In The Absolutely Last Resort

In one of his many fine lectures and sermons that I've had the great pleasure to hear in the past several years,  the Protestant Old Testament Scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann talked about how at the seminary he worked in, one of the janitors asked him what was this eschatology that he was hearing about, apparently in the dismissive tones as has been fashionable in modern academic fashion.  When he heard what eschatology dealt with, as given in Merriam-Webster:

1: a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind

2: a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankind

specifically : any of various Christian doctrines concerning the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, or the Last Judgment

Brueggemann said the janitor pointed out that to someone in his humble position, without that, he was left with nothing.   I wish I had the time to go look for the passage so I could type it out verbatim to do Brueggemann and the Janitor justice but that's what I remember of the story.  I had a not totally unrelated experience when, as I was arguing with new-atheists online, I pointed out that what the person who bagged our groceries, the woman who ran the feed store or, I think I said, a janitor at the local school had as valid ideas about the existence of God as any atheist hero with a degree.  It must have been Dawkins or Harris or Dennett or one of the Brits we were arguing but that comment thread is long gone, probably several iterations of the software ago.  

So I'm going to finish this series I had meant to finish yesterday, going through the last pages of the Swiss theologian Hans Kung's Eternal Life? the third of his great trilogy of books in which he discusses God's existence, the figure of Jesus and Christianity and, then life after death, in which Kung tells us what you can get from choosing to believe, though that's far from the only thing Kung means by it.

God all in all:  I can rely on the hope that in the eschaton, in the absolutely last resort, in God's kingdom, the alienation of Creator and creature, man and nature, logos and cosmos, the division into here and hereafter, above and blow, subject and object, will be abolished.  God then will not merely be in everything, as he is now, but truly all in all, but - transforming everything into himself - because he gives to all a share in his eternal life in unrestricted, endless fullness.  For, Paul says in the Letter to the Romans,  all that exists comes from him;  all is by him and for him.  To him be glory forever. 

God all in all:  For me it is expressed in unsurpassed and grandiose form - interweaving cosmic liturgy, nuptial celebration and quiet happiness in the last pages of the New Testament at the end of the book of Revelation by the seer in statements of promise and hope, with which I would like to close this series of lectures on eternal life. "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now, and there was no longer any sea (the place of chaos).  I saw the holy city, and the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, as beautiful as a bride dressed for her husband.  Then I heard a loud voice call from the throne,  "You see this city?  Here god lives among men.  He will make his home among tme:  they shall be his people and he will be their God;  his name is God-with-them.  He will wipe away all tears from their eyes;  there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness.  The world of the past has gone."  It will no longer be a life in the light of the Eternal but the light of the Eternal will be our life and his rule our rule:  "They will see him face to face, and his name will be written on their foreheads.  It will never be night again and they will not need lamplight or sunlight, because the Lord God will be shining on them.  They will reign for ever and ever."  

I began this short series noting the criterion that modernism, materialism, scientism, modern atheism is founded in, when it is honestly admitted, what does that get for the one who chooses to believe it.  As I have mentioned Kung began his large trilogy by going over the philosophical foundation of modernism in Rene Descartes' desire to establish the study of the material universe in the same kind of hard proof available to mathematics*.   Modern mathematics and physics give us more reason than Descartes could have probably suspected, that mathematics doesn't even full explain itself and that science can't provide us with the total certainty that the ideology of modernism insists it does.  While it might be a, sometimes, useful tool, an essential one - as this pandemic proves it must be taken as - it cannot give us full understanding, not even with the time that we don't often have to fully work things out.  The pseudo-scientific babblings peddled by Richard Epstein which he asserts had the certainty of evolutionary biological science should stand as a potent example of how that naive faith among the most credentialed and conceited of us can get us a lot worse than the common sense of stay-at-home orders provides us.   

It is one of the most frustrating things that the atheist-materialist self-assigned champion of scientific thinking, especially those who call themselves "skeptics" (but who are, actually, absolutists on insisting on their ideology, and so skeptical of nothing) that in such large numbers so much of humanity refuses to fall in line.  I think that a number of people, even those who might not be fully aware of the lapses of science and even mathematics, that they intuit that as compared to the radical economic justice, the social justice of the Gospels and The Prophets, they get far less out of the modernist eschaton of meaninglessness (if only Descartes knew his philosophical conclusions led to that end!) insignificance, non-justice, non-meaning and a meaningless extinction after a life of experiencing injustice.   Is it any wonder that they choose even the most naive and distorted articulations of the Scriptures over the sour, dismal injustice of modernism?   But that's a huge topic full of contradictions - as modernism is - and will have to be gone through later. 

I suspect that what Kung said in his books, the passages I've given you, would be very controversial in some evangelical circles, I would guess those who are allied to Trumpian mammonism would be especially hostile to it.  But I will point out that they would have to get in line behind the Catholic right **in their hatred of Hans Kung and his theology.  One of the slams on the Catholic right, the part of the Catholic church which joins the white-evangelical right which supports the vulgar king of Mammon, Trump, is that Kung isn't a real Catholic theologian, that he is, in  their accusation, a Protestant theologian.  His doctoral dissertation was about the theology of Karl Barth - Barth read his dissertation and attested that Kung understood his thinking.  One of the features of Kung's writing is that he, as he has said, relied far more on the text of the New Testament than he did medieval theology in coming to his conclusions.  I think his theology is a good bridge between the two major traditions of Western Christianity, perhaps it can be seen as erasing one of those distinctions that the will disappear in the coming time. 

*  I found it humbling to read that section of the book because several ideas I'd thought I had discovered had been articulated rather brilliantly by Kung and, as he humbly noted, had been discussed in the criticism of science long before he wrote about them.  I can't entirely regret that so many of my hours were spent playing piano but there was a cost to that in that you can't do everything and the time I could have been reading more theology and philosophy was spent on music.  I would recommend Kung's trilogy of books, or so many others, because one thing I've discovered is that a good theologian has a far more profound knowledge of and treatment of philosophical topics than most of the modern philosophers I've read do.   Modernism has that Cartesian conceit that mathematics is the model for thinking about all aspects of human experience but, as Kung notes early in his book Does God Exist?  one of those things I only realized recently, mathematics deals with the simplest, most abstract entities, numbers and their properties and that the level of proof possible about those simple things known only to reside in our minds, quickly becomes impossible when dealing with even relatively simple physical objects.  I would wonder if instead of numbers being the language of God if, perhaps, numbers are our limited minds grasping at a convincing explanation of things in terms we can deal with.  

**  It is one of the ironies of both Protestant Fundamentalism and Catholic integralism and its pop version so on display in the Catholic right, that they are both a sport of modernism and not the return to the past that they claim to be.  Both of them have the love of authoritarianism, gangsterism,  and a hatred of equality and democracy.   I would not hesitate to say that neither of them measure up as paths following the teachings of Jesus.  No more than Trumpism or Bush II were democratic.  

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3