THERE WAS ONCE A YEAR CALLED 1989. It was exactly two hundred years after the first blood of the French Revolution and we were once again on the brink of a brave new world, a world to be made with our own hands and minds and hearts, a world in which it seemed anything was possible. If the king's head could fall then, so could the Berlin Wall now. And fall it did.
The fall of the Wall and all that it symbolised was astonishing. Yet the erosion of hope in the meantime has been, if anything, even more astonishing. Not just in Europe, where we have the disarray of the Western democracies and the floundering of the Eastern economies; where the Balkan states tear themselves apart demonically; where Germans of both East and West begin to regret that there ever was a reunification; where the dream of European union seems at times on the verge of collapse. But also in Asia, where the call for a new freedom was brutally suppressed in Beijing, where the cessation of hostilities in Cambodia remains dreadfully fragile and East Timor remains a running sore; in the Middle East, where the fate of Israel and Palestine remains so uncertain after all the euphoria of the peace-agreement; in Africa, where Operation Restore Hope is drawing to an embarrassed and seemingly hopeless conclusion in Somalia, where Rwanda has fast acquired apocalyptic status and where new uncertainties are beginning to appear in South Africa after the euphoria; in the Americas, where so amiable and apparently tranquil a country as Mexico is suddenly torn apart by a rash of political assassinations, and where the U.S.A faces two years of deep–seated political uncertainty at a time when the exact opposite is required. The New World Order begins to look chaotic.
In Europe, Christianity claimed a large part in the drama that came to its climax in 1989. It may be true, as some claim, that without Christianity there would never have been a Wall in the first place; but it is more evidently true that without Christianity the Wall would not have fallen when and how it did. If this is true, then Christianity must also play its part in the salvaging of hope now, and not just in Europe. If this is true of Christianity in general, then it is true in particular of Christian theology which finds a voice in a journal such as this The social function of Christian theology is always to serve hope, and never more so than in a moment such as the one in which we find ourselves.
When hope is so threatened, people will turn inevitably to magic and weird messiah–figures, as they have in a country like Russia. Nor is it totally coincidental that at the same time there is among some Christians a surge in supposed visionary experiences and a profusion of the pieties which these supposed visions spawn. These pieties can also have about them an apocalyptic tinge which is a response to a threatening situation where the heavens seem sealed. On the one hand, people want to tear the heavens open in the search for hope; but on the other hand they prefer to retire to a world of private piety because the public world seems so harsh.
Nor is it coincidental that we see at the same time a resurgence of the most brutal ideologies, such as fascism, the spectre of which the Western world had thought long gone. Here we find not the turn to magic but to violence as a way beyond the hopelessness. The violence may appear in the murder of immigrant workers in Germany or the desecration of Jewish cemeteries wherever; but it is also found closer to home where there is evidence of a growing tendency for the strong to abuse the weak – the adult to abuse the child, the man to abuse the woman, the rich to abuse the poor and so on.
In its service of hope, Christian theology believes in the
public: it is essentially public discourse which belongs not in the world of a some purely private piety but in the public forum of a journal such as this. In its service of hope, Christian theology believes in reason: it therefore sets itself resolutely against the delusions of magic or the illusions of ideology Christian theology may not command the field as it once did, at least in the West may not speak with a powerful voice which demands attention. Yet in shaping a public and reasonable discourse about the ways of God in the world Christian theology remains a powerful and necessary servant of hope, and never more so than in a moment such as this. Shorn of one kind of power, Christian theology may be able to speak better – more publicly and reasonably – of the Cross as the source of all human hope.
As the forces of alienation gather strength, the absolute need for
dialogue becomes more apparent, the need, that is, for public and reasonable conversation. This is why John Hilary Martin's offering in this issue is welcome and helpful, speaking as it does of our need in this country to listen to Aboriginal voices. Patricia Fox's article too speaks of the need to converse with Christian tradition, and to do so fully aware that very different voices sound in the conversation, some of which have not always been well heard.
In a situation where the crudest forms of unprincipled pragmatism beckon, the urgency of the moral question imposes itself – as Hayden Ramsay's reply to Brian Scarlett's article in the last issue makes clear. The dialogue rises and the moral question is posed not in a vacuum but from within an ancient tradition which finds its prime voice in the Bible. The articles of Charles Hill and Geoffrey Jenkins establish the base from which Christian theology rises. They point us to the biblical story. Hill also alerts us to need to listen anew to the voice of the Church Fathers who have not always featured high or fashionably on the theological agenda in recent times. Their hermeneutic may seem strange to us, but that may be the very reason why we would do well to listen to them at a time when our own hermeneutical uncertainties are everywhere apparent.
These are voices which sound from the edge, at least geographically. Not all the contributors are themselves from the Antipodes, but their work appears in the pages of a journal which comes from the Antipodes. It has been said that there is a peculiarly Antipodean innocence, born perhaps of the almost unnatural calm and prosperity of countries like Australia and New Zealand. Yet Christian innocence is more like a kind of second naiveté, found in those who have known the hopelessness and somehow moved beyond it. At the heart of Christian innocence there is a hope born always and only from hopelessness. If there are echoes of that hope in these pages, then Pacifica will have served its purpose well.
