I wonder how many sermons, preached in the last decade, have been titled: "It's the end of the world as we know it/ and I feel fine."
Does eschatology hold any real claim on us these days? I doubt it. I sense rather that two basic poles anchor our brains when we think about the future. Well, three basic poles, with the third being 'De Nile,' that lengthiest of psychological rivers. The two other two poles are apocalypticism, which is quite different from eschatology, and the 'I am a rock/ I am island' mentality, quoting the wise Paul Simon parodying the great Donne's 17th.
Apocalypticism is probably the most obvious, the sense that the end of the world is a "bad thing" with much destruction, whichever side of Robert Frost's Fire/Ice line we might decide on. It does come in several varieties, though, that lurk around our consciousness. It appears in things like The Left Behind Series, which is essentially revenge pornography directed against those who disagree. It also comes in the bizarre news coverage of asteroids that might destroy us--sooner or later, it will happen, we are assured, but we do not know the hour the thief is coming to steal our comfortable temperate climate and turn us into earth's new dinosaurss. Apocalypticism arises when we think about "mutual nuclear destruction," or even global warming. It even comes up with the end of the Mayan calender, because clearly the calender ended at that spot because all created reality was going to explode, not because someone ran out of wall space. The world will end and it will be unpleasant. This alternately terrifies and delights us, rather like a roller coaster. We don't hold an eschatology--a belief that God might become all in all, that creation might be redeemed, that new life might extend in all directions. We're more like voyeurs hoping to catch a glimpse of something really nasty, hopefully at someone else's expense. And apocalypticism does not orient us in a particular direction--it's a little too busy glorifying in the Big Crunch/Cool, as the case may be. It doesn't move us toward anything--mostly, it turns us into viewers.
The 'island' mentality is essentially the sense that, whatever may happen to our world, I don't care because I am not the world. You can hear this from bankers who received the bailout money from the US government in the wake of the global economic meltdown. By and large, they are not thankful or penitent--hey, they tend to say, it's survival of the fittest. This stance is not unique to them--we also drift that way, like when we all make our individual plans about what to do in the zombie apocalypse. It's like we've developed a perfect predator gig: hunt to extinction, and then have the prey apologize for not reproducing fast enough. But it's fundamentally a stance about the end of created reality--even as economic worlds collapse, the predators cultivate new pray. It is, in effect, a belief that the world will never end for sufficiently excellent economic predators, because they will always escape. Global warming? They can afford air conditioning, not only for themselves, but for their crops. This is the island mentality, the belief that changes in the ecosystem won't ever kill an infinitely adaptable predator--never mind the impossibility of being infinitely adaptable. The 'Island' mentality, the belief that I am an island and not a part of a whole created reality, orients us anywhere but toward the end of the things.
So: what would it mean these days to live into an eschatology, a belief in 'final things' that we hope would come to pass, that would be a new creation, God having become all in all? One or two thoughts about that. First, we would have to rediscover the importance of 'surprise' in our theology. Foundational to our contemporary problems is our sense that we can no longer be surprised, or we will shortly reach a time in human history when surprises will be gone. We've got to give that up. Interestingly, though, it's incredibly hard to construct an argument, or an article, that doesn't somehow abrogate surprise inherently. It seems to me that if we are all going to be eschatological people, we will somehow have to redeem 'surprise' in our discourse in a way that is currently nowhere on our maps.
Second, we need to take seriously the insistence that we are not judges of ourselves or each other. This is not a polemic against fundamentalism. Rather, I intend it as a guide to the idea that, given the radical diversity of life within traditions, much less among them, different communities may need different visions of the future, potentially irreconcilable visions, and we might all have to live with all of us not having the same vision. If that sounds abstract, how about: people in California may need a different theology than people in Chicago for visioning the end of the world, and those two communities are in close to the same tradition. In other words, we might have to recognize that each of us inhabits many traditions at different depths. More on this another time.
And third: we need to claim and explore our profound interconnection. John Donne is more right now than ever. Each of us is part of the main, and the loss of every part of the world affects us all. Therefore, we might consider as Donne does that every time the environment takes a hit, every time poverty is strengthened and oppression reinforced, we won't have to send to know for whom this is bad news--it's bad news for us.
Surprise, reserved judgment, interconnection--I think those are the building blocks that might reconnect us to a real hope for new creation.
