The Resurrection in a “World Come of Age”
“Evolution or revolution?” That is the question our age seems to put to human society; those are the alternatives with which it confronts the Church. The churches must decide which side to support: gradual, evolutionary, non-violent progress or revolution.
That so many of us in the churches, even among the supposedly evangelical remnant, accept this pair of alternatives as the crucial choice shows the extent to which the churches have been conformed to the world, or are even, in the words of Jacques Maritain, on their knees in front of the world. In two thousand years of church history, Christians have often knelt down before the world, but not until recent decades did theologians begin to tell them that by so doing they fulfill the will of God. The evolution-revolution alternative, like so many of the questions put to Christians today, is not a true choice, at least not for the Christian, because both sides are drawn from the world’s set of values and neither faces the much more important question, “What is the chief end of man?” Both assume it to be progress (= going forward), but neither can answer the question “Which way is forward?” except in terms of what the world agrees to call good.
The Christian And The World
“Love not the world,” warns the Apostle John, “neither the things that are in the world” (1 John 2:15). Apparently a major segment of Christ’s followers, particularly the more spiritually minded, have taken this warning seriously, for the history of Christianity is marked by many movements of withdrawal and separation from the world. Sometimes the separation has been external and physical, as in the case of cloistered monks and nuns; sometimes Christians, instead of withdrawing, have attempted to remake their whole society to exclude the world, or at least all worldliness, as did the Puritans; sometimes they have contented themselves with an “inner emigration,” remaining within society as it is, but having as little to do with it as possible. Thus Christians have earned the labels “other-worldly” and “unrealistic.”
Separated evangelical Christians, like Roman Catholic monks, have frequently been accused of being useless to the world and to their fellow men, indifferent or even hostile to them, selfishly preoccupied with their personal salvation and sanctification. How can such an attitude of indifference be justified, it is asked, when God himself loves the world? Has not Christianity been perverted, or at least strait-jacketed, by monks fleeing the world, Puritans suppressing it, and missionaries converting it? Is it not time for Christians to broaden their perspectives, to accept and to emulate God’s love for the world, to stop talking about the judgment of the world and to celebrate the world’s coming of age?
The love of God for the world is certainly a basic theme of the Bible. Perhaps the best known of all Bible memory verses is John 3:16, which proclaims that love. (There is a fundamental difference between the self-giving love of God for the world in John 3:16 [and also in First John 4:7 ff.] and the acquisitive, idolatrous love for the world against which we are warned in First John 2:15, but this difference sometimes eludes the attention of church spokesmen.) Does this not mean that the Christian should affirm the world, thereby echoing God’s own verdict upon his work of creation (Gen. 1:31)? Does not this love of God for the world give the Christian the signal to forsake his contemplations and religious exercises and to embark without delay on the adventure of performing the tasks “on the world’s agenda,” as the World Council of Churches’ 1968 catch phrase put it? It might, if John 3:16contained no clause of purpose, no that-clause, if the Lord Jesus did not tell us in the same breath that God requires something of us. It might, if Genesis 1 were not followed by Genesis 3, if man were not fallen, if sin had no consequences beyond guilt feelings, if God really didn’t care about man—in short, if reality were not what it is. If there had been no Fall, then good might come through mere growth and maturation, and there would be some sense to the talk about a “world come of age.” In a fallen world, the love of God can express itself only through judgment and resurrection. Failure to take the Fall seriously means that all one’s subsequent theology will be nonsense, so that even the Resurrection becomes superfluous and an embarrassment to “faith.”
Orthodox or traditional Christianity takes seriously the fallenness of man and of the world and affirms that its effects can be overcome by Christ but not outgrown by man. The “liberal” or “radical” Christian, by contrast, looks upon original sin as a myth (and a bad one at that), and is confident that no real Fall ever took place. Therefore judgment would be excessive and resurrection superfluous. It is worth observing that as soon as we begin to ignore the fallenness of man, we no longer feel any need for the radical “cure” of resurrection and a new creation. Present-day evils must be understood as shadows on the bright landscape of evolutionary advancement, the result of environmental disadvantages, educational handicaps, and so on. They require understanding and treatment, not judgment. (Not absolutely every present-day evil, of course; for even the most tolerant liberal there is always something that is unforgivable, some evil about which he is unwilling to say, “You have to try to understand their background and the situation in which they find themselves.” Today this evil is most often [white] racism.)
If liberal religious thought is unwilling to derive lasting consequences from the sin of Adam and Eve, it is no more willing to find them in present-day human actions. This unwillingness to place an irrevocable consequence upon a human action, more than any true tenderness of heart, is doubtless behind the opposition of so many churchmen to capital punishment—for if it were tenderness, how could we understand the support of many of these same men for easy abortion? Of course, if good comes from process by gradual evolution, individual moral decisions have scant relevance; if it comes by revolution, then complete disregard for individual moral decisions may be necessary to promote the violent acceleration of the process of development.
The love of God for the world, even as succinctly expressed in John 3:16, is not indifferent to individual decisions, and for it, these decisions do have consequences, consequences that vary as one accepts God’s love or rejects it. Jesus Christ was under no illusions that the love he brought would be readily accepted by all men as a contribution to human advancement, for this love includes judgment. He knew it would meet with hatred for himself and for his disciples (John 15:18). There would be a separation between believers and unbelievers, and often enough this separation would be forced on the believers by persecution.
Yet interestingly enough it was not persecution by the world that led to the widespread renunciation of the world by early Christian monks and hermits: this renunciation came when the Church began to enjoy imperial toleration and favor and when Christians began to compromise with the world and to encourage it in its self-satisfaction. Then serious Christians began to flee into the deserts. They were turning their backs on the world not because they felt it had nothing to offer but because they knew it had too much to offer, yet not the one thing that is needful—reconciliation between man and God. The world is very amenable to suggestions for improvement, even apparently radical ones, as long as they are not so radical that they bring it into judgment and proclaim that it requires a new creation.
The Resurrection As Escape?
Precisely because Christian renunciation of the “world” and hostility toward the world has a certain resemblance to religions that reject the material world and see salvation as escape from it, it is necessary to emphasize that the Christian hope of resurrection is precisely not a hope of escape. If the New Testament emphasized the liberation of man’s immortal soul from the prison of the mortal body, then Christian other-worldliness and asceticism might fairly be called escapist in principle. Instead, of course, it proclaims the resurrection of the body. Just as the resurrection of Christ was not merely escape from the power of death and of the prince of this world but victory over them, so the general resurrection will be not our escape from “this valley of tears” but our inheritance of Christ’s victory.
The Christian ascetics, like the Christian martyrs, did not accept austerity and persecution as disciplines for escape; they were considered disciplines for conquest. Christian self-denial, though it can take on exaggerated forms, is not abdication from the world but training for the conquest of the world. Victory is not to be obtained without struggle or without sacrifice, and certainly not without the crisis of judgment, but when obtained it will be total victory.
Today, then, it is crucial to emphasize the victory aspect of the resurrection of Christ and of our own resurrections. The world may overthrow us and all our plans; it will in fact outlast us and them, if the Lord tarries, so that both evolution and revolution will bear rotten and poisonous fruits. The hippie phenomenon, in all its various facets, including the mind-destroying escape of drugs, represents a growing awareness that both progress (evolution) and revolution bring poisoned fruits. Therefore it is all the more important for the Christian to proclaim that Christ does not offer escape from this world but will overcome it, judge it, and transform it. Therefore, although we may separate ourselves from the world, although we certainly do not accept its values and its illusions, we do not abandon the world: we know the Victor, and we know that “if we suffer, we shall also reign with him” (2 Tim. 2:12).
“The blood of the martyrs,” says the proverb, “is the seed of the Church.” The courage of the martyrs has left an indelible imprint upon the history of the world. And martyr, as we know, simply means witness. The martyrs were those who were Christ’s witnesses (as in Acts 1:8), and martyrdom was the price this world exacted from them for their stubborn loyalty to the One who said, “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). The martyrs went to their deaths in the confidence that the victory had already been won, that Christ had overcome, and that despite the continuing strength of this world and its prince, their power was doomed.
The fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is for us the answer to all the prophets of evolution and of revolution. We do not have to choose between the gradual and the violent achievement of the world’s aims: we can choose obedience to the One who has gained the decisive victory, and who will make us victors with him. And in the knowledge that victory will be ours, the Christian of today—like those early Christians, who were fishermen, craftsmen, physicians, even slaves—we can share the work of the world, the burden of the world, the pain of the world, but not the fears of the world, not the illusions of the world. The message of the resurrection today is that Christians have a glorious freedom, and the sure hope of a glorious victory. No martyrdom will be demanded of most of us today, but—because Christ is risen—we should know that we could give it, and still be victors, and still reign. Few of us today will choose the course of self-denial and world-renunciation that led the hermits and monks into the deserts, but we could go and not lose the world, for Christ the Victor has overcome the world and is preparing a new creation.
The struggle with this world and its prince takes many different forms and demands many different tactics, but all must begin with the assurance that Christ is victorious and that the terms and the goals are his. The more insistent the world becomes, the more pressing its demands—“Choose! Choose evolution or revolution, choose radicalism or repression!”—the more steadfastly we must reply, “We choose Christ, for his is the victory.” This gives to today’s Christian a tremendous freedom, even a tremendous obligation, to share the burdens, the trials, the sufferings of the world’s peoples. But he must not share the illusion that the world’s projects can achieve victory over the world’s problem, which lies in the heart of man. The evil in the heart of man can be overcome by Christ, but it cannot be outgrown by evolution nor outlawed by revolution. In the light of this reality of the Resurrection as judgment and as victory, the witnesses of Christ should carry their testimony into the world’s arena. “Christian presence,” but presence as salt, as light: we must find new ways to work, new ways to heal, new risks to take, perhaps—but always in testimony to the unique and final victory, not of the world but over the world, for those who are Christ’s.
