Trinity and Church

(This paper adapts some material by Robert Doyle)

‘It is a kind of analogy of echo: the church is what it is by virtue of being called to be a temporal echo of the eternal community that God is.’ Colin Gunton, p. 79.

‘The church is called to be the kind of reality at a finite level that God is in eternity.’ Gunton, p. 81

1.       The renaissance in Trinitarian thought is perhaps more recent than we realize. Prior to Karl Barth in the 1930s, it was characteristic of conservative and liberal theologies to place the doctrine of the Trinity down the list of important attributes of God (see Schleiermacher and Louis Berkhof, for example). Barth’s ‘rediscovery’ of the doctrine of the Trinity came from his deep theological conviction that Christian theology must be done on its own terms. What could be more distinctively Christian than the Trinity? Another factor in the rediscovery of the Trinity was the way in which Orthodox theologians became increasingly read in the West (Rowan Williams, for example, writes his PhD on the Russian Orthodox Vladimir Lossky in the 1970s). This meant that Western theologians such a Colin Gunton began to challenge the pervasive influence of Augustine in Western Trinitarian reflection, and to re-read the Cappadocian Fathers.

2.       Broughton Knox’s best work, The Everlasting God, pre-empted this discussion somewhat in the early 1980s. Interestingly, he was prompted in his Trinitarian thinking by his reflections on the ecclesiology, and particularly on the notion of fellowship. Was not the fellowship of the Trinitarian persons a model for the fellowship that bound together the members of church gatherings? He did not tarry long on the matter, but the line of comparison was clearly drawn, as it was to be in theological work around the globe in the 1980s and 90s.

3.       The application of Trinitarian thinking to ecclesiology proved to be the theological fashion of the 90s, and was done in a rather cavalier fashion at an academic and popular level. It has not been uncommon to hear church planters invoke Trinitarian concepts such as perichoresis to describe the relations between church members (or between the genders) in both an ontological and an ethical mode. This may sound groovy, but there has been a widely recognized need for a careful rethink of the way in which Trinitarian models are to be applied to the church. Many of these ecclesiological models have projected up into the doctrine of the Trinity their assumptions about the shape of ecclesial life. So, more hierarchical ecclesiologies prompt hierarchical Trinities, and more egalitarian church polities prompt horizontally organized Trinities. In a more democratic age, theologians have hoped that a more egalitarian Trinity would rescue the church from a monistic and authoritarian approach. Debates about gender – usually among evangelicals - have curiously overlapped with this discussion.

4.       Is there warrant for building ecclesiology on the doctrine of the Trinity? Scripture does give us the grounds for Trinitarian reflection on the church, as long as it carefully construed. Whatever we might say, it is at least theologically obvious that the Church of God – on which he bestows his own holiness and righteousness, and which is incorporated into the Son of God by the Spirit – must in some way reflect the character and being of the one who constitutes it. All Christian thinking must be theocentric – but of course, this means that it must also be evangelical thinking: it must relate to God’s activity in the world in and through Christ.

5.       We can see this at the level even of the creation itself. The coherence and glory of the creation is the coherence and glory bestowed on it by the creator, and as such, it is like his coherence and glory. It is the divine wisdom that structures the inward parts of the created order (Job 38:36).

6.       The ‘real ontological link’ (R. Doyle) between divine and created being comes in the person of Christ, who as both man and God and the one who alone mediates between man and God invites us to consider that the being of humankind is determined by the being of God. That is to say (following Doyle, following Torrance):

a.       The NT describes Jesus Christ as the divine agent from whom and through whom comes the order and rationality of the creation (Col 1:15-23, John 1:1-18 etc).

b.      In a minor key, we ought also to point to Rom 1:17-23, in which the divine nature of God is somehow displayed in the things that are made.

c.       A third important theological datum is creation ex nihilo: God created from nothing a  creature to be in fellowship with him and which bears his image. This creature is made not according to its kind, but according to the divine kind. We must read this Christologically: the NT describes Jesus as the one in whose image we are being transformed (2 Cor 4:4-6 et al).

d.      ‘The Church’ is i) a creaturely entity; ii) personal and social; iii) constituted by the special redeem work of the Triune God. Some measure of Trinitarian reflection on the church seems appropriate.

7.       We have also to hand the Scriptural passages that directly invite a comparison between the being of God and the being of the church – though of course, these are often brief. Thus we think of Ephesians 4, John 14-17 and 1 Cor 12 in particular. Especially in the Pauline material we notice the description of an ecclesial unity being grounded in the singularity of God.

8.       Counter-ontologies? Thinking ontologically about the church is necessary in part because of the powerful counter-ontologies that have a persistent and pervasive influence in the world and in the church. It has too often been the case that a prevailing political ontology has simply been mapped on the church without caveat. This complaint cuts both ways of course – it is as true of more democratic churches as it is of more hierarchical ones. The Neo-platonism of the Greco-Roman world saw being as a graded hierarchy. This thought-form crept into Christian theology through Pseudo-Dionysius in the 5^th/6^th century, and was still in circulation by the time of Aquinas. The legal-political ontology of Rome was likewise an attempt to describe true being in terms of its relation to the law and political institutions. Too readily, the Church adopted this notion of relations as being legal-political and institutional in form, constituted by its head (the bishop).

9.       We live in a world no less pervaded by alternative ontologies. The radical libertarianism and egalitarianism has individual autonomy at its heart. Scientific materialism is an attempt to do almost without being – or at least to see relations between things as (and they can’t decide) completely random or completely determined by physical forces. Postmodernity posits a world in which everything is in complete flux – being is difference and change, in other words. (See Richard Florida’s work on Cities). John Milbank has argued that the ontology of the modern democratic state is an ‘ontology of violence’, constituted by blood.

10.   What are the controls on Trinitarian reflection on the church? Both Gunton and Volf are keen to show that they are not in favour of unrestrained and unqualified application of the Trinity to the church. Very obviously, God is God, and as such is perfect; and we as creatures are not. Furthermore, the persons of the Trinity interpenetrate each other and are united to one another more deeply than we as creatures ever could. Even in eternity, we will not become divine. So: what are the safeguards? Miroslav Volf offers three of these:

11.   First, God the immanent Trinity always remains concealed from our direct vision: he dwells in unapproachable light. Though the economic Trinity witnesses truly to the immanent Trinity, there is a remainder – God remains in some sense mysterious to us (as Paul declares in Rom 11: 33-36).

12.   Second, even though the fact of God’s accommodating himself to creaturely understanding in his revelation of himself allows us to move from Trinity to ecclesiology, we need to understand that the concepts we learn from the Trinity are to applied to human experience by analogy. The notions of ‘person’ and ‘communion’ – which are so crucial to our thinking about humanity and church – are not identical with ‘person’ and ‘communion’ in the divine being, but they do resemble, or echo, them. For example: Robert Doyle thinks that applying the term ‘perichoresis’ to human relationships is so misleading that we ought to use other terms to restrain ourselves: ‘mutual communion’ or ‘other-person centred’ perhaps. That is: in church we are dealing with redeemed human creatures, and we need to understand them as such, not as divinized beings.

13.   Third, we echo God only in the midst of creaturely life. We are the inhabitants of history, and being in the church does not escape this context even as there is a true hope, a possession of the Holy Spirit and an eschatological expectation. We are still impacted by sin, both as victims and as perpetrators. The heavenly church lies yet before us – we are on the way to it. Volf writes: ‘If the church remains at a statically understood minimum of correspondence to the Trinity, it misses possibilities God has given it along with its being; if by contrast it reaches for a statically understood maximum, it risks missing its historical reality, and certainly if it claims to realize this maximum, its self-understanding turns into ideology’. That is: we reflect an eternal being, but within time, and as finite creatures. There is in this thought an ethical dimension: that is, it is not simply that the Trinity constitutes our being and gives us our identity; it also serves as the call to us to live according to the reality of our existence and in tune with our hope.

14.   Applying Trinitarian thinking about church to congregational life

a.       At the very least, the Trinity ought to inform the vocabulary we use about God as we address him in prayer and in song. The name of our God is the Triune name: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (see JB Torrance’s little book, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace). The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that it is the Triune God who gathers the church – that we glorify the Father through the Son and in the power and fellowship of the Holy Spirit. That is: the doctrine of the Trinity protects us from pagan forms of worship!

b.      The ‘one-another’ language of the NT is extraordinarily pervasive. It clearly not simply a nice plea for everyone to get along. It is surely reflective of the very being of the God who constitutes our fellowship with one-another.

c.       We ought to hesitate before we apply Trinitarian categories to church structures or to gender relations – not that this is always going to be inappropriate but that it has been so often the result of a projection onto God of a preferred arrangement of human systems. Nevertheless: we have in the Trinity a clear challenge to the notion that there must be in order an inherent superiority of being.

d.      The struggle for the congregational church is always going to reflect the God-given unity it has while exploring and embracing proper diversity that the divine unity does not suppress.

Christian Spirituality for Teenagers - an introduction

I’ve been asked to address the question of the spirituality of young people; and I think I need to say three things before starting to discuss what it might look like practice. The first is that the word ‘spirituality’ is probably one of the most rubbery and misleading terms ever. In contemporary culture it is highly individualized – it is a way I can talk about myself as vaguely having a religious sentiment without actually committing in the usual way to a religious group. But this is absolutely not a Christian way to think about it – because we think about ‘spirituality’ as having to do with the ‘Holy Spirit’, and because we believe in the Triune God – a unity of three persons – we think necessarily of the Spiritual as having to do with God the Father and God the Son and how they act in the world. Which reminds us that a truly Christian spirituality must centre on the cross of Jesus Christ – the place where God was reconciling himself to the world. The great thing about this is that it reminds us that true spirituality is not about us doing things to make ourselves more acceptable to God, but rather about God and his gracious gift of his Son for us.

The second thing I need to say is that when it comes to spirituality, teenagers are the same as everyone else, but different from everyone else: but their sameness is more fundamental than their differences. This is important to remember because of the demographic segmentation that comes with our market economy. It divides us into smaller and smaller groups, making each group seem alien to the others so it can sell us products. Especially, it has cordoned adolescence off from the rest of us, and made us feel like teenagers are a species apart – with special needs and special interests that only specialists can understand. But spiritually speaking, teenagers are in the same state as adults: they are created in the image of God and so called to respond to God; they share like the rest of us in the Adamic crimes, and the stain of sin is on them, too; and, if they are in Christ, then the Holy Spirit dwells in them and they are fully members of Christ’s body, the church, just as much as adults are. We might recognize for practical purposes that adolescent believers have particular personal and social needs, and so form youth groups and have special ministries for them – and special ministers – these are not because we think teenagers are a different race but precisely because we think of them as being in a kind of triage situation – a point of particular need and particular openness. And this leads me to make two related points for how we develop teenagers as spiritual beings: first, that we are preparing them for lifelong spiritual engagement with the Lord of life, not simply entertaining them or diverting them for a while; and second, that we are separating them from the main congregation (in as much as we do) so that we can connect them.

So: the practices for cross-centred teenage spirituality are not in some ways different from the practices that a Christian adult ought to pursue, though they may be differently applied.

The third thing to say about them is that these practices are all responsive – they are responses to what God has done; and in fact direct us to what God has done (rather than what we do). If that focus is lost, we no longer have Christian spirituality, we simply have religion.

On word studies

A ‘word study’ (and everyone denies that they rely on these alone, but I see plenty of relying on them in evangelical circles) is when you construct a doctrine purely in terms of the way a word is used in Scripture, usually by getting out your computer software and collecting all the different references. It is not a useless activity, but
a) it is prone to ignoring the way in which words may be used in radically different ways in different contexts – and that, as linguists all know, context is best determiner of meaning, not the lexicon (which is a record of usage)
b) it prioritises vocabulary over the myriad other ways that Scripture speaks about concepts – parable, metaphor, image and above all narrative.
c) it leads to arguments from silence – ie, ‘a word x isn’t used in this way, therefore it is invalid to use it in this way in theological thinking about the concept’. Word studies have a helpful critical function in that they discipline us to think ‘why didn’t the Bible writers use this vocabulary in this way’, but that is all they achieve.
d) a word study often relies on tendentious claims about the way in which the word is used in such extant Greek literature as we still have (which is of course extremely fragmentary). This sort of move can help to rule IN certain types of usage, but it can’t rule OUT any usage.
e) evangelical word studies frequently depend on a spurious dichotomy between ‘ordinary’ usage and ‘religious’ or ‘special’ usage. So, we often hear claims that word x is actually simply a secular and ordinary word and that the NT is not using it in the sense that the word later came to have in the Christian tradition. I would say: this alleged dichotomy is usually a false one, and neglects the fact that the NT is written down only after the early church had been going for some two or three decades (and a bit more), and had plenty of time to make its usage of words quite specialised.
f) the word study appeals for its power on the claim that this is what the Bible is really saying, over the heads of the misguided tradition that came after it. I don't think that this is a theological way to read Scripture...

Simply put: a Christian understanding of (for example) ‘faith’ will be assisted by a description of how the word is used in Scripture, but this is only the beginning and not the whole of the theological task.

PROCLAMATION: An Anglican View

One of the greatest of Anglican preachers, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral John Donne, once wrote:
“if there be discounting or slackening of Preaching, there is the danger of losing Christ”.

Would it be fair to say that across the churches there is just such a “discounting or slackening”? Certainly, within the Anglican Communion there is a trend against the proclamatory aspect of the Christian gathering. The sermon has been shriveled to a perfunctory few minutes and has become instead of a proclamation of the word of God a mere moral rumination or a piece of self-help or the ponderous giving of the preacher’s opinion, a kind of Sunday oral version of Saturday’s newspaper column.

Perhaps it is for the best: if you haven’t got anything to say, then you are probably better off not saying it, or saying it very briefly. Anglican preaching has become a standing object of derision – one thinks of Peter Cook’s famous lampoon or Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no longer, or very rarely, are the best sermons printed and read.

I suspect there are several reasons for the general decline. Certainly, one of them is that there has been an awful lot of boring, overlong, self-indulgent and incompetent preaching! Another is that the evident humanity of most preachers leads us to suspect whether their words could possibly be “God’s words”: they are someone whose frailties we know too well, whose lack of skill with oratory we suffer and who is as susceptible to tears and tiredness as we are. In the midst of a beautiful liturgy filled with sonorous ancient words and majestic music in a glorious building, the utterance from the pulpit feels like a prosaic interruption. With Eliza Doolittle we say “words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.”

But if the humanity of the preacher is not enough to make us doubt the value of proclamation, the contemporary suspicion of words themselves increases the threat to the sermon. This of course resonates with apophatic tradition, and it is no accident that Derrida, Foucault and others were attracted to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus and others. Words are too susceptible to become the instruments of power or spin; words are too slippery, too inexact, too imperfect an instrument; words are too limited to contain the transcendent Almighty. As Gregory of Nazianzen once prayed:
you remain beyond the reach of speech.

All that is thought stems from you,
But you are beyond the power of thought.

Archbishop Peter Carnley, former Anglican Primate of Australia, pointed out in his  book Reflections in the Glass that the theology must start from a core Anglican – indeed Christian - belief in the unknowability and sheer transcendence of God. Yet Christian belief must not overbalance in this direction such that God’s revelation of himself in the gospel of Jesus Christ is lost. My observation of Anglican discussions is that there has been a growing embarrassment at speaking about God directly as if he could be known – as if to talk of knowing him implies mastering him in some way.

However: Christian worship is never of a God unknown, but of a God who speaks about himself to us. Have we, or have we not, a gospel: a message that originates from the divine? The contrast between the paganism of the Athenians and Paul’s message in Acts 17:23 is apposite:

23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

These are presumptuous words indeed, if human words cannot meaningful speak about the divine. And yet Paul is not presenting his message as yet another attempt fitfully to describe God from the human side, but as a decisive intervention from God in Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord.
The sending of the Logos into the realm of women and men - the incarnation, in other words - is often described as the central theological theme of Anglicanism. The incarnation of Son in the likeness of sinful flesh means that that enormous gulf between God and humanity has been overcome. It means that human flesh is an entirely possible dwelling place for divinity. It also means that human words are entirely possible as vehicles for divine self-communication. Gnosticism – which decried the flesh and emphasized the concealment of a mystery rather than its revelation – has been rejected consistently by Christians since the time of Irenaeus as anti-human. Body is not to be played off against the soul; neither is the intelligible to played off against that which is beyond reason. Paul’s preference for intelligible words over ecstatic tongues in the Christian meeting in 1 Corinthians 14 is instructive.

In the gospel of Jesus Christ men and women are addressed by the God who creates with a word. This mustn’t be understood reductionistically, of course, as if God could be contained or captured by human words. The prologue of John’s gospel sums this up well:

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known. (John 1:18)

God is beyond us and our words. But we are not beyond him and we are not beyond the sound of his voice. Nor is it beyond the people of God to pass on what we have heard God say. As the apostle Peter writes:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim  the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).

Those who have heard the call of God are commissioned to proclaim his works to the nations as a priestly duty. Just as Jesus himself came to proclaim a message of good news about himself – “the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18-19) - so his apostles were commissioned to rehearse the life, death, resurrection and glorious return of their Lord in the hearing of the nations. And it is this repetition of the mighty deeds of God in Christ that forms the basis of the act of proclamation that features so strongly in Anglican worship in its Reformed Evangelical expression.

The Anglican tradition, especially in its Evangelical form, has always, therefore, had a very high view of Scripture as the authoritative, God-breathed (qeo,pneustoj 2 Tim 3:16), witness to Christ. This is not the place to present a full-blown description of that theological step; however, this helps us understand John Donne’s comment. Proclaiming the word of scripture is the way for the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). In his framing of the Anglican liturgy, Thomas Cranmer put a priority on the reading of the whole Bible in the vernacular language once a year; so that

the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of the Holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion. 
(The Book of Homilies)

At the ordination of every Anglican minister, the Bible is given as a symbol of their authority and task: to minister in word and sacrament. The Bible, not the cup, is the symbol of the ordained ministry for Anglicans.

The ministry of proclamation, therefore, is not merely the giving of opinions or perspectives. It is a recital of God’s word to human beings, and in this derivative sense may properly be called “the word of God”. It therefore requires an attitude of fear and trembling from the one who would so preach. It asks for an unlearning of the hermeneutics of suspicion and for the forming in the proclaimer an attitude of receptive and humble listening. The pulpit in the Anglican church is not merely the preserve of the priest or even of Anglicans: it may be perfectly appropriate for a layperson or even a non-Anglican to speak, as in fact happens frequently. But the pulpit ought to be guarded with some jealousy as the place from which the word of God is proclaimed and taught to the people of God. The Lord our God uses the proclamation of his Word to remind us that his word is

living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

The Patience of Faith 2: the Longsuffering b)

That we exist within time is a hidden aspect of the traditional debates about the problem of suffering and evil. We experience evil and suffering as deeply problematic in relation to faith in God because on the one hand we have the expectation of Beckett’s audience that a beginning will lead to an end, and on the other we cannot envisage a ‘solution’ or a ‘remedy’ occurring within the span of life we have to lead. Three score years and ten is the  length by which we tend to measure time; that we have this habit is evidence merely of the framing of all our experiences by our bodily existence in the world. 

And yet the writers of Scripture know this already. I find it remarkable how the debate about the problem of evil goes on as if the Bible knows nothing of it at all – as if the Bible were written from a great height. But suffering and evil are deeply troubling to the writers of what we call the Word of God. They write not from some point of eternity, but in the midst of time. History swirls around them as they work. They record genocide, murder, tyranny and rape. They tell of the exploitation of the poor and the desecration of sacred spaces. They know what it is like to call out ‘my God, my God, why?’ They plead with God to make good his claim to sovereignty over history and to moral purity and goodness. The Bible is a messy book, stained with the many tears of its authors who wept not only over the sins of the people of God but also with bewilderment at God’s inaction. 

This isn’t the whole story of course: the Bible is, at the same time as it is a recognition of the sense of bewilderment at God’s absence and inaction, also a testimony about God’s active presence and his promise to come again. A faith such as the one we encounter in the pages of the Bible is not going to be a belief that pretends that evil and suffering don’t exist. Neither is Biblical faith the sort of faith that minimizes the impact of suffering by saying something glib like ‘it’ll all work out in the end’. 

This is the difficulty with the two standard defences against the problem of evil offered by Christians – Augustine’s ‘free-will’ defence, and Irenaeus’ ‘soul-making’ defence. Augustine (in very brief) argued that the good of giving us free-will outweighed the bad of having us harm each other and suffer harm. The Irenaean argument (likewise in very brief) claims that suffering and evil are necessary in some way to human moral development – a process which is at the present time unfinished. Both of these arguments involve us in making the highly problematic claim that God intends to bring about a good by means of evil and suffering. Even though Augustine could see the problem with making evil something necessary for the ultimate good, it is hard to see how his theodicy escapes this problem. The pastoral problem this argument causes highlights just how inadequate it is. If you have heard a well-meaning relative say to a teenager whose father has just been killed ‘God has some higher purpose in this’ (as I have) you’ll know what I mean. 

Irenaeus’ solution at least has the advantage of pointing us towards an unseen future. Some ultimate purpose justifies this penultimate experience of pain, in this view. This is something like the Biblical answer, though the Bible writers don’t attempt the justification. What the Bible does with evil and suffering does not amount to a justification for them, as if they are necessary to the whole plan of the universe – as if the creation included the fall already within it. That line of thought leaves us with a monstrous God, or none at all. The Bible simply recognizes the existence of evil and suffering and turns us to the character of God, which is revealed to us in what he does in history to make himself a people and live in a loving proximity to them.

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.