The Chaos of History and the God Who Redeems

There’s a saying in Vietnam that goes something like this: “We fought the French and now we’re friends. We fought the Americans and now we’re friends. But our war with China will never end.” The Vietnamese and Chinese have been locked in a centuries-long conflict, which last flared into actual combat during the brief but bloody Chinese invasion of northern Vietnam in 1979 (and a few border skirmishes after that).

Ironically, both nations are governed by at least nominally communist governments. Per Marxist thought, history, which is governed by economic laws as ironclad as natural laws, will unfold through a series of class conflicts and ultimately result in a classless society that shares the fruits of its production equally. But history, it seems, can run aground on the shoals of political and cultural conflict, even between people otherwise ideologically aligned.

As conflicts become entrenched over decades and centuries of mutual violence, they enter the territory of intractability. There are no clear solutions and not much hope of reaching a solution any time soon. Mercifully, even intractable conflicts can stabilize into extended non-violence (e.g., Northern Ireland). Over the last few years, there was growing hope that the world’s most intractable conflict, that between Israel and Palestine, was slowly heading in a similar direction.

All such hope was dashed on Saturday, October 7. Hamas perpetrated unspeakable crimes against Israeli civilians, specifically targeting women, children (including infants) and the aged. Israel’s subsequent military response has killed or injured thousands of Palestinian civilians in the densely-populated Gaza Strip. The war threatens to escalate at any moment, should Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon decide to intervene.

Whatever the outcome of this war, no one is hopeful that it will resolve the broader conflict. The historical, cultural, legal and religious issues will remain knotty, and the military situation tense. By all appearances, the world’s least resolvable conflict will remain so for decades to come.

For those of us who have the brain space and inclination to think about them, these unsolvable political and social problems eventually force us to critically examine our assumptions about history and how it unfolds. The usual platitudes about finding our common humanity or choosing “deed before creed” ring hollow; it’s time to dig deeper.

One approach is to deny that history has a telos. We are here due to blind, natural forces that have equipped us with powerful but flawed cognitive equipment. To quote the hip-hop artist Propaganda, on this view “human behavior is just what protoplasm does at this temperature.” Our evolutionary inheritance has made us prone to tribalism and strife, similar to the behavior of chimpanzees. Wars and genocides are therefore tragic, but not surprising. There’s no point in asking the heavens why this or that thing has happened. If we are to survive and thrive as a species, we must somehow overcome our natural limitations and solve our own problems.

This first approach has the advantage of metaphysical simplicity, but it places our hopes for the future squarely on our own shoulders. On certain days, this is a depressing prospect to say the least. Perhaps that is why other thinkers, beginning with Hegel, have proposed that reality itself is structured in such a way that history is progressing towards a reasonably happy telos. Marx, adapting Hegel’s thought, found the engine of history in purely material economic forces that can be analyzed scientifically, and that will inevitably lead to a global classless society and therefore the end of conflict.

Things didn’t work out. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyuma proposed the “end of history” in the sense that almost all nations would eventually adopt some form of liberal, capitalist democracy. Such a world would not be a utopia, exactly, but it would presumably be a far more peaceful and free one.

Even if the universe is ultimately on our side, however, history has stubbornly refused to end. Hegel’s Prussia, the rational modern nation-state at the terminus of the historical process, is long gone. So is the Soviet Union, while China and Vietnam have largely adopted market economies. An increasingly large percentage of humanity appears uninterested in Fukuyuma’s proposal. There isn’t much cause to hope that the next big ideology will have more staying power.

Yet others maintain that a benevolent God is guiding history to a good end, and that he will eventually bring about perfect justice even if we cannot currently imagine what that would even look like. Even our worst conflicts, the result of fallen human nature, somehow fit into the divine plan, and he will solve what is currently intractable.

On the surface, such an approach to history seems easily dismissible as wish-fulfillment, not least because religion is frequently an ingredient in violent conflict, as in the current war raging in the Middle East. Confidently detecting God’s hand in human history risks dehumanizing the people who (allegedly) get in his way. Some variation of the old Crusader slogan, Deus Vult, has justified countless wars and pogroms. Conversely, retreating from fitting this or that specific event into the Master Plan into a general account of providence feels unsatisfying: “God’s working all this together for good. Just trust me.”

But Christianity, at least, offers hope in a way that takes the chaos of human history seriously. The gospel holds that God himself, in his incarnation in Jesus, entered history and thereby subjected himself precisely to the kind of complex, intractable problems we experience now. His experience was one of life in an occupied nation that could neither accept nor successfully resist Roman rule. He eventually found himself crushed, like tens of thousands before and after him, by imperial power. The cross signifies that our hopes are nothing to the prevailing realities of the world.

But the resurrection of Jesus signifies that the prevailing realities of the world are nothing to God. Jesus has overcome the world, so that we can live in the world — in all of its complexities, atrocities and ambiguities — with hope. The cross shows that we cannot understand what is happening in human history in real time — Jesus’ disciples, after all, fled from it in terror. The resurrection shows that God has nonetheless committed himself to human history, promising to renew all things in the risen Christ. Hope is therefore not willful blindness in the face of terrifying and inscrutable events.

Moreover, resurrection means that if we pick a side, we have the ability to steadfastly refuse to dehumanize the other. It means that we can grieve, vent, be confused or scared, donate, advocate and pray for the peace of Jerusalem (and all of its inhabitants) against a background of confident expectation in the future. We, thank God, do not have the final word. He does.