Ours is a world with no shortage of injustice. All too often Christian churches have had a hand in fomenting and preserving it, though we’re hardly alone. It’s a problem endemic to the human condition. Those historically enacted injustices are problem enough, but I want to look beyond them and focus elsewhere. I think that most Christians — most people in general — are acting in good faith and do not wish to harm or oppress others. When faced with other human beings, we wouldn’t want to hurt them. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but most of the injustices of the world are not likely the result of anyone directly and specifically acting to make anyone else’s life worse.
For all that, though, we are still accountable and hold responsibility for the evils and injustices of the world. Here I want to offer an immediate qualification: what has happened in the past is nothing over which you or I or anyone but our forebears who actually did what happened in the past have control. And, for that reason, we are not responsible for those things. However, we do indeed live in the present, where we do have some measure of control and certainly have agency. We are responsible for what we do today with what has come to us because of what our forebears have done in the past.
Thus, white people who protest in the face of America’s long history of racialized oppression that they’ve never owned slaves, nor denied anyone civil rights, nor engaged in redlining, or police brutality, or mass incarceration have a point, up to a point. “White guilt” is a distraction, as if feeling bad for the past has any actual effect on the present or the future. However, if white people stop there and conclude that they bear no responsibility for redressing these historic injustices and evils, they also miss the point, shirk their responsibility, and become guilty for their complicity in injustices that persist.
The wonderful and terrible thing about being human is that we’re all so thoroughly interconnected that what affects one of us can indeed affect us all. The entire logic of Christian salvation turns upon this. Christ comes among us, lives, dies, rises again, ascends to the Father’s right hand, and in so doing saves the rest of us. We tend to love these thoughts of human solidarity when it benefits us, but we tend to back away when we consider the ways it implicates us in injustices in which we have no direct role.
Readers of Covenant are probably already aware of Advent’s eschatological cast. We “know better” than to confuse this preparatory period with the “Christmas season” that’s been raging among our neighbors since at least the end of October. We know that the themes of Christ’s nativity don’t really show up in any of Advent’s liturgies — except for a glancing reference to Christ “coming among us in great humility” in the collect for the first Sunday of Advent (Book of Common Prayer, 211). Catholic readers will find the first reference to the Nativity in the collect for the fourth Sunday of Advent. The principal coming of Christ to which we look during this season is on “the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead” (BCP, 211). We begin the season with Jesus’ admonition to keep ourselves alert and watchful, before moving to the prophetic ministry of John the Baptist, ultimately finding ourselves hearing of the Annunciation, but only after an itinerary of warning.
There are several lessons to learn from the eschatological dimension of the season (and the Christian faith more generally). A key lesson is to maintain a certain distance between every social and political order and anything that we might do and the goal of our lives and creation. This helps us avoid the Pelagian temptation to try building the kingdom of God. It will come not as the result of our efforts, but by God’s gracious intervention at the last day. There will be no final solution to the problems of the human family within history’s bounds. (And I’ve chosen that evocative phrase deliberately, as a reminder that when human beings attempt to engineer a perfect society, it tends to go hideously wrong.)
It also provokes us to hope and a fruitful tension in our outlooks. As we survey the world with all its horrors and injustices, we are reminded that the end is not yet here. This is not God’s intention for us, nor will things be this way forever. One day, all world’s injustices will be rectified. One day, all wrongs will be righted. In the end, all shall be well. And if all is not well, we can be confident that it’s not the end.
If we stop there, however, we will have missed yet another crucial lesson. All too often, the hope of eschatological resolution of history’s ills has led to quietism and acquiescence to the status quo. The idea that enslaved peoples need not seek their freedom, because ultimately their souls will be saved and the joys of heaven will be theirs, as but one example. Such an eschatology invites Marx’s assessment that religion is the opium of the masses. (And the next sentence breathes a certain compassion that might temper a bit of our reception of Marx’s statement: “It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions.”)
The message of Advent is not simply “lift up your heads and keep hope burning,” but rather “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand,” and “bear fruits in keeping with repentance.” The eschatological dimension of the season is a call to conversion and a call to action. No, we will never construct the kingdom on this earth. No, we will never eradicate all injustice. But we will be judged, and judged by the standards of the kingdom, by the way we and our societies treat those who are most vulnerable. (And, unfortunately, that phrase tends to be appealed to in very reductionist and self-servingly selective ways.)
Advent reminds us where all this is headed. It invites us to journey along the way to the best of our ability, even as we recognize that we will never reach the goal — instead, the goal will come to us. Yet, as we prepare, we prepare for judgment. Of course, in this mortal life, we see as in a glass dimly. Many of our moral convictions will prove to have been errant. There is only one who judges in perfect justice. Yet that does not excuse us from aligning ourselves to the best of our ability with the standard of justice revealed in the life and ministry, death, and resurrection of the one whose coming we await.
Eugene R. Schlesinger, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. He is the author of several books, including Salvation in Henri de Lubac: Divine Grace, Human Nature, and the Mystery of the Cross (Notre Dame, 2023). Schlesinger served as Editor of Covenant, 2019-2024.