From Worship or Eschatology to Worship as Eschatology James Callahan (2019) Suffer some summary for the sake of clarity and brevity. We seem to be stuck straddling a void separating passive-aggressiveness, hyperactivity, and nostalgia. Passive-aggressiveness and handwringing over the loss of old, sure and certain ways of thought and knowing and certainty and faith (so we dig in and celebrate nonnegotiables and other nonsensical abstractions). Hyperactivity and ego driving recklessly into novelty, technology, globalism and religionless faith (so we are hyper-sensitive to offense and willfully ignorant of identity). And nostalgia or renewal fantasies backwardly embracing idealized tropes (ancient, lost, primitive and therefore pure forms of worship or thought) as a carapace against the overwhelming confusion of today… and tomorrow. (That’s enough for a summary… now we take-up our question: Worship or Eschatology?) Wandering Worship Let me risk something more: the space of Christian worship creates as well as sustains the hopeful frustration of straddling a void. There is a way forward, and as Albert Borgmann suggests, it’s probably found in the emerging characteristics of – focal realism, patient vigor, and communal celebration.1 (Which is simply a fancy way of saying worship with eschatology.) 1 Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5-6. So, Michael Polanyi (an odd starting point to be sure), offers: The indwelling of the Christian worshipper is therefore a continued attempt at breaking out, at casting off the condition of man, even while humbly acknowledging its inescapability. Such indwelling is fulfilled most completely when it increases this effort to the utmost. It resembles not the dwelling within a great theory of which we enjoy the complete understanding, nor an immersion in the pattern of a musical masterpiece, but the heuristic upsurge which strives to break through the accepted frameworks of thought, guided by the intimations of discoveries still beyond our horizon. Christian worship sustains, as it were, an eternal, never to be consummated hunch: a heuristic vision which is accepted for the sake of its unresolvable tension.2 Polanyi’s cynical characterization of worship may appear disconcerting, if not simply over stated, yet it is a helpful beginning to the exploration of a community of contrition as a truly Christian community. The nomadic existence of a community that simultaneously admits to and seeks to overcome its confessed condition (resisting the Constantinian temptation, for instance) is not an onward and upward advance toward its goals—since its goal is not defined in arriving at a future moral plateau—but described in coming into its own identity. The contrast is the hopeless condition of Christendom which seeks to sustain a perpetual complicity in order to sustain its own identity (a complicity which advises that in order for Christianity to have a ‘voice’ in the larger culture it must perform the service of chaplain to society, offer justification for acts of war to ease the conscience of those who bear the sword, and resolve moral conflicts by naming who is in the right and who is in the wrong). We are not simply after a remedy to be found in the negation of Christendom as a grand, encompassing narrative; we are after the constructive and necessarily ‘thick’ demonstration of repentance as witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. If acquiescence 2 Michael Polyani, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (San Francisco, CA: HarperTorchbooks, 1964), 198-199. Polanyi continues: “Christianity sedulously fosters, and in a sense permanently satisfies, man’s craving for mental dissatisfaction by offering him the comfort of a crucified God.” to prevailing society is the paganization of Christian identity known as Christendom, then “the prophetic denunciation of paganization . . . will be in a language as local and as timely as the abuses it critiques.”3 That is, since the erroneous ways of Christendom are specific the form of contrition must be at least as specific. The alternative is complicity, which becomes necessary to defend, which is then institutionalized and must be sustained in order to sustain Christianity’s basic identity, which is then simply another form of Christendom. So, Yoder observes: somehow since Constantine it was decided that the church must be indefectible. It might change the whole tone of interfaith encounter if instead of saying, “We still think we are right, but you may be right, too,” or “Yes, that is a wrong idea, but that is not what we really meant,” Christians were to receive the grace to say, “We were wrong. The picture you have been given of Jesus by the Empire, by the Crusades, by struggles over the holy sites, and by war in the name of the ‘Christian West’ is not only something to forget but something to forgive. We are not merely outgrowing it, as if it had been acceptable at the time: we disavow it and repent of it. It was wrong even when it seemed to us to be going well. We want our repentance to be not mere remorse but a new mind issuing in a new way—metanoia.”4 In contrast to a perpetual complicity, Christian faith in our circumstances requires what Miroslav Volf refers to as a “catholic personality” and a “catholic community.” Having realized the unique claims upon our lives by means of the gospel’s orientation to “God’s future,” Christian identity is a “personal microcosm of the eschatological new creation.” 5 To put the matter of Christian community simply: we must resist (simply, reject) the tendency to transgress the confession that the gospel of Jesus is true pro me (not to me but for me) by arguing for the necessity that we are somehow assured that we know what must be the truth for everyone else as well. We are to derive a sense of John Howard Yoder, “The Disavowal of Constantine,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, Michael G. Cartwright, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 250. 4 Ibid., 250-251. 5 Miroslav Volf, “Catholicity of ‘Two or Three’: Free Church Reflections on the Catholicity of the Local Church,” The Jurist 52/1 (1992): 525-46. 3 satisfaction, instead, from the confession that we are those who have faith and gather with others of faith. Worship as Performative Our confession of faith is manifest in coming together in worship contrary to ordinary circumstances. As Volf put the matter, “A catholic personality is a personality enriched by otherness, a personality which is what it is only because multiple others have been reflected in it in a particular way. The distance from my own culture that results from being born by the Spirit created a fissure in me through which others can come in.”6 A “catholic community” is the simple influence of the “catholic personality” in that “No church in a given culture may isolate itself from other churches in other cultures declaring itself sufficient to itself and to its own culture. Every church must be open to all other churches.”7 What we are after is a pastoral-ecclesial response to the real suspicion that the current climate and heuristic demands effectively denies Christianity the privilege of making truth claims. And what I am suggesting is that while Christianity is directly challenged by contemporary doubt in this regard, the attack is proper or justified as a correction to the excesses of modernity identified within Christianity itself. By means of making ‘worship claims,’ instead of objectifiable ‘truth claims,’ those of Christian faith act in repentance and begin to demonstrate the contrition required of a people who would be restored (compare the post-exhilic experience of the Hebrews in Nehemiah 8-10; especially 9:1-3). The ‘worship claims’ of the Christian community are to be understood as ‘doxological claims’ construed as ‘performance utterances.’ As such, the utterances “Jesus is Lord” (1 Corinthians 12:3) and “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15) stand as self-identifying speech, they are 6 Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 51. Ibid. Volf’s next step is, as expected a sustained argument for a “catholic cultural identity” and then that an “evangelical personality needs ecumenical community.” I can’t resist appealing to the early hopes of my own tradition as exemplary of a momentary instance of Volf’s type of ‘openness’. See my, Primitivist Piety: The Ecclesiology of the Early Plymouth Brethren (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 7 accomplished by their very utterance: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3; cp. Matthew 16:17; 11:25-26; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; 2:6-16). Such utterances are not imposed upon those outside the community in which they serve as voluntary affirmations that function as norming and genuinely accomplished – they must be our own truthful utterances, since they are discernable in their performance, and as such they are measurable by means of the symmetry between our lives and the one of whom they speak (thus, they are not our truthful utterances without our joining in the utterances themselves). When such utterances are ‘accomplished’ they are not necessarily finished, but they are realized in the sense that their accomplishment is in the utterance itself (performative— as in ethical – worship is its own realization). In this sense, ‘accomplished’ should be seen as suggesting a trajectory, a movement that extends from the utterance, but to what? An end? On to the End This takes us to the significant facet of Christian reflection known as eschatology—the end of all things (certainly an expansive phrase, the end of all things, and one that seems to point in the direction of a grand, totalizing narrative). Eschatology understood as conclusiveness and utter confidence vitiates the very nature of belief and hope; to repeat the objections of Polanyi: “I have described the Christian faith as a passionate heuristic impulse which has no prospect of consummation. A heuristic impulse is never without a sense of its possible inadequacy, and what it lacks in absolute assurance may be described as its inherent doubt. But the sense of inadequacy inherent in the Christian faith goes beyond this, for it is part of the Christian faith that its striving can never reach an endpoint at which, having gained its desired result, its continuation would become unnecessary. A Christian who reached his spiritual endpoint in this life would have ceased to be a Christian.”8 But why? Because to reach beyond the heuristic impulse would be to reach beyond Christian identity, “A heuristic impulse can live only in the pursuit of its proper enquiry. The Christian enquiry is worship. The words of prayer and confession, the actions of the ritual, the lesson, the sermon, the church itself, are the clues of the worshipper’s striving towards God.”9 The challenge raised by Polanyi is very direct: if eschatology has to do with the end of all things—conclusiveness and utter confidence, then genuinely Christian Christianity must avoid this eschatology; so, Polanyi merely provides an understanding of Christianity without this type of eschatology. We do not make affirmations about God or the future so much as we “indwell” the distinct vocabulary and perspective (i.e. God and eschatology) by means of Christian witness as faithfulness. The alternative to futuristic forms of objectivism is not doubt, which is actually the corollary of objectivism, but the “indwelling” that should be spoken of as witness as faithfulness.10 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 280-281. Polanyi continues: “Yet according to the Christian faith this inherent dubiety of the true faith is sinful and this sin is an ineradicable source of anguish. Take away doubt, sin and anguish, and Christian faith turns into a caricature of itself. It becomes a set of inaccurate, often false and largely meaningless statements, accompanied by conventional gestures and complacent moralizing. This is the forbidden endpoint of all Christian endeavour: its relapse into emptiness.” 9 Ibid., 281. 10 Ibid., 279-280. To tackle this modern “doctrine of doubt” Polanyi centers on the grand assumption that doubt would save the world by providing objective knowledge, avoiding religious fanaticism and dogmatism and prejudicial ways thereby introducing universal tolerance by the common light of reason or employment of reasoning. “The belief in the efficacy of doubt as a solvent of error was sustained primarily—from Hume to Russell—by skepticism about religious dogma and the dislike of religious bigotry.” 8 Is Eschatology with Ethics Possible? Typically, revulsion toward eschatology is justified precisely because eschatology’s conclusiveness is a retreat from ethical responsibility—from the present, especially in the stronger (i.e. literalistic) forms of eschatology. 11 James McClendon offers a constructive alternative in his characterization of Scripture’s extensive eschatological language (an appealing admission for biblicists). His advice is to regard such matters as offering a pictorial and not a chronological order; they are to be taken “literally, a term I take to mean simply that they must be received as the true pictures that they are, and as the sort of picture that they are. More concretely, ‘literally’ means not as myths (at least not as that word is widely understood), not as a code to be deciphered, not as fragments of a puzzle to be assembled by clever modern fingers, and not as grotesque caricatures of themselves, but as the pictures, the true, glinting, dancing, awesome, God-given visions that, collected, constitute promise and warning to God’s people.”12 The trouble with eschatology is not that it muses about the future, not even so much certain version’s speculative readings of current political and social circumstances, but eschatology’s preoccupation with itself.13 That is, eschatology is often treated as its own 11 The discussions of the problems of eschatology for contemporary theology are numerous. The most helpful representations of eschatology are treated in ethical dimensions; on this subject consult: Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFransisco, 1996), 169185; and James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Doctrine: Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994), 69-102. 12 McClendon, Systematic Theology, 91. 13 Theological dispensationalism offers an interesting characterization of eschatology as historical and implicitly futuristic, but first biblicist and therefore circumspect, this is in contrast to fanatical forms of dispensationalism that transgress the literal figures of Scripture by finding ‘other’ meaning in prevailing socio-political circumstances (i.e. that China, Iraq, the Pope and Roman Catholicism, etc. are what the book of Revelation is cryptically describing). Theological dispensationalism offers a narrative reading of the Christian Bible in which a varying pattern of God’s display of grace and stewardship of this grace meet particular and unique human conditions, typically with unfortunate consequences leaving those circumstances in a state of abeyance with far reaching consequences for the nature of the existing faithful community (for popular Dispensationalism—what I refer to as dispensationalism without ecclesiology—the pattern is fundamental; i.e. Scofield’s notes; and since the pattern can be mastered its faults can be corrected rather than leaving the community in a state of suspense). See, James Callahan, end instead of carrying-along theological and ethical tasks (i.e. as if eschatology is somehow a different or discrete loci among others in a theological system, able to stand alone).14 To put the matter directly: eschatology is doctrinal but it is not a doctrine in its own right. For example, the ethical-eschatological dimensions of Pauline writings are obvious and significant—the “perspective within which everything else is viewed.” 15 And precisely because of this consumptive influence of eschatological perspective one may not speak of Pauline counsel without involving oneself in themes eschatological, but one may not, therefore, speak of Pauline eschatology apart from Pauline counsel regarding particular and discrete topics. Instead of finalizing discussions of Christian faith and faithfulness, the ethical-eschatological perspective that is Pauline counsel: “I press on to make it my own” (Philippians 3:12). By means of such characterizations we are drawn to consider Christian existence as an eschatology of pilgrimage—we seek to express the tentativeness of our theological “Reforming Dispensationalism” Fides et historia 28:1 (Winter/Spring 1996): 68-83. In the language of theological dispensationalism we are in the midst of the fallen state of the dispensation of the church—the unique community constituted by means of Pentecost—but experienced a literal ‘fall from grace’ by means of the corrupting influences that culminated in the formation of Christendom, to which Constantinianism is its best witness. For the time being, faithfulness to Jesus Christ is constituted by witness to both the fallenness of the church as well as the grace of God in the gospel of Christ (avoid the former, avail oneself of the latter); but one must not suppose to restore the dispensation to its original state. In this manner theological dispensationalism is primitivistic but not restorationist in orientation. See James Callahan, Primitivist Piety: The Ecclesiology of the Early Plymouth Brethren (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996). 14 McClendon offers: “Is eschatology doctrinal?—Now the first consequence of analyzing [certain and varying] episodes . . . may be to disqualify eschatology as a part of Christian doctrine. If the doctrine of last things is only a screen—and a shifting screen—for pastoral comfort or church reform or social theory or the release of political energies, what right has it (any more than the statistics about church membership gathered by social scientists) to be called church teaching or doctrine? Especially if its futuristic content seems to be so widely variable, so accessible to current ideology? Here we reach the first problem of Christian eschatology: has it any firm content at all? If so, what is it? Must it be relegated to the realm of myth, stories that are told and repeated to reflect a tribal ethos, rather than God-given truth by which Christians can live, whatever winds may blow?” McClendon, Doctrine, 74-75. 15 Hays, Moral Vision, 56, n.12 quoting Victor P. Furnish, Theology and Ethics in Paul (Nashville, TN: Abingdom, 1968), 214. descriptions all the while boldly supposing to witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. In contrast to other (supposedly similar academic) pursuits, theology confesses its limits, the secret of God’s identity and thus the necessity of faith about as well as in this secret. So Derrida observes: “There are no final secrets for philosophy, ethics, or politics. The manifest is given priority over the hidden or the secret, universal generality is superior to the individual; no irreducible secret that can be legally justified. . . .”16 Pilgrimage, limit and secret are regarded as problems to be solved in most traditional forms of philosophy, ethics, and politics, especially as practiced within modern Christian circles and explicitly disavowed in terms of popular eschatology. In contrast the intentional language of pilgrimage takes on a much more pragmatic orientation, tending to shyness regarding epistemological necessities (such as metanarrative or foundationalism). But this leads to possibly the most troubling influence of pilgrimage which is, to speak plainly, its tendency toward agnosticism; not in the sense of a failure to believe, but in the reluctance to affirm a final and fulfilled knowledge (gnosis) of those things which we know little about, nothing worthwhile, or falsely presume to be necessary. 17 To see pilgrimage as a norming practice does not depend upon specific periodization of modern, pre- or post- in any particular respect, but we do not need a specific era or something abstract to make sense of this experience. Pilgrimage is an experience, a 16 Derrida, Gift of Death, 63 (commenting upon Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling). Perhaps the reference to agnosticism is a bit too strong for a theological admission, but it is offered in the spirit of genuine pilgrimage. To quote a dubious but helpful source to explain what we mean by agnosticism, Thomas H. Huxley (who earns the credit for coining the nineteenth-century sense of the word) offered: “’Agnostic’ came into my mind as a fit antithesis to gnostic—the gnostics being those ancient heretics who professed to know most about those very things of which I am quite sure I know nothing—Agnostic therefore in the sense of a Philosophical System is senseless: its import lies in being a confession of ignorance—a warning set up against philosophical and theological phantasms which was never more needed than at the present time when the ghost of the ‘Absolute’ slain by my masters Hume and Hamilton is making its appearance in broad daylight.” Cited in Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 137. 17 style of addressing our experiences of differing circumstances; closer to a virtue than a disembodied thing. We are experiencing a specific alteration in landscape—a journey, as Arthur Frank offers in his work, The Wounded Storyteller: “I do believe that over a period of time, perhaps the last twenty years, how people think about themselves and their worlds has changed enough to deserve a label, and the most accepted label….” Yet, the label only names the straddling of a void – nothing more. So, Frank offers: Journeys cross divides. Once on the other side, the traveler remains the same person, carrying the same baggage. But on the other side of certain divides, the traveler senses a new identity; that same baggage now seems useful for new purposes. Fundamental assumptions that give life its particular meaning have changed. Postmodernism is such a crossing, occurring when the same ideas and actions are overlaid with different meanings. Sometimes these differences of having crossed the divide are clear, but more often they are subtle: things just feel different.18 Eschatology Keeps Us Busy Our task, then, encompasses the necessity of keeping ourselves occupied during such journeys; realizing our responsibilities through theological articulation. So, add to this theology of pilgrims the corresponding admission that Christian theology is itself an always-unfinished task—not to be completed and once completed to be cemented. The gospel of God identifies for us our task(s) as Christian people; and with the help of a parable of Sören Kierkegaard, that task can be described as follows: When in a written examination the youth are allowed four hours to develop a theme, then it is neither here nor there if an individual student happens to finish before the time is up, or uses the entire time. Here, therefore, the task is one thing, the time another. But when the time itself is the task, it becomes a fault to finish before the time 18 Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4. has transpired. Suppose a man were assigned the task of entertaining himself for an entire day, and he finishes this task of self-entertainment as early as noon; then his celebrity would not be meritorious. So also when life constitutes the task. To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.19 Our knowledge is complete only with regard to the faithful hope of the realization of Christ’s (eschatological) glory, and theology is complete only with regard to the sufficiency of its subject—God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. The summing-up of all knowledge is only properly identified as “in Christ” (—“For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.” 1 Corinthians 13:9-10). The experience of religion in modernism, seems to suffer from an overly realized religious epistemology (thanks to the vision of Descartes). And correspondingly, this pull has led Christian theologians to advocate an overly-realized form of eschatology that disdains anything less than absolute (realized) certainty even from religion (—“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” 1 Corinthians 15:19). What is offered instead is a form of eschatology that appears to be agnostic with respect to chronological formulas and affirmative regarding the literal character of Scripture’s true pictures of God’s instructions for us. 19 Johannes Climacus in Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944), 146-47.