Tag Archives: eschatology

Postmodernism, Morality…and Eschatology?

by on September 15, 2011

Recently I’ve been reading McIntyre (and if you haven’t, read After Virtue as it should be on a very short list of must reads) and discussing it at Geek Squad each week.  (As an aside, Geek Squad is exactly what it sounds like–a group of self-admitted geeks sitting around talking about things we realize make most others roll their eyes and/or yawn.  It’s our space to debate the small print as loudly and for as long as we want.)  It’s been a while since I’ve kicked philosophy around in my head, so I’m processing slowly and trying to remove the cobwebs off of all those names and books I used to remember.  What I do remember is that I felt After Virtue was a great conversation partner in the work of  ecclesiology, though McIntyre certainly didn’t intend to write a book about the purpose of the church.  As it turns out, the content and conversation is just as applicable and timely now as it was years ago.   A friend of mine referenced this New York Times op-ed piece by David Brooks about relativism and extreme individualism, and Brooks may as well have been recording part of our discussion last Thursday at the pub.

Basically, we were discussing our growing inability to think ethically or morally about issues.  I’m not even asking for us to agree on the issues, although that would be a welcome relief from time to time.  I’m just asking for the ability to discuss the concept of morality as a thing itself.  The notion of the virtuous life, however defined, is simply not something people talk about much anymore–at least not well.  I should clarify:  People talk plenty about “values” but in such a way that values are nothing more than commodities, like cans you pick off the shelf, with everyone’s basket looking a little different.  Values are not items.  They are not individually chosen.  They are not self-selected a la carte menu items you put together on a whim.  To stretch the metaphor, to attempt a virtuous life with such an approach is like trying to eat food without a plate.  Something has to hold those values, and they have to be held in concert with other values so as to create an actual meal that will sustain you and help you grow.  I find myself nodding my head vigorously (again) with McIntyre’s assessment that virtue is impossible to create when a society is based solely or even primarily upon the feeling of the individual.

On a slightly tangential note, I feel the need to argue, for the record, that the kind of flippant “Who am I to judge?” attitude evidenced by the young people in Brooks’ article is the laziest and sloppiest form of postmodern philosophy one could ever attempt to create.  I’m sure people will read that article and say, “See, that’s what we’ve been saying all along, that postmodernism will lead us to this kind of wishy-washy culture where no one knows right from wrong.”  Whether it does that or not is moot; Enlightenment rationality shattered the dinner plate of virtue way before Derrida came along.  So please don’t equate sloppy thinking with the postmodern critique.  ”Who am I to judge?” has as much to do with stress and overload in a rapidly diversifying culture without sufficient tools to help us cope with this new world as it does an adherence to moral relativism.

McIntyre’s argument is that societies based on extreme individualism and emotivism are severely broken. They are incapable of virtue, because they hold no framework.  Without a recognized and shared end-goal, virtue becomes canned values, stale and without nutrients.  And nobody cares whether they stick around or go, because they do absolutely nothing for the palate, or for the meal itself.

This is how a discussion of virtue ended up in my reaffirmation of the importance of eschatology.  When moral inquiry lacks an end-goal, there is no food but limp green beans…splattered on the floor, plate-less, no less.  What kind of eschatology is another matter for another day, but without a recognition of who-I-am-now contrasted with who-I-ought-to-be, without a shared and cohesive sense of where we all should be headed and where we all are trying to go, virtue is sure to wind up on the endangered species list.

I can only imagine this teleological discussion will come up often this year, as it seems the tensions  between those who want to make theology and those who want to keep dismantling it continues to rise.

So here are the questions I’m pondering these days:  what do we do to enliven an American framework of virtue?  (CAN we? The task itself is quite problematic…which virtue???  But the alternative–not having a framework of virtue, even civil virtue–will likely be our end.)  In what ways is the C/church called to embody a virtuous framework of shared life? CAN we?

 

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Reclaiming Christian Eschatology

by on May 23, 2011

Sunrise Over Frenchman Bay

Oh, dear.  What a week we had.  Between the CDC posting an article about preparing for the zombie apocalypse to the dire (and false) predictions of Harold Camper, it seems everyone became fixated on discussions about the end of the world.  But have no fear.  It’s Moltmann Monday, and I didn’t have to get further than the preface of The Coming of God:  Christian Eschatology to find some sane words to soothe your Armageddon-battered minds.  If you haven’t read the book in its entirety, I’d highly suggest it.  (Honestly, already worth your time in the preface!)  I happen to believe that reclaiming a rightful Christian eschatology is one of our biggest and most important tasks.

Eschatology is always thought to deal with the end, the last day, the last word, the last act: God has the last word. But if eschatology were that and only that, it would be better to turn one’s back on it altogether; for ‘the last things’ spoi one’s taste for the penulitmate ones, and the dreamed of, or hoped for, end of history robs us of our freedom among history’s many possibilities, and our tolerance for all the things in history that are unfinished and provisional. We can no longer put up with earthly, limited and vulnerable life, and in our eschatological finality we destroy life’s fragile beauty. The person who presses forward to the end of life misses life itself. If eschatology were no more than religion’s ‘final solution’ to all the questions, a solution allowing it to have the last word, it would undoubtedly be a particularly unpleasant form of theological dogmatism, if not pyschological terrorism. And it has in fact been used in just this way by a number of apocalyptic arm-twisters among our contemporaries.

But Christian eschatology has nothing to do with apocalyptic ‘final solutions’ of this kind, for its subject is not ‘the end’ at all. On the contrary, what it is about is the new creation of all things. Christian eschatology is the remembered hope of the raising of the crucified Christ, so it talks about beginning afresh in the deadly end. ‘The end of Christ–after all that was his true beginning,’ said Ernst Bloch. Christian eschatology follows this Christological pattern in all its personal, historical and cosmic dimensions: in the end is the beginning.

 

Sigh.  See?  All better.

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Top 5 Reasons I Love Moltmann: Part Two

by on August 25, 2009

Reason 2: He rescued eschatology from irrelevance.

It’s not easy to talk about the end of the world. Jesus followers have been debating and discussing these matters for over two thousand years with a wide variation of answers. To put these diverse views on a scale, we can say there are two polarizing dangers: One, we can focus so much on what’s coming that we trivialize the present. (You’ve heard that phrase that some people are “of such heavenly mind they’re no earthly good.”) Two, we can focus so little on what’s coming that we trivialize the future.

In the modern period of Enlightenment, eschatology (the study of the ‘last things’) fell upon especially hard times. Theologians argued that no rational thinking person could have faith in a religion based on some superstitious view of what God will do in the future. Rudolf Bultmann famously embodied this understanding when he recast eschatology as something inherently personal and exclusively individualist; eschatology is the event of our own sense of judgment. Others chose to make eschatology a caricature of itself- one with charts and fatalistic predictions. Many of us understandably look at these options and consider giving up on eschatology entirely. The problem, of course, is that Judeo-Christian faith is by very definition an eschatological faith. And it is corporately, and even cosmically so.

Into this overly individualistic, self-indulgent, rational-overdrive environment, Moltmann birthed a theology of hope. He refused to say that eschatology didn’t matter. In fact, he did the opposite. When all other theologians began with creation and (much like their treatment of the Spirit) ended with a few vague paragraphs about eschatology, Moltmann exploded onto the scene by writing his first major theological work through the lens of eschatological hope. He writes, “The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day” (Theology of Hope, p.16).

What of superstition? Moltmann says our question is not “What can I know of historical facts?” but “What may I hope for?” There is a questionableness to all history and all human existence, and our task is to trust in the promise of God, which is above all a promise of redemption.

What of heavenly preoccupation? Moltmann says that a Jesus follower “does not find himself ‘in the air’, ‘between God and the world’, but he finds himself along with the world in that process to which the way is opened by the eschatological promise of Christ” (p.69 TOH).

Thank you, Professor, for showing us the third way between eschatological irrelevance and eschatological hyper-vigilance…and for showing us that redemptive, transformative hope is breathtakingly beautiful.

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Judgment and Reconciliation

by on August 10, 2009

At our weekly Moltmann reading group we’ve been having a lot of discussions about judgment- specifically, what does God’s judgment look like and what is it for? This is an understandable talking point for those who are reading “A Theology of Hope” for the first time, because Moltmann’s view of judgment is quite different than what has become standard for many evangelical Christians. Without getting into all the details (too early on a Monday morning), it can be quite simply summarized in this one question: do you believe God’s goal is judgment or reconciliation? Or, even more broadly stated, is the God revealed to us through Abraham and Sarah, through the law and the prophets, through the crucified and resurrected Jesus a God of judgment or a God of reconciliation?

As you consider that question, it may be helpful to remember that reconciliation does not eliminate judgment. (We tend to keep going over that point, because many take these two to be either-or propositions.) Reconciliation by its definition requires honesty in judging whether one’s actions and intentions are right, good, just, pure, loving, gracious. Reconciliation requires us to confront those people who have done us harm. But the GOAL of that kind of judgment is not the punishment itself but the reconciliation of a relationship that has gone astray.

Last night at Journey we had a wonderful conversation on Matthew 5:21-26. These are the verses in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus talks about our command to be the kind of people who do not resort to violence, who do not spew our own anger onto others, who do not insult others and call them fools. Our command is not to be judging people but reconciling people. If you have something against another, Jesus says, don’t think you can come to the altar and offer a sacrifice and get off the hook just because you made nice with God. Go seek out the person, confront them, work it out as best you can. If you are to be my people, then you’re going to have to do the hard work of being a reconciling people.

We tend instead to be conflict-avoidant people, passive-aggressive people, forget-it-and-move-on-but-still-harbor-resentment people. Sometimes, we decide to be shove-it-in-their-face-until-they-weep people. Jesus tells us we won’t get out of that prison of anger until we’ve paid the last penny. And it’s going to be a costly kind of life choice.

To he God’s people, the way I understand it, is to be people who work always toward reconciliation. It may not happen overnight, we may not have control over the actions of others, it may not work out like an episode of Growing Pains. But we follow the God who, as 2 Corinthians 5:18 says, has reconciled us to Godself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That’s our job description in the world, or at least a big part of it- we are to be the reconciling people.

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All in All: A Poem

by on August 6, 2009

My friend Troy sent me this poem today. It’s very fitting, as our Journey Moltmann Group has been having nonstop conversations about the idea of God being all in all, which Moltmann believes is THE promise through which all other promises will be fulfilled. I’ll blog more about this later, but for now, the poem…

All in All

In this way, (and note) accordingly,
we might suppose that at the someday
consummation—what I would call
the promised restoration of all things—
those who make their gradual advance,
as well as those ascending
will step surprised into that land, into
the healing action of its elements.
Here, each will be prepared for all
immense occassions to which
nothing futher can be added.
And here, the King of all, Himself,
will school each blinking creature
in this the holy enterprise, instructing
all and reigning in them ’til He has
led them wholly to the Father—who
you’ll find has joined all things to Himself
—that is, until they are made capable
of receiving God, so that the God
may ever be to them The All in All.

-Origen of Alexandra (translation by Scott Cairns, Paraclete 2007)

Stepping surprisingly into a land and into the healing action of its elements? God schooling each blinking creature into the holy enterprise of promised restoration? Breathtaking, dear Origen. Just breathtaking.

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