Monday Thoughts: Philosophy of History

Just a quick post today. What is a Christian philosophy of history?

We read the OT linearly today, as a well defined movement toward Christ. Adam sins and creates the human problem. This sets a trajectory in history toward the solution in Christ. God creates the world with a plan. Then after the Babylonian captivity we have a missing king and a trajectory toward Christ as well.

However, it does not seem likely that Israel experienced these texts in this way. Adam plays no appreciable role in the OT. And we remember in Samuel that the establishment of a king was no certain thing--in fact the appointment of Saul is seen as a kind of moral failure on Israel's part.

Like all the other nations of the world, the Jewish understanding of history in what we now call the OT was cyclical. The OT did not originally look to the end of the world or the consummation of the ages. It looked rather to localized restoration in times of slavery and defeat. "There is nothing new under the sun," but history rather repeats itself over and over again.

As far as we can tell, these expectations began to change among some Jews in the early second century BC. We begin to find increasing interest in the afterlife and in the restoration of Israel with quite significant cosmic language attached. Language in the OT that may originally have been understood metaphorically (e.g. Ezek. 35) began to be taken literally. What had been a cyclical view of history was transforming into a linear view.

This changing situation in the late intertestamental period sets the stage for the New Testament. More than anything else, the decisive event is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Christ's resurrection implies that the restoration of all things has begun. Even in his earthly ministry, Jesus cast out demons to show that the rule of God, the kingdom of God, was arriving on the earth.

All of history now becomes a singular story. Before there was the story of Israel. But with the apostle Paul we now have the story of all humanity. God created Adam to rule over the creation with glory and honor. But Adam sinned and all have sinned after him, and are lacking the glory God intended us to have. More than anything else, we die.

But Christ is risen; he is risen indeed. The powers of death and hell are defeated. It is only a matter of time, now, until he returns and all the wrongs of time are set straight.

The general contours of this approach to history now seem deeply engrained in a Christian worldview. Of course many Christians operate with a more cyclical view, despite the fact that they say in the creed that they believe in "the resurrection of the body." Perhaps even most Christians unthinkingly translate "resurrection" into "you die and go to heaven or hell." On the street, most Christians expect to live out a full life, die, and then be assigned an eternal destiny (heaven) and that's that.

But of course the resurrection of the body originally referred to an event at the end of time. It is not the same as the immortality of the soul, which is a more Greek than biblical idea. It coheres with biblical perspectives, but is not the focal biblical perspective. The NT rather looked to a time when Christ would return and then the dead in Christ would rise. We can find biblical teaching on an intermediate state between death and resurrection--but we have to look carefully to find it (thief on a cross, rich man and Lazarus, Philippians, Revelation).

Those who have a Christian philosophy of history today (and not simply a cyclical view) tend to have a premillennial view of history, a view that in recent times revived in the 1800's. The idea of a millennium comes from the book of Revelation, a thousand year reign of Christ on earth after his return. It is not clearly mentioned elsewhere in the Bible. As such, it is possible that we should take some of this imagery symbolically rather than literally (the so called amillennial position).

Nevertheless, a premillennial position has a pessimistic approach to history. The time of restoration, the earthly rule of Christ after his return, will only come after times get worse and worse. The imagery of Mark 13 and Matthew 24 is often applied to the end of time: "There will be wars and rumors of war." Famines and other calamities will accompany the nearness of the end. This is also the most literal reading of Revelation.

However, Mark 13 and Matthew 24 originally referred primarily to events preceding the destruction of Jerusalem, which took place in AD70. It is also possible that Revelation has much to do with events of the late first century in addition to its material about the end of time. Certainly they may double for end time events, as biblical prophecy often seems to have multiple resonances in history.

It seems foolish, however, to let such views determine our attitudes toward world events. For example, there are those who object to peace talks in the Middle East because of a fatalistic view of history. "There will be no peace," they say.

But there has been. There have been centuries of peace here and there from time to time. Should we not rather follow the biblical formula that says, "If you know the good you ought to do and do not do it, that is sin" (James). If we can stop death or help curb poverty or bring the good news to anyone, it is surely sin not to try to do so (cf. Matt. 25). God does not bid us to calculate our chances of success before we try. He bids us do our bit, and He will take it from there.

A final Christian perspective on history is the so called postmillennial view. It is the view that has been held by most Christians throughout history. We might attribute its primary origins to Augustine, who was really the first person to formulate a systematic philosophy of history in the 400's.

The context of Augustine's thought on this subject was the sacking of Rome in AD410. Only 9-11 has come close to helping us appreciate the significance of this event. Rome for so many centuries had been the world power. To read the history of the centuries immediately preceding Christ's arrival is to get the inevitable "manifest destiny" of Rome to take over the whole world. Each century is the fall of a new set of nations before its power.

Similarly, the United States perceived itself to be nearly invincible in the days leading up to 9-11. The Cold War had been over for more than a decade. We had not been attacked on our own soil since Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even Pearl Harbor was off in Hawaii, which Americans no doubt perceived to be a distant outpost.

Now we find ourselves assaulted in New York City, within our borders. Historians will quite possibly describe the story of the last 8 years as a time of reactionary conservatism in the wake of the fear created by that event. As a small sample, the then mayor of the city of Marion had the courthouse baracaded immediately following the event. We look back and laugh, thinking, yeah, the Muslim world would want to attack Marion, Indiana.

But that was the feeling of paranoia we had at the time, and the powers that be enacted policies and did things that no one would ever have allowed them to do at another time. Even today, we find a host of literature based on the fallacy of composition, taking a subgroup of the Islamic world and falsely attributing the motives of a few to the entire Muslim population. Ironically, these attitudes on our part can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, for they polarize the Muslim community itself against us in a way it did not have to be.

Augustine seized on his own situation in the 400's and wrote his work The City of God. We should not be alarmed, he wrote, about the sacking of Rome. For the sacking of Rome merely indicates that the city of humanity is coming to an end. At the same time, the city of God is in the ascendency.

Augustine supposed that over time the city of humanity would continue to decline until all that was left was the city of God, the kingdom of God. The reign of God, the millennium, would thus rise on earth as the world changed into the kingdom of God. It was easy in the Middle Ages to see the dominancy of the medieval church as the presence of the kingdom of God, a position that we find more problematic today, particulary in the increasing secularization of the last 500 years.

Nevertheless, some would style themselves "postmillennials" today, based on the idea that the rule of God through the church is the millennium on earth and is already here in some sense. Whether one ascribes to a particular view of the millennium as now past or present, the postmillennial attitude is that of a "world changer" who believes that God wants us to work for Him in the world to see the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our God.