Confusion of Humanity, Reign of God

As everyone now knows, 2016 has been dubbed the year of the “Flight 93 Election” by an anonymous writer with a Latin pseudonym. The piece in the Claremont Review of Books is a frontal assault on conservative intellectuals and an “it’s worth a try” defense of Trumpism.

As he writes, “conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege.” If conservatives believed this, then they would conclude “we are headed off a cliff.”

Publius Decius Mus doesn’t think conservatives really believe it, because, he claims, they keep offering old solutions that can’t possibly fix our problems. Will Trumpism help? It’s hard to see how. Publius thinks Trump is right about immigration, trade and war, but if we are headed to a cliff then it’s hard to see how adopting new policies—no matter how prudent—are adequate to the task.

What’s most revealing about the article, though, is its thoroughgoing secularism. If Publius believes we are indeed headed for a cliff, mightn’t he invoke more-than-human assistance? Mightn’t there be a hint or two of Solzhenitsyn’s “we have forgotten God” or Heidegger’s “only a god can save us”? There isn’t. There’s not a religious syllable in the article. Publius thinks 2016 reveals the poverty of conservative elites. His solution is a secular conservatism, conservatism-without-God, which is beyond poverty.

Publius is right that the world seems to be spinning out of control in so many ways that even the spin is spinning. Today, if not always, events great and small seem to exhibit the confusion of humanity (confusio hominum, in the Latin of the theologians). Karl Barth says that we are often “tempted to wonder whether after all the confusio hominum, perhaps against the background of what is if possible an even more dreadful cosmic disorder, is not merely the reality but the inner truth of world-occurrence.” Perhaps confusion is “the final word in the matter” (Church Dogmatics, IV.3.2, 693).

Nobody’s piloting this plane, we’re on Flight 93, and we’ve got to rush to cockpit to take over the controls before we crash.

Barth teaches us otherwise. Confusion can’t have the last word. In confusion, we “wander and collide and get confused” (695). The confusion of humanity seeks “nothing less than the negation of the good creation of God,” yet it cannot be true to its aims. The confusion of the world is always a mixture of the pursuit of God’s good creation in the very midst of its negation, a pursuit of good through negation. In confusion, we think that we can split the difference, “relativizing the one by the other, i.e., the good creation of God and therefore the creaturely reality elected and willed by Him on the one side, and its negation as rejected by God and therefore that which is intrinsically impossible on the other” (696).

To the confusion of man, Christianity opposes the providence of God: “the community of Jesus Christ has a very inadequate view of its Lord, the King of Israel who is also the King of the world, if it is not prepared to recognize that even world-occurrence outside takes place in His sphere and under His governance, or if it tries to imagine that in this occurrence we are concerned either with no God at all, or with another God, or with another will of the one God different from His gracious will demonstrated in Jesus Christ, and therefore with another kingdom on the left hand directed by God to another end and in another spirit” (686).

Even outside the church, “there can . . . be no question of the real sway of any principle independent of the God who acts and is revealed in Jesus Christ,” no independent human power, no fate, no other gods. In the midst of confusion, there is only “the one God who acts and declares Himself in Jesus Christ” and alone “rules and holds the scepter” (687).

God rules even in the midst of the confusion, and the good creation of the Creator cannot be extinguished: “it would be foolish to close our eyes to the glory of creation which is manifest—and terrifyingly so—even in the confusion of world history. It would be an act of blindness not to see it even here with open eyes. What is world history? Even in its obvious and dreadful confusion, it is also the ongoing history of the good creation of God which cannot be destroyed by any confusion of man.” In every age and circumstance, “there has always been also the laughter of children, the scent of flowers, and the song of birds” that “cannot be affected by any confusion with nothingness” (697-8).

Barth rejects any attempt to find some place from which to view the double reality of providence and confusion, some Archimedian point from which to survey and synthesize the whole. That would involve carving out a positive relation between providence and the confusio that drives toward nothing. It would involve an attempt to split the difference between God’s good creation and its negation; it would, in short, be another form of, an extension of, the confusio huminum. We don’t attempt a synthesis of thesis and antithesis, but rather receive the “third word” that comes to us in and as Christ.

Panic isn’t a solution to confusion, but just another expression of the confusio hominum. Yes, the world is just as bad as Publius says; or worse. But Barth reminds us that Christians are called not to despair or panic or synthesis. We’re called to respond in faith to the gospel that declares God’s intentions and accomplishments with respect to the confusion of world history: “What He wills, and has already achieved, is the unravelling of historical confusion” (695). Confusion is not the final word. Confusion will itself be confused and dispelled.