Advent and
the Circling Year
Last
night I had a dream in which certain ideas became clear to me, so I
thought I’d record and relate them here. It centers about the fact that
this is the first Sunday in the Advent season. Readings and hymns in
church are based on the twin themes of the first and second coming of
Christ, to a degree that the two seem almost to merge together. The
faithful are supposed to scrutinize the inner horizon of their lives to
prepare for the coming of Christ. And yet, obviously, the season comes
just before Christmas, so it must be a commemoration of the first coming
as well, right? But then the cyclical nature of the whole thing implies
that the second coming we are ostensibly waiting for is the second coming
of the first coming! And that the “first” coming of Christ is
returning in the terms described by Mircea Eliade in his many books
including The Sacred and the Profane and The Eternal Return.
Many of us are used to thinking of the Eucharist this way: contra
Protestant misunderstandings of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist (or mass)
is not supposed to be repeated sacrifices, new sacrifices of Christ, but
rather the re-presentation of the one sacrifice of Christ, a mystical
bringing present of the communicant to that primordial moment. Symbolic
time travel, just as in the Passover Seder, when Jews are to affirm that
in some sense they have become present to the original events and are not
mere inheritors of it. Such liturgical re-presentation occurs in all
religion worldwide in one form or another. And in my dream I thought back
to some choice passages in Reinhold Niebuhr’s very great book The
Nature and Destiny of Man (vol. 2, 1943):
It is a good thing to
seek for the kingdom of God on earth; but it is very dubious to claim to
have found it. In that claim some new relativity of history and some new
egoistic force make pretensions of sanctity which, at best, are merely
absurd and, at worst, unleash new furies and fanaticisms. (p. 178)
The Biblical symbols
cannot be taken literally because it is not possible for finite minds to
comprehend that which transcends and fulfills history. The finite mind
can only use symbols and pointers of the character of the eternal. (p.
289)
Against utopianism the
Christian faith insists that the final consummation of history lies
beyond the conditions of the temporal process. Against other-worldliness
it asserts that the consummation fulfills, rather than negates, the
historical process. (p. 291)
Getting Real
This all has to do with
Niebuhr’s political ethic of “Christian Realism,” his belief in “the
relevance of an impossible ideal.” Human beings cannot escape the finitude
and ambiguity of worldly existence and therefore can live pure of sinful
compromise only by virtue of martyrdom sooner or later, a policy of
absolute-non-cooperation with the world. That is the posture symbolized in
the refusal of the saints to take the mark of the Beast, without which no
commerce is possible (Revelation 13:16-18). As Paul says, “you would have
to leave the world altogether” (1 Corinthians 5:9-10). Niebuhr took what I
regard as a sort of Platonic approach: in this world we can only (but
must) approximate as closely as we can the moral absolutes of the Sermon
on the Mount, knowing that we will often or even usually have only a
choice between greater and lesser evils. But that is where the Reformation
paradox of “at the same time justified and a sinner” comes in. It is the
dialectic of grace.
Accordingly, Niebuhr
denies that any righteous efforts of ours could ever establish the kingdom
of God on earth. Those who believe they can turn out to be miserable
failures or intolerant totalitarians, like the Stalinist tyranny or the
Islamic dictatorship in Iran. Or Calvin’s Geneva. Such pretenses to having
established the Millennial Kingdom would, in order to maintain the
necessary illusion, deny what problems and ethical compromises must
inevitably exist in a fallen world. And thus they become demonic. Such is
the curse of fanatical utopianism.
The same thing happens
with hyper-religious individuals who have come to believe that God has
completely sanctified them. They cannot afford to admit even to themselves
that they still harbor some sin. If they were to recognize it, it would
seem that God, who sanctifies by faith, must have failed them. So they
refuse to recognize their sins, and that lets these sins fester, allows
them to grow unsupervised to spew forth in viler forms than a realistic
self-scrutiny would have allowed. And it happens on a big scale with
regimes made of fanatics. Just look at the Muslim Jihadists today,
invulnerable in their blindness.
Niebuhr says we must not
take literally the Bible’s myths of a Kingdom of God descending from
heaven. On the one hand, if you and your fanatical buddies think you can
bring it to pass, the end will be tragic. Such a rabbit cannot be pulled
out of such a hat! But on the other hand, if one defaults to the
apocalyptic posture of quietism, silently waiting for God to bring the
play to and end and start over, you are nihilistically devaluing the world
of events we live in. You are writing off human history as a big loss and
waiting for something better. You are saying there is no use in applying
Christian values to history, as when Dwight L. Moody the evangelist
explained his lack of interest in social reform. “God has given me a
lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can!’”
So working and praying
for the advance of God’s kingdom is the Christian task, but the
realization of that task lies above and beyond history, either in the form
of a “Church Triumphant” in heaven after death or in the Aristotelian
sense of a Prime Mover of a concept of Kingdom Righteousness shining now
as a beacon above the swamp of inevitably messy human endeavor.
But what does this have
to do with Advent and the ritual reenactment of the coming of Jesus and
out preparation for it? It seems to me that this sort of liturgical drama
of reenactment fits in perfectly with Niebuhr’s theory about the
not-literally-historical character of the second coming and the attendant
consummation of all things. It means that the second coming is a symbol
for the first coming. It hoists the Sermon on the Mount, the teachings of
the gospel, as the flag under which Christians living in this world must
march. But it is more a matter of a direction than a destination. Again,
as in Aristotle, your perfection, your destination, is simply going as
far as you can go.
This is why it is no
embarrassing pretense or pathetic play-acting we are undertaking when we
“expect” the coming of Christ in Advent, “as if” it hasn’t
happened—because we are operating on the cyclical calendar of the Eternal
Return characteristic of myth and liturgy. We are not, despite Saint
Augustine and many others, operating on a linear timeline, stretching from
a starting point in Genesis to an ending point in Revelation. There is no
beginning or end. Fanatics and zealots imagine that we can come out the
other end of the historical tunnel into the shadowless brilliance of the
Kingdom of God. But we can’t. All tunnels and tracks finally end up back
here, in history, like on that Twilight Zone episode where the
fleeing couple finally realize they are in a train on a toy track, the
plaything of unsuspected giants. Cyclical thinking is not the currency of
revolutionaries and fanatics. It is rather the game plan of those who
uphold the status quo and rejoice in the unbroken succession of seasons
and ages.
Nor is it as if any one
group conforms completely or rigidly to either time-model. Popular
American fundamentalism, for instance, though committed to the linear
model of apocalypticism, likes to flirt with the cyclical model as well,
as witness the numerous movies and novels fictively presenting the End
Times events as happening in the reader’s own time, the most notable
recent example being the Left Behind series of books ghost-written
for Tim LaHaye. The popularity of these books lies in their secret
liturgical character: the reading of them supplies a psycho-dramatic
experience of the eschaton which fundamentalists believe should be
happening any moment but which is constantly delayed. By reading these
as-if novels, they can repeatedly and vicariously experience the Last Days
in lieu of their ever actually arriving. That is surprisingly close to the
cyclical, liturgical model.
Worlds within Words
Paul D. Hanson explained
the relationship between the two models of time-history in his book The
Dawn of Apocalyptic (1975). He shows how the Israelite prophets
inveighed against the seasonal, agricultural faith of the Canaanites,
centered upon Baal and Astarte as well as Yahve. These myths functioned as
royal propaganda, since the chief god was supposed to defeat the Chaos
Dragon each year, renewing and revitalizing the soil for another year.
This even involved the death and resurrection of the god. In the annual
New Year Festival, the king took the role of the king of the gods in a
ritual reenactment of the primeval battle, in the process renewing both
the fecundity of the fields and his own right to rule for another year.
But the Israelite prophets rejected all this in the name of a rival
ideology, that Yahve was the nomadic god of the desert nomads and that he
moved through, and ruled, an open, ongoing future. The divine was to be
found not in the regularities of nature so much as in the events of
history, as Yahve moved the empires of the world around like chess pieces.
The myth of the historical cycle, the eternal return, was the myth
upholding the status quo, then, while the myth of a god active in history
was the myth undergirding the efforts of those to carry history forward to
new heights, new horizons: “Behold, saith the Lord Yahve, I am doing a new
thing!”
Niebuhr would say that
the utopian fanatics believe that history is a road into the New, and that
they imagine they can reach the new age, install it on earth. But
“Christian Realists” understand that one generation is like another, all
equidistant from both the founding time of Christian origins (the giving
of the Sermon on the Mount) and from the (theoretical/mythical) end of the
world. We are witnessing the current, the latest, turn of the wheel.
Advent reminds us of the impossible ideal we must strive as best we can to
translate into history, knowing well that the Kingdom of God is our North
Star to navigate by, not the destination we think we can actually reach.
Without Beginning
or End of Days
I mentioned a moment ago
how Niebuhr’s theology of history does not require a literal consummation
point within history, no literal return of Jesus Christ. I wonder what
would happen if we turned the scope around the other way? Of course
Niebuhr similarly demythologized the Eden story of the Fall of Man, so
that it referred to the initial lapse of humans, insecure in their
finitude, into covetousness and mutual enmity. There needn’t have been any
literal Adam an Eve. But what about that other beginning point: the
beginning of the gospel the dawn of that impossible ideal? Isn’t it
equally mythical to posit a heavenly being entering the human race from
outside one evening in Bethlehem? Isn’t it equally literalistic to posit
that the whole thing started with a single historical individual named
Jesus or anything else? Does not the theological claim that “long lay the
world in sin and error pining until he appeared and the soul felt its
worth”? That is Gnostic mythology. There can have been no historical
“beginning of the gospel” since even the ancient Assyrians taught that one
ought to love one’s enemies.
Tillich left the same
door open to the Christ-Myth theory without meaning to when he said that
the Christian mode of existence (the “New Being” within the confines of a
world of ambiguity) requires a historical originator, whether or not his
name turned out to be “Jesus of Nazareth.” But if it is real in our lives,
it must have been real in a concrete, individual life at the very
beginning, or we would not experience it now! But then how can we be so
dogmatic to insist that it had never happened before Jesus of Nazareth (or
Brian of Nazareth if one prefers)? Again, as with Niebuhr, to borrow
Burton L. Mack’s expression, Tillich cannot rid himself of the
Christian-dogmatic notion of a Big Bang that started Christianity as
something utterly new, ex nihilo.
A Tale of Two
Brothers
One last note: how does
the resultant picture of Christian liturgical cyclicalism, in which the
eternal return undergirds the status quo, fit in with the models framed by
Reinhold Niebuhr’s brother and fellow theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in his
equally famous book Christ and Culture (1951)? What H. Richard
called the “Christ Transforming Culture” model would seem to partake of
the fanaticism of Reinhold’s Christian utopianism. Reinhold’s pessimistic,
other-worldly waiters for a cosmic End would fall within H. Richard’s
“Christ against Culture” category. I am guessing that H. Richard would
place Medieval European Christendom as described by Tillich (as “theonomous,”
open to its divine Ground) in his “Christ above Culture.” The “Christ of
Culture” option might fit heavily accommodated liturgical-cyclical church
bodies like the Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, German Lutheran, and
Episcopalian/Anglican churches. In them Christ is practically a figurehead
for the culture, its wisdom, and its blessings, with very little room left
for any tension between Christ as any kind of measuring rod and the
culture that ostensibly moves and lives in his image. H. Richard Niebuhr’s
remaining category is that of “Christ and Culture in Paradox,” which seems
to fit his brother’s preferred stance pretty closely. It partakes of both
the “Christ against Culture” realization that this world is hostile
territory for the Christian ethic, and the “Christ above Culture” posture
in that it recognizes the gospel as a transcendent norm like a lighthouse
above the waves. But the “Paradox” stance resolves that the message of
Jesus must nonetheless somehow be translated into this world of finitude
and ambiguity.
My suggestion is that,
once you factor in the liturgical dimension as the means for experiencing
the symbol-reality of the coming of the Kingdom of God, you can see
Reinhold’s Niebuhr’s position as having a drag toward the “Christ of
Culture” view. This result hardly calls into question the validity either
of Reinhold’s position or of H. Richard’s typology; it just reminds us
that all such categories are ideal types, abstract templates necessarily
sloppier than the facts of life and useful as yardsticks by which to
measure the living phenomena. In this case, we can understand and
characterize Reinhold Niebuhr’s ethic of the Kingdom of God better and
more fully if we lay it edge to edge with the “Christ and Culture”
typology. We can see where and why it is closer to one coordinate than
another.
Copyright©2009 by Robert
M Price
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