The Coming of the Millennium: Good News for the Whole Human Race

By Darrell J. Fasching

Throughout the last two millennia Christianity understood its divinely mandated mission to be "to conquer the world for Christ." Too often this proclamation led Christians to imagine that their goal must be the elimination of all non-Christians from the world through conversion or, when that fails, through coercion and violence (e.g., the Inquisition, the Crusades, anti-Semitic persecution, Western colonialism, etc.).

At the beginning of the third millennium and an age of global diversity, Darrell J. Fasching argues that it is time for Christians to reject this view of their mission, along with the trail of prejudice and violence it has created, and replace militaristic metaphors of conquest with the biblical message of hospitality to the stranger. When we welcome the stranger, according to biblical teachings, we welcome God (Genesis 18:1-5), the Messiah (Matthew 25:35), or an angel of God (Hebrews 13:2).

Fasching takes us on a journey through the stories of the Bible to show that diversity is God's covenant intention for humanity. Consequently, the mission of Christians must not be to convert or eliminate non-Christians but rather to welcome them as strangers, for a world without strangers is a world without God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 15, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469720739

Darrell J. Fasching

About the Author Darrell J. Fasching is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, Tampa Florida, where he has served in the past as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and as Chair of the Department of Religious Studies. Before coming to the University of South Florida he served as Assistant Dean of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University. He is the author of four books on theology and ethics and co-author of three text books on world religions and on global ethics. He is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and lives with his wife Laura in Lutz Florida, where he worships at All Saints Lutheran Church. By the author: The Thought of Jacques Ellul (1981); Narrative Theology After Auschwitz: From Alienation to Ethics (1992); The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia? (1993);The Coming of the Millennium: Good News for the Whole Human Race (1996). Co-author of: Religion and Globalization (2008) with John Esposito and Todd Lewis; Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics (2011) 2nd edition,with Dell deChant and David Lantigua; World Religions Today, 4th edition (2011) with John Esposito and Todd Lewis.

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The Coming of the Millennium

Good News for the Whole Human Race

All Rights Reserved © 1996, 2000 by Darrell J. Fasching

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CONTENTS

Preface

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Epilogue

Notes

In Memory of

Jacques Ellul, 1912–1994

who taught me to understand

that evangelical theology means

Good News for the whole human race

Preface

This book is dedicated to the distinguished French Protestant theologian Jacques Ellul, who died on May 29, 1994, leaving us with over forty books relating Christian faith and ethics to the challenges of our modern technological civilization. My own theological career began with my book The Thought of Jacques Ellul (Edwin Mellen Press, 1981). 1 was drawn to Ellul’s work initially because I was interested in his sociological and theological work on technology. However, he won my heart when I discovered that he was theologically committed to a vision of universal salvation. Ever since encountering the work of Christianity’s first great systematic theologian, Origen, I had been taken with such a vision, but I was not convinced that it could be reconciled with the Christian Scriptures. Then I read Ellul and my reservations disappeared. The turning point was reading his book Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation. It is simply the most stunningly insightful exegesis of that mystifying book that I have ever encountered. As we approach the coming of the millennium — the year 2000 — Christians would do well to spend their time reading this profound work, instead of the sensationalist nonsense produced by Hal Lindsey.

Unfortunately, Lindsey’s interpretation, The Late

Great Planet Earth, captures only too well the vengeful spirit of far too many Christians who seem to be looking forward to the coming of the millennium with the hope that God will finally bring the world to an end, get rid of all those troublesome non-Christians (as well as most Christians who do not meet with their approval) and give the world over to them exclusively. In their view, the gospel is Good News for the few and bad news for the many.

As we enter the new millennium there are far too many Christians embracing such an interpretation. In this book, which owes a considerable debt to Ellul, I urge Christians to preach and teach a far different story — one that truly promises good news for the whole human race. It is a vision born not only out of my work with Ellul but also out of my work in narrative theology and ethics, in which I have tried to understand how and why religions paradoxically seem to foster hatred and violence just as readily as peace and reconciliation.

For me this project began in a confrontation with Christian anti-Judaism and its contribution to the Holocaust, and expanded from there to deal with prejudice and violence • — and nonviolence — across religions and cultures. This culminated in my recent two-volume project on narrative ethics after Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Narrative Theology After Auschwitz: From Alienation to Ethics (Fortress Press, 1992), and The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia? (SUNY Press, 1993).

In writing those volumes it became clear to me that all religions, including Christianity, have a dark side that is capable of creating hatred and violence. Consequently, if we wish to be able to turn to our religious traditions for ethical guidance in the complex and dangerous world we live in, we shall have to begin by exorcising the demons within our own traditions. After Auschwitz, as a Christian, I was especially concerned to see that Christians embrace that task. To put it another way, religious ethics must begin with an ethical critique of one’s own religious tradition and in the process give birth to a new way of telling one’s story that takes that critique seriously.

In my previous two books I have engaged in that critique at considerable length and in painful detail. Out of that critique, an alternative understanding of how Christians must tell their story for the coming of a new millennium emerged. In this book, I try to articulate simply and briefly what that alternative way of telling the Christian story might be. I hope that others may find this attempt to tell the Christian story anew useful in their teaching and preaching — and in the conduct of their lives — as we enter a new millennium. I especially hope that Christians will come to realize that it is not what will happen to us hereafter that should preoccupy us, but rather, what we are expected to do for the stranger in our midst, here and now. If we take care of the latter, the former will take care of itself.

In criticizing the Christianity of the past millennium and proposing an alternative way of telling the Christian story for the coming millennium, I will be making some broad claims and generalizations about the nature of Christianity. I am aware that Christianity takes many forms and includes great diversity. My claims will not fit all instances equally well. My concern is that we apply these criticisms where they do fit, and I do believe they fit the main expressions of European and American Christianity only too well. I also wish to be clear that the alternative way of telling the Christian story presented here is hardly a systematic theology. Much is left out, and what is here is only suggestive for further dialogue and development. For the millennium to come, no one is in a position to provide a detailed and finished blueprint.

Before retelling the Christian story anew in the pages that follow, I want to express my appreciation not only for the influence of Jacques Ellul, but also for the preachers who have shaped my own life journey in faith — George Garrelts, Harry Bury, Don Conroy, John McCombe, M. Richard Malivuk, and Irving Greenberg. I also wish to thank James Andrews, Christine Beasley, Didier Pollefeyt, Ginny Landgraf, Gerald Iwerks, John Giles, and Richard Malivuk for reading drafts of this manuscript and offering helpful comments.

I wish to conclude this preface with a brief excerpt from an interview with Jacques Ellul conducted by Dan Clendenin (Issue #1, August 1988, p. 3) for The Ellul Forum, (published by the Department of Religious Studies, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620) of which I am the editor. This interview originally appeared in Media Development (2/1988, p. 29).

CLENDENIN: You said with Karl Barth that a person must be crazy to teach universalism, but impious not to believe it.

ELLUL: Yes, I like very much this phrase of Barth’s. For me, obviously there are biblical texts which seem to go against the idea of universalism, but I really don’t understand them very well. That’s why I say very often that for me universal salvation is in the realm of faith, but I cannot present it as a dogma.

CLENDENIN: Would it be fair to call your belief in universal salvation a pious hope but not an absolute conviction?

ELLUL: NO, it’s an absolute conviction.

CLENDENIN: Universal salvation sounds very un-Kierkegaardian!

ELLUL: Yes, this is exactly the place where I part company from Kierkegaard.

CLENDENIN: But what about his question: Does this do away with Christianity by making everyone a Christian?

ELLUL: NO, it does not make everyone Christian.

CLENDENIN: They are not hidden Christians?

ELLUL: NO….

Prologue

The World as He Know It

Is Passing Away

The year 2000 is at hand. The world as we know it is passing away. Some expect the coming of the millennium to bring the end of the world and God’s final judgment on humanity. Others simply expect a different world, a new millennium. They say we will be entering a post-modern world. All that means is that we expect it to be different than the world we were born into. I believe there is some truth in both of these expectations. I do not expect the coming of the millennium to bring the end of the world but I do believe it will bring the end of the world as we know it. And while the final judgment of the world may not be at hand, a final judgment of Christianity may be.

For the Good News of the gospel, as it has been proclaimed for the last two millennia, has no future. Out of the noblest of ideals, namely, its concern to save the world through conversion, Christianity has violated its own highest ideals. For while the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount preaches love of enemies, Christendom had no place for the stranger, much less the enemy. Bent on conquering the world for Christ, Christians demanded that all strangers become like us or suffer the consequences. That kind of Christianity missed the point. Christians are called to be the salt of the earth not to turn the whole earth into salt. Spiritually speaking, that would be a major ecological catastrophe.

A world made up only of Christians is a world that has no place for strangers. However, as I shall argue, whether we explicitly reject the stranger or implicitly do so out of a desire to make the stranger just like us (and hence no longer a stranger), we turn our back on God. For our God is not like us. Nor is our God one of us. Like the stranger, our God is one whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:8). Our God can be found only in welcoming the stranger. A gospel that has no place for strangers can have no place in the emerging global civilization of the coming millennium. The world of the millennium that is coming into being before our eyes is a global community, clearly different from that of our ancestors who shared a world with a common vision and common values. The coming of a global community brings with it a religious and cultural diversity that seems to confuse and unsettle us as much as the diversity of language unsettled the citizens of Babel. Like the inhabitants of Babel we long to go back to the good old days when everybody spoke the same