Witnessing to Anxious Tribes: Stop the Steamroller.

The question we then face is how to understand the mission of Christ in a time of anxious tribalism.

And I will suggest that Christian witness in a time of anxious tribalism will be primarily focused on the unity and diversity of human persons and societies as disclosed in the incarnate Christ.

If in the past the task of Christian mission has been primarily to articulate God’s claim on individuals and societies as disclosed in Jesus Christ, in a time of anxious tribalism our task is primarily to witness to God’s claim about humanity and its destiny.

Clearly in our short time together it is impossible to fully articulate such a theology of Christian witness in public discourse, but I believe that its outlines should be clear.

1. We need to first embrace theologically, and then interpret into secular discourse, the reality that human unity is eschatological, not primal. It has been almost reflexively Christian to think of difference as a function of deviation, and therefore of unity as a process of purification. Certainly the anxious new tribes are seeking to establish their identities on this basis.

But I would argue that the representative Biblical passage for our reflection be the Gospel of John 12:32, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (NIV) This eschatological vision is reiterated in Revelation 21, which tells us of an unending procession of the nations toward the New Jerusalem – a city with eternally open doors. Unity is achieved by the Spirit of Christ drawing us forward, not by pruning our way backward to an imagine Ur-identity.

Put another way, a public Christian witness for anxious times must recover a sense of God’s providence and project it into the public sphere.

2. We must deconstruct the Biblical focus on humanity as a collection of ethnic groups linked by common ancestries. Although this vision is shot through our missionary literature and worship, it is no longer capable of contributing to an understanding of the social realities within which we live. Moreover, it contributes to the tendency to seek out primal narratives as a foundation for public identity. And finally, it simply isn’t the reality within which rising generations will live. I am married to an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia. My daughter is married to an Austrian Jew. My son is married to a Croatian Catholic. What can the language of “nation” possibly mean to my grandchildren. Indeed, what can it possibly mean to me?

When we look closely I think we find that the Biblical narrative itself continually deconstructs ethnicity as fundamental form of human identity. It is both heartening, and a good witness in society, that Christian mission has begun to identify diversity on dozens of different axis, and to address complex identities with the gospel.

3. We need to abandon, or at least seriously rethink, our understandings of the Reign of God as a model for human social structures. Rather we could go back to scripture to discern how God is at work in human social life to create ever-evolving forms of human community.

Our focus on implementing in society the ideals that we discern in God’s reign is a major source of our anxiety. First because it constantly puts an eschatological ideal that can be realized by God alone against our own rather pitiful efforts. And secondly because it tends to normalize our present structure of nation-states bound by international relations. Our present world order is both finite and temporal and therefore incapable of embodying the Reign of God. But, and this is important, the same will be true of whatever follows, and whatever follows after that.

4. But perhaps most importantly our public Christian witness must free itself from the urgent realized eschatology that has dominated the missionary movement in the last two centuries. Whether in seeking to claim the world for Christ in the first generation of the 20^th century, or to free the world from poverty and injustice in the 21^st century, Christian witness has exchanged a confidence in God’s providence for an impatience to save souls, reform society, and unify the church.

While this drive to both may seem attractive to those behind the wheel, it can create a good deal of anxiety among those who fear that they, and their stories and the values contained in those stories, will simply be run over by a Christian juggernaut.

We can get at this by thinking about the modern ecumenical movement, which came to understand that ecclesial divisions were a scandal that prevented effective mission so that striving for unity, whether grassroots or institutional, was an urgent necessity. But imagine if you are a member of one of those groups that broke away precisely to preserve some gospel truth that it seemed would otherwise be lost. The massive ecumenical movement of the 1950’s to 1980’s might well look like an attempt to either marginalize or subsume the unique values and insights of your movement. And this would be further heightened if yours was one of the many churches that already felt itself being steamrollered by modernity.

And this returns us to my first point above. An unrealized eschatology need not deprive us of urgency, and allows a temporal space for a diversity of value-laden narratives to engage rather than exclude one another.

I have been impressed these last few years by the theological vision of political science being worked out by Israeli Jews who are not under the enchantment of a vision of the New Jerusalem. They focus on the actual mechanisms of social change rather than trying to engineer society toward an unattainable goal.

So I would suggest that instead of being architects of a new humanity, we might return to those more humble images of salt and leaven that are both relevant to our more modest role in contemporary society and quite probably form a firmer basis for realistic political theory than our popular images of God’s Reign.

5. Finally, for our Christian witness to be credible it must arise from communities reflective of our social reality. And that means that we will largely have to recreate what it means to be “church.” Our congregations and larger church structures will need to be recognizably part of the emergence of new social structures. They will need to share in the various forms of diversity that must be accommodated in our society if their witness in society is to be credible.

But another way, we need to learn to die. We need to realize that denominations and congregations, like all other organisms, will die. It will be God and God alone that preserves the value of the experiment in human social life that we represent. And it is God that will give birth to new (but equally fragile) experiments in Christian community in the future. We must show in our corporate life how the Body of Christ preserves and transmits the value-laden narratives from which individuals and groups draw their own sense of identity. And we must show in our willingness to die that we have faith that nothing good is lost in Christ’s Body.

I realize that this seems like a downer kind of ending. But if we look closely I believe we will find it is rather liberating for Christian witness to abandon the assertion of grand visions of God’s Reign for adding a little seasoning to pot of public discourse around our common life.

A couple of years ago I was asked to speak to a missionary reunion. One of the oldest persons there, and it was an old crowd, said to me before I spoke. “I suppose we are all dinosaurs. We are going extinct.”

But if I read my science right it isn’t quite true that dinosaurs became extinct. Indeed, you hear their descendants singing outside your window in the morning and circling in the sky above. The dinosaurs didn’t become extinct, they evolved. They changed to meet new circumstances and challenges. A shifting of the hip bones, a reversal of a joint, a re-texturing of the skin, and in time they began to fly.

I love a song by the Malay poet M. Nasir. It is based on the wonderful Persian story of the Conference of the Birds. This is the refrain: “Tanya sama itu hud-hud, lang menghilang, kui miskui. Kerana dia yang terbang akan aku kembali.” It speaks of the future saying: “Ask it of the hoopoe, the eagle wheeling, the hawk circling. Because the one who flies, will fly me home.”

A relevant Christian witness understands that churches will die, but are not necessarily becoming extinct. The Church is learning how to fly.