Friday, August 15, 2008

Now we see in a mirror darkly

I was once approached on a bus by an undoubtedly well-intentioned gentleman who wanted me to know that the end was near and that he hoped I had my spiritual life in order. I assured him that I was a Christian and then asked whether it wasn't more important to know that any one of us could die at any minute than to have our account of the end of history all worked out. He seemed nonplussed. It has always seemed more important to me that we think about the fact that each of us will die - and we don't know when - than to have worked out the exact meaning of Daniel and Revelation.

We are in between - in the "already but not yet." The war isn't over but it has already been won. It seems to me that Richard John Neuhaus has it in the correct perspective:
Eschatology refers to the last things, the final things, the ultimate destination of the story of God’s dealings with the world of his creation. In the Christian view, that destination, that eschaton, has already appeared within history in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. As the New Testament scholar N.T. Wright nicely puts it, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus is not a story about a happy ending but about a new beginning. In the resurrection and in the abiding presence of the resurrected Lord in his body, the Church, the absolute future breaks into present time. Because the principalities and powers rage against the new world order inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus, that future is discernible only by faith. In the words of St. Paul, "we walk by faith, not by sight."

Christians do not - or at least they should not - claim to understand the intricacies of God’s workings in time and through time. The details of the working out of the relationship between the immanent - the here and now - and the transcendent are not within our human competence. The Christian claim is that God - the Absolute, Being Itself, the Source and End of all that is - has invested himself in the human project. This happened in the Incarnation, when the Creator, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, became a creature in Jesus the son of Mary. God’s investment is irrevocable, and therefore the human project cannot fail.

Obviously, we’re into deep theological waters here. What Christians can say about the particulars of God’s purposes in history leaves us stuttering and tongue-tied. They can attend closely to what is revealed; they can try to read "the signs of the times;" they can study, discuss, debate, speculate, and then pray for the grace to act in the courage of their uncertainties. But at the end of the day, they say with Paul, "Now we see in a mirror darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." These are the words of Paul’s unsurpassable hymn of love, I Corinthians 13. We walk by faith in faith’s disposition toward the future, which is hope, relying on the cosmic triumph of the love revealed in Jesus Christ. Thus Paul’s conclusion: "So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."
FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life - "What Keeps Us Going"

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