Walter Russell Mead (James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College) lectured at Providence Magazine’s Christianity and National Security Conference on Nov. 2, 2018.
Thanks Mark. I don’t often get introduced as the fulfillment of prophecy. I’ll accept it. Nor do I often get introduced as hip, so I’ll just sort of struggle up here to cope with those things and you can struggle down there to cope with what I’m gonna try to say this morning.
People often do ask me, and I imagine they ask you also from time to time, “What is meant by Christian foreign policy?” My standard answer to that is, “Well, what’s meant by Christian cherry pie?” That like cherry pie, it really doesn’t matter who made it – whether it’s any good matters a lot more. The difference between good foreign policy and bad foreign policy is a lot more important than the difference between good cherry pie and bad cherry pie. On the whole, I would rather get my cherry pie from a good baker who was completely non-Christian than from the Sunday school teacher at my local church who had a wonderful heart but could never remember whether he used baking soda or baking powder when making a pie crust.
So one good place to start is that just because something is made in a church or even made with love doesn’t mean it’s any good. A critical approach toward things that call themselves Christian foreign policy, or people who identify themselves as Christians and believe that this gives them some sort of special charism in foreign policy, is often a serious mistake. But that’s not the end of the story because there are reasons, I think, to hope and expect that Christians can actually become very good bakers. While Christianity may not be itself a surefire recipe for good cherry pie, if you get to know the treasures and the storehouses of the Christian faith, there’s some remarkable ingredients there that if put together well and wisely can in fact be the basis for something pretty good.
I do think that the field of Foreign Affairs needs more Christians in it. The Christians who are active in this field, which is a need they share in common with non-Christians, need more wisdom, need better access to some of the riches in the Christian faith. After all, if we look historically, probably the greatest diplomatic venture in the history of the world has been the progression of the Christian faith. Ambassadors for Christ reaching out, beginning in Palestine 2,000 years ago and at this point having gone virtually through the whole world. While sometimes fire and the sword has been used in the spread of Christianity, on the whole it has spread more often and more effectively through persuasion and the missionary movement.
Movements of Christian evangelism require many of the tools, many of the things that great diplomacy requires: an understanding of the other, an understanding of the world, an ability to reach across cultural and historical divides to find common ground, a deep engagement that continues to shape and relay an ongoing relationship. There’s not only that – the spread of Christianity itself through the world has been an example of what foreign policy needs to be about, what diplomacy needs to be about. It’s also true that many of the best and most useful ideas and institutions in international life today proceed really quite directly from the thought and the activity of Christians, particularly missionary Christians.
The very idea of a global civil society, that humanity is a family and that there needs to be some sort of political expression of this unity in modern terms, is something that missionaries develop and then try to embody. If we look even at the sort of origin of some of the secular NGOs that are involved with human rights and other concerns around the world, we will often find at or near their founding, missionaries. Ideas like international law come to us essentially out of the work of Christian theologians, and people who have tried to apply these concepts into international life more often than not have been inspired by their own Christian faith.
So when we start talking about the contributions of Christianity to foreign policy, to international relations, we’re not just sort of talking about some fresh new idea for the 21st century. The more you know of the history of international relations, the more you know of history in general, and the more you know about the origins and nature of diplomacy and international law, the more struck you will be by the absolutely central role that Christian faith has played in the development of these concepts.
Beyond this history, I guess we look at our times and the challenges that we’re facing now. There is a greater need for a more conscious engagement in Christianity and Christian faith than ever before. Not that there hasn’t always been a grave need, and particularly I’d like to make the argument today that Christianity offers the soundest possible basis intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually for the kind of realism that undergirds smart foreign policy.
One of the benefits of a good religious culture is it helps people achieve levels of wisdom, insight, balance, prudence, and fortitude that would otherwise be beyond them. Christianity, which in my judgment is the religion that offers the truest vision of the real world, the best diagnosis for what is wrong with us as people, and the only real cure for the ailments of the human race, is the best possible foundation for someone who wants to understand the world we live in and to help guide the course of the United States through it.
So I’d like to do today is to talk a bit about the kind of realism that I think Christianity can help produce in each of us and some thoughts on what we can do to get a little bit better at what we need, the tasks we need to accomplish in order to help bring the potential of Christian faith more fully into the world of Foreign Affairs. So realism, what do we mean here by realism? Frankly, realism, like liberalism and conservatism, is one of these words that has become so indispensable that it becomes useless. It’s used so often and in so many contexts that the one thing you can be almost 100% sure of is that in virtually any conversation, the word realism will mean something different to each of the participants in it.
People will often find themselves, just as liberal and conservative do by the way, engaged in all kinds of arguments which they think are about reality but are actually about different interpretations, different meanings of the same word. Equivocation. So what I’d like to suggest is a synonym that might be helpful for us today that captures the essential qualities that I think of when I think of realism and International Affairs. I would just use the word, substitute the words sobriety. That a sobriety in thinking about international relations is the key.
How hard it is, a sober understanding of how hard it is to do foreign policy well, how truly dangerous the world that we live in is, how limited the resources and the techniques that we actually have to deal with the immense problems all around us, how selective we must be when it comes to using these limited resources and limited wisdom and limited political energy to address the problems of our time. It’s actually very hard to be sober about the world that we live in.
As I see it, there are kind of three great enemies of sobriety here. One is utopianism. Oh my gosh, you know, it’s the end of history, everything is going to be fantastic, or if we can just do X, everything is going to be fantastic. The next one is catastrophism. We’re all going to die, you know. If we don’t stop climate change, it’s going to turn into Venus. If we don’t denuclearize and abolish nuclear weapons, we’re all going to blow up. That kind of utopianism and catastrophism – it’s not that the dangers or opportunities that they point to don’t exist, but it is that the state of mind with which the people confront these opportunities, these dangers, makes effective action harder, not easier.
It tends to divert action from paths that might actually do some good and lead to situations where people with the best intentions in the world are actually making serious problems worse or making it harder to achieve the real goals that we’d all like to be. The third and related problem is denialism. That is, people say, you know, we don’t ruin these catastrophists and these utopians, they all are very hot-headed, but really there aren’t any dangers. These are just a bunch of idiots and fools. There’s nothing to worry about really. Let’s just kind of keep our heads and keep routinely doing the things that we’ve always done in the ways we’ve already – we started a liberal world order in 1947, let’s just continue marching down that regardless of all the things that would try to startle us out of that belief.
What they all, what all of these states of mind have in common again is that they blind us to essential features of the world that we live in and they make it harder for us to act effectively in it. And I want to emphasize that these are not trivial problems. They’re deadly, and by deadly I mean that they kill people. The over-optimistic, the idiotic illusions of over-optimistic utopia builders kill people when they lead the United States and other countries to sort of a belief that we’ve sort of reached a stage of progress that in fact we haven’t reached. And so we’ve sort of in a happy-go-lucky way – well, history is over so we don’t have to think hard about what we’re doing, everything is moving in our direction.
And under the force of that illusion, people take decisions or make assumptions that actually, you know, hey well if it’s the end of history, the Arab Spring must obviously mean that democracy is blooming across the Arab world. So yeah, let’s toss Mubarak. All right, three years later we have more prisoners being treated worse in Egyptian jails than we had in the beginning. And one of the reasons that’s happening is because liberal illusions about the end of history and the Arab Spring led us to behave in some rather rash ways.
Catastrophism can have the same effect, sort of sometimes leading people involved in the climate change movement to sort of hype science and deliberately try to scare people in a way to stampede them to take action. And we’ve seen, particularly with Rajendra Pachauri who used to be the head of the IPCC, how catastrophism can erode, corrode the credibility of a movement and actually make it harder rather than easier to achieve its goals.
Both utopianism and catastrophism are grounded in real perceptions and possibilities. You know, things could get a lot better in the world. We’ve – infant mortality has fallen 50 percent in the last 25 years globally. It could fall further. The kind of deep peace that took place in Western – that took root in Western Europe following World War II points to a different kind of international relations, a different future. And so there are clearly doors that one can think about going through, make things much better.
And at the same time, it’s not wrong to worry about climate change. There’s a whole list – it’s not wrong to worry about nuclear proliferation, it’s not wrong to worry about some of the trends that we see in rising confrontation between great powers around the world. So there’s nothing wrong with perceiving that the human race is playing for great stakes because we are. But what happens far too frequently is that we become either so fascinated and dazzled by the glorious prospects opening before us or so horrified and terrified by the abyss that lies before us – world peace, nuclear war – that we lose the capacity for real thought and action.
And you see this in civil society movements all the time. Let’s just look back at the 1930s. It’s interesting that you mentioned Mark Reinhold Niebuhr Journal and his reaction against the pacifism and ideal feckless idealism of American Christianity in the 1930s. You see people so terrified of what another war would be like that they sort of leap into this kind of pacifism. Hey, I know, let’s sign a treaty that will outlaw war forever. Let’s, you know, let’s just – let’s form pacifist associations and let’s disarm unilaterally.
A lot of good people put a lot of energy into these movements in the 1930s with no real self-awareness that every piece of work they did, every meeting they held, every petition they got signed, every member of Congress that they lobbied, they were helping Hitler and Stalin prepare the way for mass murder. They weren’t helping the world, they were hurting the world. And before the judgment seat of God, they will render an account. They weren’t bad, but in this world, being stupid can be worse in some ways than having an openly bad intention.
We have a lot of this today. How many of us see, sort of, you know, the most depressing sight perhaps in the world is a group of religious dignitaries signing a petition about something they don’t really know very much about. You know, it’s “We the undersigned concerned clergy and laity are really against X or for Y.” Well, that’s very nice, but you know, do they actually know any more about X or Y than all the people who are not signing petitions or who are actually in the bowels of the State Department or wherever it is working on the issue? Sometimes they do, but much more often they don’t.
All right, but what they – they mistake arrogance and egotism for concern. Very common fault. We don’t fully understand just how blasphemous this is, invoking the authority and the prestige of God in order to make your stupid ideas seem more impressive. I’m really quite serious. This is blasphemy, and it’s one of the reasons I’m afraid that so many of our senior politicians and civil servants and others have such contempt for the Christian faith. Because what they see is they see, sort of, you know, idiotic bubble-headed well-intentioned people who are enormously ignorant and enormously arrogant at the same time but think they are humble and wise.
And so what politicians do in a society like ours – you never confront anyone, you never say you’re stupid, particularly when they’re constituency. “Oh, that’s so interesting. Thank you so much for sharing that.” And then you will look for some ridiculous little scrap or bone to throw them to make them happy and go away. But in your heart, you are resolved you will never, never, never have any of these people in a room where serious decisions are being made because they only muck it up.
And you will also think to yourself, this religion of theirs is clearly – you know, Marx may not be right about religion generally, but here religion is an opiate. It is producing an illusory feeling of success and an illusory feeling of mastery. People are using it to lubricate their egos. All right, so we don’t realize how much damage is done to Christianity by this sort of behavior, which is – which it’s almost a sort of a cliche. Everyone thinks about it, people just do it. It’s a sort of ritual of engagement.
But it’s not just – it’s not just here that it’s damaging. Think, you know, that beautiful other – the right to protect. Can you guys all remember – some of you may not be old enough to remember the vogue in international relations of the right to protect. Oh, this was going to be the great new approach of the humanitarian human rights world. We were going to stop all these human rights violations, and the Libyan intervention was hailed as the fantastic example of at long last the truly moral people were able to shape a policy and we were going to go in there and stop the murder from Qaddafi.
I may well have stopped a murder, but one looks at Libya ever since and one just sees one long series of murders and massacres. And so nothing could be greater evidence than this that those kinds of people should never be allowed to have their hands on the steering wheel of anything. Those people don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not serious. They wave the flag of human rights and humanitarian concern to acquire power and prestige and fame for themselves, but they haven’t the slightest idea how to achieve these ideals that they speak of.
And by the way, it’s not just the charnel-house of Libya that we should look at. It’s the horrors of Syria because it was the deep discrediting of the humanitarian agenda caused by the stupidity and idiocy of Libyan approach that ensured that the United States, at least, and I think other countries, would keep their hands off Syria because all the people who tell us we should be doing this are clearly revealed to be incompetent fools. So we’re just not gonna listen to anything from that side of the spectrum. Now that we have another problem – all right, that’s blood on your hands. It’s sin, it’s blasphemy to the extent that you’ve invoked the authority of God for this.
All right, however, as far as I can tell, most of them are still moving around the world very happily telling, you know, being prophets and telling truth to power. Okay, so it’s really a tragic spectacle seeing so much energy. You know, the world doesn’t actually have that much humanitarian energy to spare, you know. And when we see large social movements, we see organizations of good-hearted people in their way utterly wasting their time, throwing their lives away, doing bad rather than doing good. The loss is not just the bad that they do, though. The loss is the good they could have done, perhaps the contributions that they could have made had they been wiser or better led.
Have I chewed you all up enough, by the way? All right, what’s needed above all today, I think, in both government and civil society is the ability to see the world steadily and whole and yet to still be able to think clearly about the choices before us. Now some of you may have heard of a poem by Rudyard Kipling called “If.” Some of you are old enough – they might still have read it in schools. I’m not gonna read the whole thing and it’s a little pagan and sexist for what I would like to get at completely this morning, but there are some elements here that are essential for anybody who wants to make positive contributions to international relations or public life.
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; if you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, or being hated, don’t give way to hating, and yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise; if you can dream and not make dreams your master; if you can think and not make thoughts your aim; if you can meet with triumph and disaster
It goes on: “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with Kings nor lose the common touch; if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; if all men count with you, but none too much.” Well, there it takes a certain kind of character to be able to function not just in the turbulent political environment of the United States in this rather distressing year, but also in an international system which is, I think, moving steadily in a direction of increased confrontation and dissension internationally. It’s not going to be a world for snowflakes.
How does Christianity come in in this if it isn’t about giving us a little short list of happy maxims? You know, “love each other” – little moralistic injunctions that we can tell statesmen and so feel better about ourselves. I think Christianity contains the elements that allow us to stay grounded in the maelstrom and to make intellectual sense of what’s out there and around us. And I think without that kind of support from Christian faith, there will be fewer and fewer people who are really capable of living up to the tests of our time.
Say first and foremost, faith in God and in His superintending Providence is as necessary to the political actor today as faith in God and His redeeming love is to each of us in our personal lives. That is, you and I and the human institutions around us are not capable of managing the forces that are headed our way on our own. American political institutions are not infallible or perfect. The UN, the international system, international law, the theories of international relations we depend on, the coalitions that are out there, the economic institutions – we’re moving into a world of storms and change that the institutions and the people cannot manage on their own.
But you know, this is actually not new, while the scale of it may be new to us in the 21st century. All through human history, every human society has faced problems it could not solve on its own, has been exposed to dangers that it could not manage on its own. The locusts might come, the Goths or the Visigoths might come, the crops could fail, the city across the hill could invade you. Radical uncertainty about the future and the insufficiency of your defense mechanisms to really wall off all the things that you fear – that’s the human condition.
Okay, so we’re sort of shocked to find out that with all of our science and all of our institutions and all of our affluence, in some ways we are like a hill tribe in Judea watching the locusts darken the sky as they come over the horizon. We are facing problems that we don’t understand, we don’t have an answer. In order not to be overwhelmed by this, in order to both be able to take the facts full-on and see them as they are, not disguise them because you’re afraid of how terrible they would be, does it not be driven to despair, not clutch at false hopes, I think you’ve got to be standing on the rock of Abraham.
I think you’ve got to have faith in somebody bigger than you, stronger than you, who while He may not be going to solve your problems at all, much less solve them in the exact way you would like, He’s there and He’s in charge and you’re working under authority under God. I think you need that to be any good in foreign relations today, and we’ll need it more.
Second, freedom from idolatry. Anybody who wants to play an effective role in the world today has got to be able to disentangle themselves from the shrouds of idolatry. And what I mean by idolatry is the belief that something made by human hands can offer an absolute path of safety and security. You know, okay, we face this terrible crisis of global warming, climate change, but the agenda of the green enough renewables and we follow this plan, we’ll be safe. Though we’ve got a world of sexual exploitation and so on, but these wonderful thinkers of me too have figured out the path, and if we can just apply this agenda, the social justice agenda, the libertarian agenda – these ideologies, that there is some sort of path that if we just follow step by step along that path, we’ll be safe, we’ll be delivered.
Again, that doesn’t mean there aren’t useful things and useful suggestions in these or that we should ignore all of these ideas or all of these problems. But it does mean that none of them are really going to get us out of the woods. The agenda, the anti-nuclear movement is not going to save us from nuclear war. The various movements and fads that roil the culture and civil society from time to time, the development fads that jazz up the NGO world – you know, oh okay, we finally figured out do this and development will happen. There are all of these kinds of man-made ideologies out there that mask themselves as, you know, they demand allegiance and there’s the belief that if we can just get a big enough movement behind some of these things, we will get to an answer. It’s not that simple. I wish it was.
It’s very difficult for human beings to free themselves from idolatry even when they know and worship the true God. The Old Testament teaches us anything, it teaches us that you know, miracle after miracle and yet there they are again worshiping those idols. But when there isn’t that, when people don’t have the idea of a transcendent, just, good God beyond everything, then the need to elevate something into that place is overwhelming. And it’s an intellectual and cultural and social need as much as anything else. And so human political agendas get moved up into a place, you know, they make promises they can’t fulfill, they stand in for the missing, the absent God.
And I think we see more and more of that in our society and we see it on the left as well as we see it on the right. I am not trying to make a partisan set of points here. Even good things become productive of evil when they’re set up and worshipped as gods. The worship of justice leads to cruelty and intolerance. The worship of peace leads to cowardice and acquiescence in injustice. The worship of freedom leads to license and anarchy. The worship of prosperity destroys the foundations of society, hollows out the human family and the human heart, and inaugurates the reign of greed. As idolaters, we can neither think clearly about the world nor act wisely in it. You must know God in order to love and serve the truth.
Third, only Christianity can give you an anthropology fit for purpose in today’s world. People are infinitely good, infinitely important, and made in the image of God. This is an idea that any statesman to be truly wise can never lose sight of – that people are not just pawns to be moved around the chessboard. They are real, they’re people, they are ends in themselves, they bear the image of Almighty God. But at the same time, the statesman can’t trust them. You can’t trust the people. They’re defaced. The image of God is defaced. Human society is profoundly torqued and twisted by a presence of sin working itself out from generation to generation, building structures of injustice.
There’s no ideal. You’ll hear some people talk about the ideal of a cosmopolitan post-national world and others talk about no, no, no, the ideal is the nation, this loving community. If you know about original sin, you know that neither are both flawed. That nations, yes, they are communities of meaning, they are reservoirs of culture, they’re wonderful things, but they also are prone to exaggerate their own claims, oppress their neighbors. They’re not a solution to anything, although they are a reality. And the date of the most cosmopolitan idealistic institutions can also pretty easily gel into tyrannical or bureaucratic nightmares.
So in order to think wisely about the world that we live in, you need to know that people are important and people are deeply flawed, and that there’s no getting out of that. Now you can get there without being a Christian and having a doctrine of original sin, but let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to get there if you’ve got this, if you’ve learned this about yourself and your own experience and it becomes a kind of a habit of mind. Also knowing this can help you think better about practical plans. The US Constitution is an example of a document that is sort of grounded in, steeped in concept of original sin. That is, you know, neither Congress nor the president nor the judiciary, neither the federal government nor the States is going to be wise, good, benevolent, and trustworthy. And so okay, on the you know, so what do you do? You set up a system of checks and
Balances where in some cases actual faults, you know, their greed, their lust for power can actually work to make your whole system better. That’s how statesmen whose minds are grounded in the concept of original sin and Christian anthropology can think constructively and realistically and actually come up with solutions that work better than sort of more idealistic ones would do.
Fourth, without Christianity, and if Christianity continues to fade in American life, there’s simply no way that American society is going to be able to carry the weight that smart foreign policy places on it. That is, America, if we continue to sort of drift away from the values and the perceptions that have shaped so much of our history, is going to become a more divided, weaker, selfish, short-sighted place. More given to sort of sway from one extreme to the other, less capable of supporting politicians and policy makers who are even going to try to be visionary, more stirred by the passions of the moments, less capable of remaining free, and therefore becoming more and more subject to various sort of laws, bureaucratic restraints as we desperately try to keep order in a nation that’s moving away from the foundations of order and liberty.
So we need Christianity in American life so that we can have foreign policy that works, and we need people who are able to make that connection. We need, I think above all, people whose lives and whose work is involved in building up the church, spreading the Christian faith, bringing the message of dignity and hope. In the past in American life, we’ve had moments like this before when the country seemed to have lost touch with some of its essential dynamics. And in the past, God has moved and sent revivals, renewal of Christian faith, raised up a different kind of spirit and a new generation that has been able to transform our situation.
I think all of us, whether we’re professionally in foreign policy or wherever we are, need to be thinking and praying and working about that now. Because without that, without a strengthening of real, serious Christianity in American life, I think nothing that happens at the State Department or the Treasury Department or in the White House is going to do us much good. And I do also believe that the world needs the United States. We’re not the answer to every problem, we can’t, we’re not the policeman for every issue, but our history of global vision, though in some ways the structure of our interests and the power that we have and can wield are essential to any kind of peaceful world order.
And that if the United States were to lose the capacity to do that or to do it wisely, the cost to people around the world and to us here in the United States would be catastrophic. So we need something beyond what we can bring to the table. We need that power of God to come back into the country and enable us to play a more, to play the role that we can play with God’s help.
And then finally, I would just conclude by saying that each of us needs the grace and help of God to be able to look the facts of this world in the face without fear, without being overwhelmed, without being tempted either to short-sighted optimism, short-sighted despair, or short-sighted denial. We need to become the kind of people who can act when the whole world seems to be falling apart, who can take thought. We don’t simply see something that strikes us as an injustice or a wrong and start running around squawking about petitions. We study, we reflect, we look at history, we take injustice and evil seriously enough to study them and to put them in context and to think hard and to think wisely about what to do.
And the thing I guess I’d like to leave you with is to remind you that as citizens of the Democratic Republic, you are all to some degree sovereign. You participate in the sovereignty of our country as voters, as actors in civil society. And as such, you’re not so far from the position of a man like Solomon who, having been crowned King, looks around and says, “My God, this immense people, how can I possibly judge them? How can I lead them? Give me wisdom to lead this people.”
My hope today, my prayer today, is that each of you would think about that and make that prayer your own. Wisdom, wisdom to play your role as Christians, wisdom to play your role as citizens, wisdom to not just pop off when you see an injustice, not to oscillate between easy optimism and cynical despair, but the wisdom and the patience and the courage to think, to study, to work, to reflect, and to act. Thank you very much.
[The speaker then takes questions from the audience. Here is the first question and answer:]
Question: I was watching, for kicks, John Hagee, who’s a very famous evangelical preacher, talking about eschatology and America’s unique role in the end times, which of course is connected to Christian Zionism and all kinds of other things. And you know, Mark Lila once said that Americans somehow got this reputation – basically the American people have never been, American Christians, very serious ones, have never been particularly sober about foreign policy. We’ve tended to apocalyptic thinking and about America’s role in the world. So how do you reconcile those two things?
Answer: Well, first I would remind you that liberals and Catholics have also shared various versions of this, so let’s not get kind of denominational about it. But I would say in general, wisdom is a characteristic that is in short supply, which is why I’m suggesting that we all pray for it for ourselves and pray that the hunger for it will increase around us. Unfortunately, the lack of wisdom is one of those where the sort of contempt for wisdom is one of those sins that carries its own penalty and usually quite quickly.
[The speaker then takes another question:]
Question: Mr. Mead, thank you very much for those insightful comments. How much space would you like to put between what you describe to be the Christian realism advocacy that you’re presenting here today and the historical views of the generations past? I mean, you did credit the missionaries and the genesis of international law and foreign policy with having been Christians and having a worldview that was formed by respect for God’s providence and plan in history. And yet the view that was, say, as recently as the peacemaking idealists of the late 19th century – were about the time of Rudyard Kipling, someone, United Methodist minister I think, wrote a hymn: “We have a story to tell to the nations that will turn their hearts to the right, a story of truth and mercy, a story of peace and light. For the darkness shall turn to dawning and the dawning to noonday light, and Christ’s great Kingdom will come on earth.” So, you know, there was a faith in some sense of Christians who believed that God’s providence was so overwhelming and that his dispensation or economy in history was evident or it was perspicacious to Christians. But you’re distancing in your remarks from those who want to subscribe to an ideology or a worldview that’s the end of history or something that God’s plan for the nations has been revealed and Christians can spread the news about it. So I just wanted to ask you, is there an inch of space between you and this minister of the 19th century, or is there a mile of space?
Answer: Well, you know, that’s something you’ll have to think about, but I would say that one thing that does strike me looking at the history of Revelation, so to speak, is that people are not very good at figuring out what the next step will be in this in Salvation history. That is, you know, the one thing we know, we will teach and rightly so, that the entire Old Testament centers on Christ and is about Christ and predicts Christ. When he appeared, most people had absolutely no idea that that’s what was going on. And my sense is that yet we then turn around, both the sort of premillennial and post-millennial types will turn and say, “Well, aha, we certainly know what’s happening next time.”
My guess is that the eschaton will surprise us and that one of the ways that Christians do get off balance and lose touch is trying to turn an eschatological hope into a plan for next month. So that one can say, you know, perhaps these happy 19th century Methodists were right and the world is just going to ultimately get better and better until Jesus, like the cherry on top of a sundae, comes down to crown the great work of progress. Maybe, but we also can be fairly confident there’ll be lots of pretty amazing twists and turns in that road and that eschatological hope may guide us in our thinking about ultimate reality but doesn’t tell me what the tariff rates should be or how I should manage my relations with China or with Russia today.
So I think getting drunk on the eschaton is something that it’s an occupational hazard of Christianity, both in the John Hagee sense and in the sort of 19th century liberal sense, and one should probably try to be sober.
