‘From now on politics will be our religion’; so wrote Feuerbach, a little before Marx socialized God. And looking now at the emptiness created by industrial civilization, we can see how right he was. With the headlong progress of technology and the development of global civilization, there is a greater need than ever for a sense of purpose, the influence of the Spirit, a new marriage covenant between the human race and the earth. Our society seems to have no aim beyond unlimited economic growth. The Spirit is not spectacular, so the image-machines offer us ‘idols’ and ‘passions’, the slick presentation masking the absurdity of it all. The spiritual under-development of some combines with the material under-development of others to create the ‘third world’ in our shanty-towns.
So the rebellion on the part of many young people expresses two cravings which are complementary: the craving of some for meaning, and that of others for dignity. We hear a great deal about ‘changing your life’, and this happened in the demonstrations when those old enemies, the red flag and the black flag, at last joined forces, blindly foreshadowing, in their assertion of the unity of all and the uniqueness of each, the communion of the Trinity. The now-mythical revolution was the misdirected expression of a much deeper need. Do not misunderstand the saying, ‘everything is politics’; the key word is everything, and politics is the opium, if not of the people, at least of a younger generation and an intelligentsia who, in denying God, are seeking him.
It is therefore time for Christians to remember that the infrastructure of history is nothing other than the relationship between humanity and the living God. In history the human and divine are blended, the emphasis being sometimes on God, to the exclusion of humanity, and sometimes on humanity, to the exclusion of God. The meaning, the centre of history is in Christ, truly God and truly human, and consequently ‘maximum human’; its creative impulse is in the Spirit and our freedom.
The human race is not only the child of the earth and of history. It is also the image of God, called to become the adopted child of God, bearer of the Spirit, ‘god by grace’. The Cross has mortally wounded the pagan religions of the earth and the totalitarian regimes of history. The tension between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar is irreducible until the final transfiguration (which will bring with it the final overthrow of the devil); it points to that transfiguration and hastens its approach, opening the space of the Spirit in which the person, also irreducible, has room to move. And if Christendom has disappeared, it is certainly because it failed to recognize this tension and denied personal freedom. History, from the empty tomb onwards, cannot be closed in on itself; it is pervaded by the expectation of the Kingdom, where the earth and the suffering of humankind will be transfigured through the free communion of persons united to God.
That is why the early Christians refused to testify to the divinity of Caesar and asserted that Christ alone is divine, that only by life in him can human beings share in divinity. When there was no other way, they kept history open by martyrdom; the act by which the Christian, in the face of overweening power, enters utterly into the passion and resurrection of the Lord, consecrating earth and history with his blood, transforming them, despite everything, into offerings. The first Christians prayed for Caesar – even when Caesar’s name was Nero – and at the same time humbly asked him to tolerate their existence which would be, was already, a blessing to the Empire.
Whenever Caesar, as an individual or an institution, pretends to explain humankind entirely by history, he is demanding to be worshipped.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
