Pastor’s Pen
We live in a world and society that is constantly shifting and changing. We have felt this especially with the war in Ukraine, social division in the United States, and compounding financial constraints stemming from inflation and the pandemic. Our understanding of history plays a fundamental role in our interaction with this ever shifting present. It invokes notions of human agency, power, change and the constant need for interpretation, story, and meaning. It raises hopes of “learning from history,” and the dismay of “history repeating itself.” German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel regards history as an intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the realization of human freedom.[1] A philosophical understanding of the progression of world history enables us to know this God, to comprehend the nature and purpose of Geist.[2] Hegel perceives world history to have developed according to a dialectical process. This Hegelian dialectic is often described in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A thesis provokes its opposite idea, its antithesis, and together they give rise to an idea that combines elements of both which is their synthesis. To make sense of this historical perspective, note Karl Barth’s awareness of the historical dialectical process in his response in “The Christian’s Place in Society,”
The Christian is the Christ. The Christian is that within us which is not ourself but Christ in us. “Christ in us” understood in all its Pauline depth is not a psychic condition, an affection of the mind, a mental lapse, or anything of the sort, but is a presupposition of life… The community of Christ is a building open on every side, for Christ died for all – even for the folk outside. There is in us, over us, behind us, and beyond us a consciousness of the meaning of life, a memory of our own origin, a turning to the Lord of the universe, a critical No and a creative Yes in regard to all the content of our thought, a facing away from the old and toward the new age–whose sign and fulfilment is the cross. The community of Christ is a building open on every side, for Christ died for all–even for the folk outside. There is in us, over us, behind us, and beyond us a consciousness of the meaning of life, a memory of our own origin, a turning to the Lord of the universe, a critical “No” and a creative “Yes” in regard to all the content of our thought, a facing away from the old and toward the new age—whose sign and fulfilment is the cross.[3]
Barth argues that initiative begins with God. The risen Christ—the one who is Christ in us—is the one through whom hope and renewal shall come. Focused on the impending Second World War, Barth does not juxtapose “Church” and “Society,” but “God” and “Society.” For Barth and Hegel, it is God alone that can save the world as is evident throughout the dialectical struggle of history. God’s history is not a movement apart from the history of our society, but one that works in and through them. God’s initiating movement breathes resurrected life into this new age and every age before it. Our chief concern as the Church, is to participate in this Divine movement—a movement we invoke each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer. Critically, Barth says that the “tragic incompleteness” in which we find ourselves is not to be glossed over, despite being ones who live in light of Jesus the Christ’s victory over death. This “already but not yet,” is what Barth terms as living in the midst of a “tragically incomplete but purposeful series of divine deeds and evidences.”[4] Christians are aware that we live in a liminal, transitory stage from death to life, from the unrighteous to the righteousness of God, from the old creation to the new creation. In other words, as Christians we live in our society as one’s who understand the resurrecting hope of Christ has been initiated but has not yet been brought to completion.
As one’s who have experienced the riches of God’s grace and have been adopted as children of the living God, the Church and Christians are called to be the ambassadors of God’s Kin-Dom on earth as it is in heaven. To be the one’s critical engaged so as to understand, to intervene, and initiate works of mercy and works of piety. As ambassadors of this Kingdom, we must both struggle against darkness and affirm God’s reign over the creation. It is in knowing that the Kin-Dom of God stands at the world’s doors knocking in the already but not yet that motivates our witness and proclamation. We are called into greater participation with God as we enter into God’s continual conversion of these present times. John Wesley and the early Methodists did this through their opposition to slavery, inhumane prison conditions, and child labor. Early Methodists understood that God is moving in society, bringing the new, resurrected life of God’s reign into the world. Since have encountered the grace of God, since we are moved by the truth of Christ, and since we have eternity in our hearts, we are moved to affirm with a resounding “yes” God’s goodness and reality in society as it is, while we are accordingly moved to reject with an equally strong “no” the evil, malformed, and sinful ills of society. Put together, the church is to take part in missio Dei. Neither to secularize Jesus with a kind of progressive salvation, nor to clericalize and spiritualize our current ills, but as one’s who participate in the dynamic movement of God in our society. As one’s who both run toward justice but also learn to wait upon the Lord. As one’s who both flee from the evil of this world and flock to the goodness of God evident in it. As a church who keeps our works of mercy and piety in creative correlation as we pray, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done one earth as it is in heaven.” As we prepare ourselves for Easter, let us be the one’s who embodied the resurrected hope of Jesus by our engagement with and in history.
[1] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1857 [1975]. Lectures on the philosophy of world history, translated by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
[2] Hegel has a very idiosyncratic idea of God, which he calls Geist – meaning “spirit” or “mind.”
[3] Karl Barth, “The Christian’s place in society,” in The word of God and the word of
man, 272-327, trans. by D Horton. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1928), 273.
[4] Barth, “The Christian’s,” 297.
