Slogans I don't believe in

In light of a good natured disagreement with a friend over the Christian use of one of these slogans, here are several phrases I hear regularly in treatments of the world or the human condition that I find unhelpful.

Slogan 1- The arc of history bends toward justice. This one has been treated a few places of late- I wish I had taken note of where. The phrase was popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. but comes from an earlier abolitionist. The quote really took off with Barack Obama, whose considerable rhetorical skill papered over the fact that much of what he spoke about was stronger rhetorically than it was possible politically. (His administration also grew my familiarity with a slogan I think is true, which is that hope is not a strategy).

If the “arc of history bends toward justice” , a few things would need to be true. If we are reading it theologically, the “arc of history” would need to be consistent with providence- the language that theologians use to speak about God’s work in the world. If this were true, than God’s providential working in the world moves toward the pursuit of justice in the world. God’s providence would be inevitable and continuous with what it is we think should happen in the world.

This raises a few issues. First, our desires for the world are often discontinuous with providence! Providence is nothing if not mysterious. Figures through the Christian Scriptures are warned not to assume they know God’s ways, which are “higher” (and different from) our own desires.

Our current moment is preoccupied with justice. It has become almost synonymous with “good”. To deny someone “justice” is to wish harm on them.

But “justice” is not an easy topic! Adjudicating what it means, and how to portion it out, takes a stunningly complex judicial system which is often in error in its best attempts.

But the bigger problem for me is with the “bending” language. The slogan frames progress as inevitable. It identifies “history” as “that which moves in a progressively positive direction”. But “progress” is anything but inevitable! In fact, many of the attempts we have made at progress make things worse!

Additionally, if the future is just, the past is unjust. This is chronological snobbery, for sure. It is easy to become “educated” and find things wrong with your forbears. But what we forget is the very real historical conditions that people found themselves in before us, including their own limitations.

When I taught theology, I held close the fear of over-educating my students. Sometimes what happens in theological education is that students get so confident of the error of more “simple” forms of faith that they lose touch with God. They look down on uneducated belief or naieve constructs. But my own private goal was to never make it so that someone despised their Grandmother’s prayers. Holding together the good of what we have inherited and making small adjustments is harder than it might seem. At the end of the day, I hope I always side with your grandmother’s prayers. Believing that the arc of history bends towards justice almost inevitably alienates us from what might be a really rich inheritance. It’s too brittle a worldview to do good work.

Additionally, the language of progress sometimes appeals to us because it allows us to hide our sin. When we imagine that our action in the world is making the world better, we can obfuscate the ways our attempts to “improve” the world might be perpetuating other, worse conditions. Progress seeks the good of “improvement” without thinking too much about what is lost. It also idealizes its current condition, only slightly better, as the future we ought to aspire to. In this way it can only be an imagined future.

But improvement- self-improvement, world-improvement, what have you, is not a Christian good. I do mean that. Believing that “the arc of history bends toward justice” can sound awfully like believing that our desired policies and belief systems will be achieved. But God’s providence runs crooked.

Slogan 2- The future has arrived. No, it hasn’t. What has happened is your priors were temporarily confirmed by the circumstances you find yourselves in today. Perhaps you predicted just this event, or perhaps you hoped for it. But seeing that it has arrived, it is no longer future, but present. This is just another way to say “I was right”.

The future remains always beyond us, just out of sight. It is, by definition, not present.

Part of the trick of Christian eschatology is that it doesn’t just confirm our priors. Life with God is not the assurance that we were right, all along. Rather, God draws us toward himself and yet remains, always just slightly out of the frame. He is always other. The life with God, when we are made like him as he is, will be no longer future- it will be now. We will all be surprised.

The future remains always outside of our grasp. It is like God in this way. When we try to master it or identify it, we just project what we recognize in it with what we are currently experiencing. Our own desires for “progress” often reflect our desire to have more of what we find comfortable, satisfying, or exciting. But these things might not be an improvement, in the end.

This is more than my being pedantic. Much of Christian writing seems to think that its job is to predict the future. We have a generation of spiritual referees, hoping to usher in whatever is next by identifying where we are. We are strategists, developing taxonomies, refereeing a game many of us don’t even seem to want to play. But triumphalism is always a refusal of trust. We have too few people describing what it feels like to need God or be in search of him, or what it feels like when we’ve found him.

Belief in God is, by definition, offering up the future to God’s own hands. Living in the present for this reason is an act of trust. Our persistent desire to figure out “what’s next” or “where we go from here” can be a refusal of trust. It’s just anxiety!! I am tired of reading endless diagnostics of “what’s wrong with American Christianity” that read like they were written by anxious people. There is something deeply un-Christian about our current, persistent need to always figure things out.

Regardless of what has happened, or where we are, the rules haven’t changed. The Christian life is a slow plod sometimes. Manna for today, “consider the lilies”, even the sparrows is more like it. When we are so focused on building and preparing for whatever is next, we can forget that God is with us today. We don’t need to always be strategizing, like used car salesmen. It is a very bad look on religious men. It makes us look like we don’t even believe in God.

Slogan 3- There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. This line from Leonard Cohen was the epigraph for at least four books I read last year. It seemed a fitting opening to so many, I think, because the world felt as if it were collapsing around them. Pandemics, wars and threat of wars, and the many insistent sorrows that pepper our lives can seem to form the “cracks” that mark our exteriors. But imagining that we live in the “worst of times” just demonstrates that we have no historical memory.

A few things I’m at odds with here, but one is the ideal of an even exterior as the ideal.

I’ve gotten into interior design. Not the glossy new stuff. My aesthetic is more “my rich aunt died and left all this here, after she worked for the Embassy in the ‘50s.” My ideal house is lived in, with a patina that is rich with history and stories and a few mistakes. I pay extra for handmade tile that is uneven with a crackled finish. I carefully dust around oil paintings that depict even older urns and vases of flowers. I collect old furniture that I hope to someday recover. Everything good shows its age.

Somehow we have come to believe that human perfection is possible. We say we don’t believe this, but our frustration with the actual limits of human lives reflects it. The reality of finitude has not crept close enough to make us understand what we are. But no one gets out of this life alive, and for that reason we all bear the marks of age and decay. We spent a few years of our lives recently kept indoors to avoid a virus that would kill some of us. Some of us did this seemingly without an awareness that death is part of the rich tapestry of a life that includes fellowship and hospitality and joy. I don’t mean to bring up a very tender conversation for many, but what I observed during the covid pandemic were some people who more afraid of dying than they were of living small lives. This slow movement toward the grave should be a grace, a reminder that the time we have has to be lived. Death is a curse, but so is living small.

We can both deny and memorialize our suffering. We can put people on a pedestal who have been through hard things, and ask them to suffer in exemplary ways. But suffering can crush you. It can make people mean and angry, hardened to this life. It is no promise of beauty, that’s for sure.

Living life with an awareness of death treats suffering as part of this world, not an outlier or an ornament or something to be celebrated. It is just the world. Perhaps it sets it alight in certain ways, but I don’t think we need to gild it. It is awful and crushing. Resurrection is not a making-beautiful of something ugly; it is making something out of what was not. It’s not a home renovation or a new makeover. It is not a new set of glasses that you can see in a new way out of. It is the thing you thought was lost, restored. It is coming to the end of your rope and then, a hand. It is falling asleep in the dark and waking up in a room bathed in glorious light.

When we imagine that heaven is just this world, with the bad things taken out, I think we misunderstand how much suffering is already written in to this world as we know it. Cohen’s slogan is beautiful, and rings true to a lot of people. This is because suffering is for many an invitation to see the world in a new way. But there are those whose suffering goes on and on, without a kintsugi gilded edge. For them, eternity is a relief. A discontinuity between this life and the next brings with it the promise of something different, something new, for those who have suffered. Promising that the life to come is simply an extension of this world is a promise for privileged people. When you talk about heaven, remember that people need to be delivered. God is beyond, drawing us out of our suffering. Only a God who is other can do this. What he gives us is not more, but something altogether different.