The question of whether religious faith is a good thing or a bad thing is very much up for debate at the present time and for that question to be discussed in the mainstream of British society is quite a significant and recent change. When I was growing up it seemed that not many people went to church but those who didn’t had a fairly positive view of those of us who did and were even in some ways appreciative of what we might contribute to wider society – values, philanthropy, community cohesion, and so on. But today it seems that you are just as likely to hear people say very negative things about religious faith. They might commonly say religion is divisive; they might say that it encourages moral certainty which is exclusive and judgemental; they might say it cultivates a sense of missionary zeal and conviction that may not be so far away from the religious extremism that our world has come to fear.
And some passages of scripture seem to give those people ammunition! Hard to use this passage from Luke’s Gospel to encourage the idea that Christianity cultivates cohesion and social stability! “I came to bring fire to the earth”, Jesus says. “I did not come to bring peace but rather division.” And in our New Testament reading from the letter to the Hebrews, the kind of faith that the writer is talking about might feel rather different from the faith we would want to encourage. These are religious people who are prepared to be tortured and refuse release in order to obtain a “better resurrection”. They seem to hanker after other-worldly glory in a way that seems to denigrate their living in this world. They appear to seek out martyrdom in a way that is very uncomfortable for us to hear in a city that has itself been shaken by suicidal religious extremists. Both these readings present to us what appears to be a decidedly un-Anglican version of religious faith – the kind of ideologically-driven fundamentalism that the Church of England has always rejected. And perhaps we prefer to take the easy way out of dismissing them.
But our critics, of course, seize upon them to say that this is what religion is really about. It is divisive, violent, life-denying, fanatical and responsible for much that is wrong with the world today. I was very sad to see a recent survey of MPs’ summer reading in which Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion came out top. And another book that has been selling fast at Hampstead Waterstone’s over the last few weeks is John Gray’s Black Mass, which similarly argues that Christianity is responsible for a great deal of damage done in world history. He views early Christianity as a rather fanatical ideology that encouraged the idea that people can built utopias rather than living with the messy realities of human life. And so Gray controversially argues that Christianity is not only responsible for the horrid things done in its own name, but also that it spawned all these other dangerous utopian ideologies such as communism and fascism that made people believe that the world could be dramatically, even brutally, reordered. “The world in which we find ourselves at the start of the new millennium is littered,” he writes, “with the debris of utopian projects, which though they were framed in secular terms that denied the truth of religion were in fact vehicles for religious myths [of the end times].”
His argument relates rather closely to the reasons why many of us may find today’s Gospel difficult, in that he thinks the problem is fundamentally in Jesus’ teaching about the end of time, the Apocalypse, and this passage from Luke’s Gospel itself comes from a chapter that talks about the return of the Son of Man. “Early Christianity” Gray writes, “was an eschatological cult: Jesus and his first disciples believed that the world was destined for imminent destruction so that a new and perfect one could come into being.” That is how he would interpret the turmoil that is predicted in this passage and he sees it as a very dangerous thing. It is precisely this kind of belief in the end that cultivates all the kind of divisive and zealous attitudes that he and most of us would lament.
But, if Gray’s view of religion is of an ideology that sweeps over particularities and subtleties, then I fear that he, along with Dawkins and all the rest of these popular critics, is guilty of something similar in his own narrow understanding of Christian faith. He has, in fact, bought into an early 20th-century view of early Christianity that has now been much revised. Christian teaching about the end times is not as clear cut as was once thought and any difficult passage needs to be taken in the light of the whole. Jesus did teach that the world will end and that all creation will at last be one with God. But he also said that even he himself did not know when this would be and that we should be wary of those who pre-empt it with signs and wonders. In fact, I don’t think that the early church was primarily concerned with Christ’s return, but rather with seeking to interpret the meaning of the events that had already taken place in Christ’s life, death and resurrection, and in the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost. Yes, the early Christians looked forward to the hope of Christ’s return, but they were also looking back at events that had already occurred and which, they believed, had profoundly altered the nature of life in this world. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, this world has already become profoundly different – we do not need to wait for it to pass away: “The Kingdom is now”.
The early Church lived, as we do, in the age of the coming of the Holy Spirit. For them, as for us, it is receiving the gift of the Spirit that is at the heart of the Christian’s engagement with the world. It seems to me very likely, that the “fire from heaven” of which Jesus speaks in Luke’s Gospel is not a terrifying end to the world, but rather the flames of Pentecost that the same author describes in the Acts of the Apostles as descending onto Jesus’ disciples and empowering them to go out to spread the Gospel in deed and word. And if this is so, then the “interpretation of the present time” that Jesus is calling for is not concerned with any kind of apocalyptic frenzy or utopian fantasising but has more to do with discerning the activity of the Spirit in the present material world.
At the heart of Christian teaching about time and about the second coming is not utopianism or ideological fanaticism but the simple truth that time is made meaningful in the purposes of God. Through prayer and worship, the events that occur in our own lives, and even the life of global society, are shaped – largely in secret – by the activity of God’s Spirit. That has nothing to do with building human utopias, but with patiently receiving the gift of the Kingdom, from God and through God as we live our lives more faithfully to Jesus in their marks of justice, peace and goodness.
And believing that Jesus will one day return furthers this by simply affirming that history in not in human hands, but in God’s. Believing that all things will end in Christ opens up the possibility that the narratives of our lives and the narrative of the world can be vocational and profoundly meaningful. St Augustine talks about the belief in the apocalypse as a kind of redemption from meaninglessness, in the present as much as the future. The pagans spend their lives going round in circles, trapped within the windmills of temporality. But for the Christian, the presence of Jesus in history, and the belief that human history will come to an end, liberates us from a meaningless circle and makes our lives ripe with potential for growth and change. Essentially he is saying, your life not just destined for more of the same; your life is an unfinished story, full of possibilities. And because Christ has reconciled us with God now and in eternity, the same is true for the life of the whole world. That is not, to my mind, something to fear as Christianity’s critics argue. But rather, it is the truth in which we can spend our lives rejoicing.
And it’s worth considering for a moment how some of this might make sense of Jesus’ difficult words to us about the potential break-up of family life that can occur because of the Gospel. Remember how much in the pre-modern society of Jesus’ day, people’s lives (particularly those of women) were constrained by simply servicing the continuation of family life. Jesus says that our lives have a vocation, a calling from God, that may include family life but may also reach beyond it, building up that new family that God has inaugurated, the family of the Church. And as we read in the New Testament letters about the women, for example, who take on roles of leadership in the early church (Phoebe, Pricilla and Chloe, to name but three), we can well imagine how this prophecy of Jesus was lived out in their families’ reactions to their discovery of God’s purposes for their lives. And I know several people today for whom pursuing their vocation, particularly in religious orders, has brought division in their families too.
So in the face of popular critiques of distorted religious views of the end times, we need to patiently and prayerfully reflect on what the event of Jesus Christ in history means. And how even these difficult passages about his return point to the truths of a life liberated by the promise of a present and future in God. Today we can rejoice that God has brought meaning to our lives and that in Christ we have all been liberated into the vocation of discovering and participating in God’s ways with the world.