The limited ambitions of the people of God

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William Cheriegate asked me to expand on the following remark in my post on Transmillennialism – not least for the benefit of those who ‘grew up in the midst of a conquering American “christian” empire’:

To my mind, the Bible has lower expectations about the nature of the impact of the people of God on the world around it.

The expansion has become something of a story in its own right, a summary of how I think the biblical narrative situates us in the world, shapes our calling as a distinct people of God, and sets the scope of our expectations and ambitions.

The struggle for existence

The Old Testament tells the story of a people that is called to live with a ‘new creation’ integrity in the midst of the nations. The nature of that creational ‘integrity’ is defined by the Law, which determines the people’s relationship principally with God and with each other (love the Lord your God, love your neighbour as yourself, as Jesus summarized it), but also with the land and with their neighbours. But consequences are attached; much is at stake. If the people maintain that integrity, they will prosper; if they persistently fail to maintain that integrity, they will suffer disease, famine, poverty – and ultimately will fall victim to the powerful nations around them (cf. Deut. 28:15-68).

The boundary of this people is defined geographically. There is some political expansionism, some prosyletism, the occasional prophetic foray into neighbouring territory; but essentially this small world of God’s new creation, the outcome of the promise to Abraham that God would bless and make fruitful and multiply his progeny in a land that he would give them, remains confined to a small corner of the Middle East.

Its existence is always a precarious one: the borders of the country are always contested, its security is always at risk. This is the point at which the kingdom motif becomes significant: the people come to Samuel and ask for a king so that they may be like the other nations, a king who will judge them and ‘go out before us and fight our battles’ (1 Sam. 8:19). Israel’s king is the one who will solve the problem of – and the problems that arise from – their political insecurity and vulnerability, the one who will safeguard their boundaries.

A salvation made known to the ends of the earth

In the end integrity fails to the point that God sends the Babylonians to punish his people. The boundaries are dramatically breached. Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, the land is devastated, and a large part of the population is taken into exile to serve the king of Babylon. But this leads to a more fundamental theological crisis because Israel’s defeat could also be interpreted as a defeat of YHWH, a humiliation of YHWH. So we have the crucial argument in Isaiah that contrary to appearances Israel’s God is sovereign over the nations, is more powerful than the hand-made gods of the nations, and will demonstrate this by rescuing his people from their captivity. The good news, therefore, that is proclaimed to Israel is that ‘your God reigns’ – not in any absolute sense but in the historical sense that he will bare his holy arm ‘before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God’ (Is. 52:7-12). In other words, he will prove himself to be Israel’s king by acting to re-establish the integrity of the people as ‘new creation’: ‘behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind’ (Is. 65: 17).

This narrative both forms and delimits the universal expectation. The salvation of Israel before the eyes of the surrounding nations will show the world that Israel’s claims about YHWH are not empty boasts: YHWH indeed has the power to take the hand of Cyrus and lead him to restore his people to their homeland, and the nations will declare, ‘Surely God is in you, and there is no other, no god besides him’ (Is. 45:14). It is an expectation that culminates in the conviction that ‘every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance’ to the God of Israel (Is. 45:23). This is the final recognition of the pagan nations that their idols are worthless, that YHWH alone is God, but it remains an integral part of the story of Israel’s salvation. It is worked out not by the global expansion of Israel but by the incidental participation of the nations in the restoration of the people and in the worship of Israel’s God (eg. Is. 66:18-21).

At the name of Jesus

So when we come to the New Testament and Paul’s argument that ‘at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord’ (Phil. 2:10-11), we should hear in this not the aggrandizing belief that eventually the whole world will become Christian but the climax to a story about the people of God and the pagan nations, the victory of the crucified Jesus over the king who regards equality with God a thing to be grasped. This finally establishes the security of the people of God as it exists in the midst of the sometimes extremely hostile nations and cultures of the world.

The story, however, does not stop there. The Edict of Milan in AD 313 symbolically marked the moment when the gods of the ancient pagan world gave way to Christ in accordance with the hopes first articulated in Isaiah. This seems to me an unavoidable conclusion if we are to take the New Testament seriously as a historical and realistic text. Rightly or wrongly, Christendom sought to give expression to the conviction that YHWH is sovereign over the nations through the various forms of political, intellectual, cultural and ultimately military power that it had available to it.

The ‘conquering American “Christian” empire’ is a late manifestation of that mode of being the people of God in the world, but it seems pretty clear now that the Christendom paradigm cannot be sustained: we can no longer, as the people of God, marshal the West’s political, intellectual, cultural and military resources to defend and propagate our belief that Jesus has been given the name above every name. So we have again become acutely aware of our vulnerability, our isolation, as a holy people amidst the nations and cultures of the world; and we have to ask once again what it means to be a new creation people – now in Christ, with all that that entails – for the sake of God and for the sake of others.

After Christendom

We are looking for new modes of being to replace the expansionist, imperialistic, institutionalized Christendom mode. Perhaps we are something more organic; perhaps simply a people, a tribe, a global community. Perhaps we are fractalized prophetic communities, imaginative story-telling communities, commissioned to tell the story of the creator through the concrete circumstances of our existence, in diverse, even conflicting ways, under diverse conditions. Perhaps we are a dispersed priestly people who mediate between the world and God. Perhaps we are localized collectives that seek to model justice and an awareness of the createdness of things. Perhaps we are all of these… and more.

The point is that our calling is not to save the world, not to assimilate all cultures and peoples into the kingdom of God, but to be an authentic new creation, both actually and prophetically, in the midst of things. Salvation, in this narrative, is something that happened historically to a people. There are all sorts of ways in which we now participate in that salvation, but there is an important sense in which it is behind us – it is what God did for his people at a time when they faced not merely exile but destruction at the hands of an enemy that presumed to govern the whole world. Abraham was summoned from Haran not to save the world but to be the beginning of an alternative world, a faithful microcosm within the corrupted macrocosm.

We still evangelize; but evangelism is simply the public proclamation, through speech but also through the drama of our shared lives, that the creator God is, that he has gathered a people for his own possession from all the nations of the earth, that he has demonstrated his abundant love for them and through them, that he has instilled in that people the capacity and potential of a new created life, that he has given them a king who cannot be toppled by any earthly power, that he will ultimately hold humanity accountable, and that evil and death will not have the last laugh.

It is a proclamation that is to be heard universally, but it is always the story of a circumscribed people, its boundaries safeguarded by its crucified Lord, that must embody the story of God for the sake of others. Many will hear it and believe; they will become part of the Spirit-filled collective. But they will believe, in weakness and humility, for the sake of the many who cannot or will not believe.