Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, ca. 1834, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art. Wikimedia Commons
The End of History Has Already Begun
SUMMARY
As noted, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all share the important conviction that history has a goal and direction. While the particulars may vary, this end of history entails the righting of wrongs, setting all things to rights.
A second step in configuring a Christianity that is “neither right nor left nor religious” is found precisely at the place where Christianity, Judaism, and Islam differ: Christianity proclaims that Jesus of Nazareth inaugurated the end of history for which Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all wait. Judaism and Islam reject this.
Consequently, we may better understand Christianity by calling it an interpretation of history instead of a religion. For Christians the resurrection of the crucified Christ is the central historical claim on which Christians stake their lives: it ushers in the end of history, vindicates the way of Christ, and inaugurates a new political possibility in the world. We are invited by the resurrected Christ to live according to the end of history already inaugurated, but not yet fully realized, not yet consummated.
The claims of this Christ are further vindicated by a community that lives by his ways—and yet this simultaneously poses a grave threat to Christianity, in that Christians, in their failures, may become the greatest threat to their own faith.
Central to Christian faith is an assertion that history is not one meaningless thing after another, is the notion that history has a direction and a goal, and that this goal is not located external to the creation and cosmos itself but is in fact a “new heaven and new earth,” a new reality. The prophets and poets, singers and songwriters have sought to find words and lyrics that may sustain such longing. Because this coming reality must be more than we can yet imagine in the particulars. Consequently, Christians sing songs and write poems and recite the words of the prophets of old.
Christians are not an exclusive club with regard to the conviction that history has a discernible direction. Many Americans and secularists, capitalists and communists, Muslims and Jews may have little disagreement with Christians about history having a goal and direction. (There are others, such as many ideologically oriented evolutionists, who do not believe that history has such a purpose, such a direction.)
But there is an important difference among these who share the conviction that history has a purpose; Christianity claims that the end of history has been inaugurated. This is a key distinction with other so-called historic religions such as Judaism or Islam: namely, the claim that the end of history has already begun. Christians believe that the glorious reign of God has already broken into human history, has been inaugurated.
This claim provides a fruitful interpretive lens through which to read the New Testament. Consider in this way the Gospel stories such as the healing of disease, the forgiveness of offenses, the reconciliation of enemies, the sharing of wealth, the learning of the ways of peace, the triumph of life over death. All these are but the end of history intruding upon the present. A child sick unto death taken up from her bed whole is but the firstfruits of the end of history. An agent of empire distributing his ill-gotten wealth to the poor is but an outpouring of the goal of history. A right-wing conservative and a leftist radical sitting at the same table sharing bread and wine together is but a foretaste of the reconciliation of all things.
Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, ca. 1834, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art. Wikimedia Commons
In the same way, this claim regarding the inauguration of the end of history provides a fruitful interpretive lens through which to read the apostle Paul. He seems at first glance to speak out of both sides of his mouth, speaking at one moment of salvation having already occurred and at other moments as if we wait for God’s salvation. But suddenly such doublespeak seems altogether plausible if we have at hand this lens of a kingdom inaugurated but not yet consummated.
So What? This: To Live Proleptically
So what is the importance of this emphasis on an inaugurated kingdom?
This: the inaugurated kingdom of God provides a proleptic political stance.
Proleptic is a grammatical term in which a future event is so sure to come, so sure to be the case, that it is spoken of in the present tense. As an illustration, when our boys were young, I was ready one morning to drive them to school. Standing in the kitchen with our ten-year-old second-born, David, I shouted up the stairs to his older brother, “Chandler, I’m in the car.” David quietly replied, “No you’re not Dad. You’re standing in the kitchen.”
“David,” I replied impatiently, “that was a proleptic statement. It was a proleptic statement.”
So sure of what was to come, even if still in the future, I spoke of it in the present tense. This is the proleptic voice. It is one way of describing the vocation of the Christian church in the world. It is the key to Christian ethics and indeed the key to understanding much of the New Testament text itself. Christian discipleship calls us to a proleptic stance in which we embody and bear witness to the world that is coming. We labor now, plowing and sowing and watering and reaping the varied firstfruits of that still-coming kingdom.
The coming kingdom entails a shared abundance and unencumbered generosity; thus we practice generosity and hospitality even now, in the present. The coming kingdom entails the unlearning of war; thus we learn the councils of peace now. The coming kingdom entails the righting of all wrongs by truth telling and suffering love; thus we tell the truth, practice suffering love, and right wrongs now.
In contrast, political realism assumes that the brokenness of the world is most real. The political realist insists that interests must always be balanced by counterinterests, and coercive power must always be checked by countercoercive power, and when “necessary,” that threats be checked by the threat of or actual employment of violence.
But the gospel claim—that the kingdom of God has been inaugurated—redefines reality. It redefines what is most real.
What is most real is not the scheming of tyrants or the lies of those in power. What is most real is not that might makes right or that greatness is defined by the size of one’s arsenal. What is most real, we Christians claim, is the power of God revealed in one who suffers in love and trusts that right has been made right not through might but through mercy, repentance, and resurrection.
This new reality fundamentally reorders the ways of life and death, politics and power. The significance of this claim is hard to overstate. It makes all the difference in whether we Christians do, in fact, understand our own faith.
In the days of the rise of the Third Reich, many Christians were celebrating the rise of Hitler and his conservative family values. Knowing that a great evil had come upon the land and sensing the need to train pastors in such a way that they could withstand the onslaught of Nazi propaganda and its threat to Christianity in Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer convened an illegal seminary in Finkenwalde.
One of Bonhoeffer’s underground seminary students later reported, “Twice [Bonhoeffer] quoted to them the words: ‘One man asks: What is to come? The other: What is right? And that,’ ” said Bonhoeffer, “ ‘is the difference between the free man and the slave.’ ”1
Christianity is no slave religion. It is a politic of authentic freedom grounded in the confidence that even death itself has been overcome and that we may, even now, live in proleptic anticipation of its consummate triumph.
The Resurrection of the Dead
Christianity proclaims that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, was raised bodily from the dead. Moreover, we proclaim that Easter shall become a universal historical event.
The resurrection of Jesus is not a merely religious claim. The resurrection of Jesus is an inherently political claim. To say that the dead shall be resurrected is not a claim about “going to heaven.” It is a claim, first and foremost, that the kingdom of God has been inaugurated and that the imperialist arrogance that humiliated and tortured the Son has been overcome such that the ways of the Son are honored in glorious vindication.
The resurrection is a twofold political statement made by the Creator of all things:
Behold the triumph of life over all the powers of death!
Behold the manner and means of the triumph!
And behold this man upon the cross, whom the power brokers humiliated and the pious dismissed! Behold this man who loved even unto death and forgave even those who despitefully used him, who prayed for those who persecuted him! Behold this man who called the weary and heavy-laden, who welcomed children and honored the prostitute, who dined with the poor and despised the imperialists and the mighty, the tax collectors and the patriots, calling all to the goodness and freedom and brilliance of the new order of the ages, which has come among you! Though we despised him, mocked him, beat him, killed him, no grave can hold down either his body or his beauty! Behold this man raised from the dead! The long-awaited end of human history has come upon us, has broken into our very midst! See and believe and receive the glorious goal of history into our midst. Know the truth and be free with liberty glorious in its delights, and possibilities, and abundance.
Justin Martyr, as noted in the discussion of proposition 1, castigated those Christians who say that our souls, when we die, are taken off to heaven. These “say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven.” It is these whom Justin calls “godless, impious heretics” and insists that we ought “not imagine that they are Christians.” “I and others, who are right-minded Christians on all points,” he goes on, “are assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead.”2
To reduce Christianity to an afterlife religion, to reduce it to some spiritual escape from real life and history, this was to pervert Christianity and fundamentally misconstrue it. The doctrine of resurrection is a claim that the “end of history” has been inaugurated. Just as a presidential inauguration begins a new administration, just as the Revolutionary War inaugurated the political entity called the United States, and just as a commencement ceremony launches a graduate into a new season of life, so the resurrection of Christ inaugurates the triumph of all the forces of life and justice and goodness over the fallen forces of death and oppression and slavery.
To sum up then: Christianity is foremost a claim that the end of history has been inaugurated. And this historical claim entails a call to pledge allegiance to this new politic that has broken into human history. Christianity is, in other words, not so much a religion as it is an interpretation of history. Christianity is a claim regarding the meaning of history: that the direction and the end of history are all revealed in the suffering love of Christ, which has triumphed over all that which seeks to subvert the goodness of God.
But we must be careful to note that the gospel is not merely an interpretation of history, not merely an academic or pedantic assertion about how to interpret the unfolding of historical data. It is an interpretation that carries with it a new power and is thus itself a history-making force set loose in the world.3
The Evidence?
Obviously, these are contentious claims.
However, the sort of interpretation of Christianity advocated here becomes testable in at least some facets by empirical data. It becomes subject to pragmatic review and practical critique.
Take for example those early Jewish and pagan critics of Christianity who rejected Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus could not be the Messiah, they insisted, because human history still exhibited a long sorry trail of grief. “Your own prophets,” they said in effect, “insist that when Messiah comes the nations will learn war no more. And look, you dumb fools, the nations continue to wage war. The most elementary observations lead us therefore to reject Jesus as Messiah.”
The critics raised, in other words, what we might call an evidentiary problem. Here they were not asking for evidence of a body raised from the dead centuries earlier. They were asking for evidence in the unfolding narrative of human history that legitimated the Christians’ historical and political claims. You claim Jesus is the Messiah to bring peace to the world? Where is this peace? Do you not see the war making and hostility that continue to pervade human history?
Numerous of the early church fathers responded, in effect, this way: “You are wrong. Jesus is the Messiah. The evidence? This: we the people of God who claim Jesus as Messiah, comprising people of every tribe, tongue, and land, once made war with one another and lived in hostility one with the other. We now have put away war and embody in our common life the peace of God. We share our lives and possessions; we forgive offenses and bear one another’s burdens; we celebrate and honor the life of the marginalized and the poor and the outcast; and we live in a freedom which otherwise makes no sense.”4
For these early Christians the political and historical shape of their common life was central to the claim that Jesus is Lord. Their apologetic, their defense of the claim that Jesus is Lord, was grounded in their new political way of being in the world.
While such an apologetic may be compelling, this sword may cut in two directions. If the Christian way of life can be employed to argue for the claim that Jesus is the Messiah, then failures of the Christian church can be employed to reject the claim of Jesus as Messiah. Contemporary critics may say to Christians in the West what critics said to early Christians two millennia ago: based on your own texts, Jesus could not be the Messiah, for we live in days still riddled with violence and hostility and patriarchy, the gap between wealth and poor growing at an inconceivable rate, the mighty accumulating weapons inconceivable in days gone by.
Such a critique may indeed be devastating to the contemporary Christian church. By and large, the Christian church in the West in the early twenty-first century cannot reply as did the second- and third-century church. More, our cultured and educated despisers may say to us: Look! Not only are our days violent and hostile, but it is the Christians who propagate and prop up and celebrate such militancy, such hostile nationalism, such imperialist might!
It is a sad state of affairs. Insufficient data may be found among Christians to confirm that Christianity is true, and consequently we Christians may be among the primary players responsible for the rapid rejection of Christian faith in the West, not the secularists, not the liberals, not the conservatives, not the Americans, not the communists. “Judgment must begin with the household of God.”
How have we found ourselves in this mess? One plausible interpretation runs this way:
It is not the final step of these four that is a dangerous rejection of Christianity. Instead, each successive step gives up something inherent to the historic Christian faith, and with each successive step we give up the basics of elementary Christian orthodoxy.
But it would be grossly unfair—on either the part of the cultured despisers of Christianity or on the part of the internal critics of Christianity—to fail to note the marked exceptions. There remain sparks of light enkindling our faith: the mothers in Charleston who in the midst of their grief spoke reconciliation to the murderer who had invaded their church; William Wilberforce, who exhausted his life in Parliament in the quest to abolish slavery in the United Kingdom; Nelson Mandela, who found that his own unjust suffering gave rise to an immense power of reconciliation and capacity to work for justice. And many, many more.
One more complicating factor to note on the evidentiary problem before we conclude proposition 2: the end of the story has not yet come. To claim that a new movement has been inaugurated in human history and thus to look for evidence for such an inauguration is an altogether legitimate matter. But to note that we are still in the midst of the story means there remain a vast number of possibilities as to where this story shall go before it reaches the end. We know full well that epic sagas have many dark days, some so dark that we cannot envision how any satisfying end may result. And we know full well that the work of God is often like leaven in bread, like seed sown in a field, and we may not be able to see all the work that is going on in the secret recesses of human culture and history.
And just as we cannot judge a book by its cover, we also cannot judge well a book without reading all the way to the end. In the same way, we cannot fully judge well any interpretation of human history that purports to know where it is headed—at least we cannot judge well any such interpretation—until history itself will vindicate or vanquish the interpreter. And all this is to say that to live proleptically is a risky affair. (So the Old Testament, for example, commends us to judge those prophets who make future predictions this way: Did things turn out the way the self-proclaimed prophet prophesied? If so, then you have a true prophet. If not, then you have a false prophet.)
While living proleptically is a truly risky affair for us would-be Christians, this does not mean that there are others who have somehow found a nonrisky manner of living. All who live by the conviction that they know where history is headed—whether they be American patriots, ideological capitalists, devoted communists, pious Jews, or the most committed secularist lover of progress—are taking a risk, based on their interpretation of history. In other words, this is a practical problem for everyone who lives by any notion of hope, progress, or longing. The risk entailed in living with the conviction that history matters, that there is a purposeful end of history, is no small matter. We may be wrong.
So, to live by the claim that history has a direction is a risky affair. And to live by the further claim that the end of history has been inaugurated in the suffering love and resurrection of Christ is risky yet again. To live by faith, to live proleptically, entails risking that resurrection and life have broken into human history, captivity taken captive by this man upon the cross, and that we are thus free to live accordingly, by love and mercy and graciousness ourselves.
It is risky not to do so, too.
But in any case, to depict Christianity as a risky political claim begins our task of staking out, in bold terms, the potential threat—and immense service—which Christian faith poses, when rightly understood and practiced, to even the most American of dreams.
1. Cited in Mark Devine, Bonhoeffer Speaks Today: Following Jesus at All Costs (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 48.
2. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 80, Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (1885; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996).
3. Cf. William Stringfellow, A Private and Public Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962), 62.
4. See the discussion in John Driver, How Christians Made Peace with War (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1988), chap. 1. I discuss this at more length in Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008), chap. 11.