Theology for the End of the World

Theology for the End of the World

Marika Rose

© Marika Rose 2023

Published in 2023 by SCM Press

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The End of the World

1. The World Doesn’t Need Saving, But Destroying

2. Theology Can’t Be Saved

3. The Holy Family

4. ‘We Have To Talk …’: Family Breakdown

5. How Christianity Invented Race

6. Mammon

7. God is Useless

8. Enslaved by Freedom

Conclusion: Theology for the End of the World

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

It’s impossible to know, let alone to measure, all the ways that what I’ve written here depends on others. I can no more repay what I owe than I can reckon up where my thoughts end and others’ begin. This is not an accounting of debt, then, so much as a poor attempt to express my gratitude to a very incomplete list of the people who made the thinking and writing that went into making this book joyful, despite it all.

The book wouldn’t have existed without Greenbelt and the friendships, connections, opportunities and encouragement I’ve enjoyed over a decade or so of involvement with the festival. I’m grateful to everyone at Greenbelt who has supported, encouraged and advocated for me, and especially to Paul Northup, Martin Wroe, Andy Turner, Mary Acland, Kate Bottley, Ruth Amos and Molly Boot. Much of the book has existed as Greenbelt talks at some point, and it would not take the shape that it does without the questions and challenges of various Greenbelt audiences over the years, not to mention those who kept me company late into the night in the Jesus Arms.

I’ve hashed out much of the thinking here in conversations with others. Anthony Paul Smith’s care and apocalyptic piety are woven through everything I’ve written in this book. I’m also grateful to Sami and Ellie Namih and Janet and Pete Overfield in Hull; Kate Tomas, Hannah Boast and Tom Hunt in Birmingham; and to Alison and Tom Merritt Smith, James and Claire Lewis, David Forrest, Sam Morris, Wayne Maughan and Alex Ross in Newcastle. I couldn’t have been kicked out of church in better company. I’m grateful for Jim Higginson’s support, wisdom and encouragement across both years and geography. I began writing the book during the pandemic and would have entirely lost my mind if it weren’t for Rose Holyoak, Flis Pitman, Christine Landry, Ben Martin, Neil Ewen and Shelley Cobb. Thanks also to Joey Jones, October Books and everyone else who made Southampton Radical Reading Group possible and joyful. Thanks to Jack Upton and Laurel Dean for much accumulated anarchist wisdom, beef and books, and Sami Çapulcu for practical and fantastical reading suggestions. The university is all too much a part of the world but I’m grateful to Adam Kotsko, Anthony Paul Smith, Dan Barber, Beatrice Marovich, Eric Daryl Meyer, Timothy Snediker, Sean Capener, Amaryah Armstrong, Tapji Garba, Alex Dubilet, Thomas Lynch and Steven Shakespeare for helping me figure out how to think within and against it.

I’m very grateful to my editor, David Shervington, both for inviting me to write this book and for helping to shape it. Thanks to Hannah Ward for meticulous copy-editing. Kelly Filreis helped with getting the book’s cover right. James Lewis and Bec Wilkinson read through several chapters and gave very helpful feedback; ‘God is Useless’ is much clearer thanks to Andrew Grenfell’s comments. Alex Dubilet, Adam Kotsko and Anthony Paul Smith read complete drafts and gave very helpful feedback. The book would not be what it is without them.

Introduction: The End of the World

Begin what?

The only thing in the world

worth beginning:

The End of the world of course.¹

I can imagine as an apocalyptic – let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.²

When I first sat down to write this book, Australia was burning. Over the summer of 2019–20, 17 million hectares burned; over 3,000 houses were destroyed, 33 people died, and over a billion animals and hundreds of billions of insects were killed.³ The loss was vast and incomprehensible; at some point I found myself looking away when updates appeared on my social media timelines. A few months later, rumours of a new illness gradually turned into a global pandemic and then riots and protests erupted around the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a police officer. Another police killing of a young woman named Sarah Everard prompted protests in the UK, and I watched as police first beat protestors and then began to drag them through the courts. Over the last few years, the news of terrible disasters caused by unprecedented weather events has unfolded alongside the rise of far-right acts of violence and increasingly grim and repressive legislation across the western world designed to make political protest all but impossible, targeting pregnant and trans people, and fortifying national borders.

It has become fashionable to say that we live in apocalyptic times, but that’s not quite right. The word ‘apocalypse’ comes from the Greek word apokalupsis, which means ‘revelation’ or ‘unveiling’. In the apocalyptic literature of the Jewish and Christian traditions, from which we primarily get our understanding of apocalypse, this moment of revelation or unveiling doesn’t simply help us to see the world more clearly – it is (as the Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes argues) revolutionary.⁴ What apocalyptic literature tends to suggest is that this moment of revealing – of seeing the world as it actually is – is radically transformative. Things cannot continue as they are. But what’s perhaps most awful about this particular historical moment is that the opposite seems to be true. However much we come to see the real nature of the world we inhabit, the structures of violence on which our lives are built – the wilful commitment to ecological destruction which drives our most powerful corporations, the corruption of our governments, the instability and injustice of financial markets, the foundational role of slavery in our laws and institutions, the stupidity of an economic system that relies on forcing people back to workplaces in the middle of a deadly pandemic – no revelation, however stark or horrible, seems enough to effect real change in the world we inhabit. Surely, we keep thinking, things can’t carry on like this, getting worse and worse for ever; surely something has to change. Yet here we still are. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe this period of history not as apocalyptic but as a time of crisis, a time in which – as Antonio Gramsci wrote of his own times – ‘the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.’⁵

But this is also the time of superheroes. As the oceans rise, the ice caps melt, and incomprehensible violence is unleashed every day at borders, detention centres, protest marches and in war zones, our collective cultural attention has focused increasingly on stories of people endowed with superhuman powers, struggling to hold off the end of the world. It seems as though our entire culture is gradually being sucked into a single extended superhero universe, remakes piled upon remakes. What does this narrowing of creative imagination tell us about the world we inhabit and its impending end?

The Nazi jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt once described the role of the state in terms taken from the letter to the Thessalonians. In the letter, the author (traditionally understood to be Paul), writing in an apocalyptic tone, says that ‘the day of the Lord’ is not yet here, and will not arrive until ‘the lawless one is revealed’. Although currently present in the world, the author says, this lawless one is currently being held in check by ‘the one who withholds’ – in Greek, the katechōn.⁶ For Schmitt, this role of holding back the end reveals the proper role of the state: not to create a perfect society but to hold back the chaos of lawlessness, which later Christian tradition came to identify with the Antichrist.⁷ As Adam Kotsko argues, something like this idea has shaped western thinking about the role of politics since at least as far back as Augustine who – against contemporary readings of Thessalonians which saw the Roman Empire as the Antichrist – argued instead that the Roman Empire should be understood as the katechōn, the restrainer, holding back the forces of chaos and lawlessness, and so holding off the end of the world. It shows up again in the more recent, far-right idea of the police as the ‘thin blue line’ that stands between us and the breakdown of society; and it’s what fundamentally shapes the narratives of superhero films. In these stories, the role of the superhero is never to put right all the wrongs of the world and to usher in a new, utopian society where the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. Instead, the superhero comes into play when something or someone causes a crisis that threatens the existing order of things. One thing that’s striking about superhero films (not unlike cop shows) is how much damage is done in the name of saving the world. Vehicles are smashed, people are tortured, tower blocks topple, entire cities are more or less razed to the ground – all in the name of saving the world. Saving the world from what? The villains arrayed against contemporary superheroes are motivated by a desire to prevent ecological destruction (Thanos, the Avengers films), overthrow white supremacy (Killmonger, Black Panther), or challenge plutocracy (the Joker, The Dark Knight); viewed from a slightly different perspective we might see them instead as messianic figures.

According to Fredric Jameson, ‘Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.’⁸ What the recent spate of superhero films suggests, I think, is that we cannot imagine the end of capitalism as anything other than the end of the world – a catastrophe so terrible that any price is worth paying in order to prevent it. We can see a similar tendency in the wildly over-the-top responses to the very moderate programmes of social democratic reform put forward by Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the USA. Although neither figure was offering any really dramatic political transformation, let alone the end of capitalism as a whole, the media and political establishments reacted as though to an existential threat, as if what was being put forward (a slightly higher minimum wage, a guaranteed right for renters to keep pets) really would mean the end of the world.

The figure of barely contained chaos, simmering below the surface of a precariously maintained order, is fundamentally conservative and authoritarian. We can’t significantly change the world, it suggests, in case we unleash the terrifying forces of darkness which are threatening to overwhelm us. All we can do is grit our teeth, buckle down and try to hold off the disaster. For Schmitt, the belief in the importance of a katechōn, the idea that challenging the authority and the necessary violence of the state would lead to absolute chaos, seems to have played a central role in his decision to throw his support behind Adolf Hitler. As Kotsko writes, ‘desperation to stave off the worst at any cost turned out to be the path toward the very worst’.⁹

Schmitt’s turn to the violent forces of fascism in a desperate attempt to hold back the end of all things is a particularly modern version of a tendency that goes back at least as far as the early days of Christianity. In the book of Romans, Paul exhorts his readers to submit to ‘the governing authorities’ which, he argues, have been put in place by God.¹⁰ By the time of St Augustine, the fourth-century philosopher, bishop and theologian, this idea that the current order of the world had been put in place by God was elaborated into a detailed theological system. For Augustine and many later Christian thinkers, God had created the world with a certain built-in order and structure. To resist this order was to resist God, and to risk unleashing the forces of evil and chaos. For Augustine, the essence of evil was the refusal to recognize and submit to the proper ordering of things. This, Augustine argued, decisively shaping theological debates and western societies for centuries to come, was the essence of the Fall, of the rebellion of both human beings and angels against God which introduced death and disorder into the perfection of God’s original creation.¹¹ Yet for Augustine, while this proper ordering of the world was intrinsically good, designed to guide us to perfect happiness in God, the consequence of human fallenness was that the originally good world, designed to make us perfectly happy, became characterized instead by violence and suffering. To stray from the proper order, to be born into the disorder that came to characterize all human life in the wake of Adam’s original disobedience, was to experience great suffering, both as a natural consequence of our sin and as a punishment from God. Wars, Augustine argued, were not only inevitable but necessary to hold back the barbarian hordes pressing at the borders of the empire; even within the supposed safety of cities, human beings were so prone to deceit that torture was a sadly necessary part of the judicial process, and even the members of your own household could not be trusted.¹² As we’ll consider in more detail over the course of the book, this emphasis on a social order ordained by God and maintained by violence has arguably constituted the mainstream of the western Christian tradition over the last two millennia. Arguments about the necessity of violence for maintaining order have formed the core of both Christian and secular western arguments for gender and class inequality, for racism and colonialism, and for the need (however regrettable) for institutions such as police, prisons and borders, which use violence to create and maintain this order.

One way of thinking about this tendency to justify the violence that makes and maintains the world is as theodicy. Theodicy is the technical term for any attempt to make sense of suffering in the light of Christian theological claims about God. If God is (as Christians have tended to argue) both all-powerful and entirely good, then how do we make sense of the reality of suffering? As Anthony Paul Smith points out, the term theodicy ‘literally means the justification of God’; and if the goal of theodicy is to justify the God who ordered the world, then theodicy also functions to justify the world.¹³ In this sense, Kotsko argues, we can see a parallel between the theological problem of theodicy (how can we continue to maintain that God deserves our worship in the face of the suffering we encounter in creation?) and the political problem of legitimacy (why should we accept this particular system of government given the suffering we see around us?).¹⁴

When we talk about the end of the world, I’m suggesting, we’re usually not talking about the absolute destruction of life on earth but about the end of the existing order of things: the systems of meaning we have put in place to make sense of our lives and to structure our interactions with the world. As finite human beings we cannot grasp the full complexity of the reality we inhabit, and so we simplify and divide in order to understand and control. We put up fences, mark out borders, divide things into categories, and pay attention to certain things and not to others. We make decisions about what is and is not important; about who should and should not get to exercise certain kinds of power. As Thomas Lynch suggests, and as we’ll explore in more depth over the rest of this book, some of the key lines along which we divide reality in order to form the world that we currently inhabit are nature (the dividing line between human beings and everything else), capital (the use of money to measure everything against a single scale of value), gender and race.¹⁵ Each of these lines of division and distinction is created and maintained by violence. The categories and divisions themselves enact a kind of symbolic violence, cutting across the rich complexity of life to create order and make sense. But we also use different kinds of violence to ensure that human life conforms to these divisions. On an individual level, we use violent words and actions to punish people who transgress those boundaries. At a societal level, we create systems that are structurally violent, causing death both indirectly (by organizing the world so that people cannot access the resources they need to survive, from health care to housing to the ability to migrate) and directly (via state institutions such as the army and the police, or by increasingly prominent private security forces – it’s probably no coincidence that the rise of privatized agencies of violence has occurred along with the rise of the superhero film).¹⁶ If we want to understand why the world continues not to end, then we have to recognize the role that these forces of violence play in creating and maintaining it; and the role of both secular and Christian theodicies in convincing us that this violence is both necessary and justified if we want to hold off – to restrain – the end of the world.

But trying to save the world isn’t the only option available to us. Both the violence of the world and the desire to hold off its end at all costs are deeply embedded in the histories, institutions, philosophies and theologies that have been handed down to us. But traditions are always messier and more complicated than any single narrative we might try to fit them into, and what we inherit from those who have made and maintained the world before us also contains possibilities for its unmaking. A central focus of this book is the way that Christianity has, over the centuries, shaped the deep structures of the world as it exists today and encouraged our investment in it. But as Christianity began to take form in first-century Palestine it was influenced not only by communities and traditions that feared the end of the world as the ultimate catastrophe, but also by those that eagerly awaited the apocalypse. Apocalyptic literature took shape in the context of the Israelites’ experience of exile and colonization, and their longing for an end to injustice. Taubes argues that apocalypticism is essentially characterized by a sense of alienation and exile – a feeling that this world is not our home, that we do not belong here – and by a sense that the world is not ordered by God but opposed to God. ‘The world’, he writes, ‘is that which stands in opposition to God, and God is that which stands in opposition to the world … God will annihilate the world and then appear in his might.’¹⁷ This kind of apocalypticism has not been the most influential strand of Christian tradition. It is not the tendency that most frequently appears in Christian texts; especially not in the ones that have survived, which have tended to be written by relatively wealthy and powerful people saying things that are more or less acceptable to the ruling powers of the various ages in which Christian theology has been articulated. But, nonetheless, it does keep showing up.

A particularly dramatic flourishing of apocalypticism took place over the latter part of the medieval period in Europe, during the massive social and economic upheavals out of which the modern world was born. Against mainstream medieval Christian theology, which tended to see the world as more or less static and unchanging, the twelfth-century Franciscan Joachim of Fiore argued that history was divided into three epochs: the age of the Father (as recorded in the Hebrew Bible), the age of the Son (from the time of Christ until Joachim’s time), and the rapidly approaching age of the Spirit, in which the world as he and his contemporaries knew it would pass away and be replaced by a new and utopian dispensation. In Joachim’s wake, a multiplicity of religious movements took up this apocalyptic theme. The Spiritual Franciscans horrified church authorities by preaching a gospel of radical poverty and declaring St Francis (better known these days for his kindness to animals) to be the ‘angel of the apocalypse’.¹⁸ Thomas Müntzer led an uprising of German peasants, under the proto-communist slogan taken from Acts 4.32, omnia sunt communia – ‘all things in common’ or, as it’s popularly become, ‘everything for everyone’. Anabaptists briefly took over the city of Münster, declaring a new Christian commonwealth where all were equal and everything would be held in common.¹⁹ It is out of this apocalyptic moment in European history that the modern world began to take shape via a series of revolutionary transformations. Yet what occurred was not so much the end of systems and structures of violence which gave that world shape as their transmutation into new but no less violent forms. Apocalypticism opened up possibilities for new and radical imaginings of the end of the world, and provided both intellectual and spiritual resources for movements and uprisings which transformed the modern world. Yet many of these apocalyptic tendencies ended in failure, or in repeating the very violence of the world they sought to end. At the heart of this book is the question of what it might mean to commit ourselves to ending the world, despite the many and manifold failures of previous attempts to do so.

When we find ourselves longing for the end of the world, and of the violence which constitutes it, it is easy to think that that desire itself means that we are no longer part of the world we want to end. But however much we hate the world we find ourselves in, however much we long for its destruction, we have to grapple with the fact that we are a part of the very thing we are trying to destroy. If we don’t understand how we have been formed by the very systems and structures we struggle against, we will end up reproducing them. This book has two goals, then: first, to try to understand some of the key contours of the world we inhabit, and in particular to trace the role that Christianity has played in forming them. Second, to ask the question: what might it mean to take sides with those who have sought not to justify or to