Years ago, an acquaintance of mine, one Thomas Sheehan, wrote a book entitled The First Coming in which he argued that the life and death of Jesus constituted the first, only, and real coming of the Christ to earth. He argued that there was and will be no second coming because Christ accomplished his task in the first one. The tricky thing here was that Tom was a well-known Catholic scholar at that time teaching at Stanford University. He upset many in the Church.
In essence what Sheehan was claiming is that the entire history of Christianity in the world as we know it was a colossal mistake. I do not know whether he was ever sanctioned by the Catholic Church, of which he was a member, or what became of his academic career after the publication of his book. I do know that his book created quite a storm, both within the Catholic Church and throughout the entire field of Biblical scholarship.
The story began on this wise. Back around 321 CE, when the Christian Church was just getting under way and was being strenuously persecuted by the Roman Empire, the new Emperor Constantine decided that the way he read the situation of the future, at least his future, as well as that of the Roman Empire, lay with these strange people who called themselves “Christians”. So, when he won a battle under their banner, he claimed that he had had a vision in which he was directed to fight under the sign of the Cross, the chief Christian symbol.
Thus it was that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire during Constantine’s reign. Thomas Sheehan’s claim was that this shift from being a strongly persecuted group of refugees on the very edge of the Empire to being the favored group of the Roman Emperor signaled the end of Jesus’ “First Coming” and thus the end authentic Christianity. All that was left for real Christians to do was to wait for the coming of the Kingdom of God.
In other words, according to Sheehan’s reading everything that has transpired in Western and world history since the death of Jesus had nothing to do with Christianity. Rather, it had all been a classic and cosmic confusion. What Christians should have done, and what they should now do, is wait faithfully for the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. Sheehan’s claim was simply that the whole history of Christianity had been predicated on a huge mistake about just what the Christian faith was and is all about. Needless to say, making these extraordinary claims got Professor Sheehan in a lot of trouble.

In the midst of our own perennial squabbles and accusations over when, or if, Christ will return to reign in his kingdom over the world, this idea about the First Coming being the ONLY official visit of Christ to earth constitutes a genuine bombshell. Catholic believers tend to remain faithful to the original idea of Christ returning to earth in order to set up the Kingdom of God when the right time arrives. This was Sheehan’s point, that so far there has been only one coming of Christ to earth, and that is all that was intended.
Very conservative Protestants, on the other hand, have been arguing and even fighting over the nature and timing of the Second Coming for centuries. As far as I know no one has claimed that Christ has already come, but there are those who, mostly on the basis of certain difficult passages in Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians, argue over whether it will come in two phases separated by seven years of tribulation. There also have been folks who expected to meet Christ in the air aboard his space ship (Heaven’s Gate?).
After two thousand years it seems to me unlikely that any of the Biblical passages were ever meant to be read as a secret coded message. I like Tom Sheehan’s idea. Perhaps there will be no “second coming.” As Jesus put it: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”, and Jesus’ teachings should be sufficient for the present.

This part of Plato’s philosophy is perhaps the most well-known of his many contributions to ancient Greek thought. Not only did it become the foundation for his political theory, but it even became a kind of paradigm for the Western view of reality as a whole. Here, in Book Seven of his Republic, Plato offers an allegorical account of how he sees the nature of reality and our knowledge thereof. It is possible that no other image of such matters has had more influence in Western thought than that of “The Cave.”
Plato begins by drawing a picture of a person in chains at the bottom of a cave with his vision, or understanding, limited to the shadows he sees on the cave wall cast by various objects passing before the light from a fire that exists outside of the cave. The prisoner and his colleagues pass the time trying to guess what the objects are passing in front of the light of the fire. Obviously, this “game” is fruitless as regards coming to know what the objects actually are, even though in this very primitive setting the guesses pass for knowledge.
Now, Plato surmises, if the prisoners were to be freed from their chains and able to find their way up and out of the cave, they would be on their way to acquiring actual knowledge of the reality outside of the cave. He likens their struggle up and out of the cave to that of a child initially finding its way around in the world. Our pilgrim is at first blinded by the light of the fire and all that it reveals about reality. At first, he discerns various objects being carried bye in front of the fire that are actually the items casting the shadows on the wall of the cave. He now understands that these items, and not the shadows, are the real objects of knowledge. However, he also soon discovers that these objects are themselves only physical copies of still other, actually more real objects in the world.
Plato suggests that even such objects are themselves only copies of the various “Ideas” or “Forms” that make up the ultimately real world lying behind the world of physical objects and making them possible. This world of ideas is what is “really real”, while all the rest is mere shadows and copies. It is here that the ideas such as Goodness, Justice, and Beauty reside, in the world of Ideas, not in the physical world. Plato argues that once a person actually encounters this real world of Ideas and Forms he or she will never wish to return to the world of physical reality, never ground their values in the anything other than pure ideas and truth.
Of course, Plato’s real purpose in developing this allegory was to provide a solid background against which to show how and why an effective and honorable political government must ultimately be based on solid ideas and those who know how to follow them. He calls such leaders “Philosopher Kings” and claims that those alone who have struggled their way up out of the cave of ignorance into the world of Ideas would be fit to rule a government effectively and honorably. Plato argues that they should not have any money or possessions of their own. He goes on to develop strict ideas about how these rulers would be educated. He argues that they should not have any personal life of their own so that they can be devoted entirely to the welfare of the State.
Plato actually made two trips to Syracuse in Italy trying to convince his friend the ruler there to institute his ideas but to no avail. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” has greatly influenced Western thought, both in its metaphysical and political development. At the same time, it has helped shape our ideas about education and knowledge. Moreover, the image of reality as a cave and education as the way out of ignorance has played an important role in guiding many thinkers’ ideas about how best to go about gaining knowledge. Indeed, Christian thinkers such as Augustine took Plato’s image as a blueprint for understanding the way humans should come to a knowledge of God through developing an understanding how God has structured the cosmos and how we can gain knowledge thereof.