Francis Fukuyama's book The
End of History and the Last Man draws heavily on the above
authors to tell us that liberal democracy is the end point of political
development. He attributes the movement towards liberal democracy
to the equalitarian aspects of Christianity which proclaim that
all are equal in the Kingdom of God. However, following Hegel, he
argues that Christianity is the last great slave religion because
the freedom that adherents are called to is cancelled when they
bow their necks to an imaginary Lord who is none other than their
own projection. Furthermore, he argues, along with Nietzsche, that
the idea that all men are equal is a prejudice perpetrated by Christianity
and an expression of the assertion of the weak against the strong.
This has produced a fanaticism that strives to make all equal as
witnessed by the programs of political correctness. Christians are
thus the un-free compared to those liberated by the movements of
secular liberalism.
When one looks at contemporary Christianity we must admit that he has a
point. The strong emphasis on humility, of "giving oneself to
Christ" of the power that is perfected in weakness and of Jesus
giving himself up to death would suggest that this is a religion for the
weak who use their weakness by way of guilt and conscience to take the
high moral ground over the strong. Witness the almost knee-jerk response
of the church whenever the possibility of war occurs. Inspect any number
of Christian congregations and look for the intellectuals, scientists,
captains of industry and leaders of the community. By and large they will
not be there. It is often the case that the people who are in church are
the sentimental, the superstitious, the gullible and the uncritical. This
has led to Christian congregations being described as the ghetto of the
immature.
Witness also the social justice movement in the church that fanatically
pursues the equality of all men, women and children and the natural
progression of such an idea in all age worship, the transformation of
worship into Sunday school. In the absence of a more virile agenda,
committees spend time and money making sure that no minority is excluded
or offended. This leads to the mangling of ancient liturgies and texts so
as not to offend the feminists, access ramps when there are no wheelchair
worshippers and preaching that is careful of stirring the least passion or
taking a firm stand.
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From our observation of contemporary Christianity we may draw the
conclusion that Christianity is a slave religion that tells its adherents
that they are free while reducing them to intellectual dependence. The
question arises as to whether contemporary Christianity is a true picture
of the original or whether it has been hijacked and distorted by the
spirit of the times.
What does the Christian tradition say about equality? The key saying of
Paul that: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave
or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in
Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28) does not say that we are all equal but that
Christ has broken down all of the social, cultural and sexual barriers.
Indeed, his metaphor of the church as a body that is composed of different
parts (1Cor.12) emphasises not that we are all the same but that we are
all different. It is in this difference that we properly constitute the
church. It is the breakdown of the barriers between individuals in society
that sets the stage for liberal democracy. Being one in Christ Jesus
supercedes the authority of the master and destroys the stratification of
society into classes or casts. Such stratification is antagonistic to
liberal democracy and of economic activity. It is only after this move has
been made that meritocracy, that basic component of efficiency, may be
established.
In the gospels Jesus is seen eating and drinking with the tax
collectors and the prostitutes, the traitors and the morally unclean, much
to the disgust of the good and the religious. In doing so did he tell us
that the person who cheats his fellow citizens is equal to the law-abiding
and hard-working or did he mean to expose religious self-righteousness?
Similarly, when Matthew frames parables of the kingdom in terms of the
priority of the microi (little ones) does he invert social hierarchy
making the slaves into masters and the masters into slaves or does he
subvert the social hierarchy that keeps the sick and the poor in their
places? The saying that, in the kingdom, "the first shall be last and
the last first" obviously does not intend to bring about a kind of
dictatorship by the downtrodden. We have learned full well that such a
reversal of social position brings more evil than it replaces. Rather, the
saying subverts the dehumanizing tendency of cultures mired in privilege.
Christianity subverts dehumanising culture, whether that be religious,
civil or familiar culture, and as such has been the engine that drives
freedom movements. Hegel's criticism is that it engenders another kind of
slavery when the adherent "clings to Christ".
The accusation that Christianity is a slave religion begs the question
as to the origin of Christian freedom. If we are freed from the
bonds imposed by culture in the form of the family and the state
or the group only to come under tutelage to an all-powerful deity,
then Christian freedom evaporates. If this were so, and it is for
so many practicing Christians, then the pronouncement of Hegel is
correct.
However, there exist strong traditions in Judaism and Christianity that
release us from that kind of bondage. These traditions are centred
on the prohibition against any images of God whatsoever. We find
this in the prologue of the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:4,5) in Moses's
conversation with God before the burning bush in which the name
of God is given as "I am" (Exod 3:14). Not only can there
not be images of this God but there can also be no proper name for
Him. This is given visual expression in the design of the mercy
seat that occupies the top of the ark of the covenant (Ex. 25:22).
This seat is bracketed by the cherubim but consists of an empty
space.
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The imagery is duplicated in John's gospel in the tomb, in which two
angels bracket the space where Jesus had been laid (John 20:11,12). The
God of Christians and Jews is represented by an empty space. A similar
removal of God from the sensible world occurs in front of Elijah's cave in
which God exists only in sheer silence (1Kings:19:11,12) This means that
when Israel was called out of slavery in Egypt they did not simply
exchange one master for another. The agony of the desert was due to the
habits of slavery they brought with them and the apparent absence of their
God. In the New Testament, the exodus is a journey out of slavery to sin
and death or to the principalities and powers of the universe. As for
Israel, the transition was fraught with problems because radical freedom
is an uncomfortable thing. The theme of many of the NT epistles is similar
to the mumbling tradition in Exodus, it was all too easy for adherents to
fall back into slavery as does the church on the back foot in our time.
The strong traditions of iconoclasm in both the Old and New Testaments
ensure that the freedom of the Christian is not just a mask for religious
slavery.
There is a crucial distinction between revelation and ideology. I use
the term "revelation" to indicate those insights gained from
historical event rather than as a direct communication from a supernatural
God. Revelation thus consists in Israel and the Church reflecting on the
events of the past as any political historian may do. That is, this kind
of truth about what it is like to be human must be incarnated. It is only
in the fleshly history of Israel and of Jesus that ideology is avoided. It
is only when we are thus equipped that we can address the present and the
future. Prophecy is the forward-looking movement of revelation. All this
is to say that revelation is different from ideology because it has an
historical grounding. This is instructive when we come to discuss the
evolution of liberal democracy. Freedom in the Christian community is
grounded in the experience of Israel and the Church in history. However,
with the decline of the church and the absence of potent theology in our
educational institutions, this is turned into ideology, something that has
been severed from its ontological origins and now exists as an attractive
attitude. This is nowhere more apparent than in the spread of the idea of
human rights that has become foundational for liberal democracies.
John Locke, in his essay Second
Treatise of Civil Government [1690] derived the idea of rights,
not from the traditions of Israel and of the church but from natural
theology. Natural theology relies on a theology of creation that has God
create the physical world. Being God's creation, the physical world
demonstrates his handiwork and his laws. Thus we arrive at the idea of
natural law. Human rights are thence derived from this law as self evident
and needing no other warrant. Human beings are created free and possess
inalienable rights by the fact of their creation. This idea has become so
widespread that it is impossible to discuss issues of justice without it.
Paradoxically, although the idea of human rights is based on theism it
is profoundly atheistic in that it denies God's demand for justice.
Instead of understanding the wellbeing of human beings as vested in God,
the language of human rights makes it a property of the individual.
If we do not accept the premises of natural theology and the existence
of self-evident natural law, then human rights have no basis other than
ideology. Secular people, who have no faith or belief in God, continue to
chant the mantra of human rights with no understanding of their origin.
Indeed, the language of human rights has crippled ethical discussion
because the warrant for them is hidden: they rely on simple assertion to
carry the day. These assertions have grown from the original three, of
liberty, fraternity and the right to property, to include anything that
seems like a good thing in the councils of the United Nations. The
assertion of rights produces not community and cooperation but a jostling
for precedence among overlapping and conflicting claims. As Walker Percy
has pointed out, such language easily leads to convoluted ethical outcomes
as when the unborn or the old are killed because they have a right not to
live lives of senseless suffering.
Human rights also breed a dependent mentality. This has happened
because the original Judeo/Christian tradition about freedom has become
ideology, in theological terms it has become an idol and idols never
produce freedom and life but suffocation and death.
Fukuyama tells us that there will probably be no advance in political
systems beyond that of liberal democracy and thus he proclaims the end of
history. I must admit that I find his argument convincing. However, he is
ambivalent about the man who has to live in "post historical
times". This man lives in a time in which politics consists of
economic management. In liberal democracies there is little or no change
in the fundamental structure of government. There will therefore be no
revolutions, no sweeping aside of old regimes, or in Fukuyama's terms, no
history. This leaves the last man who lives in this time no outlet for
passion or what he terms "megalothymia" since all of the great
political questions have been resolved. With so many aspects of life being
taken over by the state, causes are pushed to the periphery of the
mainstream as in the animals rights movements or radical environmentalism
or directed towards the body as the proliferation of disease associations
attests. The thirst for justice is directed towards obtaining absolute
egalitarianism in gender issues, the disabled or of people of colour. The
passion for coalition formation is siphoned off into sport.
We are obviously not content to live as consumers and must set
ourselves artificial goals in order to convince ourselves that we are
alive. My problem with this is that there seems to be no more to say.
History has ended and from here on there will only be economic activity
and minor adjustments of distribution and equity. But it seems to me that
the individual life is absent from this. Fukuyama's last man is an
abstraction.
Despite the end of history and the continuation of liberal democracy
we still must live out our lives and confront our deaths. The old
joke about Hegel is pertinent here: he explained all things except
how we must get through the day. My recent reading of Walker Percy
underlines this. Our science is able to explain the macrocosmic
and the microcosmic but we find ourselves "left over".
We must still struggle with the mystery of our own lives. Stable
government may bring an end to war and revolution and establish
a soft welfare net but the journey towards God, discovered in the
ancient accounts and in our own lives must still be embarked upon.
This is why the end of history in liberal democracy may not be likened
to the end of history described so luridly and mysteriously in the
book of Revelation in which Christ becomes all in all.
Hegel located the event that signalled the end of history as the
battle of Jena in 1806 at which the basic principles of the liberal
democratic state were seen in their full form although not in their
universal application (we are not there yet). The church, on the
other hand, proclaims a different date and event, the crucifixion
of a wandering teacher by the Roman authorities in AD 30. This is
the hinge of history from which there is no turning back that directs
all events towards a culmination in the kingdom of God, that earthly
reality in which human freedom and justice and peace will be complete.
That would be a real end of history, not just the end of political
evolution. It shares with Hegel's end of history the continuing
tension of the now but not yet, of the end being seen in the present
in an incomplete form yet glimmering on the horizon to beckon us
on.
May we understand the establishment of liberal democracy as being a
part of the journey towards the Kingdom? But then why not see the
invention of penicillin or electrification or any number of technologies
as being a part of our progression towards the Kingdom? We could well
point to the materialism of Israel being the necessary precursor to
scientific thought in a similar way that we point to the egalitarian
content of Christianity being the precursor to the liberal democratic
state.
The parable of the ferment of the yeast is apt here. The yeast remains
invisible in the dough but produces the leavening that makes the bread
delicious. Just so the gospel ferments in culture to produce good things.
It is not there for itself but for the ferment that it produces.
So there is a way that we can see liberal democracy as a fruit of the
gospel, but it is not the gospel itself. As such it is not any kind of end
or telos. History or geography may still sweep Western culture away, even
end the species. We would be mistaken to identify our cozy position in
life with the kingdom. Such a conclusion would pre-empt the kingdom and
close the future. It would also strengthen the hubris of the West. The
establishment of liberal democracy does not end our waiting. For as John
says in his first letter:
Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been
revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like
him, for we will see him as he is.
(1John 3:2)
This is the arrow of history, this waiting and not knowing, this
leaning into an unknown history to reveal what we already know in part
that we will know in full.