Edward W. H. Vick provides an unbiassed assessment of the claim that you can go on speaking of the Second Advent as ‘soon’ after having said so for centuries, followed by a constructive statement suggesting a more honest approach derived directly from the New Testament.

If you use ‘soon’ in the ordinary sense, you can’t go on saying that the Advent is soon. If you say the Advent is ‘soon’ in a qualified sense (meaning ‘in the unknown and indefinite future but not long into that future’) the claim is meaningless. So the claim that the Advent is soon is either false or meaningless.

That leads us into a range of interesting problems: knowledge, certainty, truth, claims to know the truth, the meaningfulness of religious claims, the status of claims about the future and of the argument from prophecy, and the gap between the first and twenty-first centuries.