|
|
Anno Domini:
The Year of Our Lord 2000
by Gene Edward Veith
The year 2000 conjures up science fiction images of the future, but, strictly speaking, it is the anniversary of the life and death of a Palestinian Jew. The Western calendar numbers its years from the birth of Jesus Christ. The actual date Jesus was born, is, of course, uncertain, and the confusion is compounded by Pope Gregory's miscalculations when designing the calendar. Most scholars believe that Jesus was born around 3 B.C. Not that it matters. The Western calendar has traditionally counted a year as being either "before Christ" (B.C.) or as being anno domini, "in the year of our Lord" (A.D.). The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ and His life, death, and resurrection, constituted the mid-point, the turning point, of human history.
It is awkward for non-Christians, whether secularists or followers of other religions, to follow this same system of organizing time. "A.D." and "B.C." have been secularized into "C.E." and "B.C.E.," referring first to "the Christian era" and "before the Christian era." This was hardly an improvement, so the initials were secularized still further by giving them new meanings: "Common Era" and "Before the Common Era." Nevertheless, nothing was really changed. The numbering sequence of the Gregorian calendar remained, as did the centrality of Christ in the reckoning of human history.
A non-Christian might object, why should the era of Christianity be enshrined as the norm, the "common era"? The way we count our years reeks of at best a religious ethnocentrism and at worse religious imperialism. We might as well date our years as Muslims do, from the hajj of Muhammed. The Greeks numbered their years according to the Olympiad; perhaps Americans could pick up on the sequence of Super Bowls. The one serious attempt to recast the calendar was during the French Revolution, with the year the Bastille fell being proclaimed as Year 1, the true dawning of human history. The revolutionary numbering system never caught on, the reign of terror proving no match in the popular imagination for that of the Prince of Peace.
For all of our secularism, the millenia are still defined in terms of Christ, a practice that is now followed, despite local religious calendar traditions, around the world. The spectacle is similar to that of Japanese shintoists giving each other Christmas presents. Even non-believers seem to be paying unintentional homage to the Christian God, as if in fulfillment of their scriptural prophecy that "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. . . and every tongue should confess," including presumably those who do not believe in Him, "that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Philippians 2:10).
It is certainly appropriate that Christians should measure their days and years in terms of Jesus. Christianity, as no other religion, is bound up with time. Its principle tenets are not so much metaphysical claims or ideological theories but assertions about history: that God, the transcendent and eternal creator of all existence, entered the flow of earthly time at a particular moment, becoming a human being of flesh and bone. His mother Mary bore him and raised him as a child. Jesus, "very God and very Man" in the words of the creeds, suffered from poverty and oppression. In the course of His life, He healed the sick and taught a radical ethic of love, His words carrying a strange resonance unlike other prophets, speaking "as one having authority, and not as the scribes" (Matthew 7:29). He was betrayed, arrested, tried, and convicted by the power of the state as exercised by a particular, historically-attested Roman governor. He was then tortured and executed. Christians believe that in the hours of His crucifixion, He bore the sins of all human history, assuming, in a mysterious exchange, the guilt and punishment for the sins of the world, expiating them as the ultimate sacrificial victim. Three days later, in another audacious historical claim, He rose from the dead.
Orthodox Christianity has always resisted the impulse to spiritualize the Christian story, to turn it into some mystical allegory or a mythological projection. This really happened, in time, Christians insist. The Gnostics, who denied that Christ came in the flesh, in the world of matter and blood and history, are dismissed as heretics who miss the point of the faith entirely. God is not a vague, impersonal power, remote and indifferent. He has come into His world, intervening into human history in space and time. The problem of evil was resolved at Golgotha, and sinful human beings and a holy God can now be reconciled. That Jesus rose bodily from the dead means that new life is opened up for everyone connected to Him by faith.
From the first, those who believed in these historical facts commemorated them in the Church year. The liturgical calendar began with the season of Advent, which imaginatively recreated the time of waiting, prophecy, and anticipation of the era "before Christ." Then came Christmas, the joyous feast of the Incarnation. Then came the season of Epiphany, celebrating the revelations of Jesus as being the Son of God. This was followed by the mournful days of Lent, remembering His suffering through fasts and acts of self-denial, culminating in the somber vigils of Good Friday. Suddenly, in a constant surprise, came the exhilarating happy ending of Easter. After the season of Easter, commemorating the days the risen Jesus stayed with His disciples, came the Assumption, then Pentecost, recapitulating the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Christ's people. The rest of the church year coasted to an end in the season of Trinity, celebrating the new knowledge of God as a relationship of persons--the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--punctuated by saints' days and other historical memorials. The final Sunday of the Church year celebrated "Christ the King," the Lord of time.
The events of Christ's life were further recapitulated every Sunday in the liturgy, as the Gospel was read, as Mary's "Magnificat" and Simeon's "Nunc Dimittis" were chanted, and above all in the ritual re-enactment of Christ's Last Supper, in which His passion was replayed and His broken body and shed blood were communicated to His latter-day disciples, leaping the gap between His time and the present.
Thus, it was completely understandable that Christians would count the years after Christ's ascension and would see the years of their own lives in relationship to His. It is less understandable why non-Christians would adopt this same Church year and this same ennumeration of years, centuries, and millenia. That they have done so testifies to another legacy of Christianity, one which has proven compelling even for those who reject its religious claims: the notion of linear, as opposed to cyclical time, and the consequent possibility of progress.
There is a reason why Christianity could supply an ever-accumulating calendar while other religions could not. For most of the world's religions and cultures, time is cyclical. The pagan nature religions--and also Hinduism and Buddhism--see time in terms of the cycles of nature. Spring turns to Summer, which turns to Autumn and Winter. Then the same process begins all over again. In the same way, human beings are born as children, grow up, have children themselves, then grow old and die. But the next generation replays the cycle of human life. The essence of time is not progression but repetition.
Christianity promulgated the Judaic insight that time has a beginning. God created the universe, including time itself, ex nihilo. God is eternal, but the creation is temporal and finite. The creation myths of other religions tend to depict the gods creating the new world from the remnants of an earlier world, in an ever-receding regression that has no absolute "in the beginning." If time has a beginning, it must also have a middle--Christ's incarnation and redemption--and an end: Christ's Second Coming, the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment. In this view, time is not merely cyclical, for all of the cyclical re-enactments of the Church year; rather, it goes somewhere, its two points of Creation and Apocalypse creating a straight line with a distinct direction.
With a linear view of time, the concept of progress becomes possible. Cultures with cyclical views of time tend to be highly conservative. The so-called "stone age tribes" regularly discovered by Western anthropologists have changed little over millenia, not because their members are ignorant or technologically inept, but because their worldview gives no basis for change. Each new generation re-lives the life-cycle of the previous generation. The customs, social structures, tools, and rituals are all grounded in the sacredness of nature and, as such, they can be neither invented nor, unless under disruptive outside pressure, altered.
Herbert Schneidau, in Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), his magisterial study of mythical cultures and the demythologizing impact of the Bible, points out how the Hebrews also had the concept of a transcendent moral law, which transcended the culture, just as the Hebraic God transcends nature. While the surrounding Canaanite societies had divinized kings and rigidly authoritarian social structures, the Hebrews had the concept that even kings are subject to God's law. Biblical prophets come before kings and, in the name of God, condemn their mistreatment of widows, orphans, and the poor. This would have been, literally, unthinkable in the Canaanite societies, for whom the king, the law, and the gods were coterminous. Schneidau shows how the Biblical perspective opened up the possibility of social criticism and thus the Western heritage of ceaseless social change. The Hebraic desacralization of nature also led eventually to the rise of science and technology, as Schneidau shows, further opening the floodgates of change.
The concept of linear time, accompanied by social criticism and technological innovation, gave birth to the notion of progress. Scientists who believe the universe started with a big bang and has been in a constant process of evolution are working with the notion that time is linear. Marxists who see society as developing dialectically into a classless utopia and humanists who believe in inevitable human progress are unwittingly assuming a Biblical view of time. Today even secularists who have no belief in Judaism, Christianity, or any religion at all nevertheless tend to assume, at least when it comes to time and its possibilities, a Biblical worldview. No wonder that the year 2000, with its connotations of utopian technological progress and looked to as an icon of human advancement, is reckoned by the Christian calendar, which has given the West and the world the conceptual basis for progressive time and the sense that history is moving to some inevitable, yet unfolding goal.
What does the year 2000, anno domini, mean for Christianity? Obviously, the 2,000th anniversary of the Incarnation will be cause for great celebration among believers. From the pope's proclamation of a year of jubilee--a time of special commemorations and spiritual blessings for Catholics--to evangelical Protestants' plans to celebrate at Bethlehem, the occasion will be a time of festival throughout the world-wide Church.
Inevitably, thought of a new millennium will cause many Christians to contemplate the end-point of linear time, the Last Days, when, according to the Christian scriptures, Christ will return, the dead will rise, Christ will judge the world, and a New Heaven and a New Earth will be established forever. Christianity's eschatology, the theology of the last things, likewise has counterparts in the secular imagination, as fears of nuclear annihilation, environmental disaster, or "the big crunch" which many scientists say will ultimately end the universe, make the prospect of a final end--often understood as the consequence of humanity's sin--a sobering and unsettling possibility. Christianity posits a day of personal, social, and cosmic reckoning, beyond which, however, is hope, sealed in the deliverance of the world by Christ--now coming not in weakness, as at first, but in power to establish His Kingdom forever.
Thousand year periods and the prospect of a new millennium have peculiar connotations in Christian eschatology. The New Testament Book of Revelations, which prophecies the end times, refers to an enigmatic thousand-year era in which Satan will be bound and the saints and martyrs will reign with Christ (Revelation 20). This millennial age is associated with the Old Testament prophecies of the time to come in which "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" and "the LORD God will wipe away tears from off all faces" (Isaiah 2:4; 25:8). Exactly what this so-called Millennial Age means and when it might be expected has been a matter of theological debate.
Most Christian traditions, whether Catholic or Eastern orthodox or Lutheran, can be classified as "amillennial." The thousand years spoken of in Scripture is a present reality, the age of Grace, to find ultimate fulfillment in Heaven and on earth at Christ's return. Amillennialists look at the Book of Revelations more or less symbolically and tend to be sharply critical of Christians who scan the newspapers for signs of the end and who set a timetable for the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Jesus himself, they point out, observed that whenever He comes again, it will be a surprise (Matthew 24:36).
Other Christians take the millennium more literally. They expect a literal thousand-year era of peace and joy on earth. The question for them is whether this will occur before or after Christ's return. The Postmillenialists believe that Christ will come after the millennium. God's people will establish His reign of justice and love on earth. Then Jesus will come again. This view has motivated Christian social activism, both on the left, beginning with 19th Century liberal Protestantism, and the right, in the heritage of Calvinist reform movements and contemporary political activism on the part of many evangelicals.
The Premillenialists, in contrast, believe that Christ will come before the millennium, that there can be no earthly utopia until it is established by Christ at His return. Premillenialists emphasize another theme of the Book of Revelations: Before Christ comes to set up His peaceable kingdom, there will be a time of Tribulation. An Antichrist will be the center of a new world religion and, with his prophet and political factotum the Beast, will rule the entire world with unprecedented cruelty and oppression. Christians in particular will suffer persecution and martyrdom. Finally, when sin seems to be victorious and humanity is at its lowest point, God will intervene in judgment, pouring out the horrific plagues of the apocalypse. After the sinful world-system is destroyed and Satan and his minions are defeated, then and only then will Christ, the Lamb of God, establish His beatific reign.
Such speculations no doubt seem incredible to the secular mind, and certainly the degree to which Christians subscribe to such teachings varies in intensity and degrees of literalness. But these arcane interpretations of scriptural texts articulate the various options by which anyone anticipates the future: Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about what is to come? Will human beings be the creators of the future or its victims? How can we right the world's wrongs, when efforts to do so have historically tended to create new modes of oppression? Surely there is evidence for both optimism and pessimism, skepticism and hope, perhaps at the very same time.
The Christian view of the future is shaped by a central doctrinal paradox: The Church's profound awareness of human sinfulness--as Chesterton said, the one doctrine that can be proven empirically in the constant failure of individuals and institutions--countered by its trust in Christ's sovereignty, the faith that God is providentially in control of the universe, that Christ is, in the words of the hymn, "the potentate of time" and that, whatever tribulations may arise, "all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28).
The Christian expectations of a new millennium will thus tend to be profoundly ambivalent. They will also tend to be at odds with purely secular expectations. Futuristic speculation about a new global religious consciousness, a one-world government, technological utopias, and New Age spiritualities may sound benign, but for Christian readers of the Book of Revelation, they have unsettling connotations of Antichrist, the Beast, and Tribulation. Christians will celebrate the new millennium, but they will not join all the parties.
Certainly the advent of the third millennium, A.D., will provoke soul-searching about the history and the future of Christianity. The first thousand years of the Church's history was an era of suffering and triumph. Just as Jesus was slain by the Romans, His followers were at first outlawed and killed. Nevertheless, the gospel of new life in Christ spread throughout the Empire. Christianity appealed most to the marginalized of the Roman Empire--to women, slaves, and the poor. Their rejection of the culture's syncretic religion and their refusal to bow down to a divinized state power provoked brutal retaliation in an empire otherwise known for its toleration of diversity. Astonishingly, against all opposition, when a confession of faith could mean the death penalty, the Church grew and eventually converted the emperor himself.
When Rome fell to the barbarians--the ancestors of most modern European nations--anarchy and brutality reigned, as Vandals burned libraries and Germanic tribes plundered at will. During these dark ages, the Church was practically the only institution to survive, copying manuscripts, preserving literacy, and proclaiming the gospel, even as churches were being burned and Christians were being slaughtered. Eventually, the barbarian tribes were themselves converted.
All of this happened by the year 1000 A.D., the evangelism of Rome followed by the evangelism of Europe. It was a time of martyrdom and of victory, an era too of unusual sanctity and spiritual integrity. Paradoxically, when the Church is socially acceptable and powerful, it tends to fall to hypocrisy and corruption. The early Church, on the contrary, was at its purest when it was facing persecution. The first millennium was the heroic era of the Church. Some amillennialists argue that the Book of Revelations was predicting the Roman tribulation, with its emperor worship and persecutions, and that the first thousand years was the true millennial age.
The second millennium was an era of both great success and great failure for the Church. Christianity thrived and shaped the whole culture, and yet, following the other pole of the paradox, the Church often lapsed into sin and confusion. During the first half of the millennium, from the Middle Ages into the Reformations of the 1500's, the Church dominated Western culture, both for the good and for the bad. During the last half of the millennium, from the 1600's through the 20th Century, Christianity--though everpresent--has been declining as a cultural force. Matthew Arnold thought he could hear the Sea of Faith's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."
And yet Christianity not only survived the 20th Century but continues to win converts. What are its prospects for its third millennium? In Europe, the cathedrals remain tourist attractions but churches are essentially empty on Sunday mornings. In America, Christianity, though on the surface thriving, is increasingly being turned into a religion the martyrs would never recognize, an enervated, pop-religion more concerned with earthly prosperity than spiritual depths.
In the meantime, New Age religion, a combination of secularized eastern mysticism and pre-Christian occultism, has begun to permeate the West, from the the pop culture of the entertainment industry, through the self-help books and management seminars of corporate America, and the scholarly discourse of the intellectual establishment. Christian morality is being displaced by permissive sexuality, materialistic hedonism, and the disposability of life. The legacies of the Biblical worldview that were so influential in the West are now under attack or being tacitly abandoned: transcendent moral law, desacralized nature, the limits of culture, even linear time. We are witnessing what may be the repaganization of the West.
And yet, while Christianity seems to be fading in the West, it is in the midst of a huge revival in the developing nations of the so-called "third world." In the shanty towns of the Latin American poor, in the African bush, in the underground house churches of China, the gospel of Christ is spreading like wildfire. As in the early church, these native, indigenous Christians often face intense opposition and even martyrdom--the anti-Christian pogroms in Nigeria; apostasy trials in Islamic countries; arrest and torture in China and other police states. As in the early church, these Christians also tend to exhibit a staggering spiritual depth and sanctity.
It may be that in its third millennium, Christianity will shift away from Europe and America--its base in its first two thousand years--to the rest of the world. The West may become pagan once again, while the "developing nations" find both spiritual nurture and cultural progress in the Biblical worldview that once transformed the West. Perhaps the West and the "third world" nations might even trade places in the next thousand years, with Europe and America embracing a static cultural absolutism, while Africa and Asia discover the cultural implications of linear time.
At any rate, it seems clear that the most relevant model for Christianity in the year 2000 will be its first millennium. In this sense, the new era bodes well for the future of Christianity. Times of struggle, opposition, and weakness have always been the best years of the Church. There can be no doubt that whether the next thousand years will mean tribulation or renewal, whether the Church will shrink to a tiny remnant or whether Christ will actually return, Christians will still consider them years of the Lord.
Copyright 1998 by
Gene Edward Veith, of Concordia College, Mequon, WI.
| The Meaning of the Year 2000 |
How do we get beyond the Y2K Computer Crisis? Is millennial fever and techno-phobia distracting the church at the advent of the third millennium? How must the church change in order to be relevant to the 21st century? Let your views be heard on our bulletin-board. Enter the Magi Forum...
|
|
where
millennial journeys begin™
