From Reclaiming the Nation to the Resurrection of the Dead: Part Eleven in People of Repair
By Gregory Thompson
This is the final article in a series of articles called A People of Repair; a series in which I have tried to explore what I believe to be a critical question facing every American Christian who seeks to live faithfully in this world: What do we do when we realize that the forms of Christianity we inherited are either insufficient for—or opposed to—the Christian mission to which we are called? As I have wrestled with this question over the past 20 years, I have come to believe that the church in America, if it is to truly be a people of repair, must deliberately undergo a number of shifts in both the substance and the structure of its life.
From The Reclaiming the Nation to the Resurrection of the Dead: A Shift in Hope
In an interview conducted late in his life, the missionary pastor and theologian Lesslie Newbigin was asked a question about his view of the prospects for the church in a rapidly secularizing west. “Are you a pessimist or an optimist?” the interviewer said. Without hesitation, and with a hint of a smile, the elderly pastor said simply, “I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist. Jesus Christ is Risen from the dead.”
In these words, Newbigin sought to reframe the question of hope. His hope, he said, was not rooted in his personal disposition, though he was known for his warmth. Nor was his hope rooted in his contemporary assessment of the church, the institution to which he devoted his life. Nor was his hope rooted in the complex dynamics of late modern culture, the subject of much of his writing. His hope—for the life of the church and the life of the world—was rooted in one thing only: the sure knowledge that Christ who died lives again. Alleluia.
In one respect, Newbigin’s words were ordinary. In voicing them he was simply bearing witness to both the teaching of the Bible and the historic confession of the church. As Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 15, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied…But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep in him…Therefore my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm.” In like manner, the Nicene Creed—a creed confessed by Christians around the world as the essence of Christian teaching—ends with this same hope: “We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” Indeed, it is this hope that has led millions of Christians throughout the ages to face the lions with joy, care for their fellow prisoners with tenderness, lay their loved ones in the ground with song, and give their own lives in service of the world. The hope of the Christian church throughout time and across the world is rooted neither in triumphant optimism nor in self-preserving pessimism, but in one thing and one thing only: the resurrection of the dead.
Except when it isn’t. The truth is that throughout time and across the world, Christians are constantly tempted to place their hope elsewhere. In money. In safety. In health. In beauty. In power. In endless fantasies of control. Every day, each of us faces the allure of some form of immanent hope; something we can cling to when the truth of Christ’s resurrection seems too abstract or too impotent to provide the consolations that we need. I know the power of this allure, and I suspect that you do too. We are, in fact, witnessing its power all around us.
As I write these words, a great number of American Christians are deep in the grip of false hope. I am speaking of the false hope of ascendant Christian nationalism. If its purveyors are to be believed, this form of nationalism asserts that if we could just get the right people in and the wrong people out, we would at last enter into a new age, in which both our nation—and we ourselves—can once again be, as the saying goes, “great again.” This vision, with its unblushing carnivalesque grandiosity, promises to give us all that we ask for; not only money, safety, health, beauty, and power—but also (perhaps most wonderfully) the delicious tang of triumph over our perceived enemies. Indeed, as I write these words, millions of people—many of them claiming to be followers of the risen Christ—are intoxicated with this vision, buoyed by both the promise and possibility that it offers.
It is, of course, a fantasy; a counterfeit hope that can only heap personal disappointment and generational scorn on those who embrace it. But it has captured us. And in hopes of cashing in, we have debased ourselves almost beyond recognition. We have transformed the gospel of the glorious Christ into a parochial and easily falsifiable myth of our own greatness. We have treated our neighbors as enemies. We have scorned the poor. We have scapegoated the sojourner. We have profited off of the captive. We have poisoned the air with our vitriol and tortured the earth with our greed. We have seen our pastors become little more than court-theologians, and watched them turn our churches into franchises of cultic nationalism. We have shown ourselves willing not only to ignore, but to justify all manner of wickedness insofar as it serves our fantasy. And, as the consummation of these things, we have kept silent—and in
some cases celebrated—as one of the most transparently dishonest and morally compromised political leaders in living memory cloaks himself not only in extraordinary power, but with idolatrously messianic expectation. All the while sanctimoniously using the word of God as justification for our folly.
These are the actions of a community blinded by false hope, a community completely captive to the idolatrous messianisms sheltered within Christian Nationalism. And the consequences of these actions can only be the disappointment of our desires, the division of our communities, and the death of our credibility as the people of God. What then are we to do? Only what the people of God—when faced with their own deaths—have always been called to do: To renounce every false hope—including that of Christian Nationalism—and to re-establish our hope in the only place where it may truly find vindication: the resurrection of the Living Christ.