When Christians Start Dreaming of Victory

André Trocmé, the kingdom of God, and the danger of sacred triumphalism

Note: On Monday I wrote a review of the recent English edition of the memoirs of French pastor André Trocmé. Today I want to isolate a few paragraphs from this fascinating memoir for further reflection. These paragraphs are connecting very deeply with me on the question of the moral potential, and danger, of an eschatologically-grounded Christian vision.

Here is the quote that got these reflections going.

Those weeks spent in the [prison] camp amid Marxists had a decisive influence on me…I no longer believed that my stubborn fidelity to Christ’s message could vanquish evil during the dark night of history that we were living through. Our arrest and the network of pitiless police repression seemed to demonstrate the uselessness of the Gospels in this world.

But our [Marxist] comrades thought differently. They believed that they possessed an efficacious means of putting an end to evil on earth. Furthermore, they believed that the ‘big event’ was coming. Hitler represented the final convulsions of a dying capitalism, which for them was the incarnation of evil. They were experiencing a type of apocalypse. Stalingrad was the harbinger of the fall of Babylon. Crushing Fascism would mark the beginning of the Messianic Age.

I remember one of them, a teacher, walking with great strides into the barracks and declaring with firm belief, ‘The proletariat is healthy, free of the gangrene that eats away at the exploiters. When the exploiters have disappeared, everything will fall back into its natural order. Then we will see the world of the workers, where competition, rivalry, jealousy, violence, lying, and war, having become useless, will disappear.’

For them, this world free of evil was at hand. We only needed to defeat Hitler and his henchmen, Mussolini and Pétain. All means were justified to reach this end… ‘Then and only then,’ our comrades said, ‘will we be able to love and practice nonviolence with you.’ We responded that we had to love God, as absurd as it might seem, right now. Love and pardon right now (p.321).

Trocmé has abandoned an earlier belief that Christian faithfulness today will bring the decisive victory over evil in this world. This abandoned vision is illuminated for him, so very ironically, by the apocalyptic, eschatological, millenarian vision of his Marxist comrades in a wretched German prison camp in occupied France. It was the Marxists who believed that their actions would bring about the “kingdom of justice” on earth. It was the Marxists who were then anticipating that a “world free of evil was at hand.” Not André Trocmé the Christian pastor. What shall we make of this?

Those who know my work well will know that “kingdom ethics” has been at the heart of my contribution.