When will Jesus return?

Easter Sunday seems a good time to discuss this. I was fascinated by the Slate Magazine article, Half of Christians Think Jesus Will Return Within 40 Years. Now granted this article has it’s usual dose of media hyperbole. It isn’t really 50%, but it is close to that. Much more importantly, it isn’t all 2.2 billion Christians in the world, it is nearly half of the 250 million people in the US who self identified in a 2008 ARIS Survey as Christians. When you consider that some 40% of Americans believe that the Earth is less that 10,000 years old that percentage, while certainly disconcerting, becomes much less surprising.

Still that’s a lot of people. And here’s the odd thing about so many people holding a belief in Christ’s imminent return. Christians have been believing Christ’s return was imminent for over 2,000 years now, and it’s never come true. How are so many people able to retain such a fervent belief in the near immediacy of an event when that expectation has gone unfulfilled for such a very long time?