The Kingdom Here and Now
Rethinking Politics, Apocalypse, and the Last Things
By its very nature, the post-modern age presents a number of difficult questions.
All of these questions are serious ones, each with deeply nuanced and careful responses for the Christian, and difficult ones to navigate in the increasingly political nature that marks modern discourse. However, perhaps the Christian’s work is not to immediately engage with these questions until a far more fundamental question is answered. This question is the Lord’s, asked in the Gospel of Luke: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on Earth?” I’ve posited this question before on this blog, and I’ve had a different answer. But the more I’ve thought, the more I’ve realized there may be another, better, answer.
Of all the questions before us, the Lord’s question is the most fundamental because it is the most teleological. We cannot answer any of these other questions until we first answer the Lord’s. In the bestselling book Zero to One, the investor Peter Thiel cites the chess grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca: “You must study the endgame before everything else.” Beyond chess, investing, or entrepreneurship, this exhortation belongs to the most to the Christian, and never more so than in the highly distracting age in which we live. What, then, is the endgame of Christianity, of our lives as Christians? That is exactly the Lord’s question in Luke: when He comes back at the end of all things, at that final conclusion of His long project of redemption, will He find faith on Earth?
For the post-modern Christian, the Lord’s question seems foolish. We need only to give Him our smartphone, full of an array of choice apps and websites, to answer Him. The world hardly needs He Who Is, the Supreme Judge Himself, to accurately assess the situation: an illiterate four-year old would do well enough. However, the Lord’s question deserves more rigorous scrutiny than our world-wearied selves might give.
Why are so tempted to answer the Lord so cynically? Perhaps it is our awareness that our more recent spiritual predecessors, holding a Christianity both influencing and influenced by the Enlightenment values that have marked the modern West, would have thought to find us in a different situation in 2021. We may be too aware of this, perhaps believing that, by now, the great well-oiled train of capitalism, the Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution would have glided gently along the tracks of time toward the destination of that happy paradise of open and liberal democracy, the station marked “The End of History.”
However, that isn’t how it turned out. Something strange happened on the trip to the End of History. Instead of our predecessors’ expectations that our challenges today as Christians would be the shuffle of souls from the Sunday football game to the pews and the pitch to the hordes of happy, well-fed capitalists to tithe, we Christians have a considerably different task before us, and many pressing questions we feel need to be answered in our own fashion.
Faced with this shocking meteoric shift, the instinct for the Christian is to shrink from the world. This disengagement is made easier by the ever-disappearing Overton window between Christianity and the broader culture within which it resides. We may decide to consider the Benedict Option, retreating into our own corners of media, socializing only with each other as we calmly await our own deaths, at which we will receive our eternal reward, finally freed from the endless doomscrolling that marked our days on Earth.
Like all lessons of the Lord, however, we are always differently positioned in His sight than how we believe ourselves to be. We Christians of today bear much more in common with our spiritual ancestors who kindled for us the young fire of Christianity in the catacombs under Rome than we do with the strange bedfellows of Deism and Puritanism that molded America. Lest we tempt ourselves too much with flattering comparisons to the early martyrs in the pagan coliseums of the Empire, however, we should also realize that we, like our predecessors, are also prone to an infectious, insidious Gnosticism. Surrounded by a post-Christian and paganized culture, we may slip into a sense of hopelessness and despair about the incarnational world. Unlike our forebears, however, we can easily numb our pain with entertainment and disengagement. This attitude is what gives us our cynicism in answering the Lord’s question. This is a tempting solution for the Christian of the post-modern West, but it is as dangerous as it is seductive. It is at this juncture where even the most ardent of Bible-believers may inadvertently throw themselves headlong over the cliff into a meaning crisis that rivals even the last days of Friedrich Nietzsche.
If this is a juncture for the Christian, then what lies on the other side of this juncture from the disengagement that leads to that dark forest from which we will never return? How can we answer the Lord’s question not as cynics flirting with nihilism, but as Christians so true as to make our martyred spiritual mothers and fathers proud?
A small collection of academic essays published in 2007 may shift this question. Politics & Apocalypse explores mimetic theory, as propounded by Dr. René Girard, in the context of the long shadow of September 11th which bore, in so many events, no small resemblance to the prophesized crescendo toward Megiddo. The earnest reader walks away with the belief that the apocalypse is something real – something that happens here, in the incarnational world, not in some far-flung future that bears a closer resemblance to fan fiction. If, as Politics & Apocalypse suggests, it is man who causes the apocalypse through his attachment to sin and slavery to the prince of this world, then while this news is understandably terrifying, it may also be edifying. If man participates with God in the creation of the world, as God envisioned for man in Eden, then undoubtedly God’s plan of redemption and salvation extends this invitation to be partners with Him in building the City of God. The Straussian message of the Book of Revelation may well be that if the apocalypse is in part our doing, then the Kingdom of Heaven is certainly our responsibility.
Where is this Kingdom though, though? It is waiting for us to take action, to step out of all the things that comfort us. As the Apostle Paul states in Hebrews, Abraham left his home to go out in search for the promised land “by faith,” obeying and going “like a stranger in a foreign country.” What are we Christians but strangers in a foreign country, living among the pagan nations? Like Paul writes so well of Abraham, are we too not “looking for the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God”? Are we not yearning for the Kingdom of Heaven, built not on the pain and suffering of pagan culture but on the joy and radiance of the cornerstone that is Christ?
Like Abraham, we must leave our comfortable position and earnestly live in this culture, separate from it but not at all distant from it. We must settle among the nations and build with our own hands and efforts the Promised Land. It is our work to do the will of the Father, bringing about the perfect will “on earth as it is in Heaven.” The pagan world should not scandalize us, cause us to fall into sin, and especially not to retreat further into our own communities. With prayer, work, time, and blessing, the world can be sanctified. We are returning to our spiritual heritage: but now we must re-evangelize the evangelized world. We must put aside all inclination to retreat into our corners as well as our deep-seated disordered desires to snipe at each other and the broader culture.
The context in which the contemporary Christian finds herself should not be cause for concern, but for eagerness. We need only to look at our spiritual heritage to see how suited Christianity is as an oppressed religion nestled within a pagan culture. Christianity began in a country occupied by a pagan empire, and its message spread like wildfire. The pagan culture has nothing to offer anyone but misery and suffering; the message of Christianity is a welcome and refreshing well of joy in comparison.
Our ancestors give us the key to the Christian’s proper relationship with the pagan world. Rivalry with the pagan world will not save us: it never has. The first Christian martyrs who awaited death by being eaten alive by wild animals knew that proper engagement with the pagan world wasn’t about power, politics, government, social approbation, or out-scandalizing the scandalizers, but something far greater: a kingdom. In their faithfulness, they knew that this kingdom would ultimately swallow whole the very seemingly indomitable Roman Empire that surrounded them and built the very coliseums in which they met their ends.
We cannot detach from the world, nor be scandalized by its inevitable paganism, but rather we must “seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness.” We must offer ourselves up, like the Apostle Paul before us, as a libation for the Kingdom. This work rightly encompasses all the ordinary work of life appropriate to our vocations, but also all the extraordinary work of life too. The Kingdom asks us to perfect our own home and hearths, but also to move out of these sanctuaries into the culture, claiming it all for a process of sanctification. All of this work requires a living, dynamic relationship with the king of this Kingdom to help us both discern how this Kingdom should be built and avoid falling sway to our own self-serving and morally relativistic narratives. It is only in recognizing our own weaknesses that we can allow the grace of God to flow through us and properly evangelize to the broken world around us.
The Lord asks us again: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on Earth?”
Is His question not the question of any good rabbi, not one that seeks an answer directly, but instead challenges the student, setting her back on her feet as she searches around the Master with her eyes, grasping at His question?
It is in this grasping that we may discover the right answer. Is the Lord not asking us to be with Him in His endeavor? His ask is as demanding as His being: it is something beyond Sunday mornings, beyond allowing the fruits of the culture to mollify us into a passive disengagement with the world around us. His ask is of our entire lives, every single minute, for him, for the kingdom. If we are to declare ourselves members of the Kingdom of Christ, then we must begin preparing it.
The Lord is generous in giving us this endeavor and striving, if we accept His invitation. The Kingdom is here and now, breaking out like yeast in the leavened bread, waiting only for us to work it. The Lord’s generosity in giving us Christians this mission to further His Kingdom gives us more meaning and happiness than we can imagine. As Dr. Girard himself wrote, “Christ allows us to face this reality without sinking into madness. The apocalypse does not announce the end of the world; it creates hope. If we suddenly see reality, we do not experience the absolute despair of an unthinking modernity but rediscover a world where things have meaning.” Perhaps the Good News of the Gospel is this: we can be saved from our own Gnosticism.
So, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth? Will the widow still be knocking at the judge’s door? Will the slaves have returned the talents in multiples to the Master? Will the King have a Kingdom, here and now? Once we know our response to the Lord’s question, then we will understand the answer to all others.