I appreciate the response, but this response is pretty scripted, isn’t it? I was aware that the New Testament eventually addressed the problem of the Parousia’s delay. But the authors did so by concocting propaganda, not by thinking matters through. And by quoting that propaganda, you’re sort of falling into that trap, I think. Quoting scripture can buttress faith, I suppose, but it’s not going to convince anyone who doesn’t think the creator of the universe would write a mere book (directly or otherwise).

Also, I don’t think these scriptural excuses address the question I raised about what authentic Christians are supposed to be doing in the twenty-first century after two thousand years of Christian compromises with secular, natural norms. The notion that God is waiting until there’s a magic, pre-appointed number of Christians is ludicrous on its face, but this would also have to be balanced against the loss of converts due to the Christian hypocrisies generated by the delay.

These scriptural excuses are quite cheaply unfalsifiable in that they could be trotted out even five billion years from now. Maybe God’s patience would take even that long to play out. Who’s to say? And the number of people who would have to be preached to and Christianized is indefinite, since God’s delay creates new generations. Thus, the apologist could say even billions of years from now that there are new souls who must be preached to, and God’s continuing to delay only to give them a chance to be saved. But the delay would cause those souls to come into being. If God hadn’t delayed, there would have been no such new generations who would be in danger of going to hell.

And the longer the delay, the greater the threat to Christianity due to the embarrassing contradiction between the scriptural excuses and the earlier scriptural promises that Jesus’s return would be “soon” in the coming. The longer the delay, then, the starker Christianity’s existential predicament. That’s what I was getting at in the article.