125 - The Rubicon

The Rubicon
By James I. McCord

THIS year we are celebrating the past, but we are worrying about the future. We are attempting to focus on the two centuries of our history, but we are haunted by the prospect of the next few years. Today's inquiries into the future are producing conclusions not for our comfort. Not only are there the usual fears of the unknown, the passing of the old and familiar, and the strangeness of the new and disturbing, but for those born since the close of World War II there is an added dimension of dread-the possibility of no future at all. This generation was born under the threat of atomic, and later nuclear, extinction. With childhood came dire predictions of overpopulation and mass starvation, predictions that are now being fulfilled in many parts of the world. With maturity came the ecological crisis, the sudden awareness of the limitations of creation and of a disintegrating planet, with dead and dying oceans and streams, and with an atmosphere choking and polluted. More recently there has come a new threat of genetic control and a host of other biological menaces.

So bleak is the prospect that an entire generation feels doomed to

126 - The Rubicon

live in a world shorn of a future and without hope. Moreover, it has been said that no other generation has faced such a situation, and history has little to offer in dealing with these problems. This helps account for the "instant" generation. Its members feel cut off from the past and the future, from memory and hope, robbed of time, and abandoned to the present. There is no other captivity quite so cruel and paralyzing as confinement in the present, without guidance from the past or confidence about the future, but such is the predicament of many today in a society that is aimless and stagnated.

I

History, I am convinced, contains more continuities than discontinuities. The road to tomorrow continues to run through yesterday. But the past must be appropriated, and George Herbert Mead has taught us that for each generation a new Caesar crosses the Rubicon. Our responsibility is to interpret the past, especially in this Bicentennial year, in such a manner as to recapture those ideas and convictions that will be relevant to our situation and that will produce a fresh vision necessary to unite and motivate a society.

In Mead's terms, the reality of 1776 for us today is different from what it was in 1876. Then the nation was in a heady mood. The Civil War had ended successfully; a nation threatened with schism was freshly healed. The opening of the West was a new challenge, with an opportunity for manifest destiny to be achieved, and new technology was ready-to-hand to complete the triumph of the Industrial Age. Ten decades later we are chastened, increasingly aware that something has gone awry, and perhaps more willing to search for our spiritual roots.

Much of America is the product of a cultural revolution that was going on in Western Europe when the new world was being explored and settled. It was an effort to break the shackles of old medievaldom's oppressive forms and structures and to form a new society that would be more hospitable to movement and change. A new generation of leaders appeared, the so-called "Dynasts," Henry of England, Francis of France, and Philip of Spain. The new nationalism was the result, and at the same time a new class of people, the middle-class, was emerging for a new role in this society. This was the group that produced John Knox in Scotland and that furnished his most consistent support. It attempted to create a society that was not dominated by a court which was no longer in touch with the reality of the new urban life. The new class was active in the universities and found in these institutions comrades in shaping a new society.

II

It is out of this ferment that our nation was fashioned by those who brought with them to the new world deep theological conviction. The most powerful of these convictions was the strong belief in the sovereignty of God, often a cliché in the present, but at that time a

127 - The Rubicon

strong stimulus to faith and action. This sovereign God was understood in terms of dynamic will. No longer did the old world-view obtain, the belief that everything is part of a single whole, that all reality is one piece of cloth, that there is a hierarchy of existence. In such a worldview, nature, society, government, the royal family, the heavens, and the Deity are related in a hierarchical way. Reality is thus a pyramid, with God immobilized at the top. But there is no place for motion, progress, or transformation. This is a static world, which, although for other reasons, resembles ours today.

One can break out of the prison of a frozen world by going back to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and reclaiming the doctrine of God as dynamic will. The reformers had begun this escape by pointing out that the God of the Bible is not encased in an ontocratic world-view. Sovereignly free over creation, God is the sovereign Lord of history. This God is active in history, engaged in human affairs, and frees people from all institutional and bureaucratic controls.

If God is understood in terms of dynamic will, then the most divine human quality is not contemplation but action. In medievaldom, with its monistic world-view with God at the apex of a pyramid, the end of all life is contemplation. But if the God of the believer is the God of the exodus, then our greatest good is to become God's partner, co-workers in the fulfillment of the divine saving purpose. As Cromwell put it, "What are all events but God working?" And he added, "I do think the Lord is with me . . . I do feel myself lifted on by a strange force, I cannot tell why."

III

The second theological conviction informing our beginnings was the doctrine of vocation or calling. In the old world only the clergy were equipped with a calling. Lay persons had no vocation; their lives were not related to the purpose of God. They were taught to accept their station at birth as God's just judgment on them for their sin. In worship they were separated from the clergy by a screen, with the laity confined to the nave and the worship of God taking place behind the screen. The Reformation attempted to change this. The screens were dismantled, and Martin Luther made the common person, the householder, central to the purpose of God. Now each believer was equipped with a calling, and vocation was returned to the whole people of God. This brought a new sense of depth to life and a fresh awareness of human worth and value.

Sydney Ahlstrom has printed the text used by the Reverend William Symonds when he preached at White Chappel, in the presence of adventurers and planters of Virginia, published for the benefit of the colony to be planted for the advancement of their Christian purpose:

Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy

128 - The Rubicon

name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed (Gen. 12:1-3).

Pilgrim people tend to identify with Abraham, and with Israel in the Exodus. This was true of the Boers in South Africa when they left the Cape and made the "Great Trek" up into the high veld of the Transvaal. It is true today of black Americans, who identify the freedom movement with the Exodus. It was true of early Americans who came to the new world as part of a new Exodus. They, like Israel, felt they were related to God by a covenant and were seeking a land of promise.

IV

Every exodus has a goal, and many emigrants articulated their goal as a "Zion in the new wilderness." Their aim was to create a nation that would be a lamp for other nations, an experiment in self-government that would guide and inspire all people seeking relief from bondage. The symbol that best expressed this dream was the Kingdom of God. Even today this symbol remains the most unitive in our land. Kingdom is a much more dynamic symbol than church. It is what Jesus came preaching, and it points to what lies ahead and involves transformation.

A generation ago, H. Richard Niebuhr published The Kingdom of God in America. Earlier he had attempted to interpret American denominationalism in terms of its social sources, but he was dissatisfied with the results. The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) told a horizontal story, but it did not probe the dimension of depth. He tried all over again, posing the problem from a theological standpoint. He, too, was trying to understand the beginning of a tradition of which we are a part, and he found the one common vision that held the various groups together to be that of the Kingdom of God. This vision came in three stages. It was, first, in terms of God's sovereign power. Life was not easy, risks were high, and our forbears were sober realists. The visionaries came later on, settling mainly in Pennsylvania, but the earliest settlers were more conservative. They were sustained through hard, cold winters when food was scarce and disease rampant by a strong trust in the absolute and sovereign power of God. The next century saw the Kingdom interpreted in terms of the reign of Christ. Now the evangelical experience dominated, the rule of Christ in the heart and in human affairs. It was only natural that the third stage would be focused on the Kingdom of God on earth.

In all three stages what was being asked is the question we are raising today-how can we begin to transform the world around us so that it will look more like God's intention for all people? My suggestion is that this will come only through theological renewal, through the rekindling of the vision of God's kingdom in order to re-focus the American dream and bind us together in a common resolution to become partners with God in making all things new.