Or, how does your understanding of the End Times affect the way you read, write or approach human history?
Oops, sorry, forgot to put the health warning first. Normal readers, look away NOW!
This question seems to me to be important in a variety of ways, and has arisen from a paper I was reading today with the snappy title of Reinhold Neibuhr's Theology of History by someone called Langdon Gilkey and published back in 1974. The paper compares and contrasts Neibuhr's views with those of other C20 theologians such as Pannenberg, Moltmann, Gutierrez and a pile of others I'm too ignorant to have heard of. It is quite a complex paper (or at least I found it so) but the key to it seems to be the way we relate our understanding of the eschaton to the path of human history, and how we we see God's relationship with creation in all this. Threads of process theology run through the arguments, and words like 'grace' 'judgement' and 'freedom' abound.
So, I am going to try to note the things it's made me think about before I forget them again.
Firstly, the eschaton, and eschatology. How do we understand these terms in practical terms? Do we have some kind of 'realised eschatology' (which I have to confess to never having really got my head around as a concept) or one that is still to come? And whichever of these we have, is it about a perfect and/or new heaven and earth or something else? You might think the answers to these are obvious, and perhaps they are, but they will affect the way you understand human history and human behaviour on a wider scale.
If we anticpate that at the Eschaton (or the end of time, or whatever) that humanity will attain perfection, then we end up with something not a milliom miles from the 'myth of Progress' model of academic history. In this model, later is better, and it is possible to argue that sin can be equated with devotion to present and past and a closing of minds to what is to come. This, the writer argues is what theologians other than Neibuhr tend to do. I guess this is a kind of Pauline 'forgetting what is past I press on towards the goal' approach to the past, which renders the past irrelevent because now we are more perfect than we used to be. If I can caricature somewhat, this model seems to have God as a kind of divine coach standing just beyond the temporal finishing line urging us on and telling us not to look back. If this is what we believe - and to some extent I suspect most of us do - then it cannot but impact on how we tell the story of the past and how much (or little!) import we give it.
Neibuhr's approach is rather different, and centres on the idea of transcendence, and of God somehow involved all through human history rather than standing at the end of it beckoning us on. Furthermore, even for humans there is potential to trasncend our own circumstances and reflect upon them. In this model the idea of human experience getting more and more close to perfection as history (chronologically) unfolds is not inevitable, though it is possible, if only we are able to grasp it. Rather than an inevitable end point, perfection becomes a horizon against which we can measure reality. In this model, human sinfulness is part of our makeup and therefore no matter when, chronologically, we live, we have the same potential for sin. Perhaps again with dear old Paul, we may find it to be a natural 'law' that despite our best efforts we foul up, failing to do the good we want to do and doing the wrong we don't want to do. In this model, rather than sin being about being bound to the past, it is about being open to the potential of the future - which is full of possibilities, good, bad and indifferent. If this is so, then our past is more obviously relevent to us in our thinking - as we 'transcend' it and reflect upon it, it can inform the choices we make as we go into the future, as (I think) God enables us to see and understand better. Again depending on how much we relate to this model - and, again, I think that to some extent we probably all do - it will impact our reading and writing of our past.
I suspect that it is never quite as easy as the 'either/or' constructed by someone way cleverer than I am (and it is highly possible I've completely misundertsood this paper!) but really more of a 'both/and.' Why might God not be both beyond the end of time, beckoning or luring (or whatever) us on and breaking into time with what gets referred to as 'special revelation'? Surely the concepts of grace, sin, justice, atonement, and resurrection used in the writer's detailed discussion of these models can speak into both views, albeit maybe in different ways?
This kind of leads to the second area of thought, which relates to the use of theological language or categories in writing about church history. The themes of sin and grace, especially, seem to crop up quite often in this kind of paper, but not in the history books I read. In other words, it seems that there is some good confidence that such language can be used when history is abstract, a general term for the sum total of human experience perhaps, but when it comes down to particular, or specific, examples, we cease to be comfortable in so doing. Intuitively this seems both a good thing and a bad thing. It is good in so far as any human endeavour to identify what is 'sin' or 'grace' is fallible - indeed open to sins such as pride, judgementalism and so on. On the other hand, it is bad, because we get a story that is perhaps agnostic or a-theist in the sense of a 'lack of God.' So is there a happy medium? Maybe if the writer or reader can hold in mind such categories, consciously and with appropriate humility, then the hints of the divine will be evident or glimpsed. I have to say, that whilst I'd love to find a way of writing God into the story that doesn't read like triumphalism or the ubiquitous 'Kingsway paperback', I am as yet far from convinced that it is achievable.
I am still far from having a clue what a 'more useful for congrgeational theological reflection' hsiotry might look like, but it has been helpful to be reminded that our theology of history - however implicit and undeveloped (as I think mine probably is) that might be - is an important factor to bring into consciousness in our writing and reading of history. I think if I am honest, I can't see a long path towards perfection in human history and am left with some kind of inbreaking of God at the end of time as we know it to 'make all things new.' But that doesn't mean I can't be inspired to aim for that perfection, to seek for better self-understanding, to search for the mind of Christ in shaping individual and church life as I walk the chronological path of history. Further, other concepts, such as 'kairos moments' may also have something to say in all of this.
As I have typed away I have found the words of a hymn coming to mind...
The Church of Christ in every age
Beset by change, but Spirit-led,
Must claim and test its heritage
And keep on rising from the dead.
This hymn, by F Pratt Green seems to me to express hints of both strands of theology Gilkey discusses in his paper; whilst it is quite political and liberation focussed, echoes of both atonement and resurrection can be found in later verses.
So, at the end of all this, what have I learned? Probably that I need, at some point, and not too far in to the future, to think more carefully about my 'theology of history' and how it impacts, for good and ill, upon my work in this field.