Entering the Millennium on Christian Time
Carol Zaleski
"Are we there yet?" my son Andy
cries just as we are pulling out of the driveway.
"Are we there yet?" when we drive
up to the McDonald's take-away window. "Are
we there yet?" when we stop at a traffic
light. No, not yet. Unable to grasp any estimate
I might give him (is an hour short? is a
day long?), he fusses, then falls asleep,
only to wake up surprised upon our arrival.
"Is it morning yet?" I hear Andy
call out from his bedroom. I check the clock:
3:00 a.m. "No," I say, "it's
still sleep time." He takes my word
for it and goes back to sleep. Are we there
yet? I have to admit that, whether for want
of imagination or want of nerve, I have always
had some difficulty with the doctrine of
the Second Coming. When the "four last
things" (death, judgment, hell, and
heaven) are proposed for meditation, my tendency
is to focus on personal eschatology: What
happens when we die? What can we hope? Where
are the dead? Can the dead on whom God's
mercy rests have a share in the "life
of the world to come"?
Some biblical scholars and theologians have
argued that the idea of personal immortality
was smuggled into Jewish and Christian thought
from Greek philosophy, that it is incompatible
with biblical realism about death (our name
Adam, after all, means "dust"),
and that it renders superfluous the promise
of resurrection. Yet social surveys show
that the vast majority of Americans believe
and hope that their own dead kin and friends
live on, fully conscious and alive, in a
heavenly realm. The bestseller status of
books on near-death experience attests to
a widespread preoccupation with the afterlife,
undeterred by critics who argue that it is
a symptom of a narcissistic culture that
prefers eternal longevity to eternal life,
expects reward without judgment, and dreams
of heaven without taking thought for hell.
What is the proper theological and pastoral
response to this striking divergence of views?
Surely not to suppress belief in immortality
? there are enough forces already working
to destroy hope. More fruitful would be to
reclaim the full Christian teaching in which
belief in personal immortality is folded
into and dependent upon the proclamation
of Christ's sacrificial death, resurrection,
ascension, and parousia.
The religions of the world present us with
instructive analogues to Christian eschatology;
but if such analogies are pressed too far,
we may be left with misreadings of the distinctive
Christian hope. One thinks of the Bhagavad
Gita's searing vision of Krishna: "I
am the source of the universe, just as I
am its dissolution. . . . As an eon ends,
all creatures fold into my nature, Arjuna;
and I create them again as a new eon begins"
(The Bhagavad-Gita, tr. Barbara Stoler Miller
[New York: Bantam Books, 1986] 7: 6, 9:7).
There is no telos to the periodic destruction
of old and production of new eons, just as
there is no lasting fulfillment to be found
in the cycle of rebirth; the highest aspiration
is to follow a path of self-discipline and
devotion leading to union with the infinite
spirit, beyond all worlds and all times.
It is a profound and incomparable teaching;
but it is not the same as the Christian path,
which takes refuge in Christ and awaits his
final reign over the new heaven and new earth.
And there is much to unlearn in our habitual
ways of thinking about the tribulations that
are expected to precede Christ's reign. In
the popular imagination, Antichrist is another
name for Satan and the last battle has the
aspect of a superhero comic book. Here is
ample inducement to paranoia - which may
be the Antichrist's way of having a bit of
fun with us. Belief in the Antichrist is
safer deployed at a distance. Hitler and
Stalin surely were types of the Antichrist;
but who is to say whether the Antichrist
of the last days will be so obvious? In R.
H. Benson's novel The Lord of the World and
V. Solovyov's Short Story of the Antichrist
he is a bringer of universal peace.
In any case, the classical Christian view
is that we have been living in the end time
for the past two thousand years, the end
time Christ announced when he read from the
Torah at his synagogue in Nazareth, saying
of Isaiah's proclamation of the jubilee year
of the Lord's favor, "Today this scripture
has been fulfilled in your hearing"
(Luke 4:21). While recent interpreters of
the historical Jesus may quarrel over whether
he was a Cynic philosopher or an apocalyptic
prophet, classical Christianity settles for
neither of these partial views, making the
much more dramatic claim that Christ himself
is the Alpha of creation and the Omega of
end times. He taught wisdom like a Cynic
philosopher because he was Wisdom. He proclaimed
the imminent end of the saeculum because
it did in fact end with him when by his death
and resurrection he overcame the rule of
sin and death. As icons of the harrowing
of hell suggest, the general resurrection
is already in progress, the jaws of death
are broken, graves are being emptied, the
new heaven and new earth have already begun
to be realized.
If genuine Christianity consists, as Kierkegaard
says, in being "contemporaneous with
Christ," chronological location is beside
the point. We are in Andy's position: uncertain
whether it is morning or night, we have to
live on trust.
[copyright 2000 Christian Century Foundation.
Abridged from The Christian Century, 5-12
January.]
Zaleski article excerpted from:
http://www.tandtclark.co.uk/tp_journals/cfc_bulletin/index.html
Faith & Culture Bulletin 7, Easter 2000
Click HERE to see whole.
CENTRE FOR FAITH & CULTURE
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19 November, 2000