Being Human in the Coming Tribulation

American Christianity has offered Christians a seamless package of family, work, national culture, and church as a response to God’s calling to be human. Unfortunately the positive value of this American version Christendom is lost when American Christianity becomes Americana Christianity. Small wonder we have so regularly dehumanized those who cannot participate in the whole package.

But is the Americana Christian vision of what it means to be human that found in scripture? 

The foundation of the Biblical narrative occurs in the Garden when God, knowing that a person should not be alone, creates of the one, two and commands them to be fruitful and multiple. 

Relieved of the kind of false specificity that leads to perversions like asserting a literal seven day creation we see in this story almost all we need to know about what it means to be human. It begins a narrative arc that will carry us to the so-called summary of the law. “Love the Lord you God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” 

What Jesus does by calling on the law, the primal law of Israel, is to place the teaching of the human vocation at the center of community life. The purpose of the church, like the purpose of Israel, is to call, lead, and form people into their true humanity. Worship, preaching, teaching, fellowship are all means to this end. 

Put in other words the freedom won by Christ for us on the Cross is the freedom to be human for God and one another, and thus to be human at all. 

The Church can’t be located with a GPS any more than the Garden of Eden. We look instead for where two or more (for you cannot be fully human in isolation) are gathered in Jesus' name, and thus gather in the freedom to be human for one another won and acknowledged as the work of Jesus the Christ.

Recovering this mission will become critical in the future. 

In the 19th and early 20th century Americans fell under the marketing spell of promoters of the "Christian family,” a concept created to promote US business interests. It has led to our absurd liturgical celebrations of holidays created by marketing and greeting card manufacturers rather than God’s history with humankind. 

In Americana Christianity a particular kind of family life was brought into the church as essential to the human vocation, diminishing the distinctive witness of the church. Now for most Americans, especially the post-boomers, the family looks less like Norman Rockwell and more like Modern Family with all its transience and variation. As a basis for pursuing the human vocation the old model of the American family has a distinctly sandy feel, while there is increasing solidity in fictive families built around bars, coffee shops, social causes and leisure time activities.  

In the 20th century Christians in the United States were coaxed into associating their citizenship with their Christian identity. A combination of business interests fearful of communism and their Christian allies fearful of modernist atheism created out of whole cloth the idea of a “Judeo-Christian” nation. American flags were planted in churches and national identity and its associated idolatry became part and parcel of the human vocation, even when there was (rarely) the recognition of other national identities. In Americana Christianity we celebrate nationalistic holidays as solemnly and robustly as Christmas and Easter, falsely injecting our nation into the story of salvation.

Among the post-boomer generation the association of nationalism with the human vocation is breaking down. The cynical manipulation of patriotism to support everything from pointless wars to gun ownership, while increasingly disassociating it from human rights, is clearly making it harder for some to join in the celebration. Coupled with increasing experiences of national and ethnic diversity post-boomers, and indeed all who have a growing experience of the larger world find it hard to see what Americana has to do with being fully human. 

And work? Until recently most Americans had a sense of vocation, of calling into an identity, that came through their work. Whether they worked in agriculture, factories, or professions work structured their time, gave them their most consistent relationships outside the family, provided a sense of place in the larger society, and even socialized them into a set of ethical standards. Being called, having a vocation, meant being called to work. This was a development both amenable to and resulting from early Protestant theology that saw in economic productivity a sign of God’s favor among the elect and thus and important outworking of what it means to be human. 

Those same Christians saw, and continue to see being unemployed, being idle, as a failure to be human. 

The emergence of an economy in which people hold many different jobs over a lifetime is rapidly undermining the idea that professional identity can be a fundamental part of having a human identity. For more and more Americans work no longer provides a sense of vocation, but merely a way to earn an income. 

More challenging, in the future economic productivity will be a less and less available option to Americans. Current low unemployment is an anomaly created by a combination of rising demand for personal services and families in which every potential worker must be employed at minimum wage to survive. In the future artificial intelligence and further mechanization will begin to eliminate jobs more quickly than they can be replaced. Indeed new businesses will be built around machines rather than employees. A church that assumes that being unemployed or idle is a failure to fulfill the human vocation will find itself dehumanizing the majority of its members. 

Finally with the emergence of post-denominationalism the church in practice is revealed for what too many churches have always been; social organizations built around neighborhood, social class, culture, entertainment, and services provided.  When a congregation fails in any of these areas, by becoming more diverse or less attentive its attendees (member is too strong a word) simply move on or more likely move out.  

And why not? If a church isn't in some way restoring people to their essential human vocation it has become irrelevant and imminently replaceable. 

These four changes I’ve mentioned; rapidly evolving family structures and their breakdown, the end of nationalism as a positive force in creating human heartedness, the growing disconnect between economic productivity and being human, and the church devolved into service provider and entertainer are leading to a coming tribulation that will exact a toll on every person whose humanity has been lost to sin and no longer hears from the church the voice of the gospel. 

As family, national identity, profession, and even church membership as sources of humanity dissolve under the pressures of contemporary culture only a church wholeheartedly dedicated to the human vocation of loving God and neighbor will be able to rescue the perishing and care for dying.  

We can do it of course, and it is being done wherever we let go our reliance on Americana  Christianity and return to reliance on Christ.