Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high
school English, Latin, Greek and science, and served
as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve,
retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest
book, Don't Throw Out Your Bible, is now
in print.
“The
whole worl’s in a terrible state of chassis.”
So, with delicious malapropism, says “Captain”
Jack as his dysfunctional life and family fall apart during
the Irish Civil War (1922-23). Aristotle was right: history
tells us what happens at a particular time and place,
but fiction shows us what happens everywhere and all the
time. A hundred years after O’Casey’s play
– with news of the various troubles in Ukraine,
Israel, Taiwan, the USA, and [you fill in your own blank]
– the whole world is still in a terrible state of
chaos. And despite our modern rationality, technology,
and councils of nations, we still seem unable to do anything
substantive to correct it. Our ability to do so may very
well be, as we used to say in my army days, beyond our
pay grade. We do, however, construct various narratives
in an attempt to make that state of chaos understandable,
or at least manageable.
One
of those narratives, with some significant variations,
is the view of Judaism, Christianity, and later, Islam,
that the events of world history move at God’s pleasure,
anchored in an act of creation and leading to that other
anchor point, the state of everlasting fulfilment. The
Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution enhanced(?) that
view by adding the notion of progress. Then Marxism came
along, lopped off the two anchor points, and substituted
secularist variants in which a revolution replaces the
act of creation and a mythic “just society”
replaces everlasting fulfilment. Meanwhile on the other
side of the planet, in the absence of ideas like creation
and progress, there grew up Eastern religions whose cycles
of rebirth portray the universe as some sort of cosmic
Blue Box, from which the soul may eventually escape into
the blissful anonymity of the One. Or if none of those
narratives suits you, how about Arnold Toynbee’s
cynical quip that “history is just one damned thing
after another”?
St
Paul described the Judaeo-Christian narrative of the rise
and fall of nations when he addressed the Council of the
Areopagus in Athens: “ The God who made the world
and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth .
. . . gives to all men life and breath and everything.
And he made from one every nation of men to live on all
the face of the earth, having determined [their] allotted
periods [of time] and the boundaries of their habitation,
so that they should seek God, in the hope that they might
feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each
one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have
our being’. As even some of your own poets have
said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring’ ”
(Acts 17:24-28).
The
Council members would have recognized the historical details
that Paul was alluding to. The then-current Roman Empire
had taken over the three fragments of Alexander’s
Greek Empire, which had previously conquered the Medo-Persian
Empire, which before that had taken over the Babylonian
Empire. Even the Roman Empire would fulfill its life cycle,
followed later by the rise and fall of others like the
so-called Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. And
some of us have been around long enough to watch the sun
setting on our own beloved British Empire. A lecturer
on the state of the American Empire reminded his audience
recently that, statistically, the average duration of
such empires is about 250 years. So it was not idly that
the author of the epistle to the Hebrews wrote, “Here
we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to
come” (Hebrews 13:14).
Nevertheless,
we do in fact go about our affairs as if we could preserve
some “lasting city” in this present age. We
must not have been listening when Heraclitus (500 BC)
told us that this material world is at every level in
a state of flux -- that you can’t step into the
same river twice. What St Paul contributes to this discussion
is the idea that the flux itself is not an accident. Rather,
he says, the flux has a pedagogical purpose: God has determined
that no nation or empire will continue indefinitely in
time or geographical scope. And God has done this so that
people should seek him and, hopefully, find him. The insufficiency
of things is supposed to motivate us to seek the one thing
that is sufficient; the impermanence of things should
motivate us to seek the One who is permanent. “Here
we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to
come.”
Now,
in one sense that’s enough to make us cynical about
ever accomplishing anything significant “down here”
because all our efforts will eventually “head south”.
But some theologians would rescue us from that cynicism
by pointing out that the command to “fill the earth
and subdue it” (Genesis 1:18) is our “cultural
mandate” — our mission statement that says
we should be about the business of creating godly cultures.
The fact that all such cultures will inevitably have a
life-cycle does not exempt us from the mandate. Of course,
the Old Testament assumes a theocracy and tells Jews how
to live within that culture, and the New Testament assumes
a secular, pagan, and indeed non-democratic society and
tells Christians how to live within that culture. But
what neither testament contemplates — correct me
if I’m wrong — is a pluralistic democracy
in which Christians might actually hold some power. Nor
does it tell us how Christians in a democracy should vote,
nor how they should govern if they attain positions of
power within a democratic and secular culture: in particular,
what values they should try to impose by legislation,
and what not. In the past, many Christian law-makers have
behaved as badly as their secular peers, and fared no
better in preventing their cultures’ inevitable
decline. Given the consistency of human nature, I see
no reason to expect anything better in the future.
It
may be that the best that best Christians can do in this
age or in any age is to create godly subcultures within
the existing culture, modeling our values for the world
to see, and courageously speaking truth to power. We need
to hear our neighbors saying again that famous line from
Tertullian (200 AD): “See how these Christians love
one another.” We need to let that love flow out
to the secular communities in which we live. And we must
continue to do so until the cycles of rise and decline
have ceased and (however you may imagine it) “the
kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of our
Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and
ever.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
This afternoon I watched the movie "Black Hawk Down",
a 20+ year old docudrama on the ongoing civil (!) war
in Somalia. I followed that by reading the Wiki article
on same. Captain Jack could never have known just how
right he was.
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