It Is Not About Us

by

August 21, 2022

It has become a commonplace to see the Church (presumably the "Church militant" although this is no longer PC) as the center of cosmic contestation. Its members are caught up in a cosmic struggle between good and evil (and related conflicts between liberation and oppression, justice and injustice, order and chaos, truth and falsehood.) Pick your abstract binary and the Church has chosen sides and is thrusting us into the fight. 

One problem is that these characterizations  of life within the body of Christ is they don’t seem remotely like good news. The Gospel is Christ’s victory over sin, death, evil, and the world. Who wants to join an organization that remembers this only once a year, or maybe for a few minutes each week, before plunging back into the fray?

But it is also because the language of cosmic struggle takes us far from the Bible and its witness. The Bible tends to be concrete; so that evil and good are adjectives rather than abstract nouns. Even apparently abstract nouns like oppression, injustice, and chaos refer to specific events and places. As do terms like liberation, justice, and order. 

Taken as a whole the Bible tells a concrete story; the story of God acting out God's selfhood, to us God's glory, in creation. The way the Bible teaches us to recognize God is not by checking a list of abstract assertions about God, but by looking for  where and when we see God acting in character. And the Biblical witness to us, as humans, is an invitation to understand who we are in the story and what roles we have played, could play, and should play.

While the Biblical story of God introduces God’s actions on a cosmic scale, and alludes to a cosmic struggle, that isn’t what drives the story, and certainly not for the human participants. What drives the story is the question of God's character, and how it is revealed as humans continually resist God's plan for the earth and its creatures. 

Put simply the story is driven by a question that arises in the Garden of Eden, and intensified by the Flood: Who is this God that sets humans on a mission (to bear the "image of God" and thus to "be fruitful and merciful and cover the face of the earth") and is then set in motion again (after "on the 7th day he rested") by human resistance and failure. 

Good vs evil is thin Manichaean gruel by comparison. As are our usual efforts to make the story about us and our salvation. The story is about God. We come into the story because God includes us in God's mission, and we resist doing what we were created to do. Our salvation is just a byproduct of our failure to play our role in God's story. 

Like all dramatic stories, those of us hearing or reading this story are in some sense participants. We are humans, and thus share in the role of antagonists to God's intention. Yet we are simultaneously the objects of that intention. We are, to use the images the Bible itself provides, being wooed by God into returning to God and thus to our true selves. 

But again, God is the story, not us. 

If there are cosmic battles to be fought then, at least as found in the Bible, they are God's to fight not ours. Caught as we might be in the terrifying midst of those cosmic battles we are called to keep the faith, not to join the war. What could we do anyway, when the sky is raining (beginning water, ending stars) and the earth is split open to pour forth her fury? Let's not let the hubris of our Star Wars stoked imaginations make us misread the Bible. 

The Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, "It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all the atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil-which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama." (Quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman)

Feynman is right. If our religion is about humans struggling for good against evil then we're playing it out on an absurdly large stage - and one which shows no evidence that the struggle is even taking place. And if God is just watching, then it isn’t the God revealed in scripture. Either our God is too small, or our claims are too big to be taken seriously. 

I think our God is both too small, and our claims too big, to be taken seriously. To restore Christian witness to a Biblical basis we must first recognize that the story in the Bible is about God and God's intentions for a single species on an insignificant planet in a vast cosmos. To claim that we're the center of a cosmic struggle is simply not credible given what we know of the cosmos. It is too big a claim.

And it makes God too small. Better to learn from the Bible that the character of the God who created the cosmos is to give God’s self in love for the least of God’s creatures. We are not the lynchpin of cosmic history (which is absurd hubris), but a living example of God’s complete self-giving even for those who make no difference on a human, much less cosmic scale. The God who creates the cosmos and condescends to live among us humans is far greater and more glorious in every imaginable sense than the god of just the human tribe. 

We do not need to be drawn into cosmic struggles in order to find our lives made meaningful by the Christ. Through the incarnation the God who made the cosmos has imbued our little world and our human story with all the meaning any created thing can need. Knowing that our lives and histories here on earth are redeemed we only need to play the role to which God first assigned us : to be fruitful even as we tend to the fruitfulness of all those on the earth. 

If in time we have also multiplied to the extent that this blessing can be spread a little from the earth we may also visit other worlds. And there without doubt we will find God has also condescended to be present, which we may deny and resist, or accept and grow.