One reason why Jesus and his followers expected the kingdom to arrive very soon is that they had no notion that human activity might have any role in helping to establish it. For the early Christians, the kingdom was a gift of God, not the work of history. There could be no place for such a political theology in the worldview of the Gospels, which is one reason why Jesus was not a revolutionary in the sense that Lenin was. He was not a Leninist because he would have had no conception of historical self-determination. The only kind of history that mattered was Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history. Christianity is thus considerably more pessimistic than secular humanism, as well as immeasurably more optimistic. On the one hand, it is grimly realistic about the recalcitrance of the human condition - the perversity of human desire, the prevalence of idolatry and illusion, the scandal of suffering, the dull persistence of oppression and injustice, the scarcity of public virtue, the insolence of power, the fragility of goodness and the formidable power of appetite and self-interest. On the other hand, it holds out not only that the redemption of this dire condition is possible, but that, astonishingly, it has in some sense already happened. Not even the most mechanistic of Marxists would claim these days that socialism is inevitable, let alone that it has already come about without our noticing. For Christian faith, however, the advent of the kingdom is assured, since Jesuss rising from the dead has already founded it. A new polis is possible only on the basis of a transfigured body. It is this that is traditionally known as the resurrection. Was Jesus, then, a revolutionary? Not in any sense that Lenin or Trotsky would have recognised. But is this because he was less of a revolutionary than they were, or more so? Less, certainly, in that he did not advocate the overthrow of the power structure that he confronted. But this was, among other reasons, because he expected it to be soon swept away by a form of existence more perfected in its justice, peace, comradeship and exuberance of spirit than even Lenin and Trotsky could have imagined. Perhaps the answer, then, is not that Jesus was more or less a revolutionary, but that he was both more and less.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 13:05:29 +0000
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