Advent Reflections, Part 1--God Out of the Machine

David Bentley Hart, a well-regarded classics scholar and provocateur, has published his own translation of the New Testament that is a fascinating read.  Hart's goal with this new translation is to try to capture what it would have been like for a 1st Century reader to encounter these texts for the first time, as opposed to the more staid and committee-driven versions to which we are now accustomed.  My Greek is no where near good enough to judge whether Hart has succeeded in capturing these subtle nuances of the original, but his text has a striking quality to it, far different than any other translation I have encountered.

In particular, one thing that Hart conveys very effectively is a frantic, almost manic, quality to many of the texts of the New Testament.  This can be seen most clearly in the earliest texts--Paul's letters and the Gospel of Mark.  Everything is in a hurry, everything is coming soon, events are moving quickly toward their conclusion.  Part of that is driven by the notion that God had done an amazing, unprecedented thing in the form of Jesus coming into the world, dying, and rising from the dead.  But equally important is the fact that the earliest Christians were absolutely convinced that Jesus was coming back very soon--literally "any day now."  There was no time to waste in prettying up the text, because in the intervening time Jesus might return and it will be too late to get the message out.  I was at a lecture Sunday night, and the speaker (a church historian) made the statement that the most important event in Christian history is the event that didn't happen--Jesus didn't come back in the lifetime of the Apostles, or as of yet.  By the time you get to the second century, the Christian world had to rework its own theology on the fly to account for the fact that Christians were still here.

But, here's a question that occurred to me listening to the lecture Sunday night and reading Hart's New Testament--why?  Why were the earliest Christians convinced that Jesus was coming back soon?  I think, in large measure, this is a function of the environment out of which Christianity comes.  Christianity comes out of Judaism, and more specifically 1st Century, late Second Temple Judaism.  The documents that were discovered as part of the "Dead Sea Scrolls" portray a Judaism that was deeply apocalyptic, deeply concerned with the imminent possibility of the arrival of the Messiah.  People were looking for, and hoping for, the dawn of a new age.  This yearning for a new age was predicated on the idea that the coming of the Messiah would, in one fell swoop, remove what they saw as the primary political and social dysfunction in their lives--the Roman occupation and the associated political oppression.

First Century Judaism was looking for a deus ex machina--God would come out of the machine and sweep away all that they saw as wicked and set everything right.  When Jesus came, who of course Christians believe to be the promised Messiah, it is self-evidently the case that He did not provide the hoped for deus ex machina.  Sure, Christians believe that Jesus's death and resurrection changed the world in a deep and abiding spiritual level, and while that's part of the story of what the Messiah was for in the minds of First Century people, there was also a very concrete and practical set of things that the Messiah was supposed to do.  And Jesus did none of those things.  Rome was still here, still oppressing people.

I can't help but wonder if the insistence of the early Christians that Jesus was coming back any day now grounded in some (unspoken, surely) disappointment in the way the whole thing played out.  Sure, sure, Jesus rose from the dead, and that's great and all, but surely He's just taking a break before the real fireworks begin and He topples the Romans.  I wonder if the early Christians were still holding on to the idea that the Messiah had to be a God out of the machine.  And, conversely, if the God out of the machine didn't materialize, then maybe Jesus wasn't really the Messiah.  I wonder if that's what they were thinking.

In our day, we have many Christians--mostly but not exclusively of an evangelical flavor--who are every bit as amped up for the deus ex machina as their 1st Century counterparts.  Trump's recent declaration that the United States officially recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital was greeted with Hosanna's by evangelicals, because that move is seen as moving us closer to Jesus's return.  Jack Jenkins connects all the dots on this in an excellent piece, and I want to come back in the next post and talk about the understanding of God and Biblical prophecy that underlies this idea.  But for now, the point is that the desire for God to come out of the machine is still very strong, and very much a part of modern Christianity.

As I sit here this Advent, as we remember and look forward to Jesus's coming the first time, I guess I just wonder about deus ex machinas in general.  Last year, my big thought for the season was that God's promise of salvation doesn't mean that salvation will necessarily come in the way we would prefer or is most convenient for us.  And, reflecting now, there is no clearer example of trying to make God fit into our schedule than a deus ex machina.  Things are bad, and we want God to come in with a total, comprehensive solution that will wipe the slate clean.  God out of the machine is, by definition, the most convenient solution for us to our problems because we don't have to do anything.  All we have to do is wait for God to show up and fix everything.

I'm just not sure any more that that's the deal.  Maybe that's just not how God operates.  God's interventions seem to be toward marginal people in marginal situations, and maybe that's the point.  God is here, among us, right now, working through the crude yet wonderful tools that are real flesh-and-blood people.  Jesus came to earth and took on human form, not as some sort of exception to this basic principle, but precisely to underline and emphasize that this is how God works.  God has given us the tools to make the world a better place, and God is looking to us to use the tools we have been given.  To sit around and wait for God to do all of the work is to shirk our responsibilities.  It's a kind of spiritual and moral laziness.

It has been a consistent thread of Christian belief, stated in the Apostles Creed, that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead.  Fine.  But more and more I think that, whatever that means or will look like, it should not have much, if any, practical effect on what we do in the here and now.  We must live with the knowledge that the present is just as much God's appointed time as the future.  The work is to be done now.  We must live as if God is not coming out of the machine.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Doesn't Care if You Masturbate, and Other Provocations

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

Holy Sex!--Part 3.3 Getting Down to Business, Part II