Memorials of Beginnings and Anticipations of Endings:

A Theology Done In Hope

By

John C. McDowell

Meldrum Lecturer in Systematic Theology

University of Edinburgh

With the skill of learning to tell the time temporal patterns are discovered; which are then calculated and regulated within a universally consistent mathematical frame; cognition of this temporal scaffolding is something into which many are initiated; and within that patterning one comes to regulate one’s future behaviour. How many people had been planning their 1999 around a slight numerical transition at its close?

But as Nicholas Lash recognises, theological time-telling is an immensely more complex skill and yet central to the business of Christian thinking, living and acting. It is located within a greater whole than in the mere awareness of the repetitive regularity of the sun’s movements, in the eschatological significance of certain aspects of the Christian communities’ stories when interpreted well (and it is no easy task to determine what this ‘interpreting well’ would be). Our memories and expectations thereby properly become focused on a particular story and its subsequent reception: that of a life lived before God, a non-identically repetitious human response of obedience, and an eschatological consummation in and through One who is identified with God’s kenotic ways with the world. If Christian hope is to be appropriately grounded, is to direct the church, and is to engage with the hopes and fears of the wider societies in the third millennium, it is this subject matter that must be recovered and remembered for it is in this memory, particularly of a tragic event, that Christianity’s being and becoming are shaped. Theology’s faithful witness to the world then can become a directing of the latter’s attention to the theological significance of the fact that our time is approaching the third millennial celebration of Jesus Christ, born, crucified and risen. One is thereby liberated and enabled to develop and encourage valid ways of appreciating the meaning of this story and learning to practice appropriate ways of inhabiting its claim on both ours and the world’s selfhood, in all forms of thinking and praxis.

Indeed, Christian theology’s interrogative performance precisely prophetically asks about and critiques all motivations and practices, not least those who perform the Gospel. It, allying with certain contemporary cultural criticisms, powerfully places a question mark for instance over the secular versions of a realised eschatology, modernity’s optimism that lingers on despite an overwhelming cultural post-modern death of meaning. Apparently there remain a few who refuse to learn the lessons of Nietzsche’s madman in The Gay Science, offering illusory possibilities for control (of self, society, environment) through technological advance.

And yet, in further critique of the nihilism and hopelessness pervading much of the ‘postmodern condition’, if plural presents may be so named, theology can offer a vision and a hope engaged in practical and ethical movements of individual and social transformation. It centres on a redemptive life lived, died and resurrected for the sake of the humanisation of the dehumanised, and the restoration and completion of the imago dei in the context of the image defaced and broken. The dawning of the third millennium commences these conversations since that event focuses many of the apocalyptic and nihilistic fears felt at the closing of this bestial century.

In referencing and knowing its proper subject matter, theology should be concerned with that story’s primary narrative form and its ongoing life and interpretation in the canonically collected and recorded reflections of the earliest followers of Jesus (and therein rightly converse with the biblical scholars). Loss of this story is to the detriment of what it means to be human, since its protagonist is precisely the eschatological articulation of what it means to be human. As such, narrative textuality, when considered under the guise of this story, is irreducibly constitutive and regulative of Christian identity. Speaking of this irreducibility, Janet Martin Soskice argues that

But theology also treats that story’s subsequent traditions of interpretation (and therefore, theology continues in dialogue also with the church historians).

This latter piece of memory is, of course, not the primary locus of study, as if it had meaning and significance in its own right, or as if it could co-operate as a primary form of discourse for faith. As Roman Catholic theologian Aidan Nichols describes, implicitly undermining many Protestant complaints over that branch of the church,

Himself aware of the particular details of where he came from, the place that defined his identity, John Calvin speaks of the ecumenical creeds as glasses through which the scriptures may be properly read.

These subsequent traditions themselves serve to focus scriptural interpretation on theology’s primary reference point - theo-logia. It is precisely this realistic sensibility of past theological traditions that the Barth of 1916 perceived as disturbingly missing in his Liberal theological heritage. His painful recognition led him into continually fresh and transformative encounters with the God witnessed to in, what he called, "the strange new world of the Bible", and that in a Reformed vein.

However, if left unqualified, Calvin’s ocular hermeneutical image could lend a suggestion of invulnerability to the traditions that have formed the character of the church. One needs to recall a number of necessary limitations which entail an important self-critical element in all ecclesial and theological dealings. And here the sense of eschatological provisionality serves to demand practices of humble critical reflection and reinterpretation.

Firstly, there is the inherently necessary fragility and tainting of sin in all human endeavours, including those of Christians, and therefore in the way in which we hear and retell the cardinal stories that make sense of our lives. If, as von Balthasar explained, theology’s self-involving nature must be done continually on its knees, this must indispensably involve confession and repentance. How many forms of Christian life and thought forget that eschatological redemption remains future for us, albeit anticipated in our particular presents?

Secondly, Christian self-description inhabits certain places and times, being informed by both various strains, and therein necessarily certain limited perspectives, of Christian tradition and much from outside. The stories that we tell are shaped and influenced by the circumstances of their production, and those themselves being always subject to ideological distortion. While on the one hand the attentiveness to the other that this necessitates may appear dangerously open-ended and relativistic for some, this limitation is itself a feature of reflection on the mystery or hiddenness-in-revealedness that is the God that many Christian traditions worship, of the God who is not part of the furniture of the universe. As Nichols argues, "because of the intrinsic richness of revelation, no one theology can hope simply to reproduce revelation in some kind of complete and unconditional way". Hence, Barth dynamically depicts the theological enterprise as a continual astonished description and redescription of a mountain peak from various places at its foot.

It is in this resistance to closure of the theological task, its refusal to capitulate to the self-indulgent temptations of imagining that the way one tells one’s story is necessarily the way in which it has and always will be told, albeit firmly rooted in seeking to better comprehend the primal story of faith, that humble dialogue with other perspectives and disciplines begins. Otherwise theology will not do justice to what David Ford names the infinitely inexhaustible richness of the mystery that is God in Christ. This would enable it to be continually engaged in what Barth names an eavesdropping on the world for whom Christians are responsible as representatives of God’s eschatologically transformative power for this world. In other words, without coming to a too easy and quick agreement with them, theology must listen sensitively to its critics in order to pursue the task of seeking truth wherever it may be found in God’s world, even if that process of vulnerable openness to the other involves great risk. After all, the entertained guest may turn despotic or venomous.

Finally, there are good eschatological grounds internal to Christian faith for the necessary humble admission of theology’s limitations. As advanced before, although redemptive time may have in some sense ended for Christ, it has not yet for us. There remains, as Rahner declares in his docta ignoranti futuri, a necessary curtain hung over our futurity. In this time of eschatological provisionality and penultimacy, negotiating itself during the theological period between the resurrection and the parousia, Christ remains on his way for us as the Prophet indicting the world of its blindness to its truth in him, as Barth recounts. Given that that is so, a theology that remembers that dark glass through which it sees admits with Lash that the process of "interpreting time is always darkly difficult". Indeed, Lash’s image of darkness is also applicable to the tentative hints at a via negativa being made here, although they must remain hints.

But yet, as Lash argues elsewhere, drawing on David Tracy’s reflections on a counter-factual conversation, this blindness and self-critical reticence in theological speech does not excuse one from participating in the task of humanising the dehumanised.

where conversation is understood as the "paradigm of noncoercive, nondominating, nondestructive social relationships". Indeed, Hans Küng rightly draws attention to J.B. Metz’s insistence – here linking up with Bloch and Marcuse – on the activation of memory as the activation of a "dangerous and liberating memory." It is the radicality of that remembered, when seen in an eschatological perspective, that enables Küng to complain of

This account of theology’s faithful, dialogical, and yet fragile and risk laden nature and task is well depicted in an image utilised by George Steiner, drawn from von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale, of the Easter nature of temporality. This image is doubly appropriate given the theological significance of millennium time. Friday is portrayed as the day of solitude, failure and pain. To these we might add ignorance and despair. Sunday, by contrast, is a day of liberation, resurrection and justice, the resolution of all our Good Fridays. It is "The lineaments of that Sunday [that] carry the name of hope", that provide propulsion to all our creative imaginings.

This image for hope, and profoundly for Christian hope, enables one to interrogate all easy optimisms that refuse to taste the bitterness of rupture and absence, and all pessimisms that forget where hope lies. Here theology performs the critical function by asking us just what day we imagine today is, presenting itself as a kind of perpetual moral wakefulness in its seeking to comprehend the God incarnate in Jesus Christ, and sets us on our way to participating responsibly in provisional movements of healing.

Therefore, it does not comprehensively and completedly answer any philosophical or theological questions, but instead raises and re-raises them in acute fashion, particularly over any created securities of meaning and value, and the ambitions and aspirations that we have. What Paul Ricoeur claims of the function of tragedy is somewhat appropriate for the interrogative and transformative functions of theology: that it teaches less by didactic or conceptual means, but by "more closely resembling a conversion of the manner of looking" through destabilising interrogating which therein reorients action.

Christian hope reminds itself and the wider world of the appropriate mood of discourse, recognising the long Saturday in which the hope for Sunday’s dawning should regulate and shape fragile human agency for the sake of the christologically determined humanisation of the world. This is the theologia crucis, eschatologically depicted as a pilgrim theologia viatorum, resisting stabilising forms of conceptual and existential closure, and reorienting it upon the vision of a world redemptively completed through the ‘lamb slain’ from its foundation. In other words, Christian hope reminds that we stand at the threshold of the third millennia of the birth of the eschatological Man who continually confronts us with the existentially and ethically relevant question, ‘Who do you say I am?’ And indeed, theology too needs to continually and humbly place itself within the hearing of, and responding to, that very question.