The blog of J.L. Wasson

Moltmann’s second chapter, Promise and History, is one of the best things I have read all year. He continues to develop his thesis that God is revealed in promise. This relates not only to God’s future but to God’s faithfulness in the past. God’s very character is grounded in his ability to remain faithful to what he has promised. This is to be understood in light of God’s action with and for his covenant people in redemption and judgement. The nomadic people of God are on the move, as Godself is, headed in a direction towards a future - not simply grounded in the time and space of local geography as the epiphany religions that surrounded them. Thus history and existence are bound up in this movement toward the fulfillment of the promise.

The whole force of promise, and of faith in terms of promise, is essentially to keep men on the move in a tense inadaequatio rei et intellectus as long as the promissio which governs the intellectus has not yet found its answer in reality. It is a promise, which keeps the hoping mind in a “not yet” which transcends all experience and history…

There is a certain amount of emptiness and lack of fulfillment in the present reality. This realization forces us to be on the move, hoping for the promise. We tend to have an infatuation with wanting everything to be fixed now. We belabor to fix brokenness as soon as we witness it. The idea that history is on the move and that a promise is offered does not suggest that it will come to fulfillment within the framework we have created. It simply means that human history finds itself somewhere between promise and fulfillment. Again, the idea of waiting for the promise to break into the present is deeply scandalous. Little is offered in terms of mending in the present. I think, however, this is what makes hope so very profound. Hope is longing for the promise that faith has believed to arrive. Hope longs for the future and announces it’s coming - whenever that may be. We become less wrapped up in trying to fix everything now and lamenting when it is not - and more about announcing and confessing the one who will fix it and the time when all will be fixed. 

Between promise and fulfillment there is a whole variety of intermediate links and processes, such as exposition, development, validation, assertion, renewal, etc. Between promise and fulfillment stretches the process of the history of the working of the word - an event of tradition, in which the promise is transmitted to coming generations in interpreted and actualized form, and every new present is exposed to the promised future in hope and obedience. 

This also changes the way we look at the world around us. It seems every year there is a new book or some hip pastor who seeks to define the role of the Church in the culture - as if the two are mutually exclusive. It is a mistake to assume that the Church is not apart of culture and it is a mistake to assume the Church is the only thing in the world bringing “redemption” to culture. As God created all of humanity in his image - we ought to have a broader understanding of how non-Churched-image-bearers can still reflect the redemption of the world. It is also a mistake for the Church to stand over-against the world - counter to it - that is, of course, unless the Church takes hostage something culture has already been doing yet merely attaches some form of Christian language or cliché to it. My point is that to “redeem broken parts of culture” (typically politics, music, movies, blah blah, etc) for the sake of hallowing them seems to actually go nowhere. Fortunately, Moltmann offers a better perspective. In his discussion of the nomadic people of God, he relates the appearances of the presence of God in particular places and times as proclamation - not merely appearances. The point here is that the very reason a ‘place or a thing’ was considered hallowed by the people of Israel was not because the thing itself was such but that God was announcing something by and through it. The promise was revealed in the appearance. This challenges our quest to redeem things themselves rather than to look to what the thing is announcing about God and God’s future for the world. The most pressing example I can think of this misappropriation is found in the brilliant asinine and pious ridiculous idea a local church in Dallas, TX had to blow the whistle on those in the culture not specifically celebrating ‘Christmas’. They decided to create a website whereby people can put businesses, community centers, entire towns, etc on Grinch Alert.

This is really dumb. For real. 

Christmas trees, stockings, gift-giving, decorations, Merry Christmas! are all cultural forms by which we proclaim the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. But those forms do not contain the meaning of his coming. If someone wishes you a ‘Happy Holidays’ it does not detract from your ability to announce the future that God has set in motion through the sending of Jesus Christ into the world. Announcing such a future ought to transcend the cultural mores that surround cultural Christmas traditions and subvert them. While it is certainly lost on the creators of the website, their very action is in actuality subversive to their own message. What they have managed to get themselves caught up in is the hype of Christmas season when what they desperately need to do is invite the world to share their hope, namely, a hope in God who has broken into the world in Jesus Christ to share our humanity and invite us to share in God’s future. Creating a website for people to report those who are, by their standards, naughty or nice is, on all accounts, subversive to sharing a message of that hope. The irony is all but amusing. 

In what ways are you announcing the promise of God to bring hope to the world in Jesus Christ this Christmas?