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Waiting for the Lord?

November 11, 2018—when the armistice was signed at Compiègne, France, at the beginning of the end of hostilities—marks the centenary celebration of the end of World War I. Since the first two articles in this issue of the IBMR describe the variant Christian responses to the postwar situation in Europe, China, and Korea, it seems fitting to try to unpack the tensions felt in that historic moment, while keeping in mind those of our own time. A year after the armistice, Irish nationalist poet W. B. Yeats penned his oft-quoted poem “The Second Coming,”1 which describes the apocalyptic disintegration toward which the West seemed to be rushing headlong. The scale of the brutality of “the war to end all wars” had awakened the world to the shadow sides of nationalism, industrialism, and technologism.2 The Yeats poem evokes a world where the premodern religious and linguistic heritage of the West is in danger of being lost. The present moment is spiraling into the vortex of a violent denouement, where the past could no longer be relied upon and the future seemed shrouded in ominous danger.