Where is God in the present crises facing the church and humanity? See my book…

I ended my last post agreeing in principle with Ian Paul that preachers need to take the historical dynamics of the biblical narrative seriously, but disagreeing over the scope of that contention. It is not history only insofar as it sets up the conditions for the existence and mission of the church that matters—the process by which grace is extended to gentiles, for example. It is history as a continuing lived experience that preachers need to address, the history in which we now live, and move, and have our being.

When Geoffrey B. Wilson says that the “only revelation from God which Christians still await is the revelation of Jesus Christ at his second coming,” he misreads the Bible in two important respects—both theologically and eschatologically. He reduces the dynamic God of biblical history to a universal, static, internalised, idealised deity; and he misses the profoundly realistic significance of the New Testament hope that Jesus would soon be seen coming with the clouds of heaven. See my book The Coming of the Son of Man: New Testament Eschatology for an Emerging Church (perhaps the term “emerging” is becoming useful again).

If history continues, which of course it does, then the God of history must continue to reveal himself in precisely the manner in which he reveals himself in the scriptures and in the wider literature of second temple Judaism—as a God with a purpose for his people and a mind for his reputation in the world under dramatically changing historical conditions.

So I venture to say that where God is in the current “polycrisis” of church and humanity is a fundamental theo-logical question—perhaps the fundamental God-question faced by the church today.

On the way out

In response to the slow but inexorable collapse of the Christian consensus in the West, the church withdrew into a private domain and took God with it. So we got very comfortable with Christianity as a religion of personal experience, rubbing against post-Christian society only in a few sensitive areas—apologetics, sexual ethics, not much else.

The more recent engagement of evangelical and charismatic churches in social action has been one attempt to break out of this confinement, and is a step in the right direction.

Most churches will now also express a desire to “welcome” LGBT+ people, even if we are unable to “affirm” their behaviour—less a step in the right direction, perhaps, than tripping over our own shoe laces.

But we are still a long way short of being able to articulate a more or less agreed, more or less coherent vision of where the living creator God is, what he is doing, what he is thinking, what he intends for his new creation, priestly people, as we enter a new age of global techno-humanism against the backdrop of a much larger catastrophic transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

Narrative and history

Why is that? We are a biblical people, and if there is one thing that we find in the Bible, it is that God is a slow but irresistible actor on the stage of human history. Jesus, above all, is an agent of the God of history—the judge of Israel, the ruler of nations.

The core biblical story runs from the calling of Abraham out of the shadow of the proto-empire which was Babel through to the fall of Babylon the great, which was pagan Rome. Along the way, it becomes a story about kingdom: the God who called Abraham would eventually be served by the peoples of the pagan empires that dominated Israel’s world. It’s what happened.

In the “Christian” telling of this story this eschaton or “end” was marvellously achieved through the radical faithfulness of Jesus. Because he did not seize at Satan’s offer of kingship but took a path of servanthood, humiliation, suffering, and death on a Roman cross, he was highly exalted and was eventually confessed as Lord by the nations of the Greek-Roman world, to the glory of the one living God of Israel (Phil. 2:6-11). In other words, he attained the divine kingship over the oikoumenē which Satan had dangled tantalisingly before him without bowing down to him (Lk. 4:5-8). See my book In the form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul.

Western Christendom is properly understood as the sustained, historical fulfilment or embodiment of this eschatological vision, but in that case, the collapse of western Christendom leaves us stranded beyond the reach of the core biblical story about the people of God. We are in the undifferentiated void of John’s thousand year period between the beginning of Christ’s rule over the nations and the final resolution, which will see a new heaven and a new earth.

Only, this protracted period has turned out not to be undifferentiated at all. History continues apace. Events happen on a biblical scale. Christendom came and went, and a new world has taken its place, entirely unforeseen by the prophets, both energised and terrorised by runaway technological success, by the breakdown of the old boundaries, by the chaotic quest for a new anthropology.

Where is God in all of this?

So where is God in all of this? What are the “signs of the times,” as my friend James asks?

We are taking a giant step into the unknown, and it may help to put some crude biblical guide rails in place.

The main biblical template or paradigm for making sense of massive historical change is a two-part divine judgment, a day of wrath, a day of the Lord, leading to a new or renewed state of affairs. The judgment unfolds in two phases typically because God first judges Israel, then judges the nations arrayed against Israel. Its scope is historical—unrighteous Israel, then the violent Chaldeans; the hypocritical first century Jew, then the idolatrous first century Greek. The righteous few among God’s people are saved from the mayhem and destruction (cf. Hab. 2:4; Rom. 1:17) and enter into the life of the age to come.

Does that paradigm work today?

1. We have to say, surely, that the church in the West has been chastened and marginalised—punished?—over the last two hundred years. The recent resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury over a safe-guarding failure is just the latest miserable entry in a long catalogue of transgressions, great and small.

If we read Romans, should we not identify, in the first place, with that obsolescent Judaism for which Paul the Jew has so much scorn, over which he expresses so much anguish—vessels of wrath prepared for destruction (Rom. 9:23)? See my book The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom.

2. Secular humanism is now little bothered by the vestigial presence of the church, but it is not difficult to cast it as the agent of chastening and marginalisation. At least, we can say that the active “deconstruction”—to use the voguish term—and passive disintegration of the church as social and intellectual institution has happened because more plausible and more powerful institutions have taken over our world.

3. But I think we can also say, with some confidence, that a new thing is emerging. There are signs that the church in the West is slowly and falteringly getting to grips with its diminished status and the need to reposition itself, to rebuild credibility and trust, to imagine new hopeful futures. Here are some developments that comes to mind, but please suggest others:

• The emergence of small, barely visible, grassroots communities acting in the name of Jesus.
• The decline of denominationalism as a sign of institutional re-formation, the corresponding emphasis on collaboration both within and across the borders of the church.
• The appeal of a quasi-monastic ethos and spirituality as means of undergirding and giving shape to a precarious “missional”—for want of a better word—existence.
• Renewed identification with those on the fringes of our bloated consumerist societies as a way of re-grounding the moral life of the church and as a mode of prophetic embodiment.
• The development of new and diverse economic models to sustain corporate life and mission.
• More talk of resilience than of revival.
• The reworking of the narrative framework for thought and theology. See my book Re: Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church, though it probably needs updating.
• The foregrounding of creation themes, displacing the characteristic preoccupations of Christendom-nationalist and personal-salvation theologies. In one important historical sense the kingdom of God is no longer with us; and the personal-salvation part needs to be subordinated to a larger “eschatological” or end-of-epoch agenda.
• A general interest in reconnecting the mythical Jesus of modern evangelical piety with the very different but much more relevant Jesus of history.
• A hesitant but largely constructive (I think) engagement with the challenges of affirming and living an eschatologically relevant anthropology. What do I mean by that? See my book End of Story? Same-Sex Relationships and the Narratives of Evangelical Mission.
• And while we are on that tricky subject, the church will have to find a way of making good sense and good use of the tension between theological conservatism and epochal adaptation. Is this bound to be divisive? Or can we find in the polarisation a developmental energy that will inspire and sustain a new vision?

OK, so that was all too dense and a bit abstruse, but something to work with hopefully.

4. On this basis, looking again to Paul’s argument in Romans, we may believe that out of the ruins of the old will emerge a new, dispersed, effective, corporate way of being that will constitute the benchmark of righteousness by which the living creator God will judge our civilisation at the turn of the ages. It may sound over-ambitious, even hubristic, but it’s a solidly biblical principle.

If the God of history is in this, then the re-formation of the church should tell us something about the nature of things to come. I think that’s sort of what Jesus meant when he said to the Pharisees that the future kingdom of God is already “in the midst of you”—in the form of the unconventional, unexpected, and quite offensive (Lk. 17:21).