Restoration
In today’s world, so also in Jesus’ day: there are those who give up hope of a better world beyond this one. When a teleological (goal-oriented) perspective on history is abandoned then hedonism or apathy or despair or nihilism follows. E. M. B. Green gives an example of the first three from inscriptions on ancient tombs. One tomb has: “I was nothing; I am nothing; so you who are still alive, eat, drink, and be merry.” This is hedonism (pleasure is the only good). Another shows apathy: “Once I had no existence; now I have none. I am not aware of it. It does not concern me.” His next example found on yet another tomb reads: “Charidas, what is below? Deep darkness. But what of the paths upward? All a lie. . . . Then we are lost.”54 Here is despair of a chilling kind. In Shakespeare’s magnificent play Macbeth, there is a scene in which Macbeth learns of his wife’s death, which leads him to lament:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.55
This is the nihilistic conclusion.
Others both then and now have hungered for immortality. There are those who hope that cryogenics will mean that at some later date, well after their death, they can live again and be cured of whatever killed them in the first place. Still others hope that their science will enable the next evolutionary leap. Robo-sapiens or transhumans are coming on this view—human and machine melded into a new species that can cheat death. Millions of dollars are being spent on this quest at some of the most prestigious universities in the West. Some governments are attracted to the quest because of its military potential: the enhanced or augmented soldier of the future.56 To some, the science fiction film “Robocop” represents the hoped-for future.
A characteristic of the biblical story is its hopefulness. Hope, after all, is one of the great virtues alongside faith and love. Peter in his first letter writes of Christians who have been born again to a living hope (1 Peter 1:3–5). This hopefulness is founded on an astounding historical event, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and his return. The king is returning—and I am not talking about Elvis. The head of the serpent has been crushed as the ancient promise of Genesis suggested. Yet not all has as yet played out. According to Peter in his second letter, time has been allowed for humankind to hear and respond to the divine plan. Oscar Cullmann captured the scenario vividly by drawing an analogy between the New Testament understanding of time and the way the war in Europe against Hitler unfolded.57 D-Day in 1944—so remarkably presented in Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” and also in his “Band of Brothers”—was the turning point in that theater of WWII. That day, June 6, “marked the beginning of the victory of the Allies in Europe.”58 However, it wasn’t until V-E Day the following year, May 8, 1945, that armistice was declared after Germany surrendered.59 We live, as it were between the divine D-Day and V-E Day.
Importantly this concept of hope is not to be confused with the weak secular version found today. In the latter version hope is equivalent to a wish. I hope that the stock market becomes bullish again. But with the stock market there are no guarantees. By contrast, as St Paul preached to the Athenian intelligentsia so long ago: “For he [God] has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed [Jesus]. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). St Paul would have little time for the postmodern view that I heard expressed recently—that if you believe in resurrection you will be resurrected, if you believe in reincarnation you will be reincarnated, if you believe that there is no life beyond the grave then there will be no life beyond the grave. Everybody is right. No one has got it wrong. In contrast, Paul argued in one of his letters that if he had got it wrong about the resurrection then he was to be pitied more than anyone because there was then no answer for his plight and he had misrepresented God by declaring falsely that God had raised Jesus from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:12–19).
Christian hopefulness also engenders a particular perspective on human history. Unlike some other great religions of the world, especially from the East, Christians are roadies not wheelies. Let me explain. Lesslie Newbigin sees a key divide between those who believe that the human story will be endlessly repeated like a wheel turning on its axis but not actually going anywhere (reincarnation and eternal recurrence) and those who see human history as a road.60 He reached this conclusion after spending many years in India dialoguing with Hindu scholars. A road has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The biblical story too has a beginning, middle, and an end. It starts in a garden in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, and ends the human story in a city in the last book of the Bible, Revelation. In the middle is the coming and cross and resurrection of Christ. The journey is from the old heavens and earth to a new heavens and earth. Evil is no more, death is no more, tears are no more, mourning is no more. The universe is at peace; it is characterized by shalom, by God-given well-being.
Technically, the book that understands me presents a comedy—not comedy in the Simpsons’ sense, but in the literary one. The movement is from harmony through descent into tragic disharmony before the restoration of a richer harmony than the beginning.61 The great poet Dante understood this in his magnificent work, The Divine Comedy. It ends on the note of “The love of God that moves the sun and the other stars.”62
The implications of the king’s returning are legion. To begin with the horizon to our life is not the next paycheck or vacation break—at least not in ultimate terms. We are to live as the classic phrase put it: sub specie aeternitatis (“under the aspect of eternity”). Immanuel Kant argued that one of the great questions we can ask is, “What may I hope?” The Bible’s answer is plain: the coming again of Christ. This frame of reference keeps the Christian from both naïve utopianism and dyspeptic pessimism. The quintessential expression of the latter is found in Bertrand Russell’s famous essay A Free Man’s Worship:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for my belief. Amid such, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origins, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.63
Some fifty years later another secularist, Lord Blackham, adds to this pessimism: “The most drastic objection to humanism is that it is too bad to be true. The world is one vast tomb if human lives are ephemeral and human life itself doomed to ultimate extinction.”64 Some contemporary scientific theory about the future reinforces both Lord Russell’s and Lord Blackham’s gloomy conclusions. Although the universe is expanding post Big Bang, there is a day coming on which gravity will win out and then comes the Big Crunch and the end of all things human.
Now someone might say that if the story is to be believed then why doesn’t its chief character turn up not incognito but in full divine display now? Then we would all believe. I wonder if the questioner really understands what he or she is asking for. To use Francis Fukyama’s phrase, we would be at “the end of history” as we know it. It is a kindness of God’s that the end is still coming. There is a window of opportunity for us to change our minds about our lives and to embrace the story. For the final great event before a renewed heavens and earth is the Last Judgment. On that occasion there will be no doubts as to whose universe this is, and by then our allegiances will be set.
Describing: Is It Enough?
When it comes to the claim to know, philosophy introduces an important distinction. Philosopher Bertrand Russell in his famous book The Problems of Philosophy distinguishes knowledge by description from knowledge by acquaintance.65 Knowledge by description is propositional. I know that Abraham Lincoln was the President during the Civil War years. I can read about it in books and look at the old photos. I live in Illinois, his home state, which means that I can easily visit the Lincoln museum in Springfield. In contrast, knowledge by acquaintance is personal familiarity. The French language likewise has a nice distinction between two words for knowing. Savoir is used for facts or knowing by heart or even knowing how to do something. “I know that Paris is the most famous city in France.” Connaître is used for people and places known by acquaintance. Connaître is always followed by a direct object. In fact, I know Paris. I’ve been there and taken the boat tour on the Seine with my wife and daughter. A frame of reference or worldview is about connaître, not savoir, whether religious or scientific. As philosopher Roger Scruton says: “[O]ur knowledge of God is a matter of personal acquaintance, which cannot be conveyed in the language of science.”66 For that reason I suspect that ultimately there is radical insufficiency about worldview thinking alone. For savoir alone is not enough to satisfy the deep places of the heart.
Has Christianity A Worldview?
The short answer is Yes and No. Christianity has a worldview (technically, theism) but isn’t a worldview. As for the Yes, there is a cluster of touchstone propositions at the heart of an intellectual account of Christianity: propositions about the Creator, the creation, the fall, the rescue, and the restoration. Moreover as we have seen earlier, this frame of reference not only has explanatory power—that is, it makes sense of our experience—it also raises significant questions about naturalism, secularism, modernity, postmodern relativism, naïve romanticism, utopianism, nihilism, pessimism, Islam, Hinduism, and the transhuman project as alternative stories. Frames of reference have both a positive and a negative function. They attempt to explain and to exclude. Even a frame of reference such as a thorough-going pluralism, which argues any frame of reference is viable, has trouble inviting to the table frames of reference that are expressed in absolutist terms. “Absolutely no absolutes!” as philosopher John Dewey reputedly said.
As for the No, historically the term “Christianity” was used first to describe the religion of people who had given their allegiance to Jesus rather than to Caesar. Caesar was described as Lord (kyrios) and savior (sōtēr) and news of his birthday or accession was labeled “good news” or “gospel” (euanggelion). These are the very words used by early Christians to refer to Jesus and the message about him. He is the true Lord, the true Savior, and the message about him is good news indeed. The implied political challenge to the empire by these words may be one reason that to confess to be a Christian could be punished by death, as governor Pliny’s letter to the Emperor Trajan shows (early second century). True Christians, he found, were prepared to suffer for that label. Furthermore, they refused to curse Christ and worship Caesar instead.67
The first recorded use of the word “Christianity” that I know is found in the letters of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, as he made his way under guard to his martyrdom early in the second century. He wrote a letter to Christians in Magnesia in which he contrasted Christianity with Judaism. In other words he was contrasting not one philosophy or worldview over against another (e.g., Stoicism versus Christianity), but one religion over against another.68 Or to use Eric Fromm’s language once more: in the first instance he was contrasting objects of devotion, not frames of reference.
Christianity is first of all news of a person and his significance and not views about the world. Yet it has very definite views about the world, as we have seen, with big organizing ideas for thought such as God, Christ, creation, fall, rescue, and restoration. To put it in Eric Fromm’s terms, Christianity does provide a frame of reference.