Beyond Optimism
The Cross, the Kingdom, and Hope After Disillusionment
My post from June 26 about “The End of White Liberal Christian Optimism” clearly struck a chord. I argued, in brief, that white liberals have been disabused of our optimism about the world, the US, and history itself, by developments of the last decade.
By optimism I did not mean positivity, confidence, or joy. I meant the conviction, implicit or explicit, that history itself is reliably moving toward greater justice through human progress.
We have seen that optimism, in this sense, was based in part on a progressive-improvement reading of history, including God’s action in history. It was also based on a reading of US history heavily dependent on happy memories of progress during the US civil rights movement.
I confessed that the benefits of white privilege were entangled with these illusions.
So where do we go from here? When we no longer are sure that “the arc of the universe bends toward justice.” When we are no longer confident that forces for justice and inclusion will necessarily prevail in the world. When we are no longer optimistic that white ethnonationalism and its corrupted version of Christianity — baked into the US cake from the beginning — will ever be finally defeated here.
In some upcoming posts, I will offer some tentative reflections about post-white-liberal-optimism life, about faith and ethics on the other side of shattered illusions.
In this post, I will begin with theology. I want to wrestle with how Christians should now think about God’s involvement in human history.
The Creedal Confession
The idea that God is working in human history for good is both biblically rooted and well-attested in tradition.
But the idea that God is working in human history in such a way that we can be confident of progress and the victory of justice on the earth is by no means universally attested.
It is interesting that the primary affirmations about history in the creedal tradition are that God is Creator of heaven and earth, that the Son of God became human and was crucified, died, and raised from the dead, and that this Jesus Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”
The creeds do not confess that history steadily advances toward justice.
The creeds confess belief in the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, Christ’s return, judgment, and the kingdom without end. They do not confess that history steadily advances toward justice. Between Easter and the consummation lies the long and uncertain history of the Church’s witness.
The idea that even our efforts to follow Jesus and do the will of God will bring material, sustained, visible gains for kingdom values like justice and peace is not part of historic Christian confessions. The tradition (by now) tells us that believers are called always to work toward these ends, but it does not promise their fulfillment in this aeon of history.
The Late Thought of Walter Rauschenbusch
It is very interesting to me that very near the end of his life, the Social Gospel thinker Walter Rauschenbusch wrote A Theology for the Social Gospel. Published in 1917, during the mass slaughter that was World War I, Rauschenbusch was notably less optimistic than in his earlier books. Rauschenbusch argued that human beings live within what he called a “kingdom of evil” as well as the kingdom of God, and that the social and institutional powers aligned with the kingdom of evil inevitably oppose those seeking God’s reign. That helps explain why those working for God’s kingdom inevitably face organized and sometimes dangerous opposition.
Here kingdom theology can intersect fruitfully with Cross theology.
The Gospel accounts of Jesus’ whole ministry show him exercising profound spiritual and moral power, and gaining victories over Satan, illness, hunger, injustice, and even death. But his ministry always occurs in the teeth of determined opposition from human and superhuman forces.
Menace surrounds Jesus from the earliest pages of the Gospel. In Mark, leaders are plotting to “destroy” Jesus by chapter 3. In the end, of course, the human being Jesus of Nazareth is in fact destroyed on a Roman Cross, a death marked by comprehensive rejection, humiliation, scorn, torture, and grotesque violence.
Rauschenbusch, by 1917, had seen so much bloodshed overseas and so much resistance to basic reforms at home, for example, better working conditions in factories and living conditions in cities—that his thought had returned to the Cross.
By then he had also discovered that prophetic social criticism can carry a stern cost. His opposition to America’s entry into World War I and his refusal to join the anti-German fervor of the period subjected him to sharp criticism and diminished his public standing. He was not placed on a cross, of course. But neither was he any longer the celebrated and relatively uncontroversial spokesman of the Social Gospel that he had once been.
Few theologians did more to advance a Kingdom theology which celebrated this-worldly social progress as the work of God’s kingdom, and called Christians to this work.
The road of history will continue to be lined by crosses.
But from within even his own chastened Christian perspective, Rauschenbusch saw that the world is a bloody battlefield between forces pressing for the “kingdom of God,” a world where God’s will is done, God’s love is advanced, and God’s justice prevails, and forces of personal and superpersonal evil that take many an advocate for justice and love to their own crosses.
