No Crumbling Crown, Part II

My last post was something of a thought experiment, a foray into what might be in the next 50 years. That was a very short hop away from this Church Relevance article. It was an interesting thought experiment but I wonder if there really is any projectability (that's baseball talk) in this world.

This world is not baseball. There aren't really the same tidy rules and contexts that there are in baseball.

Who knows if there isn't a Hitler in a Minneapolis school dreaming of hate crimes on an unprecedented scale? Or what if there's a St. Francis or Mother Teresa in Lebanon or Bangkok? These things can't be planned for or anticipated. In a very general sense, someone like that will arise but who knows where or when and to what impact?

Does it really matter?

We may not have a steady-fixed set of rules with a large sample size that consists of similar events but that's not to say we don't have any kind of history at all. From the Reformed tradition, we do have a very tangible teleology in redemptive history.

What is redemptive history? Redemptive history is quite simply, a belief in God being the principle actor throughout history and guiding it towards a specific end, that of ultimate redemption. To make it easier to understand, this is what appears to be a MS-Paint image that I found on Google image search.

I wonder if Christianity in its post-modern trendiness has begun to trend away from its teleological perspectives. American tent-revival Christianity ostensibly adheres to a sort of redemptive futurity in its religion/belief as life raft and escape themes. God is the savior of the world and you better get on his good side while the getting is good.

Recent trends in Christianity seem to move in another direction. I'm not sure if I can even come up with a witty line to encapsulate it at all. It defies encapsulation and reduction. (I'm such a good post-modern aren't I?) With such an emphasis on missions of mercy, diversity, reconciliation I wonder if there is some unspoken belief in God not coming back in the future. Of course, I also believe that a good deal of this emphasis stems from an accepting of social responsibility (and possibly Western hubris?) but I legitimately wonder if there is an eschatological aspect to this focus. Are we the new saviors of the world? I wonder what extent we are instruments and to what extent actors? More importantly, to what extent should we consider ourselves as such...