A philosophy of wonder born of an ancient disappointment
In his book Infinitely Demanding — Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, Simon Critchley notes that, although philosophy often begins in wonder, it can also begin in disappointment.
The disappointment I want to name this morning—one the Christian tradition rarely speaks of—is this: woven into the Christmas season, which celebrates Jesus’ birth two thousand years ago, is the failure of an early Christian hope. The first believers expected Jesus to return soon: the “second coming”, when he would appear again, physically and visibly, in glory, fulfilling the messianic promises, bringing the present age to an end, judging the world, and establishing his kingdom. But that return did not happen, and the expectation has proved false. Christianity has largely met this disappointment by constructing increasingly intricate explanations for the delay, and then by adding further reasons for continuing to believe that the second coming will still occur.
Well, here we are, two thousand years later: Christmas Day has passed, and Jesus’ second coming has again not occurred. Without wishing to be unnecessarily unkind to those who continue to believe in it, I confess that I find it utterly astonishing that anyone can continue believing in it. However, having said that, it’s important to see that it would also be irrational to deny that many people really do believe in the second coming and continue to act upon that belief.
Please remember that within the current Trump administration there are influential people whose support of the state of Israel and it’s current genocidal policy towards Palestinians, is simply being offered as an opportunity to convert Israeli Jews to belief in Jesus in order to bring about Christ’s second coming and the apocalyptic end times. Only two weeks ago a Christian Zionist church in Jerusalem, whose explicit, public aim is to convert Israeli Jews to belief in Jesus, held a service on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Temple Mount, at which the church’s pastor, Rick Ridings, proclaimed to the assembled congregation that “the only perfect government [in Israel] will be established when you [Jesus] come, and you reign from your holy hill.” And when the time came for the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, to speak he said: “We don’t have to know the outcome of the final moment [of redemption], because it’s already been determined,” adding that he was there to serve as both US ambassador to Israel and as “an ambassador for the kingdom” (see HERE and HERE).
Whilst I am certain that people like Huckabee and Ridings, along with the current extreme rightwing, ethno-nationalist Israeli government, are engaging in the kind of religion and politics that always ends up encouraging the worst kinds of religious misunderstanding, bigotry and genocidal violence, I am equally certain that none of their words and actions will ever succeed in getting Jesus, or any other Messiah, to return for a second time.
Given this, for a liberal, free-religious group such as our own, one vital, humane, compassionate and rational task is always to be clear that sometime between 30 and 33 CE, Jesus was brutally executed in Jerusalem by the Romans, was laid to rest in a still unknown tomb, and that this is where he lies to this day. May his bones be allowed to remain undisturbed and resting in peace, say I. And it seems to me that it is also important to state clearly that belief in the second coming, still promised by many forms of Christianity, is both false and potentially — and often — damaging to people’s mental and spiritual well-being, and that in the hands of people like Huckabee and Ridings it is extremely dangerous to everyone on the planet. To hear that belief in the second coming is false belief may be a disappointment to many Christians in the world, but, as Simon Critchley observed, such disappointment can be used to help develop a much better and life-enhancing philosophy of life.
The way of dealing with this disappointment that I continue to find persuasive is as follows . . .
Despite my inherent scepticism in all forms of supernaturalist religion, I still find the example of the human Jesus central to my own spirituality and religious outlook, and his Sermon on the Mount and/or the Sermon on the Plain still seem to me to present a set of ethical teachings that are worthy of my continued loyalty. That is why at Christmas I continue to celebrate his traditional birthday. However, I will admit that the fact such a teacher was executed for these kinds of teachings remains a great disappointment to me.
However, in my experience, this disappointment — along with many others connected with the teachings of traditional Christianity — caused me to think hard — that is to say philosophise — about my inherited beliefs. And the wonder is that this disappointment eventually turned to a philosophy of wonder. This happened because I came to see that Jesus’ basic teachings did not die with him but were passed on to the next generation. I also came to see that these teachings were then passed on for a third, fourth, fifth time and so on, ad infinitum, to this very morning. And it was this that helped me to grasp no one has ever needed to wait for the second coming of Jesus, because the first coming was always sufficient. Once that kind of humane and compassionate teaching had whooshed up into our world, it never went away, and it continues to be a light to lighten the darkness. But this light also helped me to see that I could not simply start, nor stop, only with Jesus. This was because, as my knowledge of the world and its history has expanded, I found that the whooshing-up into our world of the kind of teachings Jesus offered us were not only expressed by him but by countless other teachers across generations and geography, both before and after Jesus’ lifetime. Some of them are very well known to me, such as Śākyamuni Buddha, Socrates, Shinran, Confucius, Tolstoy, Tenkō Nishada-san, Okada Torajirō-sensei, Kiyozawa Manshi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Spinoza, Paul Wienpahl and Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei. But there are many others I know less well and, I am sure, there are even more who are completely unknown to me.
One of my own favourite, little known whooshing-up of these kinds of teachings was seen in the Leicester shoemaker Jacob Bauthumley (1613–1692) who, in his book, The Light and Dark Sides of God, published in 1650 wrote the following:
“I see that God is in all Creatures, Man and Beast, Fish and Fowle, and every green thing, from the highest Cedar to the Ivey on the wall; and that God is the life and being of them all, and that God doth really dwell, and if you will personally; if he may admit so low an expression in them all, and hath his Being no where else out of the Creatures.”
And so, to finish my thought for the day, I want to say that out of my own early disappointment that there has been, and will never be, any second coming of Jesus or, indeed, any other Messiah — I mean, this was what I was taught in Sunday School by my Sunday School teachers — I have found wonder, wonder that the truths found in his teachings have never gone away, and that, when one looks and listens carefully, these teachings continue to be found, as Jacob Bauthumley once saw, not only in other human teachers, but in all creatures, and every green thing, from the highest cedar to the ivy on the wall.
The point to grasp is, that no second coming is required and this has, in the end, not been a disappointment to me, but something that has gifted me with a philosophy born of wonder, wonder that a light has shone in the darkness, and the darkness has never overcome it.
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