HOPE IN A TIME OF DISINTEGRATION
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.H. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
The poem, alas, is overused. We always seem to be entering a new Yeatsian era. And when have not the lines, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity” been true? And yet, in this present moment things do seem to be going awry in spectacular fashion. The era of the American empire is coming to a close. The world as we have known it, the world in which we grew up, a world we assumed would always be here, the pax Americana, is fast slipping away. There seems to be no retrieving it.
Some have suggested that we have come to our Suez moment—the moment when it becomes apparent to all that the empire can no longer impose its will on others. In 1956, within my own memory, the old colonial powers, Britain and France, tried and failed to oust Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, and seize control of the Suez Canal. They failed. Now, just 70 years later, an ill-begotten American president in a moment of hubris tried to humble Iran. To date, he has succeeded only in humbling himself and, with him, the image of American power. The world will not be the same.
This may not be entirely a bad thing. In his bumbling and ignorant way, Donald Trump has exposed the rot at the core of America. We have too long traded on ignorance and arrogance. A reckoning is at hand. What the world will look like post-Trump is not yet clear, but in it America will play a different and perhaps lesser role. But in our new role, we may also rediscover the values that made us America in the first place.
What gets less play is the second stanza of the Yeats poem, which begins: “Surely some revelation is at hand.” It’s called, after all, “The Second Coming.” Yeats seems to have been quite unnerved by the prospect of what was coming next. “What rough beast,” he asks, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” No way to tell what our “rough beast” will bring, but such times in which the world is remade can be times of hope and renewal. We remember the heady days after the fall of the Soviet empire when we dreamed of a new and better world. Perhaps this time, with the fall of the American empire, we can dream again. I offer this not as prediction but as possibility.
I did not mean to write quite so long about politics—it’s not what I do—even though the political disasters of our time fill our everyday news. I meant to talk about something adjacent to the fall of the American empire, adjacent but not the same, the fall of what might be called “the Christian consensus”—the form of the faith that has dominated the church in the West and, particularly, in America for centuries. No Suez moment just yet, unless we take Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth’s public imposition of his angry and militant Christianity as such. Or Donald Trump’s Easter message on social media, threatening to destroy Iranian civilization. Unless the sheer ugliness of that form of faith at last exposes the hatred the fuels that kind of evangelicalism.
But it’s not just Hegseth and his failed faith that convinces me that something is stirring, that we need a new way of thinking about Christianity; it’s also N.T. Wright. In his recent bestselling book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (HarperOne, 2025), Wright opens by dismissing two ideas long central to the Christian consensus: the soul as that part of us that survives death and heaven as the place where souls ultimately go.
Neither of these theological notions is biblical, Wright says, correctly. The notion of the soul we carry around in churches is mostly Platonic, and the idea of heaven as the ultimate abode for humans gets the biblical direction entirely wrong. In biblical thought, it’s not that we fly away to heaven but rather that God takes up residence on earth. “Behold,” says the Revelation of John, “God’s tabernacle is where humans are; God will tabernacle with them. . .” (21:3). The destiny is earth, not heaven. And all this from N.T. Wright, beloved among many evangelicals.
Take these theological constructs away—souls and heaven—and much of evangelical theology falls apart. The engine that has driven evangelical churches for years is “saving souls.” What will faith look like if earth and not heaven is home not just for us but for God.
Or, if N.T. Wright is not your thing, how about David Bentley Hart. Today, as I write this, the New York Times published an interview with Hart. In the interview, he says what I and many others have been saying, that the God of the evangelical consensus (what often passes for Reformed theology) is not the God anyone should worship.
Christian history has been a constant struggle between two fundamentally irreconcilable pictures of God. One is based on the terms of Christ’s public ministry and the notion of a loving father from whom children can ask and expect to receive all real blessings and who loves the poor and the ptōchoi — the downtrodden, the forgotten, the rejected — and comes to save.
Then there’s the other language of the God who elects a particular portion of humanity for himself, who is willing to condemn or at least to allow souls to go to hell for an eternity of suffering for the failure to understand what they should be doing or what they should believe.
This struggle has been constant throughout Christian history. The most monstrous pictures of God come from the Christian tradition just as the most radiant images of God come from what Christians believe.
With this in mind, Hart adds:
The institution of the church, to my mind, has been a 50-50 phenomenon, as evil as good, as Christian as non-Christian. In itself, it is not Christianity. In fact, what we call Christianity in itself is not Christianity. That’s just a blanket term we use for anyone who makes even an ostensible claim to loyalty to Christ.
The ecclesiastical ground is shifting. We seem to be at the end of an era, the last gasp of what could perhaps be called the Reformation order or, perhaps, the Protestant consensus. It’s not yet clear what will come next. We live in a time both of endings and of possibilities, of a coming apart of what was and the first suggestions of what may be coming together. We don’t yet know what “rough beast . . . slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
There have been other such times. History has a way of helping us to see our times more clearly. I come to this fresh off reading a brilliant new book by Hindy Najman, Spiritual Vitality: Rethinking Philology and Hermeneutics (2024). Najman is the Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford University—the first woman and first Jew to be appointed to that long prestigious chair. For my Michigan readers, I note that she grew up in Detroit and taught at Notre Dame, Toronto, and Yale, before her appointment to Oxford.
In Spiritual Vitality, Najman addresses the Second Temple era in Jewish history, from roughly 516 BCE (the completion of the second temple in Jerusalem) to 70 CE (the Roman destruction of the temple). In my seminary education we called this era “the intertestamental period,” the period between the Old and New Testaments. We thought that there was nothing much going on. In our training, we skipped from the Old Testament, which we erroneously regarded as predominately finished by exilic times, to the New Testament. What came between the prophets of Israel and the apostles didn’t matter much to us in the Reformed faith.
Our approach to this era was informed in part by early modern biblical studies, although we were mostly unaware of this, especially in Germany, which regarded the Second Temple period as spätjudentum, “Late Judaism,” a period when the biblical prophetic movement had lost its impetus, and Judaism became a legalistic, priestly religion. This construction of biblical history was not only antisemitic, what is now called supersessionism—the idea that Christian grace replaces Jewish law—but anticatholic with its denigration of priests.
This entire historical and theological construction is wrong. The Second Temple period is not “intertestamental.” At that time neither testament existed. What came to be the Old Testament was still under construction. Nor was it, as Najman amply points out, spätjudentum, a diminished form of Old Testament religion. It was a time of theological ferment, as the faith of ancient Israel emerged into Hellenistic culture. A lively cultural and religious conversation was taking place. And, last it was not literarily barren. Scriptures were being written and rewritten. New ways of interpretation were advanced. It was, as Najman argues, a time of great theological vitality.
The Dead Sea Scrolls give us a window into this era. We have tended to write off the scrolls (except where they provide early biblical texts) as sectarian Judaism. In doing so, we have supposed that there was a mainstream Judaism that came down to the New Testament era from the time of the kingdom of Israel, thus permitting us to marginalize the voices we have labelled as sectarian. The book of Jubilees, to take one example, may on this account interest scholars but the rest of us can safely ignore it. It’s not part of the theological line in which we stand. But to sort the writings of this period into orthodox and sectarian is to impose a later standard on this era. Better, Najman argues, to see what was happening from the vantage of the time itself, looking forward, not backward.
The priests and teachers of the era took what had come down to them, scriptures and traditions, and adapted them for a new era. To take one example, the books of Enoch, among the earliest of these writings, take a piece of tradition, the strange story in Genesis 6:1-4, and spin it to address the evil of their own age. We encounter in this literature an array of theological and religious possibilities coming out of the old faith. Some of these possibilities were eventually abandoned; others stuck. Out of the ferment came both rabbinic Judaism and, later, Christianity. It was a time of spiritual vitality, when the biblical faith took a new turn. Or, rather, several new turns.
We might say the same of the first few centuries of Christianity. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls for the Hellenistic period, there are for this formative period relatively new documents, the scrolls discovered in the Egyptian desert at Nag Hammadi. These scrolls have been marginalized by scholars wanting to maintain the idea of an original orthodoxy. But they represent, as do the variety of Hellenistic writings, the ferment of the period, when the church was sorting out what belonged to the faith and what didn’t. Contrary to what many of us have been taught, it was a time of great creativity. Compare, for example, the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas with the roughly contemporaneous Gospel of John. Both are rewritings of the Jesus tradition, ways of construing who Jesus was and is. Both deserve to be read.
Our impulse, taught to us by a long line of people intent on sorting right thinking (orthodoxy) from wrong thinking (heresy), is always to sort and discard: that’s true gospel, we say, hang on to that, and that over there is heresy, get rid of that. But as Najman teaches us for Hellenistic Judaism, it’s better to see these as possibilities, to think through them, to allow ourselves to see the breadth of the faith in every era, to not succumb to the temptation to shut down ways of thinking that may still have something to teach us.
And what if, as I suggested above, we live in an era like the Hellenistic age, an era in which the old consensus is breaking down, and we have the task of working toward new ways to see and understand the faith? Then we need not only to value tradition as it has come to us but to lean into the future, to find new ways to understand and present the old faith. We need to be about the tasks of writing and rewriting the faith.
I believe us to be in such a time. The long-held Protestant consensus is fast falling apart. The way that many of us have understood the faith no longer works in the way it once did. But this is not a time to despair. It can be, surely will be, a time of renewal.
I propose that we think about this together. In God’s Homecoming, N.T. Wright attempts to retell the story of the gospel, asking the question: what is the Christian message about, after all? His retelling strikes me as still far too much embedded in old ways of thinking, but never mind that. It’s what he is trying to do that matters. I’ve been entertaining doing something of the same: outlining how we might reconstrue our faith, honoring both tradition and the present context. How should we begin? In my next post, I’ll have a few suggestions. I would be glad for yours.
Clay