Historical guesswork and the Christian spoilsport

  • I’ve been enjoy­ing a Teach­ing Com­pany lec­ture series called “The Search for a Mean­ing­ful Past” that presents and com­pares dif­fer­ent “philoso­phies, the­o­ries and inter­pre­ta­tions of human his­tory.” It’s been fas­ci­nat­ing, but sooner or later when I’m lis­ten­ing I always end up real­iz­ing why intel­lec­tu­als just can’t abide Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy — it spoils all the fun.

    Here are all these bril­liant indi­vid­u­als sift­ing through the ashes and try­ing to make con­nec­tions. It’s an ardu­ous task, par­tic­u­larly before the Infor­ma­tion Age when accu­rate data was so hard to come by, and as with so many of these dis­plays of Deep Thought, it’s stag­ger­ing to con­tem­plate the intel­lec­tual prowess on dis­play behind the work of Hegel and Marx and the rest.

    But the big unspo­ken truth is that the sin­gu­lar rea­son for these types of the­o­ries is to grab that elu­sive brass ring: an accu­rate pre­dic­tion of where mankind is headed. Not that it’s not fun to just dig around in the bones, but sooner or later that curios­ity has to suc­cumb to the temp­ta­tion to be both a sci­en­tist and a prophet.

    It’s just our way, of course. We’re all afloat on this mag­nif­i­cent cruise boat, and we all want to be the one to say either “Land ho!” or “Ice­berg dead ahead!” So there are the­o­rists that are bull­ish on mankind’s future and ones that are bear­ish ( — opti­mists and pes­simists, basi­cally). There are those like Marx that thought that soci­eties would nat­u­rally progress to a higher and higher level until they became “class­less” (well, he got THAT part right, any­way) and all would go well. There are oth­ers that believed that soci­eties are cycli­cal, repeat­ing pat­terns of birth, growth and death with­out mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant progress to or from any­thing. More recently there are those that are say­ing that there’s noth­ing new for soci­eties to do and we’re all just on a big film loop for the fore­see­able future. (“The end of his­tory” so-called. Talk about a pepper-upper!)

    And then there’s the Chris­t­ian epis­to­mol­ogy, (though the illu­mi­nati would always pre­fer to dis­re­gard the view­point of that quar­ter of the earth’s pop­u­la­tion). We’re not likely to view the last few cen­turies as glow­ingly as a Marx­ist would, but we cer­tainly don’t think we’re doomed to just travel in mean­ing­less cir­cles until the sun goes nova. Mostly, of course, we tend to view any seri­ous exam­i­na­tion of human his­tory as being incom­plete if it doesn’t at least attempt to take God into account. He’s far from a dis­in­ter­ested party. At the absolute least, He has taken a hand on occa­sions to estab­lish the covenants doc­u­mented in the Bible. And finally, He has come in the flesh and estab­lished His Church in these lat­ter days.

    All of which a sec­u­lar the­o­rist would debate or dis­count of course. So I can only imag­ine how much less these guys want to con­sider that the brass ring they’re search­ing for has been given to the hum­blest Chris­t­ian with the hum­blest men­tal abil­i­ties (which might just be me, come to think of it). And that is, we know what the big fin­ish is — it’s the Sec­ond Com­ing. We know we’re not to spec­u­late too much about it (though we do it any­way). And we know that there are a lot of specifics we don’t know (the most mad­den­ing of which has to be when???). But any ortho­dox Chris­t­ian (lower-case ‘o’ or upper-) believes that this is how the story ends and all that’s left are details.

    Which can make us seem cocky, I would think, when we’re not just viewed as being idi­otic or demented. But I think it also makes us the least favorite ones to invite to the talk-fest. We’re like peo­ple attend­ing a mur­der mys­tery play who say we know for cer­tain who did it but haven’t a clue as to why or how. I sup­pose the non-believing crowd wishes we’d either shut up about it or come back when we can fill in the juicy details.

    So I sort of tune those parts of the lec­tures out. I sup­pose what I find much more telling is how sec­u­lar thinkers are deal­ing with the fact that the Age of Enlight­en­ment hasn’t suc­ceeded in point­ing the way out of human fal­l­en­ness. It was all sup­posed to be very sci­en­tific, you see. And when we enlight­ened West­ern­ers dis­missed all the super­sti­tious stuff, human­ity was sup­posed to take flight. The sci­en­tific approach has brought West­ern civ­i­liza­tion as far as a demo­c­ra­tic repub­lic (though we may not be able to hold onto it much longer). And it has pointed the way to ele­vated pos­si­bil­i­ties like com­mu­nism (which I’ve always thought would work just dandy if only peo­ple were entirely devoid of self-interest, com­pet­i­tive­ness, ambi­tion, greed or indi­vid­u­al­ism). But the best think­ing by all the peo­ple with a lit­tle too much time on their hands hasn’t suc­ceeded in get­ting beyond that, and morale just keeps get­ting lower and lower.

    Per­haps Chris­t­ian morale is a bit low as well, at least amongst the End Times the­o­rists. Maybe we’re all ready for God to take a hand again, even if it’s just to give us a kick in the pants. But then, how many times do we have to find out that you want to watch what you wish for?

    As the Chi­nese adage goes, “May you never live in ‘inter­est­ing’ times.” Inter­est­ing end times would def­i­nitely be worse. But prob­a­bly both the his­tor­i­cal the­o­rists and the End Times spec­u­la­tors would be thrilled for a cou­ple min­utes or so.


    Related posts:

    1. The per­va­sive­ness of the Chris­t­ian idea
    2. Begin­nings and The Big Finale
    3. Good Chris­t­ian tree-huggers
    4. Why I don’t believe what Penn believes
    5. Chris­t­ian Carnival

    August 5th, 2007 | Grace | No Comments |

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