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As the romantic sounding year of 2000 C.E. appears on the horizon, people in all walks of life begin to speculate about life in the third millennium. It has clearly entered the rhetoric of politicians this election year as they attempt to build "a bridge to the 21st century."
But amid all the banter there is a serious concern. What will be the shape of humanity in this future? What values will survive? What issues will engage us? What new knowledge will reorganize our thinking? The leadership of the Christian Church must surely also ask about those things that are present on the Church's horizon, and seek to understand the direction in which Christianity is headed.
When this century began in 1900, the thought of Charles Darwin was just beginning to reverberate around the western world. The Origin of Species had been published in 1859 and the attack on traditional Christian thinking implicit in its pages had just begun to be felt. The literalness of the seven-day creation story was the first casualty, but the authority of all scripture was also seen to totter. An uneasy accommodation was made by the pious suggestion that each day in the biblical account of creation was really millions of years. Scripture could thus still be called accurate even as its substance was visibly eroded. It did not, however, save the Church from the embarrassment of the Scopes trial in the 1920's. Periodically, other versions of the same hysteria that found John Scopes guilty would erupt to play across the headlines of our newspapers as fear and ignorance masqueraded as faith and knowledge. However, Darwin's challenge to traditional Christian concepts was far more profound than first imagined.
Darwin's revolutionary concepts destroyed forever the power of the traditional Christian myth by which this religious system had defined itself for centuries. This myth assumed that the original act of divine creation was perfect and complete and that from this perfection human beings had fallen away into a sinfulness that was both universal and inevitable. This "fall," it was said, required a divine rescue operation and in terms of that requirement the Christ story was typically told. That is what produced the various atonement theories which stated just how it was that the divine rescue of our "fallen nature" had been accomplished by Jesus. "Christ died for my sins," became the codeword. His death was even interpreted to be a sin offering that God required to be paid, a ransom if you will. Those strange sounding theological words reflect a first century Jewish-Christian mentality which understood Christ in his death as the new paschal lamb slain to break the power of death or the new sacrificial lamb of Yom Kippur, that was believed to have taken away "the sins of the world." But Darwin has confronted this traditional understanding with the vision of an unfinished and therefore imperfect universe and of human life not fallen but still emerging out of its evolutionary past. The basic Christian interpretive myth of Jesus as God's divine rescue operation, designed to save a fallen creation, quickly becomes inoperative. As that realization has dawned in religious circles, both anger and defensiveness have risen and, simultaneously, religious power has waned. The heart will never respond to that which the mind rejects.
One manifestation of this decline in religious certainty is that people today no longer have confidence in the reality of life after death. Life after death was a powerful and consoling idea in a believing age. It was this hope that kept our human fears and insecurities in check. It provided believers with the ability to embrace the radical unfairness of human life. It promised that God would rectify this unfairness in the world to come. With the demise of belief in life after death, a passion was born to bring fairness to this present world now. Heaven, as a solution for this human problem, was simply too nebulous.
That was the reality that gave birth to the revolutionary politics of the 20th century. From the writings of Karl Marx to the legislation that launched The Great Society, the hope to build a just society was born to deal with the loss of the assurance that justice would be done in heaven. So it was that this century witnessed a variety of liberal political expressions: communism, socialism and the New Deal. Its emergence was a kind of secularized attempt to provide what belief in a just God who promised an afterlife once provided. But the conviction that liberal politics could make fair our unfair world has also died and with its death has come a new disillusionment. The liberal experiment died in the 1980's, and was replaced by a mean-spirited politics of greed and raw power. National budgets are cut by curtailing welfare and medical resources for the poor. Homelessness increases in the richest nation of the world.
So it is that another reality the Church must face as we prepare to enter the third millennium is that we do so on the wings of a dying idealism. That is why I believe we are witnessing today a growing political concern to protect the boundaries of our affluence from the surging masses of the third world, and why we struggle to maintain our standard of living at the expense of the poor in our own country and the underdeveloped nations of the world. An increasingly cruel and insensitive world is on the horizon of the new millennium. One wonders how or if the Christ story will be heard in this world where tomorrow is rapidly approaching.
Still another factor before us as we enter the third millennium is that the 20th century has seen the breakdown of one oppressive dehumanizing stereotype after another. As each stereotype has crumbled, Christian anxiety, which manifests itself in both hostility and defensiveness has increased. The 19th century ended slavery legally, but the 20th century gave rise to racism's bastard stepchildren known as segregation and apartheid. The battle to end these twin evils has been won officially, but unofficially racism has demonstrated an incredible tenacity and it still lurks just beneath the level of our consciousness. The churches of the Christian west continue to have soiled racist hands.
The traditional religious definition of a woman as a second class human being, based upon significant literal biblical references, has also been obliterated. Only in this 20th century have college and university educations been opened to women; the power to vote and to serve in public life achieved by women; and the freedom to determine how their own bodies would be used, won by women. Only in the latter years of the 20th century has full participation in the life of the Church been accorded to women. Each of these battles divided the Church into warring camps.
The traditional religious stereotype of homosexuality is also dying. This century has finally learned that gay and lesbian people are not heterosexual people who, because of their moral depravity, have chosen to live sinful homosexual lives. They are not people who need to be rescued from this evil and converted or restored to normalcy. They are simply people born with a different sexual orientation who have been inaccurately defined as abnormal and condemned as immoral by an ignorant heterosexual majority. Once again, as this new consciousness has dawned, the Body of Christ has been torn between the dying stereotype and the new learning. On every front the relentless revolution in thought that has marked the 20th century has been resisted by traditional religious voices. Yet nowhere is there any evidence that the thought revolution is being deterred by this opposition. Rather, the Church itself is being driven involuntarily into a new world which will require a new understanding of what we Christians believe and how we live that Christianity out. A religious system based on the dismissed truth of another age and filled with the vestiges of the rejected stereotypes of the past will hardly appeal to people in a post-modern world. These are major factors before the Church as the new millennium is born.
We could cite other thinkers whose work has shattered the operative presuppositions of the religious life in the past. Despite the assumptions of the Bible, the earth is not flat. It is not the center of the universe. God is therefore not looking down on us from beyond the sky. This God does not invade our world with miracle and magic to fight our wars, destroy our enemies or do our bidding. Virgins do not conceive. Resurrection cannot mean physical resuscitation and the restarting of bodily processes after three days of death. People cannot ascend on their own gravity-defying power into the sky of a Ptolemaic universe that is no longer believed to exist. Both human truth and traditional moral standards have been relativized. Infallibility and inerrancy do not exist any longer. These are among the changes that have created the tidal wave that now propels us into the 21st century. Reality is that we are destined to be third millennium Christians or we will not be Christians at all.
How shall we respond to this new reality? Can we learn to sing the Lord's song in the strange land of the third millennium? Can we be believers without denying the reality of the world? Must we park our brains outside the church door in order to worship?
Until we address these issues, all that we do as a Church will be akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the great ship Titanic! Yet from within the Christian institution seldom do we hear a voice that speaks to these concerns. Church leaders rather seem content to occupy themselves by stopping the leaks, denying the storm and pretending that things will soon improve.
My vocation as a Christian and as a bishop is to walk into this future of our faith. I prefer to walk in concert with others in the body of Christ, but if this institution is unresponsive, I am prepared to walk alone. I do it because I am a believer who lives in a world that the Christians of the past could never have anticipated. I will never sacrifice my faith, my integrity or my citizenship in this modern world. Faith must have integrity. It must live in this age or it will not live at all. The third millennium ought to be exciting for it will be the context in which the life or death struggle for the Christian Church is engaged. Stay tuned.
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