Saying Goodbye to a Thanos Theology

It sure seems easy to look around these days and realize that things on this planet are pretty ugly lately, and seem to be getting worse every day.

Are we humans about to be bailed out of this mess, or is our responsibility (and honor) to fix it?

Okay, that’s a big question to kick off a blog post, so let’s set the stage a little bit.

For a few years now, I’ve been grappling with the question of the true depth of the divide between human and divine. For decades I had a sense that God was the ultimate “otherness” – beyond compare, almost beyond comprehension. But at the same time, I was keenly aware of many verses describing God breathing divine breath into mankind, of exalting humans to divine heights, giving humans rule over creation, giving humans even godlike responsibility and authority over the very judgements and communications of the divine council in Revelation. And most curiously to me, I think about Jesus telling His followers of their place in the Kingdom as His own brothers – speaking in ways that didn’t sound just like something He might have said to make them happy, but rather as if Jesus actually considered them His equals, even before His death and resurrection.

This apparent paradox between divine otherness and yet human divinity deeply disturbed me. But, being raised in the era of an explosion of New Age philosophy and the Christian backlash against it, I always shuffled aside those disturbing feelings, and chose to fix my mind on the simple “God is the only true god” answer. I’d often say “there is a God, and I’m not Him.”

But now I find myself having abandoned my long-held certainty that we’d be Raptured out of here soon, and it’s got me thinking about our intended role in the future of Creation.

Here’s the problem:

The earth is a mess. That’s pretty obvious, I think. Humanity has messed everything up, and people around the world are suffering deeply at each others’ hands, and even the very earth itself is suffering under our lousy rule.

And as I once did, many Christians believe that it’s all got to go to hell – literally burned up – so that God can remake it into God’s own image, restore it back to God’s plan. And – according to a lot of those Christians – the only way that can happen is if “the restraining One is removed” (2 Thess 2:6-7) – usually interpreted as the Church – so that evil can finally totally flourish and be revealed in its awful fullness, before being justly annihilated by God’s divine judgement in the Apocalypse of Revelation.

But if you excise the Rapture from your theology, as I have, this set of assumptions about the future of our world also starts to make a lot less sense. If we’re not about to get yanked out, if God’s not about to let it all go to hell in a handbasket, then maybe we’re in it for the long haul. And if so, what do we do with all those verses about the righteous ones ruling and reigning with Christ? We can’t put that off into a post-Apocalypse era of perfection.

So what’s the solution?

Maybe, instead of God planning to someday snap the divine fingers and instantly set everything right, Jesus was serious that God gave us all this authority and Holy Spirit power and expects us to actually do something about the mess ourselves.

It’s kind of like a parent saying “Hey, kids, look at the mess you’ve made. Start cleaning it up, please.”

So, the fundamental question we have to settle is whether we see
a) a vision of billions of humans collectively rising up to do the hard work of casting out evil and hatred and division until the world finally reaches true unity and love, or
b) a vision of a remnant being carried away from this painful earth to a permanent rest in heaven, until God supernaturally fixes everything, punishes and expunges the evildoers, and turns a perfected world over to us to rule for a thousand years.

• One is a long-term plan; the other waits on an essentially instantaneous correction.
• One puts the responsibility in the hands of humanity with God’s power at their disposal; the other expects God to do the work with a minimum of human intervention.
• One is painful and hard; the other is sweet and simple.
• One is willing to suffer through a process; the other expects to be saved from suffering.
• One sees man as fundamentally good, and able to move towards wholeness; the other sees man as fundamentally evil, needing to be destroyed except for a faithful remnant.
• One sees God present in all love and goodness, no matter where it appears in humanity; the other sees only one jealous and restrictive God.

These are basically two irreconcilable visions, but both carry scriptural support, depending on one’s understanding of the Bible.

The first vision – of humanity rising up to do the very hard work – takes its support from the universalist reading of eschatology, very well fleshed out in modern writings by people like Richard Rohr and George MacDonald and David Bentley Hart, and is founded on the Biblical statements that God’s most essential nature is love, and when love is expressed, God is incarnated, and along with that, God is unwilling that ANY shall perish and will thus redeem all and not just a remnant.

The second vision – of a rapture and rebirth – takes its support from a fairly recent evangelicalist reading of a handful of eschatological verses from the New Testament, plus plenty of Old Testament verses about God’s wrath and judgement.

I don’t see any way to reconcile these two positions – yet various versions of them animate and sustain most people who believe in the Christian God.

This means that we have essentially two camps of people who both consider themselves faithful Christians, but who hold irreconcilable theological differences about the fundamentals of their faith.

I grew up steeped in the second escapist reading. Books like “The Late Great Planet Earth” by Hal Lindsey, “Things to Come” by Dwight Pentecost, the “Left Behind” series from Tim LaHaye, “The End of the Age” and “The New World Order” by Pat Robertson: these all affected my thinking. The idea of the Rapture was just as foundational to my theology as the cross.

I also grew up being told to fear anything even slightly universalist. We were warned that it was a devilish attempt to steal believers away from The Truth, by making them believe in a non-exclusivity of the Gospel of Jesus. Much fear was centered on the New Age doctrines of god-like humanity. And one of the worst things you could do as a Christian was fail to believe exactly correctly, because that doubt or misunderstanding would put you at risk of eternal hellfire. Naturally, not believing in the permanence of hellfire was one thing that would send you straight to that hellfire. Not believing in the exclusivity of God, and the depravity of humanity, would be just as deadly. And believing in your own divinity? That was arrogance beyond any compare, certainly worthy of hell.

But because of that upbringing, I never encountered – because it would have been opened my mind to the devil to even read such things – any careful and studious treatment of the universalist reading.

And as one untouched by such thinking, I also never encountered anyone who entertained the idea that God was in it for the really long run, not intending to come and settle the score violently and promptly, but would patiently work with humanity for generations still to come.

Well, I’ve encountered that patient, long-term thinking very often since I abandoned my evangelical beliefs. And I find it deeply compelling, and definitely in line with the nature of God expressed in the Bible.

But part of the challenge for a universalist long-human-future view is theodicy, the “problem of evil.” One cannot observe our world and not recognize a great deal of evil present in how humanity treats each another today. If we postulate a patient God, we’re also necessarily postulating a God that is willing to let humans continue to murder and rape and assault and steal from one another for centuries into the future. If we don’t see a major change from stories of old to stories of today, one might thus wonder – “is God?” Is there a God at all? If so, is God interested in our affairs? Why is God willing to allow this evil and the resulting suffering to continue?

Plenty has been written on this topic already, and I cannot hope to do it justice in a short post like this. I’m also not going to dig into the theology; I’ve already done that in my four-part series on personal eschatology, which explains in detail why I find the universal reconciliation viewpoint so convincing.

At any rate, I honestly don’t really like any of the explanations for the theodicy – especially the idea that “God knows better than we do, and loves us even more than we do, so we have to trust God that it’s all for the best in the eternal scheme of things.” I think that’s a cop-out. It basically avoids the entire question in favor of dogmatically asserting that God has it all under control, and our entire job is to simply trust and believe.

But neither do I like the answer that “God’s going to fix it all instantly,” because THAT answer comes with the theodicy of hell or annihilation. It says that God loves SOME humans so much that he’ll either eternally torture or painfully burn up all the rest of humanity to accomplish the necessary purging.

Neither answer seems to fit any definition of “good” that I know.

But I also don’t like the atheist or agnostic answer of “therefore, no God.” I simply have too much personal experience with God to suddenly disbelieve and walk away from our long relationship. So I must continue to wrestle with this issue.

An interesting consequence – or perhaps a driver – of the universalist view here is that it sees in humans a very real component of the essence, the nature, the character of God, and expects humans to use that essence to bring about the necessary change on earth. The countering viewpoint replies that this makes out humans to be God themselves, that this is arrogant and it steals glory from the true God. It asserts that if this is true of humans, then there would be no need for God because man is already God, or at least becoming God. It points back to the Genesis stories and cautions against repeating the age-old lie of becoming like God by eating from the tree, or building a tower to heaven.

But even those Genesis verses are interesting – because they clearly portray God as saying quite unambiguously that humans – even humans after The Fall – actually ARE capable of becoming just like God, and would have if God had not taken very specific steps to prevent it at that time. And if human divinity was possible in Genesis, it’s possible today, and perhaps the work done by Jesus finally, in due time, enabled exactly that to happen – because Jesus seems to clearly welcome His disciples into the same level of relationship with His Father as He enjoyed.

When I survey the whole of the Bible, I see a clear trend away from the earliest views of God as ineffable “other,” as unapproachable, towards incarnate and approachable. The crucifixion (even before the resurrection!) split wide the veil hiding the Most Holy Place of the Temple. I read about Jesus completely restoring the relationship between God and man – and to my reading, that was done unconditionally. I read about God partnering with God’s people, choosing to not just act unilaterally. I read about God’s people being made kings and priests, of being given rule over creation and the Kingdom. I even read about Jesus explicitly giving His followers authority to directly forgive or retain people’s sins – one of the most intimate and important rights of deity.

In my evangelical days I would have understood all those promises to only apply once the Kingdom had come, after we went to heaven – but now I see Jesus constantly telling his followers that the Kingdom had ALREADY come, even 2,000 years ago. If that is the case – if we believe what Jesus said – then the way to God has been cleared, we already are kings and priests, the world has already been turned over to us to rule and to reign. I don’t get the sense that God is waiting until some Rapture day to do all this, but instead that God expects us to get on with the work right now, right here, to be the ones that renew the earth in the power of Christ and in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, instead of waiting for God to magically snap the Thanos glove, eliminate all the evil, and remake the earth in an instant.

So I find that here we are, on a messed-up earth, with the responsibility but also the authority and the power to accomplish its healing. Maybe it sounds defeatist, to not expect the Trumpet to sound any day now, and the End Times to truly begin, instead to expect to continue to serve the Kingdom for many more years of my life. That reclaiming of the original Garden of Eden won’t be instantaneous. It won’t happen without life-long hard work. None of us alive today will see it accomplished; the best we can expect is to see a change in our own surroundings and those who may know us. On the scale of the whole earth, of billions of humans, it’s almost invisible, and clearly there’s a TON of work still to do.

It seems defeatist, impossible – but to me it’s actually deeply comforting.

Because here’s the thing: if I believe in a Thanos glove-snap eschatology, nothing I do here would really matter, other than whatever souls I happen to convince to trust God and shortly join me in heaven. Nothing I change in society would matter. Nothing I do to restore the earth to God’s original design would matter. I would be expecting God to burn it all away very soon. And that’s horribly demotivational.

But instead, I see that I’ve been given an awesome responsibility, and God expects me to participate exactly WHERE I am, exactly AS I am, exactly WHO I am. I can actually expect to accomplish what God has given me to do, and actually expect to see positive change that will MATTER in the long run. Everything I do will move the Kingdom forward – the earth AND its people – as I personally exude God’s nature and God’s love and create a tiny pocket of light and love, that will grow and grow and grow over time, until the entire earth is reborn. Every bit of the mission I complete will move us that much closer to a resurrected, revitalized, renewed earth and humanity. My life MATTERS to the eternity of the entire world, not just to some souls.

And THAT is motivational.