Once it becomes clear that there is no straightforward way to align the events in this present evil age with the age to come, lots of bad choices get laid out before us, some of which are laid out by H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. I do think Stanley Hauerwas is right that making “Christ” and “culture” two separate categories is a serious mistake. However, I think it is also a serious mistake to think that anything that we might recognize as “culture” is easily made compatible with anything that the gospel might recognize as “Christ.” It is the system that creates the problems. That system may be able to be cataloged by an ethnologist or be a much more subtly intuitive “world view” (Weltanschauung). The Jesus Christ of the gospel is not an instance of either of these. If anything, he is the disrupter of such things. I am more and more convinced that the key that unlocks this locked door is St. Paul’s distinction between “flesh” and “spirit.” The former proceeds from the past through the present in order to make a future as a consequence. The latter enters the present and the past to gather them into a future as an eschatos.
So, the question is, how do we then live? And the answer is, we live wisely, as a serpents who understand the ways of the flesh, the extrapolable processes that again and again precede relatively predictable ends. We plan accordingly, recognizing the complications described by chaos theory, which are not wrongly tagged “luck,” and expect abundant harvests some years and disastrous yields others. We build granaries and we can and freeze. We scrape and save. That is, we are good worker ants.
But since the end of the world is manifest in the uncannily resurrected body of Jesus, we would be wise to attend to extrapolable processes as though they were not extrapolable, to weep, as though we wept not, rejoice, as though we rejoiced not, buy, as though we possessed not, use what falls into our hands, as though it were not even loaned to us, in no way ours to use or abuse according even to our best plans and schemes.
That is, the way to live where the present evil age has been shaken to its core by the age to come, is to pray, and to pray always with the benediction “nevertheless, not as I will, but your will be done!” And then to abide.