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Properly understood, apocalyptic rhetoric is not the language of despair, but the language of hope. In theological terms, the apocalyptic is not so much the end of the world as the beginning of the breaking through of truth and justice into the world we live in. To say that “we are living in the end of the world” — whether because of economic exploitation, environmental collapse, or devastating consumerism — is not to say that everything is dying but that everything must change. To employ apocalyptic rhetoric is not to say that the world is doomed but that another world is possible.
Again, in religious terms: The apocalyptic task has always been the work of the prophets, not the priests. The priests say that if the current system ended, everything would be over; the prophets say that if the current system ended, the new one could at last begin. Perhaps the prophets are “unrealistic”; perhaps they are “naïve”. That’s what was said of MLK, of Gandhi, of Milk — but these men and others like them, though dismissed as ignorant and idealistic and unworthy of being taken seriously, are the very prophets who have given us hope and brought us change. It takes an act of daring and dreaming to listen to their visions; but when we do, we see suddenly not the end of the world, but the true beginning.
Hannah Arendt has become one of my favorite political philosophers of late. I was introduced to her work in my History and Politics course at Yale this past semester, wherein we read large selections from her brilliant Origins of Totalitarianism. Just last week I read the brief entirety of her On Violence in an evening (her nuanced discussion of the differences between power and violence is one of the most valuable contributions to the topic I have encountered).
One of the most striking passages of Origins was, as it happened, the closing paragraph:
But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est — “that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.
I see the hints of an entire philosophy of history in this paragraph (though I don’t know enough about her work to know if it would be one that she would agree with), a philosophy of history that rejects both linear notions of progress and cyclical notions of endless circles of fortune and instead holds up the absolute worth of every human person as an end in him/herself (in the Kantian sense). I also see a powerful theological idea that resonates with my understanding of the resurrection of Jesus.
One of my long-time “favorite quotes” has been from William Stringfellow, who once wrote that “The essential and consistent task of Christians is to expose the transience of death’s power in the world.” That is, Christians are called to constitute a radical community whose task it is to witness to the transformative power of the Resurrection in the universe. The significance of the narrative of the Resurrection is inherently political, for it challenges the supposedly absolute power of the kingdoms of the world, whose rule is always based on violence and death. The implications of the Resurrection are that human life embodies transcendent hope within the physical world, that death cannot destroy the power of that hope, and thus that every human person has absolute worth no matter what assaults upon the Image of God in her are made by the Powers That Be. In Arendt’s terms, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus tell us that the end of every human life contains a new beginning; every birth, every human person, is a guarantee of the transience of death’s power in the world.
The two statements of Arendt and Stringfellow are saying essentially the same thing. What both Arendt’s concept of human beginning and the Christian concept of the Resurrection give us is a way of interpreting the events of the world. This interpretive lens tells us to view events with an eye towards hope rather than despair, to see new beginnings in every end, to look for the resurrection that accompanies every death. It is a worldview that does not rely on an overarching (and probably ultimately untenable, for all its attractiveness) teleology of constantly ascending human progress. It is rooted rather in what I would term a “reverse teleology” of beginning rather than ending, an inverted telos not of an external end or purpose but rather of the end-in-itself (again in the Kantian sense, as a reflection of the absolute worth of every person). In this view of the world, individual human worth derives not from some future “end” of human life but from each life’s individual beginning, from the very fact of being human — religiously speaking, from the reality of the Imago Dei. The uncontainable, bursting-forth expansiveness of this process of beginning and resurrection is what validates continued hope despite the evils of the world.
A quick thought: If the Resurrection is real, then “Jesus lives” is a political statement.
William Stringfellow once wrote this: “The essential and consistent task of Christians is to expose the transience of death’s power in the world.” Indeed, the power of death is far-reaching in the kingdoms of the world, for it is from death and the fear of death that the State ultimately derives its influence. Governments are founded on violence, which has as its ultimate manifestation death itself. To deny the power of death (as Jesus did!) is to challenge, in effect, the underlying principle of the State. Thus, to say that Jesus lives is to make a statement with drastic real-world political ramifications.
If death is the final expression of violence and destruction, resurrection surely is the final expression of non-violence and transformation. Thus, the basis of Christian ethics (nonviolence/transformation/overcoming-evil-with-good) is contained in the narrative of Jesus himself, rather than in any set of abstract philosophical-ethical propositions.
Related: Creeds and Ethics – Towards a Narrative Christology
This post is part of a series where I’m sharing some of my reflections from my senior project, for which I spent three full days in solitude at Lake Hiwassee, NC. For a fuller explanation, see the introductory post.
On the first full day of my project, I decided to go for a run. After some time, I turned off onto a side road and came to a tiny, old, overgrown cemetery. The cold, grey headstones were often illegible, and some seemed never to have had anything written on them at all. Many were tilted, crumbling, ready to fall. Yet this cemetery was hardly a place of death. Indeed, what astonished me about it immediately was how much life there was. Pine trees were growing. Moss spread throughout. Bees buzzed nearby and ants clambered along.
Lichen grew on the gravestones, eating away at them in the slow progress of time (though all years are but a blink in the eternity those stones represented). Gravestones, to most people, symbolize death – but right there, on those crumbling markers, new life was sprouting.
I’m one of those Christians who believe in a literal resurrection from death. But I also believe in resurrection as a metaphor, as an idea with incredible power. I saw resurrection today; I saw new life coming from death, new hope springing out of what must have been great sadness. I saw graves, and though there were bodies in them, those graves were empty.
Resurrection is all around us.
