1. SCRIPTURE – KEY TO THE FUTURE

Chapter 3  A Theology of Good News

3.1 The crsytalised expression of the gospel

The essence of the apostolic witness to the world is captured and re-iterated with every liturgical Eucharist in the form of the acclamation following the words of institution. Variously expressed in different liturgical forms, the acclamation proclaims:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

As Archbishop Rowan Williams has stated, in one sense this is the totality of what the church is required to proclaim to the world and, when it is proclaimed, the church fulfils its function. What the world does with that message is then up to the world.

It is good to have this stated so clearly because the Christian community so frequently tortures itself with a sense that it must somehow be responsible for whether or not the world hears and responds to the message and so it goes into all kinds of contortions trying to make the message ‘understandable’ or acceptable to the culture of the world. So often in that process the church succeeds only in obscuring, even denying, its message.

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3.2 Understanding our message

This three-fold proclamation is, therefore, the bedrock of the apostolic community and the apostolic testimony. Nevertheless, the church itself needs to understand within its own life, experience and theology what it is about the testimony that makes it good news. We are not just a parrot community saying words the meaning of which we have no idea. Nor are we simply a message service, having no life connection to the message we carry or responsibility for its content. We are, in fact, the message much more than in the words we say, the ultimate expression of McLuhan’s, ‘the medium is the message’. Our words, however clearly articulated, have absolutely no meaning unless they integrate with the life lived by the body of those who say them. The theology we communicate to the world is in who we are, not primarily in what we say.

How then does this three-fold expression of our message find expression in our life as church?

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3.2.1 'Christ has died'

The Christian life and message is anchored in history, in a faith-destroying event, an event that expressed utter weakness and failure and an event that expressed commitment to love that did not fail even in the face of the most terrible way to die. What fundamentally distinguishes the Hebrew/Christian tradition from every other claim to religious authenticity is this rootedness in a crucial, faith-annihilating event. At the same time, the event of Jesus transcends infinitely the event that generated the Hebrew community by reason, first, of the nature of the person whose life was extinguished and, arising from that nature, the quality of the love that was never compromised in the face of the death.  It is ‘Christ’ who died; the death was an event of cosmic, eternal significance. Yet the event appeared to express exactly the opposite: that the divine and eternal was powerless, useless and inconsequential. This ‘cosmic’ event took place in the utter obscurity of a backwater nation, unnoticed by the empire except for a few local officials and even for them forgotten next day.

This, however, is precisely why this part of the message is so powerful and is experienced as good news. As Paul expressed to the Corinthians, few in the Christian community are powerful, influential and belong to the A-list. As a whole, the church is generally weak and seemingly powerless, even irrelevant. It is the constant encouragement for the Christian that this reality matches the incarnate reality of the Christ. The power inherent in the Christian life is a ‘hidden’ power, not manifest in the ways secular power demands. Furthermore, it charges every event, even the mos apparently insignificant, with eternal meaning and significance.

Above all, though, the message, rooted in physical history, expresses that the life of grace is lived out within the physical sphere of life that is the locus of eternal life, not some ‘preparation’ for another life. It is what happens in the here and now that is important, not the ‘hereafter’, whatever that might be.

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3.2.2 'Christ is risen'

The tense of this part of the formula is important. The essence of the message is not to some past event but to the present life. This has become even more significant today because it would be very difficult for us any longer to say ‘Christ has risen’ as if what we are testifying to is the literal truth of the empty tomb. If ‘Christ has died’ anchors the proclamation into a sure sense of historical rootedness, this cannot any longer be said with any confidence of the resurrection as an event on the plane of history. That, however, is not the apostolic witness of the Christian community. When sections of the Christian community generate argument and controversy around this issue they only serve to obscure the witness and distract the community from its mission.

What the Christian church witnesses to is that it emerged from the faith-destroying experience of Jesus’ death with a new and transformed faith and community life and that this transformative power has been and is continually experienced by the ongoing community, and is experienced as the continued life of Jesus in our midst. The ‘resurrection’ is a present reality in the Christian encounter with the world. This is directly and intimately connected with the day-by-day identification of our living reality in this physical life with the nature and experiences of the Christ who died. It is a day by day identification within living reality of a power that transforms death into life, defeat into victory, insignificance into significance, meaninglessness into meaning, bounded life into unbounded life, hate into love, loss into gain, war into peace, emptiness into abundance. This the Christian community in its daily life witnesses to in its living community and is encapsulated in its cry, ‘Christ is risen!’

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3.1.3 'Christ will come again'

For contemporary Christians, this part of the acclamation is the most problematic dimension of our message, of much greater difficulty than any issue surrounding the historical veracity of the resurrection.

It is important to look at these difficulties in the face. First, there is the long history of apocalyptic expectations, all of which, from Paul onwards, have come to nothing, leading to disillusionment and loss of faith. Pauline apocalyptic theology, incorporated into the synoptic gospels, was to cause a major headache and crisis in the first century church as it became clearly discredited.

The second level of difficulty has been created by our modern awareness of cultural awareness and our ability to trace, to a greater or lesser degree, how and where particular ideas arose. We can see how it happened that Christianity arose just at a time when, in Judaism, there was a surge of apocalyptic ideas. Of particular significance was that Paul belonged to a sect within Judaism saturated with apocalyptic ideas. It is quite possible that Paul mediated the whole influence of this strain of thought, projected back onto Jesus by Mark who was probably a disciple of Paul. The point is that we can identify the apocalyptic as a cultural fashion of the first century, not a necessary component of the gospel message.

The third difficulty is that one of the products of the modern mind is an awareness of the dynamics of the human community and in particular the techniques of persuasion. We have become aware of the dimensions of manipulation especially by the power elite, and the shameful history of religions – all religions – in the way they have used their command of these techniques of persuasion to gain and extend their power and wealth and worldly influence using unashamedly manipulative techniques to secure ‘spiritual’ ends. The apocalyptic has been at the heart of much exploitative Christian proselytising over the centuries and most particularly over the last century. It stands discredited before the tribunal of human integrity.

The final difficulty the apocalyptic faces in the modern world is that our sense of time, past and future, has expanded almost indefinitely. For us, the potential future of humanity and the Christian community can be put in terms not of a few years or even of a few thousand years, even a few million years but in hundreds of millions of years. Even if we insist that there will be a physical ‘return' of the Christ, there is no reason to say this event will not be delayed for a billion or ten billion years. This is not a mere quibble. It is a totally new way of approaching and understanding the human sphere not just scientifically but theologically, ethically and spiritually.  In this light, the kind of apocalyptic thinking that has been fashionable over the last generation is deeply and fundamentally anti-Christian.

So, in the face of all these difficulties, should the Christian community abandon this third section of its message? Not at all – but it does need a new understanding of what we are saying. This third section is the most important of all to the contemporary world. It speaks of hope and speaks of accountability and, in a very real sense, it joins the circle that started with the message of Jeremiah and brings the Hebrew prophets and the Hebrew experience into focus for us.

What this third part of the message says to us and through us to the world is, first that we are never without hope not just at the individual level but at a cosmic level. This world is only half understood if all that we understand is its physical science. That is only one stance before reality and, complete as it is in itself, is only one half of the picture. The other half is seen when we stand before reality as grace, a reality that is also fully complete in itself and just a fully real as the appreciation of the world through physical science. I shall be exploring this model of grasping reality more fully in the next book in this series, ‘Model Basics’. Suffice it to affirm here that it is part of the Christian experience and witness that reality can be appreciated as pure grace and, when so seen and experienced, every part of the universe, in every immediate detail, at every moment of time, is fully and completely governed by God. Therefore there can never be any time or circumstance in which hope is lost.

This is true for the individual experience ‘in the spirit’ and also for the community extending to the whole of humanity. We are living in a world in which there is a rising sense of despair about the future and this process is inevitably bound to accelerate exponentially as we confront the confluence of crises bearing down upon us. The power of the testimony of both bodies of scripture is that God acts transformationally upon crises that appear to annihilate us. In this sense, the testimony of the Book of Lamentations is one of the most powerful statements in the whole of the Hebrew Testament for it expresses in poetry of almost overwhelming power the shattering nature of the Hebrew core event, yet even within itself it struggled to affirm hope into the face of the bleakness and horror. When placed within the corpus of the whole Hebraic experience, which testifies to the new life and faith that arose from this very experience, it takes on tremendous power. When the apostolic community of the present affirms this third phrase of its message, it is declaring its total and complete faith in the power of God to transform the suffering that our world is undergoing and will undergo in its near future, a suffering that may even see it applying Lamentations as contemporary expression not just of the experience of a city but the entire world of global humanity.

It is not for us to try to predict of describe the how or the manner of this transformation, or into what kind of life and community the transformation will lead us. This much is one lesson we can draw from the two Testaments. The Hebrew reformers thought they could create a specific description of the fate of the transformed community and their idealism led to the ultimately fruitless and destructive pathway of the Law. Intertestamental Judaism, struggling with the evident failure of the way of Law, generated the expectation of a messiah as a political figure, expectations it projected onto Jesus. These expectations did not materialise, through the transformation he effected immeasurably surpassed those expectations. Paul projected, at least in the early years of his preaching, expectations of transformation that would happen through a cosmic ‘return’ and again the expectation proved false. Yet the hope in the future engendered by Christianity transformed human society beyond anything Paul could ever have imagined.

If now we try to project any kind of scenario as to how God will ‘save’ humanity and what the transformed humanity will be like, we shall be as wide of the mark as were the Hebrew idealists and the Jewish and Christian apocalyptics. It is enough simply to proclaim the message and live towards the future in unconquerable hope – a hope that will not die even if we live to read the words of Lamentation as descriptive of current global human experience.

The other aspect of this third statement of the message is of accountability. With the abandonment  of the literal notions of hellfire and damnation as the destiny of the wicked, there has been a corresponding loss in any sense that we will be held accountable for our actions. We see horrific evil done by people and done with apparent impunity and without conscience. We do not see them being brought to account in this life for their evil. On the contrary they are often rewarded, even hailed as saints by their supporters and followers.

Does evil go unpunished? As long as we can get away with our behaviour, is it true that there are no consequences for an individual or society that does ‘wrong’? Indeed, is there anything that is adjudged ‘wrong’ at all or is it a matter of purely subjective judgement for which no one can ever be held objectively accountable? The third affirmation states with unambiguous import that there is judgement upon evil and those who do evil. In the conditions of the way we live we can only affirm this into the face of all the evidence to the contrary, just as we affirm the transformation hope into the face of every circumstance that denies any such possibility of hope. We cannot know how that judgement will be worked out: only that it will be and is. What we can affirm, however, is that the judgement is not ‘confined’ to ‘heaven’: it is indeed expressed on earth. Take a person such as President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. On the surface he appears to succeed in his evil. Yet he will know that his deepest desire to be loved and honoured by his nation into the future beyond his death will not happen and that he will always be remembered by his people as a horror and a destroyer of life.

Even the vast accumulation of crises affecting the contemporary world, seen from a grace perspective, is an outworking of judgement. This is part of the power of the Hebrew prophetic testimony. Climate change, at least to the extent that it is human generated and to the extent that our human cultural response is preventing our successful adaptation to a natural cycle, is a direct product of our moral and intellectual failure not just of the last few years but in reality to the whole course that civilisation has taken over the past few thousand years.

As the Hebrew prophets detected this is much more than simply an issue of chickens coming home to roost. The crisis in Palestine in their day could be analysed in terms of political changes and the moral failure of the nations. What the prophets saw was ‘into’ the physical crisis and as the hand of Yahweh in judgement exercised not just in the consequences of human actions but also in the entire course of nature itself. In this perception, the Hebrews were called to a divine purpose in the context of the whole of humanity and they failed to respond to this calling. So in the Hebraic Testament there are many levels of accountability. This is the personal accountability, especially of the kings, elders, priests and prophets who failed to articulate the people’s calling and were morally and religiously corrupt. There was the accountability of the Hebrew people collectively and there was also the accountability of the forces that were then instrumental in the judgement but in doing so acted without justice. The prophetic message is focused on accountability, worked out in the political, economic and social sphere.

Once again, it is not productive to state how, why, or where the accountability occurs. The affirmation is that accountability occurs. This too is good news because the accountability is always, in the prophetic vision, ultimately creative and constructive and purposeful.  If our world is under judgement it is because grace is at work towards the creation of a transformed human community.

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