Vos: The parousia "is a point of eventuation, not a series of successive events"

“In its secular as well as in its religious-eschatological use the word (parousia) expresses the two closely connected ideas of arrival and presence. Parousia signifies "becoming present" and "being present" for a longer or shorter period. Somewhat of an analogy to this is furnished by the double sense of the English word "visit." It has been surmised that in parousia the static significance was the original one, out of which the other developed. This, however, is not certain. In the New Testament the idea of occurrence, arrival, plainly stand in the foreground. Of chief importance to note is the absence of the notion "again" from the word considered by itself. The noun means "arrival," not "return." It can not correctly be rendered by "second coming." When the Christians spoke of the parousia of their Lord, they were, of course, aware and mindful that the event spoken of was in point of fact a second arrival, duplicating in a certain respect that of the incarnation. Still there did not develop out of this consciousness the phrase "second parousia." That this did not happen is only explainable from the intensively prospective outlook of the early Church. So many things and such absolutely-consummating things had become associated with the parousia of the Messiah, that only the catastrophe of the last days seemed capable of attracting and retaining the word for itself.

“This undoubtedly differs from the gravitation of present-day Christianity towards the historical life of Jesus in the past. The New Testament believer felt that while the Messiah had entered the world and been present in it, nevertheless the epochal coming, the one fully worthy of that name, the actual parousia of the Lord, belonged to the future. While the centering of Christian contemplation upon the nativity is both justified and understandable, yet it is more in the line of doctrinal perspective than in the line of instinctive, immediate apprehension of things. Paul in this respect occupies the same standpoint as Peter and James, whilst in the Synoptics, if not the term "parousia," at least a past "coming" is predicated of Jesus, and that in words spoken by Jesus Himself.

“The parousia taken as an event is with Paul catastrophic. Of a development within the limits of the concept, or a duplication or triplication of the event there is nowhere any trace. It is a point of eventuation, not a series of successive events. About the question, whether it ushers in the "millennium" or the eternal state, nothing can, of course, be decided by this in itself. Only, if it should be found to refer to an "interregnum," then this by stress of usage would be apt so closely to bind it to the chiliastic (chiliasm is what we know today as "millenialism"; crb) complex of hope, as to dim the eternity-prospect beyond. It designates the momentous event, and consequently that which it opens up must needs carry a supreme, absolute weight to the religious consciousness. To conceive of Paul as focusing his mind on any phase of relative consummation, and as tying up to this the term "parousia," inevitably would involve his relegating the eternal things to a rank of secondary importance...A chiliasm-parousia tends to make for a chiliasm-complexion of the final state as a whole...The vista of the transcendental world of heaven would have become all but effaced by the concrete shapes moving in the temporal foreground.” – Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology, pp. 75-77