"Are We Living in the End Times?"
Yes, and for about two thousand years.
That is not a joke, and it is not a dodge. It is what the New Testament writers say about their own moment. When Peter stands up on the day of Pentecost to explain what has just happened, he reaches for Joel and quotes him with one phrase adjusted.
And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Acts 2:17
Joel says "afterward". Peter says "in the last days", and applies it to that morning in Jerusalem. The writer of Hebrews opens the same way: God "hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:2). John is blunter still: "Little children, it is the last time" (1 John 2:18).
So on the New Testament's own usage, the last days are not a period that begins when the news gets bad. They began at the first coming, and everything since has been inside them.
Two questions wearing one set of words
The reason the question feels slippery is that "end times" is doing two jobs at once.
| The question | What it means | What the New Testament says |
|---|---|---|
| Are we in the last days? | The era running from the first coming to the second | Yes. It started at Pentecost, and the church has been in it ever since |
| Are we in the final years before the end? | The short stretch immediately before Christ returns | Nobody is told. That is the part Jesus explicitly declines to schedule |
The Greek behind "last days" is eschatai hēmerai, from eschatos, last or final, which is where eschatology, the study of last things, gets its name. It marks an era, not a countdown. When Christians say the last days began at the resurrection, they are using the phrase the way the apostles used it.
Most people searching this question mean the second row of the table. It is worth knowing that the Bible answers the first row clearly and the second row with a refusal.
But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. Matthew 24:36
What each view does with the question
The twelve Christian positions on eschatology give four broadly different answers here, and the difference is not about how alarming the news is. It is about when the prophecies are fulfilled.
| Perspective | Answer to "are we in the end times?" |
|---|---|
| Preterist | Mostly past. The judgments of the Olivet Discourse and much of Revelation fell on Jerusalem in AD 70. We live after them, awaiting the return, with no prophetic checklist left to tick |
| Historicist | We are somewhere in the middle of a long unfolding. Every generation since the apostles has been inside the prophecy, which is why historicists have historically been the most willing to identify current events, and the most often embarrassed by it |
| Futurist | Mostly future. Almost nothing in the tribulation sequence has begun, so the question is whether the preconditions are assembling now |
| Idealist | The wrong question. The imagery describes the recurring pattern of persecution and vindication in every age, so it is always true and never a timetable |
Notice what that table does to the debate. A preterist and a futurist looking at the same headline are not disagreeing about the headline. They are disagreeing about which century the text was pointing at. If that framing is new to you, the full grid of twelve views is the place it comes from.
What the survey data actually shows
Two datasets are worth citing because both are public and methodologically ordinary.
Pew Research Center, in a survey of 10,156 US adults conducted in April 2022 and reported in December 2022, found that 39 percent of American adults say we are living in the end times, against 58 percent who say we are not. Among American Christians the split was almost even: 47 percent yes, 49 percent no. The variation by tradition is the striking part. Sixty-three percent of evangelical Protestants said yes, against 31 percent of mainline Protestants and 27 percent of Catholics. Sixty-eight percent of Black Americans said yes, the highest of any group Pew reported.
Lifeway Research, surveying 1,000 American Protestant senior pastors in 2016, found the clergy split about as widely as their congregations. Forty-eight percent were premillennial, 31 percent amillennial and 11 percent postmillennial. On the rapture, 36 percent held a pre-tribulation position and 25 percent said the rapture is not a literal future event at all.
Put those two together and you get the honest picture. This is not a question where Christians hold a common position and outsiders dissent. It is a question where the churches themselves are divided, roughly down the middle, and where the answer someone gives correlates closely with the tradition they were formed in.
The long record of confident wrongness
Every date so far has been wrong. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is an unbroken record.
| Prediction | Who | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Second century | Montanus and his followers in Phrygia expected the New Jerusalem to descend at Pepuza | It did not |
| 22 October 1844 | William Miller and the Millerites, estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000 followers across the United States and Canada | Known ever since as the Great Disappointment. Miller gave up prophetic calculation and died in 1849 |
| 11 to 13 September 1988 | Edgar Whisenant, a former NASA engineer, in a booklet titled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. Around 300,000 copies were mailed free to American ministers and roughly 4.5 million sold | Nothing happened. He issued a revised date for 1989 |
| 21 May 2011 | Harold Camping of Family Radio, promoted on billboards worldwide | When the day passed he declared it an invisible spiritual judgment and moved the end to 21 October 2011. In 2012 he called the prediction a mistake |
| 23 to 24 September 2025 | Joshua Mhlakela, a South African pastor, in an interview that spread on TikTok as "RaptureTok", passing 300,000 posts before the dates arrived | The dates passed. He moved the prediction to 6 to 8 October 2025 |
The pattern is stable enough to be worth naming. A date is proposed on the strength of a calculation, it is amplified by whatever the fastest medium of the era happens to be (pamphlets, then radio, then paperbacks, then short video), and when it fails the calculation is adjusted rather than abandoned.
Being fair to the people who say yes
There is a way of dismissing this question that is both smug and wrong.
The New Testament does not treat expectancy as a failure of nerve. Jesus tells his disciples to watch, repeatedly, and the Greek verb grēgoreō means to stay awake, to keep alert, not to calculate. Paul writes that the day comes as a thief in the night, which is an argument for readiness rather than for indifference. A Christian looking at the state of the world and thinking "this could be it" is doing something the text asks of them.
What the text does not ask of them is a date. In Acts 1:7, on the point of leaving, Jesus tells the disciples plainly that it is not for them to know the times or the seasons. That verse is directed at exactly the question they were asking, and it is the answer they got.
So the useful distinction is not between people who think the end is near and people who do not. It is between watchfulness, which Scripture commends, and date-setting, which it forecloses and which has failed every time it has been attempted.
The question worth asking instead
If you cannot know the day, what did Jesus actually say would happen before the end?
He answered that at length, sitting on the Mount of Olives, in Matthew 24. He listed things that would not be signs and things that would, and he was specific about which was which. Wars, famines and earthquakes he explicitly ranks as the beginning of sorrows rather than the end. A short list of other things he treats differently.
Reading that chapter carefully turns an unanswerable question into an answerable one. Instead of "how close are we", which nobody can measure, you get "what did he say to look for", which is written down and can be checked.