The Long View

Some of you may know that for the last three years I’ve had only one functioning eye. Let me corner you at a party and I’ll tell you all about it.  The takeaway is simple. One can adapt. To look to my right I have to turn my head a lot further. Stretching exercises are a necessity, not an option. Especially when driving, one can’t be too careful about what’s coming up on the blind side.  

Fortunately, right before losing the sight in one eye I had cataract surgery, and thus artificially overcame the myopia which had long necessitated that I wear glasses. And yet, like almost all of my fellow humans, I still have a particular form of myopia. It comes from the shape of our mind rather than that of our lenses, and makes it hard for us to take seriously even a future we can clearly see. 

Many in my generation despised the efforts of Hal Lindsey and his ilk to scare us into faith through apocalyptic visions of the future. We thought Bob Dylan’s idea that a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, or Jackson Brown’s Before the Deluge both more likely and more desirable than a vengeful God who would rescue his faithful followers before raining destruction on the rest of us. 

But if Lindsay and LaHaye and the rest were poor interpreters of scripture, they understood something ,as did Dylan and Brown, that is absolutely necessary to the human race. 

In the last post I talked about the danger of myopic prognostication, the term used by Justin Gregg in Nietze and the Narwhal to identify humanity’s ability to predict the future, but failure to be emotionally engaged with and thus act on the long term consequences of our behavior. Intellectually we can prognosticate. Emotionally we are quite myopic. We’re like American corporations and US politicians, always focused on the endorphin rush that comes from quarterly returns and the next round of primaries, and who cares if the economy goes to hell and the country falls apart. Like Anthony Eden of an earlier generation we’re quite satisfied with “peace in our time” and can’t figure out how to care about whether bombs fall on our grandchildren. 

Just look at global warming. The hottest year on record and we’re busy shopping for our fall wardrobes. In my home state of Texas we’re celebrating how the cause of global warming can keep the AC running while making it illegal to require water breaks for overheated workers or for companies doing business with the state to divest themselves of oil and gas stock. We’re building highways (which create heat islands) to accommodate more cars (which generate greenhouse gasses) while we imagine next year’s summer vacation in Colorodo or Canada. 

It turns out that one of the positive things about Christian eschatology is that it forms humans to engage emotionally with the future. The problem was that the church back in the 60’s and 70’s taught that I was facing apocalyptic judgment because of my fantasies about Mitze when it was really going to be ushered in by my big Buick that got 4 miles to the gallon. It wasn’t the back seat that was the problem. The problem was under the hood. 

And still is. In Texas its burn baby burn and drill baby drill and hand out the semi-automatic weapons and who cares what happens to my grand children. We can see the future, but we just can’t make ourselves care enough to change it. 

Which is why Christians and Christian churches must foster a re-invented eschatological imagination. We need to form people through real stories of coming judgment and apocalyptic suffering so that they become emotionally engaged with their here and now responsibility to avoid the coming tribulation. 

But how?  

Well not pre-trib escapism. That is what got us where we are today. That is just another form of myopia.

The urgency of Christian eschatology doesn’t come from making sure everyone has a free pass to heaven. The urgency is in making sure that it doesn’t come to that. The apocalyptic imagination isn’t to create fear, but is to give us a vision of God’s Reign that inspires us to make it happen before it comes to cosmic war and a scorched earth.

You do not know the day or the hour. Jesus says “watch,” but read all of Mark 13. What he means is “get to work.” Like the wise steward, get ready for the return of the One who calls us to enact God’s Reign. Quit looking up the sky and get on with the mission. The voice that calls you into action is a better voice than that which rose from the ground around Able’s feet. It doesn’t desire revenge, but it will not save you from the consequences of your actions. 

So we shouldn’t let it come to our children getting what we deserve. 

The apocalypse was always of our making, and so we must learn to think in eschatological terms so that we can join with the apostles, martyrs, and saints to insure that it is unmade. 

Let Christian teaching become what it was always intended to be; a way that trains us to respond to what evolution doesn’t teach us to feel: the future. Myopia isn’t our destiny. Christians should be the optometrists of humanity. Let those who have eyes see. And act.