The weather in Virginia was bizarre this past winter: 80 degrees one day, a blizzard three days after, all of which prompted a concerned acquaintance of mine to ask if there wasn’t something in the Bible somewhere about strange weather being a sign that the Last Days were at hand. I showed her the passage in the Gospel of Matthew known as “The Little Apocalypse” where an oblique reference to the climate is made: “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places; all this is but the beginning of the sufferings…. Pray that your flight may not be in winter.” This seemed to increase her alarm. But then I added, “But that doesn’t necessarily mean the end is upon us. Besides, there’s been strange weather in Virginia before. 1816 was known as ‘the year without summer’ because it had a mild winter and snowstorms in July.” She seemed relieved, and maybe a little disappointed. History has a way of doing that.
The Bible is, among many other things, a book about history, specifically about God’s salvific work in it. If the Bible is not perfectly consistent when every statement is taken literally, its authors and redactors nonetheless share the conviction that God has been active in human affairs. Moses led the Exodus sometime after the Pharaohs directed the building of Pithon and Rameses; Jeremiah prophesied during the time of the Babylonian expansion; according to Luke, Jesus was born when Augustus was Caesar and “Qurinius was governor of Syria.” If the concision of the details don’t always rival Barbara Tuchman, they nonetheless manifest the contributors’ shared conviction that history is vitally important. The sitz im leben of Star Wars—”A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”—is hardly ever a Biblical perspective. Sound theology must always take seriously the historical dimensions of scripture.
It is a given that fundamentalists and liberationists (the two opposite ends of the Christian spectrum) don’t see eye-to-eye on theology. But if each appropriated the Biblical concern for the significance of history, they might edge a little closer. Fundamentalists find their Weltanschauung in a conviction that the scriptures are more than divinely inspired, they are inerrant. Belief in inerrancy was an undercurrent in American Protestantism throughout the last half of the nineteenth century, in part as a reaction to the theories of Darwin. Organizational resistance began with a series of 12 booklets entitled The Fundamentals, which first appeared in 1910.
These little books, written and edited by some fairly erudite conservatives, were not in and of themselves the troglodyte missives demonized by their later liberal critics. What their publication accomplished, however, was to bring together under one broad tent both the literalists and the premillennial dispensationalists. The latter believed in a numerological scheme developed at the turn of the century by Cyrus Scofield (of Scofield Study Bible fame). Scofield taught that God operated under a series of arrangements with humanity, and that the present one, the Covenant of Grace, portended the seventh and conclusive Covenant, when Jesus will return and the Kingdom will be established. For all their erudition, the authors and editors of The Fundamentals helped legitimize their anti-intellectual descendants who have, without intending to, demeaned the breadth of Christian experience by exalting the King James version of the Bible into the textus receptus of the Holy Spirit, and debased the historical integrity of the faith by converting large numbers of Christians into numerologists.
Certainly, the classical Christian theologians were neither inerrantists nor dispensationalists—not Augustine, nor Aquinas, nor Erasmus, nor Calvin, nor even Luther, who called the Letter of James “an epistle of straw,” sagely noted that “The Proverbs of Solomon were not the work of Solomon,” and who, though he believed in an early end to the world, serenely trusted that God knew best when that ought to be. In short, Protestant fundamentalism, which presumes itself to be the sole living and faithful heir of the true apostolic Church, is really a twentieth-century phenomenon; older than TV, in other words, but not quite as old as the airplane.
Since Christian fundamentalism, particularly in its premillennial manifestation, is responsible for exciting the innocent every decade or so by uncovering new evidence that Armageddon is around the corner again (The Armenian earthquake proves it! The Ethiopian famine proves it! The West Bank uprising proves it!), a healthy dose of history might do wonders for all the rattled nerves. It’s helpful to recall that the Millennium has been upon us on a fairly regular basis these last 1900 years.
The Book of Revelation, for example, which has provided such bountiful grist for the premillennial mill, was probably authored around the turn of the first century, and begins, “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place.” In the plague-ravaged fourteenth Century, mobs of flagellants whipped themselves down the roads of Europe to forestall the Last Judgment. William Miller, the original visionary of the Adventist movement, concluded that the Second Coming would occur in March 1843 and aroused thousands by his predictions. After the passing of that date, the leadership of the movement changed the date to March 1844; when that day slid by, October 22, 1844, became the definitive time. After that day passed uneventfully, the movement largely collapsed. Adventists to this day refer to that time as “The Great Disappointment.”
In the 1970s, Hal Lindsay raised premillennial expectations again with his pot-boiling The Late Great Planet Earth, which identified the cataclysm-invoking Gog and Magog of Revelation with the Soviet Union. This, of course, was before Gorbachev and glasnost and the toppling of the Communist empire, all facts which seem to have silenced Lindsay of late.
Of course, it is absolutely a New Testament teaching that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and that someday Christ will return. Still, a large dollop of church history might help stifle some of the frenzy that periodically sweeps the fundamentalist circuit; even more helpful would be for the premillennialists to take their own literalism seriously in at least one specific instance: Jesus saying that “of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” If Jesus himself was so circumspect about His return, it would certainly behoove his followers to be a little more restrained themselves.
Evangelical Atheism
If the fundamentalists can be charged with being ahistorical, a larger indictment can be made against the liberationists. Most fundamentalists have not had the benefit of a liberal education. Most liberationists have. Worse yet, very few fundamentalists consign the living to an actual perdition by sanctifying the oppressiveness of their governments. Many liberationists do. It is the peculiar conceit of liberation theology that Christianity and Marxism—not just theoretical Marxism, but that brand actually perpetrated on the human race—are not only compatible, but complementary. The fact that Marx’s atheism was evangelical, or that his analysis of history demonstrates as little regard for inconvenient facts as Parson Weems’ fables about George Washington, leaves most liberationists unmoved.
Some liberation theology—for example, that which has contributed to the empowerment of women and minorities in this country—has been largely benign and sometimes even edifying. Before the Sandinistas betrayed the people’s revolution, poor Nicaraguan campesinos employed some of the tenets of liberation theology to come to an understanding that God was not willing them to be victimized by the Somocistas. Still, it bears remembering that the Biblical demand of justice for the poor and the oppressed is absolute and needs no Marxist critique to make it more so. Where liberation theology is guilty of wretched excess is in its refusal to acknowledge the oppression of millions of human beings in Marxist states. For example, Jose Miguez Bonino writes in Christians and Marxists:
No sensitive person can read the story of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, to name only a few, without being moved by their deep compassion for human suffering and their fierce hatred of oppression and exploitation.
Miguez says this without irony. Another liberationist, William Nottingham, an Indiana-based denominational staffer of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), writes in The Preaching and Practice of Liberation:
One thing Marxists have taught us is that the fundamental fact of life is economic, not philosophical. .. If this means learning from socialism and the revolutionary societies in the world, so be it. Some of them seem especially successful in eliminating gambling, pimping, begging, organized crime, unemployment, racial discrimination and disproportionate levels of wealth.
What this theologizing from the Barcalounger fails to take account of is the human cost exacted in the making of Marxist states. How did the societies Nottingham extols eliminate the social ills he deplores? One may be sure that it was not by educating their people on the ethical tenets of Judaism or the saving grace of Jesus.
A recent study by R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii has shown that the leading cause of violent death in this bloody century has not been its incessant wars, which have claimed approximately 35,654,000 lives, but having the ill fortune of residing in nations with totalitarian governments. These governments have taken the lives of some 115,500,000 of their own citizens—over three times the human cost exacted by war. Of the humans killed by the totalitarians, 95,200,000 had dwelt in Communist-ruled nations. Indeed, of this century’s four leading genocidalists (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot), the Marxists on the list hold the first, second, and fourth places of infamy.
One would think that a fairly bright Christian could make the mental connection that the Karl Marx exalted by state terrorists and the Karl Marx employed in liberation theology is the same Karl Marx and that the Jesus Christ of history might have a prophetic word or two to say about his legacy. But most liberation theology, for all its vaunted dialectic, is ahistorical, and most liberationists are unable to make those necessary connections between historical events and contemporary affairs that are among the shining hallmarks of wisdom.
By way of edifying counterpoint to the liberationists quoted above, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, Armando Valladares in Against All Hope, and Nien Cheng in Life and Death in Shanghai all provide eloquent testimony of the torments exacted on Christians (and others) living in the workers’ paradises of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China. Their faith, and the suffering they depict, are actual rather than theoretical. In short, their testimony has the credibility of being historical.
North Korean Paradise
The report of an ecumenical delegation on a 1984 “fact-finding” mission to North Korea is typical of the ongoing willful ignorance of some liberationists. Composed of a Maryknoll nun and two Protestant ministers, the group reported that:
We are deeply impressed with the enormous achievements after the devastation of the entire country during the Korean War. In three decades Pyongyang has erected many public buildings of great scale and a vast number of apartment buildings, with construction going on everywhere…. It appears to be a society relatively more egalitarian in income and living conditions than societies elsewhere in the world….We learned of Korean Christian disillusionment because of American bombing of churches, even during Sunday services. Many Christians were killed during the war, others went South, and Christians now number only 5000… Efforts to meet Catholics were unsuccessful. It is thought there are about 100 living in Pyongyang, Shinuiju, Sinchon and Wonsan…. We confess to being puzzled by the relative solemnity and lack of response on the part of so many of the people in public settings, especially toward strangers.
It seems not to have occurred to these turistas that the reason for the solemnity and unresponsiveness of the average North Korean might be the hazards of life in a non-free leftist state like North Korea. But their appropriation of Marxist insights evidently dulled their capacity to raise critical historical questions, such as, Did the Americans really bomb North Korean churches during worship? If so, then why did most of the surviving Christians flee south into the arms of their oppressors, instead of north to their Chinese allies?
Not only did their theology deprive these liberationists of the ability to make critical historical judgments, it also cost them their capacity to interpret the things they saw with their own eyes—such as considering the possibility that the recurrent adulation of Kim Il Sung in private as well as in public has its basis in pure stark fear rather than honest-to-goodness affection. That contemplation seems to have been avoided. If a government can claim Marx as its progenitor, that evidence is sufficient for the militant liberationist. Such a government is obviously on the side of the poor, the oppressed, and God.
To press the point, let’s try a little historical revisionism, and from it draw an analogy. Let’s hypothesize that Hitler came to power in 1932, but that he stopped his expansionism after the seizure of Czechoslovakia and thus avoided World War II. Would the middle-class American liberationists visiting the Nazi state today have marveled, as they do in totalitarian nations like North Korea, at its order, its industry, the apparent equality of status, the manifold social benefits everywhere apparent (well-equipped schools, free medical care)? Would they have celebrated its recovery from the ruin of World War I? Would they have pointedly ignored its statist anti-Christianity, and taken for granted the reassurances of their government hosts that freedom of worship was guaranteed to all, but that most of the citizens had lost interest and moved to a higher plane of understanding? Would they have considered the cultic glorification of Der Fuehrer simply a sign that a formerly oppressed and victimized people were celebrating being “masters of the country, of its revolution and construction”? And would they, lacking any sense of history, ever consider the implications of the fact that once upon a time there had been six million Jews in the vicinity?
Perhaps the saving grace is that liberation theology is losing its pride of place among those who think history is worth knowing. Indeed, Christian thinkers might someday remember liberationism as unfondly as they do nineteenth-century triumphalism, which proclaimed the inevitable triumph of western imperialism acting in concert with Christian mission work. Exchange the inevitable triumph of dialectical materialism for that of western imperialism, and you’ve got a fair summation of the pretensions of liberationism, which like triumphalism, is trendy, ahistorical, and arrogant. And, like triumphalism, liberationism may someday be forsaken and un-mourned. After all, with the leaders of the largest Marxist nations now acknowledging that there is very little broken that Marxist dogma has the capacity to fix, the leading lights of liberation theology might feel led to do something else with their time. They might even begin studying history.
It would be good for their souls.