minds and hearts. The author is to be commended for his efforts to write a book that presents the great truths of the Ad vent in new and fresh ways.
While the book focuses on the second coming of Christ and the wonder of this truth, its unique contribution is found in what it says about the signs of the coming, their meaning, and the method by which they are interpreted.
Bacchiocchi's view of the nature of prophetic signs becomes clear in chapter 7. He writes, "The signs of the end given by Christ in His Olivet discourse (which includes false christs, wars, earthquakes, famines, worldwide gospel proclamation, and tribulation), are all signs which cannot be precisely dated or fixed. Christ did not say, for example, when an earth quake completely destroys San Franci sco, or when famine causes the death of hundreds of thousands in Ethiopia or Cambodia, 'then you know that My return is near.'. . . On the contrary, Christ chose to give signs of a generic nature which could find a degree of fulfillment in every age." This concept is repeated several times throughout the book. He rejects the idea that there are unique signs that have a specific fulfillment and that can be seen in the context of a chronology of events giving certainty of the nearness of the Advent.
The author uses what he calls the "prophetic perspective" as a context in which we can understand the purpose of Advent signs. He places the focus on the "what" rather than the "when" of Christ's return. The "what" are generic signs that will bring assurance of the certainty and imminence of Christ's coming. They enable every generation to experience imminence as a necessity for faith. His premise is that faith can be sustained only if a person believes that Christ is coming in his day. Therefore the signs must be fulfilled for each generation.
If the Advent signs are of a generic nature with no unique characteristics in any generation, then it follows that they must be fulfilled in each generation. This the author calls "contemporizing the Advent signs." Acknowledging that in every age there have been Christians who believed they were witnessing a unique fulfillment of the Advent signs, he does not feel this is an acceptable use of signs. Making unique applications of generic signs in any age results in ridicule by thinking people, sensationalism, a hopeless attitude toward the present social order, a false sense of security, and finally disappointment. Contemporizing generic signs then is to make general applications of them to the present age, showing that God is at work in the world and that the conflict between good and evil is moving toward a climax.
While Bacchiocchi appears to believe in the historical perspectives of Daniel, his hermeneutic for interpreting prophecy is in conflict with it. He writes that some weaken the Advent hope by concentrating on peripheral factors such as dates, events, and hypothetical future political developments. In chapter 10 the author presents what he sees as "true" and "authentic" signs and in outline form explains them in detail, using many of the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments to identify them.
His basic argument that the signs "point to the certainty of the approaching end" is predicated on the concept of signs intensification. This concept is the modus operand! by which signs bring hope and assurance to the believer.
There is no chronology of events as taught by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the past to give assurance of the nearness of the end. Bacchiocchi appears to say that the Scriptures do not identify, even generally, a period of world history when the end will come. A concept of end-times with specific signs, events, and dates identified by prophecy is missing.
Further study is needed to fully understand Dr. Bacchiocchi's eschatological views and the hermeneutical principles undergirding them. This study is a matter of urgency in view of the seeming differences found in this book from traditional Adventist eschatology and in view of the probable wide circulation of this work.
