The Patience of Faith 2: the Longsuffering a)

In what ways has our time-consciousness had an impact on faith in God? Or perhaps we need to acknowledge the possibility that our culture’s declining faith in God has had an impact on our time-consciousness. The relationship is complex and recursive. Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot (premiered 1953) makes a kind of dark fun at the futile hopes of its characters. The plot is perfectly simple: Vladimir and Estragon make the audience laugh while waiting for someone called ‘Godot’ who never appears. Though Beckett denied that he intended ‘Godot’ to sound like ‘God’, complaining that he wrote the play first in French and the word for God in French is ‘Dieu’, the Biblical and religious echoes in the play are very suggestive of the absence of God. The play is fairly slathered in allusions from Scripture, including an intriguing discussion of the thief on the cross. Godot is said to keep sheep and goats, which sounds very much like the Biblical divinity. But even without these, simply by setting up a narrative Beckett is pointing to the way we, out of habit, conceive of time as consisting of a beginning, middle and an end. When we have a beginning, we expect for an end. By not offering us one – and yet by keeping his audience entertained for the full length of the play – Beckett is saying something deeply disturbing: that our sense of an ending is perhaps simply a layer we place upon the events of our experience. Perhaps passing the time is more important and of more significance than what we are passing the time for. Hope – especially the hope claimed by a Biblical faith - is a distraction.

Traditional orthodox Christianity has always spoken of the return of Jesus Christ. The early Christians prayed marana tha (come, O Lord!). Christianity has always had an eschatology, in other words, a doctrine of the last things; and Christians have since earliest times given voice to a hope not only that things will get better over time, but that there will be a decisive conclusion to time. One of the difficulties of this doctrine in the history of Christianity is that the Scriptural language describing the last things is stretched as far as it will go by symbol and metaphor. Insensitivity to the nature of the language the Bible authors used to describe the things that are far beyond our experience has led at various times to crass speculations and pseudo-prophetic movements led by would-be messiah figures. As a reaction to this feature of Christianity especially in its popular forms, some scholars since the Enlightenment have described a Christianity shorn of its eschatological elements. For D.F. Strauss, author of Leben Jesu (1835), Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who simply got it wrong – an error repeated by the early church. His real value for today is as a romantic vision of liberal humanity at its finest. There was thus for Strauss the possibility of Christianity-sans-eschatology – especially in the ethical teaching of Christ.

So we can see already within the camp of Christianity a move to scrub away the embarrassment of these apparently primitive eschatological elements. God is not coming to end history and bring time to its conclusion – that language in the Bible was entirely encapsulated in the history of Jesus of Nazareth. The historian Ernst Troeltsch wrote in an essay entitled ‘The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith’:

When it first formed its religious ides the primitive Christian community had already taken Jesus out of history and made him Logos and God, the eternal Christ appearing to us in historical form, one who is related in essence to the eternal Godhead and so not unnaturally the object of faith. But historical criticism, grown up in a world no longer dominated by the church, has returned him to history where all is finite and conditioned.

Contemporary criticism of the Bible had swept away, in Troeltsch’s view, all the unnecessary accretions of church dogma with all its talk of the eternal God and of the world to come, and opened up the possibility for a new consideration of Jesus as simply a historical figure. This was typical of theology of the early twentieth century. As the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, a critic of this turn, has said:

For modern theology the early Christian expectation of the parousia is an embarrassment which it thinks it can get rid of with the help of demythologization.

Popular level Christianity, as if in direct defiance of the scholarly guild, has featured wilder and wilder predictions about the future return of Christ – most tastelessly exemplified by the best-selling Left Behind series that were published in the 1980s and 90s in the USA. 

However, the loss of an expectation of God’s return at the conclusion of history parallels an increased sense of disillusionment with and even anger towards a God who apparently refuses to act against evil in the world. We can see this in Waiting for Godot: Beckett isn’t simply laughing at poor deluded theists with a smug sense of superiority. The unbelief that comes through in the play is a more believing unbelief than that. The feelings of disappointment or rage against the God who remained absent and silent in the face of the horrors and savagery of the twentieth century is magnified by the loss of belief in the God ‘who is to come’. If his promise to intervene is disregarded, then it seems we have more grounds to complain against him for not intervening. 

The protest against God’s inaction wouldn’t have any force against a God who was absolutely non-existent. If he does not exist, then you are wasting your breath complaining about him from the start; and your emotional energy is better held in reserve. But what has been lost is a God who is not merely a benign force but is also the Lord of history. That is: the version of Christianity frequently rejected, by apathy as much as by active non-belief, is a Christianity shorn of the God to whom the Psalmist prays ‘my times are in your hand’. Against this emaciated view of God there is a justified protest, for he is impotent at best, a maker of false promises at worst. 

We are left abandoned by God in the middle of history. We have nothing to do but to nurse our suffering, to curse him for gifting us with a consciousness of time which prompts us to hope for a meaningful conclusion to history where there is none. Our experience of suffering then becomes not simply one of pain, but one of despair. Our suffering is intensified by our awareness that there is no future; our happiness is compromised by it.