Living for tomorrow today

Right now I’m in Lowestoft, almost at the most eastward part of England. I’m here to speak at ‘Lowestoft Living Word’ on the topic of ‘The End’ — which is to say, the ‘last things’, the ‘end times’, ‘Second Coming’ or, to use a more biblical expression, ‘the Day of the Lord’.

This is a particular favourite of mine due to my conviction that ‘missiology follows eschatology’. That is to say, the mission of the Church will be determined by its understanding of and expectation about the future.

This is, of course, true about societies and individuals as well. I have noticed amongst teenagers a lack of expectation that they can change the future for the better. The result is not (as one might expect) despair, but a ‘live for today’ outlook. The problem is, of course, that today becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow brings eventual decline, decay and death. Therefore, without any way of making sense of this, one must also live with a ‘dissonance’ between practice and reality.

In society, meanwhile, one can only speculate how long it will be before there is a general realization that things are not likely to get substantially better — that we have reached the point, in the West, of ‘what goes around comes around’, with the only dramatic changes likely to be for the worse. At very least, this realization is likely to result in a general ennui, but it surely also has much to do with our present political environment.

There is much excitement about the American presidential election because it is believed by many that ‘getting rid of George Bush’ will ‘make the world a better place’. To my mind, this is the same as the belief in the 1980s that the collapse of Communism would ‘make the world a better place’.

Even at the time, I was quite convinced, simply on the basis of history, that it wouldn’t. It would certainly make the world a different place, and it would relieve many millions of people from the problems Communism caused, but it would be only a matter of time before fresh problems would emerge — problems would couldn’t occur under Communism and Soviet domination, but which could once those factors disappeared. And so it has proved to be.

Similarly, we may recall the euphoria which greeted Tony Blair’s triumphant election. Again, my reaction was, ‘Give it time ...’ And here we are.

This is not to be cynical, but rather realistic. Nor is it to suggest that things can’t get better. They can. But to get better, you must have a conceptual basis from which to develop the improvements which itself corresponds to reality. In other words, you’ve got to understand how the world really is, before you can hope to improve it.

Secular Liberalism does not understand the world, any more than Communism did. What will be interesting, then, is to see whether there will eventually be a similar collapse of the former system as once affected the latter. (‘Interesting’ in the sense of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”) What we have in the UK at the moment is an abundance of ‘secular liberal’ manipulation of social structures to try to produce the ‘utopian’ vision. But it is an impossibility that will always end in failure.

Equally, scientific materialism does not understand the world. Yet many advocates of that viewpoint similarly want to change the world, and believe that they have the tools to do it. We must hope that their inevitable failures will be less drastic than those of the secular liberals.

And again, Islam wants to change the world, Russian nationalism wants to change the world (or at least, Russia), as does Chinese communism, and so on, and so on.

However, the utopian vision for the world is, arguably, a derivation of Christian eschatology — the doctrine of the end. And without that theology, one must not only find another set of criteria by which to define ‘progress’, but one must also admit that permanent improvement is impossible. Even if the world can be made a better place, it cannot be kept that way, because ultimately, and finally, the world and everything in it faces inevitable extinction.

Like the death of the individual, this is the great ‘unmentionable’ that confronts all the schemes and dreams of our politicians. And it is, I would suggest, why the American co-mingling of religion and politics is less pernicious than our own tendency to divorce the two.

The ultimate reality is this: “God commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:30-31).

The world, in other words, is heading to a decisive end point entailing a moral judgement. And for many centuries, that understanding of reality has been part of Western consciousness. Sometimes, during times of revival, it has been at the forefront. Sometimes it has been submerged almost out of sight. Sometimes it has been transmuted into an alternative form, such as during the French or Russian Revolutions, or even, arguably, under Fascism and Nazism. Indeed, the post-war vision of Britain reflected this viewpoint.

And of course it is true, and so even attempts at utopianism which deny religious belief and ignore cosmic reality will appeal to the human heart and find their adherents.

The challenge to the Church is to keep on target with the original vision, losing neither heart nor confidence.

To live for the future is the only way to change the present, but you have to get your future right.

John Richardson
3 September 2008

PS, I hope to get back soon to the theme of Tom Wright’s ordo salutis by reading through all the comments and trying to sum up where they left us.

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Mission: why the future determines the present

One of the great truths of church life is this: missiology follows eschatology.

Missiology refers to the mission of the church — what the church does, or aims to do, in the world in the present. Eschatology is the doctrine of the ‘last things’ — where the church thinks the world is heading and what the future holds.

And the important thing to recognize is that the church’s understanding of the future absolutely dictates the church’s mission and ministry in the present.

However, it is also important to recognise that the church often approaches mission without any clear or coherent view of the future. How, then, (someone might ask) can this dictate the church’s mission? The answer is simply that if there is a lack of clarity about the future, there will be a lack of clarity about the present. A missiology without a clear eschatology will lack focus and coherence.

Nevertheless, just as Abraham Lincoln once said we cannot escape history, so we cannot escape eschatology either. The end of all things is heading towards us at the pace of sixty seconds a minute, sixty minutes an hour.

Leaving aside any theological considerations, and barring other occurrences, the Earth is going to be destroyed in some 5 billion years time when the Sun becomes a ‘red giant’. This will be global warming on a grand scale — in fact the Sun will expand in size to embrace the Earth’s orbit. It may, however, have become uninhabitable before then, not because of the ‘global warming’ about which we currently exercise ourselves but because of things like the fact that the Moon is moving away from us and eventually our tides will cease and our planet will be free to tilt on its axis to the extent that we don’t have any seasons either.

These are just raw, inescapable, scientific facts, and if anyone thinks they’re a long way off, I used to think being 57 was a long way of as well, but here I am! Time will take care of everything eventually.

Others may dismiss this as an irrelevance. What matters, they will say, is the problems we are facing now: ecological disasters, HIV, poverty, injustice, starvation — indeed all the things and more that are covered by the Millennium Development Goals. But the problem here is that, to a greater or lesser extent, we in the West have already achieved six of these goals: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health and combatting HIV, malaria and other diseases. Yet no one is seriously suggesting that the church’s work is done or that we have in some sense ‘arrived’.

To define our eschatology, therefore, we have to go beyond these issues and ask, “Even assuming these goals could be met, what happens next?”

The reality, one suspects, is that no one is really asking that question at all, because no one really thinks it is going to happen. Our tacit assumption (unspoken, but widely assumed) is that the poor will indeed always be with us, and that surmounting one set of problems will merely reveal another set — like Western obesity, for example.

Under these circumstances, we may expect the church to focus on achieving short term goals of ‘improvement’, but not to be looking too far into the future — in fact, this is precisely what we do find in many situations.

At the same time, however, the church will generally couch its mission in biblical terms, primary amongst which is the notion of the Kingdom of God. The problem is, of course, what we mean by this expression, and here we find a wide divergence.

For many in the church, this ‘Kingdom’ is coterminous with achieving the Millennium Development Goals and whatever will succeed them as the next set of problems reveal themselves.

Biblically, however, it is something else. In biblical terms, we see three exemplars of the Kingdom. The first is the idealised situation in Eden: mankind in harmony with God, with themselves and with nature. The second is the geo-political nation of Israel: every man dwelling under his vine and under his figtree all the days of king Solomon. The third is the person of Jesus: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.

Yet there is still a future Kingdom, quite distinct from, though foreshadowed by, these particular instances. Moreover, the biblical witness shows that each of these other instances is inadequate as expressions of the coming Kingdom. The Garden of Eden is lost through the Fall, the kingdom of Solomon is lost through idolatry. The incarnate ministry of Jesus is terminated by the powers of this world. If the Kingdom is to arrive, rather than always be a future hope, something must change.

This also means that the church must not mistake the present manifestations of the Kingdom, which share the character of these earlier manifestations, with the Kingdom itself. Eden is lost. The kingdom of Solomon proved unsatisfactory. The ministry of Jesus is a foretaste. We may plant our gardens, we may fight in the political arena, we may heal the sick and bring good news to the poor. But the Kingdom is still to come.

And the other aspect of this future Kingdom, in biblical terms, is that between us and it lies individual judgement and divine wrath.

It should be obvious, then, that if this is our eschatology, it will give a particular shape to our missiology. On the one hand, we ought to be concerned with how we can live the life of the Kingdom in the present, just as Jesus did. On the other hand, we ought to be concerned, just as Jesus was, with how people, including ourselves, can be saved from the coming wrath.

A ministry which treats the present as an irrelevance in terms of our engagement with life is failing to understand what it means to be a citizen of the Kingdom in the present. A ministry which treats the future as an irrelevance in terms of judgement, wrath and salvation is failing to understand what it will mean to be a citizen of the Kingdom in the future.

How we understand these things will then shape how we proclaim Christ. If our understanding of the future is hazy about judgement and dismissive of wrath, we will focus on those aspects of Christ which relate to life in the present. In short, we will downplay the cross, despite our emphasis on the life of Jesus. The justification for evangelism will become the benefit to the individual, in terms of a life made fuller, and to society in terms of a world made better. We will want to see people converted, but the unanswered question will be, “What happens to those who are not?”

It is, however, possible to forget that Jesus’ own ministry shows that the life of the future Kingdom is to be lived in the present. And when this happens the church’s ministry is again distorted. Then we find there is no real difference between the believer and the unbeliever — except that the believer believes that they are saved! And this, we must recognise, is just as much a false gospel, and just as serious a threat to salvation, as ignoring future salvation entirely.

It is much to be doubted whether the church currently has a good grasp of these issues. Some of us live as though there were no judgement in the future. Others live as if there were no purpose in the present. The answer, however, is not to ‘get the balance right’. It is to get the right perspective. Christ is coming again, but when he comes, will he find faith on earth (Lk 18:8)? Getting that right should be enough to keep any of us occupied until he returns.

Revd John P Richardson
26 June 2007