Advent and the Judgment of the Church
By: Ian Olson
Tags: Gospel, Politics, Features, Christmas, Advent

“St. John the Baptist Preaching” (panel), Adam Elsheimer, (1578–1610)

“For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God.” (1 Peter 4:17).

A reckoning has come for our collective delusion as Americans. Our cherished myth of exceptionalism has led us to a precipice and compelled many of us to leap. Political frenzy is ubiquitous but fueled by spiritual torpor. What can rouse us out of this narcosis?

I

We are often blind to the exceptionalism we assume for ourselves. It is visible and audible in our assertions of superiority over the rest of the world but operates silently in our denials of reality: the denial of racial injustice, the denial of the consolidation of wealth to the rich, the denial of human responsibility for climate change, the denial of ubiquitous commodification, the denial of the bitter fruit borne of the Sexual Revolution, and many others. Psychologically, we need these things to be false or grossly exaggerated. We cannot afford for these things to have truth to them or else we will recognize the pervasiveness of our implication in vast systems of wickedness and harm.

The contemporary COVID-19 crisis is another case in point. For, in spite of protocols urged by epidemiologists and health care professionals, many Americans have minimized the dangers of the virus and demonstrated a willingness to cut corners and put themselves and others at risk to such an extent that the United States has consistently led the world in new COVID-19 cases and deaths. At present a fresh surge of new cases and subsequent warnings from the Center for Disease Control and other authorities dismay many who had planned on a return to normalcy for Thanksgiving and the holiday season. But those plans were always fantasies for they were anchored in nothing real.

Sadly, this is typical of much of our discourse and much of our planning and policy-making. The friction of reality problematizes the stories we tell ourselves and provokes us to frenetic denial of the exceptions which sustain those stories. For we need the exceptions which secure our position to be the norm, to be the fulcrum upon which right and wrong are disinterestedly scaled so that our belief in our righteousness and superiority can persist. For if we have not, in fact, exemplified the norm, and have instead relied upon exceptions to norms, then we have much for which to answer.

The presumption that I and those like me, who are conscious of the world’s wrongs and are morally agitated by a vision of a more just world, have already condemned to death that which is unjust and compromised with us typifies us all. We are proficient at identifying the sins of our opponents and woefully insensible to the evil which makes itself at home amongst our in-group and those adjacent enough to it. Political discourse arises algorithmically out of our Manichean presuppositions of the world and the other, presuppositions most of us do not know to name “Manichean.”

II

The arrival of Advent into the maelstrom of conspiracy theories, the COVID-19 crisis, and utopian hopes for the coming presidential inauguration announces a judgment American Christians must heed.

This judgment is necessary precisely because American political identity and Christian identity have so thoroughly merged in an enormous segment of the church in America. To be one is to be the other in the doxa and praxis of entirely too many Christians. This is perhaps most apparent in those conservatives who pathologically justify the sins of the Trump administration and of reactionary forces on the far right with spuriously Christian rhetoric, but it is also present in liberals who hoist messianic expectations upon a Biden presidency. Though it is not as egregious, it is still symptomatic of being entangled in illusion.

Americans on the whole, and American Christians in particular, sense a terrible wound in the matter of our shared life. But this wound goes deeper: it is in our being as creatures and the being of the world, a lesion which infects and sabotages our efforts to bring about the good and to restrain evil.

The wound of our time is not the consequence of discrete historical actions: these are but the symptoms of that wound in the creation’s being actualizing in concrete event. It is mistaken, therefore, to assign blame for the present crisis to Donald Trump, or to Trump supporters, or to racist police. All of these are blameworthy, and each in their own way contribute to the devastation of that wound but are not its cause.

We are often afraid to acknowledge our susceptibility to propaganda, to illusion, to self-deception, for we fear this will relativize all beliefs and commitments, thereby discrediting the urgency of moral action. But this is not a tacit admission that none of our positions are more wrong than anyone else’s: only the recognition that there is no one who is not impacted by that wound.

Whatever it is we may deny about ourselves, what all of us are aware of is the need to act. But a program or a social theory is not enough to establish the utopias we fantasize. Resentment of the present animates the anthropocentric delusions of contemporary politics and that resentment compels the zealot to wield coercion so as to forcefully change the present. But resentment is not, in itself, prophecy. Many who would take up the mantle of prophet are unaware of how they themselves fall under the judgment they would assign to their out-group.

For too many of us in the ambiguously modern or postmodern West the hope of the future is an abstract ideal which can only come into historical existence by our efforts. But the apocalyptic desperation which has become so prevalent and so fervent over the last five years, when wed to harmful overestimates of human ability and competency, only seem to result in objectifying opposition to those efforts as the demonic impedance which must be defeated and destroyed to secure that future.

Such a perspective, however, is not sanctioned by the gospel: that way is the recourse of ideologies and despots. Sadly, many who have ostensibly aimed to serve God in our world have wielded force in just this way and brought God’s name into disrepute. The witness of the church has been tarnished through the conflation of the age to come with various policies and goals which do not bear the imprint of the Crucified Nazarene.

III

Christians, collectively, are in desperate need of revival that our witness in the world may be resuscitated. But that revival and reconsecration of our witness only comes on the other side of judgment. “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy,” John the Seer is told as part of a rebuke to worship nothing other than God (Revelation 19:10). In his astonishment at the vision of the overthrowing of Babylon and the glorification of the saints who have persevered against Babylon’s tyranny he worshipfully prostrates himself before the angel who mediates that vision.

The Seer himself must be warned when he is tempted with idolatry. For the judgment that has come upon Babylon falls upon it in its political and religious particularity but only because that same judgment is pronounced against all false worship and unjust practice. John is susceptible to the same inclinations, albeit on a smaller scale, as Babylon, and God’s “No” must jolt him out of the narcolepsy of idolatry if he is to carry out his vocation to prophesy.

For not all proclamation is prophecy: “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” In the vision John is given subsequently he sees a rider on a horse called Faithful and True who is given the task of judging the nations. His name is the Word of God and he deals out judgment with a sword that is in his mouth (Revelation 19:11–15). When this Word arrives on the scene the enemies of God are brought to nothing and the nations — those who do not know God — are shepherded in one and the same move.

But the saints, though they march behind this Word as an army, do not appear to fight against those enemies. They simply accompany the Word, bearing the testimony of Jesus, his judgment and his succour both, in themselves and in their speech. John is one of those saints, and his perseverance is a function of his bearing judgment upon himself — “You must not do that!” — and his restoration to standing with the angel as one of the “fellow servant… who hold[s] to the testimony of Jesus” (19:10).

So it must be for all of us who call ourselves Christians. We claim to have been encountered and reconstituted by the apocalypse of the cross, and yet for all too many of us we then return to a world that has not been so confronted, shattered, and remade. Our presumptions simply adopt the language of Christian theology but otherwise carry on as if nothing had happened.

But this is not a valid option for Christians. We must stay awake, expectant of apocalypse.

IV

Martinus de Boer identifies the New Testament’s apocalyptic thrust as the unexpected and calamitous unconcealment of the nature of reality through the revelation of God in Christ: “It is only through the disclosure of the coming age that the present can be perceived as ‘this (evil) age,’ destined to be brought to an end by God” (“Paul, Theologian of God’s Apocalypse,” 22).

The age to come dawns in the reception of God’s “No” spoken in Jesus Christ for this “No” uproots the givenness of the present. The judgment issued in Jesus’ coming unveils the falsehood and disorder which permeate and fuel the present age. The future age arrives in the trappings of the present age, in the flesh of the preacher from Nazareth, objectively present within the current of fallen history and subject in that flesh to its authorities. But that subjection is not proper to his being as the Son of God, the substance of the age to come. He comes to overturn the status quo and the plausibility structures of the present age because the way things are is not the way they are supposed to be.

But the apocalypse will not erupt out of the better organized or more wholly indoctrinated base of any of the ideologies on offer for apocalyptic denies an inherent potency for righteousness within the fallen cosmos. Apocalyptic is what it is because it is God’s action interrupting the disorder of our politics and attempts at order. In it he speaks a word which does not originate in the pamphlets or propaganda of any party. All are judged by it regardless of their affiliation because all are implicated, in some way, to some extent, in the disorder of the present.

This redescribes the traditional, pietistic understanding of humanity’s righteousness being comparable to a polluted garment (Isaiah 64:6). All of our efforts, however good and worthy they may be in intention, utilize the present order and are encumbered with the entropy of the present age. Our attempts to restrain or nullify chaos are themselves actualizations of chaos. The ontological wound in the world wounds our efforts to heal that wound. We therefore, inadvertently, contribute to the ruin of the world in our attempts to save it.

All are not equally guilty or guilty of the same offenses, but all find one commonality in being in the wrong. Contrary to our noblest ambitions and our convictions concerning justice we bring about consequences we could never have foreseen. We may rightly refuse to be intimidated by thugs but we may inadvertently escalate a dispute in so doing, one which results in injuries or death.

Or we misjudge the time in which we are placed and turn, in desperation, to measures we customarily would never employ. We beat and imprison the recalcitrant to bring about the order we are certain ought to obtain. Or we endeavor to suppress votes so as to secure the outcome we are certain our desperate time requires. The future is in jeopardy, and we must act now to repel the tidal wave of chaos threatening to engulf the foothold the forces of good possess.

But Advent redescribes time and the hope of the future so as to open possibilities otherwise invisible or unthinkable to us.

Jesus Christ, the future clothed in the trappings of the present, comes to this world as one of us yet uncompromised by that ontological wound which impairs us. Two ages overlap in the flesh of Christ; wherever he goes, the Kingdom of God is at hand. In him the weight of the age to come crashes upon the corrosion to which we are habituated. And yet he consecrates for service that which he unmasks as inadequate, as fraudulent, as wicked. So it is that John the Baptist is sent to rouse Israel to repentance. So it is that he comes to judge Israel but assembles twelve Israelites to carry out that work.

The Son’s mission into the far country is not an item out of the historical past; it is already accomplished and it is being accomplished presently. Christ’s exaltation is the act of God by which Christ is appointed as the perpetual crisis of all historical time. He is the continuity between first century Palestine and every subsequent time. His opening of the present age to the future has not yet been consummated, and so our historical existence stands in constant need of renewed receptivity towards that future.

But we are too often absorbed in the present, and the shape of our present is always marked by that fundamental, ontological wound. Our contradictory existence within the age of Adam is an inertia encumbering the receptivity to the future in Christ. Our perception of what is is so distorted by our being wounded that we embrace the false syllogisms of illusion and ideology to try to stave off collapse.

The upward call of God in Christ speaks into the present and energizes the creatures and institutions which actualize their judgment and their forgiveness both in hearing that call. For there is no intrinsic principle of continuity uniting or sustaining the decisions, small and large, which effect good in this world. There is not a continuing surge of goodness from which human beings draw and to which they contribute like an avalanche sweeping through history. The moments of decision are real, but they are the signs of God’s advent, his drawing near to judge and to renew.

Any moment can become the occasion of Jesus’ coming. And though we all stand under his judgment, some of our efforts will be crucified and consecrated for service in the future he brings with him.

V

Therefore we cannot listen complacently to the testimony of John the Baptist this Advent season. To hear his testimony and imagine it is directed only at the heinous offenses of our out-group is not to listen. “There was a man sent from God… he came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him” (John 1:6–7). The purpose of his witness is to reveal the Coming One to Israel (1:31) — the very people anticipating his coming. Many of them were likewise presumptuous of their relative righteousness but were given to see the truth of themselves in the Baptist’s announcement of coming judgment.

The gospel is both crisis and consolation; both are always intertwined in the Word become flesh. There is no “Yes” granted by God that is not accompanied by his “No” to our sinfulness. The coming of Jesus Christ into the furor and expectancy of first century Palestine is the type of his advent today. The Christian’s dual existence in both ages echoes the dual temporality of the Word who has acted and, in the proclamation of that action, acts contemporaneously. The Word was crucified and raised to life: that Word summons its hearers to the same crucifixion and resurrection in every hearing.

To repel the judgment of that Word is to repel the faith which reaches out to incorporate its listener — it is infidelity, a denial of faith to faith. Judgment does not give way to renewal when illusion is chosen in its place. The moral impulse which animates the demand for change sinks into self-degradation when that judgment is refused. True apocalyptic perception, on the other hand, simultaneously apprehends the evil of the present age, the demand of the age to come, and the power of God to reassert his lordship over his compromised creatures. The darkness of the present age is real, but hope is more real as the Word confounds that darkness (John 1:5).

A political theology of Advent recognizes that partisan politics will not accomplish anything of value nor help the church to keep watch (Matthew 25:13). There is no way to legislate against the illusion of self-determination, against belief in misinformation, or against the pugnacious denial of involvement in systemic ills. All that can be done is for Christians to continually bear the judgment of the gospel against their illusions, their egregious sins, and even their best efforts at pursuing the good.

But we are not exemplars: though we are all called to obedience, our obedience does not bypass the ontological woundedness of our world and the principle of our compromised best intentions. The way of Jesus Christ is only ever taken up by compromised, fallen human beings who must be empowered by the age to come which becomes present in Christ through his Spirit.

All that we can do is bear witness to the judgment of Christ in our own convictions and practices. For in becoming visible in this way Christ’s “No” and “Yes” actualize as address to those who witness the fruit borne of repentance and renewed obedience. We bear the testimony of Jesus upon ourselves, not only outward to others. For we are only ever accompanying the Word, marching behind the Word, witnessing to the judgment and renewal which concretely arrive in that Word.

The Word became flesh in a historical moment we cannot cross the gulf of intervening millennia to reach. But he came to us as one of us, rendering the substance of God’s will in a life like our own and in our own words. His arrival in created time inaugurated the end of the present age and opened all subsequent time to that coming. His light shines in our contemporary darkness and he is coming soon to judge that darkness. The Baptist stands upon the shore of the Jordan, urging us all to repent, for the kingdom is at hand (Matthew 3:2) and the axe is already laid to the root of the tree (3:10). The One for which he was sent to prepare the way is coming.

Will he find faith when he does?

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