It doesn't have to be this way

"This foundational theological belief in the sovereign rule of God in the risen Jesus Christ can be the basis for an attitude of confidence without lapsing into an ugly triumphalism or a defensive paranoia. The sovereignty of God is the basis not for a martyr complex, but for true martyrdom – which is witnessing to Jesus Christ come what may. A persecution complex is essentially self-interested and even narcissistic. A life lived for Jesus Christ, on the other hand, risks itself entirely for the good of the other without regard for self – knowing that it entrusts itself to the God who raised Jesus from the dead."

- Michael Jensen.

Michael is talking about why a particular denomination or church doesn't need to fear its own demise, though his key theological claim here (which lies at the centre of his PhD thesis on martyrdom) is not far from the centre of my own thesis.

The good news of the risen Christ means that Christians don't need to fear squaring up to whatever social, political or ecological challenges that may already exist or may soon arise. We are free to pour ourselves out in loving service of neighbour for the glory of God, entrusting ourselves to the God who raised Jesus from the dead. We can do the hard work of thinking through how best to love our neighbours in a rapidly changing world, where a complex variety of interconnected goods clamour for our attention in patterns both persistent and novel.

Why does the good news banish our fears? Or rather, why does it enable us to face them squarely and yet be undaunted, requiring no distraction, no promise of a silver bullet, no paralysing despair, no frantic scramble to save ourselves? In faith, hope and love, Jesus walked willingly into the valley of the shadow of death. We can follow him without being alone, without needing to vindicate ourselves, without needing any guarantees that the path will not be bumpy or difficult. Where he has gone, we follow.

I have finished a number of my recent posts suggesting that "It doesn't have to be this way". The possibility of another way is discovered as we walk in the footsteps of the one who carried his cross to Golgotha. And it begins with surprise, wonder and joy at the birth of a baby amongst beasts. Advent is a season in which Christians are to wait, to pray, to hope: it doesn't have to be this way.

Perplexed but not in despair: Christian pessimism

"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair" - 2 Corinthians 4.8.

This is a verse I have often reflected upon, and it seems to me to justify a certain kind of Christian pessimism. Paul is no triumphalist; he makes no claim that the Christian life will consist of steady improvement or sudden perfection. Affliction, difficulty, confusion, grief, yearning, lament, dissatisfaction, weakness, dying: these all belong to the normal Christian experience. Faith in Christ is not a miracle cure for all of life's ills. In fact, it is what enables one to let go of all such delusions as the inevitability of progress or the impossibility of failure, to embrace one's finitude and acknowledge one's fallenness and the brokenness of the whole created order without being crushed by fear or guilt in the process.

Of course, such pessimism is not the whole story, but it is a very important part. Without it, faith is shallow, or simply in denial. Unless we are willing to lose all our false hopes, then real hope is obscured and diluted. Christian faith means the courage to face the truth about ourselves and our inability to secure the results we most earnestly desire.

Karl Rahner offers these thoughts under the heading of "Christian pessimism" as a reflection on 2 Corinthians 4.8.

“Our existence is one of radical perplexity. We have neither the right nor the possibility to ignore this situation or to believe that we can abolish it in any dimension of our experience. I need not point out, or bemoan in detail, the daily experiences that make us perplexed.

“In the beginning of Scripture God tells us that we must rule over nature and her powers. When we do it we start misusing them. We invent all kinds of social systems, and every one of them turns without fail into an occasion of injustice and abuse of power. We claim that we are looking for peace among all peoples, and we get ready for war in order to find peace. The whole of human history is a perpetual swinging back and forth between individualism and collectivism, and humanity has never succeeded in discovering a permanent and universally acceptable compromise between these basic demands of human nature.

“What matters here however is to understand that, for a Christian anthropology, this perplexity in human existence is not merely a transitory stage that, with patience and creative imagination, might eventually be removed from human existence. It is a permanent existential of humanity in history and, although it keeps assuming new forms, it can never be wholly overcome in history. This is an essential feature of a Christian pessimism. It does not matter here whether we explain this pessimism through the fact that we are creatures, and finite creatures at that, or through an appeal to original sin, or by making our ineradicable sinfulness an argument for pessimism.

“Of course, we cannot say that human finitude and historicity alone explain the fact that history cannot follow its course without friction and without blind alleys. Nor can this Christian pessimism be justified merely by the fact that it is impossible fully to harmonize all human knowledge with its many disparate sources, or to build a fully harmonious praxis on the basis of such disparate knowledge. We might also mention that we can never fully understand the meaning of suffering and death. Yet in spite of all this, the Christian interpretation of human existence says that within history, it is never possible wholly and definitively to overcome the riddles of human existence and history, which we experience so clearly and so painfully. Such a hope is excluded by the Christian conviction that we arrive at God’s definitive realm only by passing through death, which itself is the ultimate and all-embracing enigma of human existence. It is true that Christian hope has the right and the duty to project, in the empirical space of our human existence, an image and a promise of a definitive existence. But ultimately this is only the manner in which we practice faith in the consummation that God alone gives, that God’s self is.

“People are afraid of this pessimism. They do not accept it. They repress it. That is why it is the first task of Christian preaching to speak up for it.”

- Karl Rahner, "Christian Pessimism" in Theological Investigations XXII
(trans. Joseph Donceel; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1991), 156-57.

Palingenesia and futility

I have usually arranged my eschatological thought under three headings: (i) the return of Christ, (ii) the resurrection of the dead, and (iii) the last judgement. However, I'm becoming more convinced that there is a fourth heading: (iv) the renewal of all things, or palingenesia (Matt 19.28). I used to consider this as a sub-point under resurrection (since the revelation of the children of God is the condition for the creation's own liberation in Rom 8), or perhaps as a consequence of the judgement in which that which is evil is finally repudiated and brought to an end, while that which is good is affirmed and released and revealed and vindicated. But illustrating intersecting themes does not itself justify their conflation.

Corresponding to this hope for universal restoration is a fourth fundamental aspect of our present situation. Not only is (i) divine presence hidden or absent, not only do (ii) all the living die, not only does (iii) evil infect every good thing, but (iv) the entire created order is subject to futility. In each case, the solution is found in the inbreaking of the kingdom of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and in his pouring out his Spirit upon all flesh. The solution is Christ and the Spirit: (i) God with us, (ii) new life to the dying, (iii) forgiveness and vindication - and (iv) liberation. These have each begun, but the problems remain until the end. This is often called 'inaugurated eschatology'. Neither side of this dialectic can be safely neglected. The kingdom is geniunely at hand, but not yet established beyond dispute. It appears as the mustard seed, the field shot through with weeds (seedy and weedy): holding out the promise of great things and purity, but presently small and ambiguous.

So 'now and not yet': perhaps nothing particularly new here. But my point is that futility must also be placed within this dynamic. Christians too continue to find life frustrating and thwarted. The good gifts of the earth are filled with - vanity. Even as we give thanks for them we groan and yearn for what they are yet to be (just as we give thanks for health even as we waste away, just as we give thanks for forgiveness even as find ourselves once again sinning, just as we grasp the promise of Emmanuel in Word and Spirit even as we await the coming of God). Without this, Christian interaction with our physical context becomes either a gnostic hostily (in both active and apathetic varieties) or a triumphalist presumption. The former is found in endless world denying dualisms that justify the marginalisation of environmental considerations; the latter in prosperity gospels (found in both pentecostal and bourgeois comfortably complacent varieties). Admitting futility doesn't come easily.

Biblically, this theme, apparent in the 'thorns and thistles' of Genesis 3, is also evident in the life of Cain, marked as a wanderer (as suggested by Andrew Shead in a sermon today). Futility and exile belong together. For the rootless existence of the wanderer is also fruitless. It is the child of Cain who first builds a city, an attempt at civilisation, at a lasting legacy. But the mark that lasts is the one that God inscribed upon Cain. The very soil recoils from his touch. Adam, taken from the ground, given to it as its servant (Gen 2.15), begets a son to whom the ground no longer yields. The ground cries out with his brother's blood. This chthonic cry remains (Heb 12.24); the earth groans at being thwarted (Rom 8.18ff).

But the blood of Christ speaks a better word, a word of hope for spilled blood, untilled earth, fruitless labour.

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.

- Friedrich Nieztsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue §3