(1) You have to understand the bigger picture. I did not say “there is a resurrection of the saved prior to the end of the world or the end of time.” I said that eternity is outside of time, so that the resurrection of Jesus and of everyone else “takes place” (if you will) outside of time.
(2) The “end times” items to which you refer are symbolic. Humanity will go extinct with other macro-scale plant and animal in another half billion years when the increasing solar winds of the swelling sun first strips away the atmosphere and then boils the oceans. Life on earth will continue in bacterial form for another few billion years until either the red giant sun swallows up the earth, or the planet cools to a frozen balls when the sun collapses to the state of a brown dwarf.
Certainly, Biblical eschatology is expressed using symbolism. The Apostle John explained his supernatural vision in a way that could be understood by his readers, using metaphors and symbols. In the Gospels, Christs explains the Last Judgment using “images” of sheep and goats. Christ Himself is described with the imagery of the Lamb. Yet all this figurative language expresses deep religious realities and eschatological truths.
Science can only project the future state of the cosmos based on what it knows on the scientific level. I don’t know of any scientists who would claim to have prophetic knowledge about the distant future. Science cannot tell us that the universe and time will in fact continue any number of millenniums and that its present course will not be interrupted by Divine intervention such as the Second Coming of Christ. To deny the Parousia as a future historical event is in fact to deny what the Bible and the Church clearly teach.
To claim that science trumps Revelation is rank scientism or at least a misuse of science. It’s a poor exchange to give away one’s inheritance of the Faith for a mess of quantifiable pottage. Science has no magic crystal ball to see into the future.
To assert that the Last Things recorded in the Bible are just symbolic is to make an unintelligible statement. The question truly is, What are the statements symbolic of? They are not meaningless or empty symbols. What realities and truths are expressed by the symbols and other figurative expressions?
(3) Cosmologists see no evidence that the universe will re-collapse into a reverse Big Bang; indeed, the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating, leading to its eventual entropic heat death tens of billions of years from now.
I see no evidence either that the cosmos will collapse. I cannot say “re-collapse” because a re-collapse presumes that it has collapsed at least once before.
If the universe continues to expand, and if scientific knowledge is correct in its understanding, then it is fair to predict, on a scientific level only, an eventual entropic failure of the universe. However, to predict that this “could” happen is no guarantee that it “will” happen, because time may end, as Catholics know, before the universe ends its current phase, all as a result of Divine plan and intervention into the natural history of the cosmos.
It seems that we must either accept what astronomers and cosmologists tell us and jettison a literal interpretation of biblical eschatology, or insist on a literalist eschatology and junk modern science. Of course, we could always choose both to accept science and to interpret eschatology in a way that distinguishes between the temporal and the eternal. StAnastasia
Your alternatives are not realistically stated and need not be considered.
Astronomy and cosmology cannot guarantee that God will not intervene again in the course of history as part of His plan. Christ did not reveal the time of His return. He said He will come at a time when it is least expected, as does a thief in the night.
From what you are saying, it sounds like the Second Coming will be a surprise to those cosmologists and astronomers who think their projected time-line playbook for the cosmos has to be followed page for page by the Creator. I am sure an awful lot of people will be surprised by the Last Things, just as Christ predicted they would be.
