Is it that God orders history or that God’s history orders us? This question assumes that there is a God, first of all, and that this God is interested in the events of the shared human experience. I guess my mind begins there because most of what lies outside of these assumptions is a God whom I am uninterested in. It is the god of the dualists that see the scared as something devoid of the simple. It is the god of deism that kick started this place but has no responsibility for it. But a God that is responsible for the world and in some relational way is connected to it’s history is a God I can get anger with. It is a God I can remind and engage and be loved by.
I got interested in history in high school and started college thinking I would study it and even teach it. The courses I found most interesting were the ones that dealt with the ancients. It was so interesting to see how the things we have in some ways ‘progressed’ from are still in some ways present to a greater degree here and now. The modern parallel for any war or social injustice needs no translation for our time. And so when I think of God relating to world history I get frustrated because God is suppose to be progressive and learn from mistakes and get with the program of redemption and justice and love-in God’s world. But I am not always sure it is God behind the events of my day or all of history for that matter. Trusting there is a God frees me to trust that God claims history unashamed of what people think of him or her. But if this God is relational-in the sense that he allows choice (which is the stuff of love) maybe history is that sphere or dimension where we reorder life in a response to a God who wants to reorder history beginning with us…
I think this is the business of the cross of Jesus. It split world history, not in the sense that all of history was some how altered but it was God’s definitive NO to the way world history has cycled. It was the definitive YES to a subversive, just, and loving community that dances out the rhythms of an alternate history in synced with the eternal lines of the heavens that were making their way into the soil of lived history. Shoot… I think this means that the God I believe in invites me to live better and love with a kind of abandonment that is often unfound in our day. I think this God invites me to see history not as simple happenings that make up time but as moments to enact a new kind of momentum narrated by the way of Jesus.
