There is an excellent post about the messianic rhetoric (as this blog has commented on elsewhere) in Obama’s campaign by Patrick Deneen.
[N.B. I wrote about the problems of Messianism in Obama’s campaign a year ago; much of this post follows what I wrote there earlier.]
The reason this is important is because the messianic tones of this campaign are the latest instantiation of the constant dynamic in modern politics: to immanentize the eschaton. Eric Voegelin wrote much of this in his New Science of Politics, as well as in other works. What this amounts to is a rejection of the Augustinian (i.e. Catholic) view of politics, a desire to replace the supernatural and eschatological mission of the Church with a secular alternative: salvation by politics. Henri de Lubac demonstrated in his Drama of Atheist Humanism that the progenitors of Modern Atheism, Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, etc., explicitly intended to replace the Church. Since Christians indeed have an obligation to work for justice, on surface levels this may not sound so bad. In fact, the Christian commitment to justice and to building the Kingdom is one that always remains apart from the immanent aims of the world and the worldly. Understanding the difference, however, is not so easy.
In the sixties, Harvey Cox, among others, in his book The Secular City, argued that in this new age Christians must leave the walls of their churches and go out into the world and transform it: the mission of the Church, which Cox understood to be simply the people of God, is to make the world into place of peace and joy. Many Catholics followed a similar orientation, believing their mission as Christians was to make the world a better place, not to convert non-believers or to spend time in contemplation. Church architecture and liturgical music followed (or perhaps in turn, inspired) this mass elan among many Catholics. We’ve all heard “Let us build the City of God” and no doubt wondered about the theological presuppositions there.
I would argue that the Church will always remain uncomfortable (if not, persecuted) in the world, because the world (as a theological concept) always has a competitive aim. There remain, as ever, two cities here on earth, radically different in origin, construction, and purpose.
The difficulty here is that Christians are indeed called to go out to the world. Gaudium et Spes contains much in this vein, to the point that many at the time of its writing, and still to this day, are uncomfortable with the bristling optimism expressed there. This is indeed a difficult debate, with liberation theology on one side, and integralism on the other. In recent years, many Catholic theologians have followed the work of Stanley Hauerwas (as expressed in his Resident Aliens) believing that the job of the Church is not to go out to the world and transform it, but simply to be the Church, living within the tension that the Church and the world will always have radically different aims. For my part, I still think that David Schindler has outlined the most orthodox approach: that the Church transforms the world ultimately by being what she is, and it is in the living out of this holiness as the Spouse of Christ, in the world but not of it, that the Church organically grows in its mission. As Pope John Paul said, there is no genuine solution to the social problems of the world apart from the Gospel. As for a practical example, I believe the Catholic Worker idea (in its original spirit) the best example of how to live this out.
Nonetheless, the temptation to embrace secularism, and see the aims of the Church and politics as the same (or even, to judge the eschatological prerogatives of the Church as a threat and impediment to the success of politics and the construction of a more peaceful just world) remains. Especially every four years when the Presidential election rolls around. Political messianism is just as much a threat as ever.
In conclusion, note what the Catechism says in this regard (676-677):
- Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
- The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatalogical judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.
- The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.
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