The Future is always with us, bearing down through our hopes and our fears. The Future walks alongside the Present, even if only in our projections, imaginations, dreams, and designs. How does Advent specifically, and Christian worship generally, reconfigure our understanding of the Present as we journey toward an emancipated Future?
The recent issue of New Left Review contains an article, by Erik Olin Wright, outlining an emancipatory social theory offering an alternative to both capitalism and statist socialism. While there are several interesting portions of this article, the part that jumped out at me was how Wright described the three tasks of emacipatory social theory: 1) the critique of society tells us why we want to leave the world in which we live; 2) the theory of alternatives tells us where we want to go; 3) and the theory of transformation tells us how to get from here to there. The first task is the diagnosis and critique of the Present. The second offers a utopian view of the Future. The third, and really the goal of emancipatory social theory, is to offer an account of the “journey from the present to a possible future.”
My initial reaction was to think how nicely a Christian understanding of salvation fits into this emancipatory social theory. First there is the critique and declaration of the Present world as “Lost in Sin.” Second is the utopian paradise of a Future glory with God. Third is (insert your preferred understanding of Salvation…i.e. Penal Substitution, Christus Victor, Theosis, etc.) which Bridges the first (sin/death) and the second (pardon/eternal life).
But then I realized the Gospel narrative does not agree with this temporal trajectory. Gospel Emancipation does not move from the Present into the Future as a humanist social theory must. It is not progress, building from the here and now into the Future. Gospel Emancipation does not wait for a Future event (revolution). The revolution has begun; the Comforter has Come. With Mary we sing (not in the Future tense, but the Past tense):
He has put down the proud hearted;
He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty.
from Luke 1:46-55
But not only with the Gospel does emancipation flow from the Past into the Present. Emancipation is actually getting the Future into the Present. Let us consider Communion, the Memorial of our Redemption which seems to be oriented toward the Past. A nearly universal portion of the liturgy of the Communion has the leader and/or congregation proclaiming this mystery: Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again (BCP, 363). Noting the tense of each phrase (past=has died, present=is Risen, future=will come again), we see each task of emancipatory social theory. Christ has died is the critique of the work that the wages of sin is death. Christ will come again our ‘utopian’ hope of final community of peace. And Christ is Risen is the mean of getting from death to life, as we participate in His resurrected life. Joining this resurrected life of Christ, this first fruit of the eschaton, is living as if the Future had already come. Or as Jean-Yves Lacoste says, we live “from the future onward.”
The consequences of this are that we should not rely on a modern, progressivist perspective on human emancipation, neither in its conservative/fundamentalist guise (i.e. we will build God’s Kingdom of democracy and capitalism) nor its far left/radical guise (i.e. we must topple the state in a socialist revolution). But neither should we settle for an infinite deferral of the eschaton (a la a perpetual deconstructive to come) as a shield against fundamentalism. Instead the Church should recommit to being the foretaste of freedom, and the aroma of emancipation. Emancipation is Now, in the Present, because while we cannot make the Future, the Future is making us. For Christ has Come; Emmanuel, God with us. The Advent of Emancipation has come; the Advent of Emancipation is Coming.
Brilliant post!
Posted by: Pastor Astor | December 17, 2006 at 01:23 PM