re MDDM 35 Christ and History

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Samuel Moyer wrote:

> Rev C: p 75 (I think)
> 
>  History is the Dance of our Hunt for Christ, and how we have far'd.  If it
> is undeniably so that he rose from the Dead, then the Event is taken into
> History, and History is redeem'd from the service of Darkeness, - with all
> the secular Consquences, flowing from that one Event, design'd and will'd to
> occur.
> 
> Doesn't this imply, I am asking, that Rev C. believes history to be linear
> and predetermined?

Great passage, and very relevant indeed. "History is the Dance of our
Hunt for Christ" is a strangely beautiful metaphor. "Dance" does not
sound too linear, but at least it is a predetermined affair. A hunt may
be perceived as a linear, even teleological affair - Ahab's hunt for
Moby Dick certainly is. 

But does Cherrycoke believe in the factual veracity of the resurrection
and thus see history as a linear and teleological process? This is the
important question. His phrasing is dubious, no? If my English does not
fail me, the "if" at the beginning of the relevant sentence implies that
he is making a subjunctive statement, talking about a possibility, while
the use of "is" instead of "was" implies that the statement is in the
indicative, i.e. that Cherrycoke takes the factuality of bodily
resurrection for granted. Elsewhere RC tells us that "Doubt is of the
Essence of Christ", so I am inclined to take his statement here as
expression of a possibility.

The possibility is that Christ's bodily resurrection is a fact. Then,
and only then, history would be provided with an origin and a goal, it
would be linear and teleological, a single chain of cause and effect, an
event from which all the secular consequences flow, "design'd and willed
to occur". History would have a sense and a reason, and all secular
events - "including ev'ry Crusade, Inquisition, Sectarian War, the
millions of lives, the seas of blood", in a broader sense also
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Wounded Creek, September 11, to add just a few
random examples - would be redeemed by the grand scheme (the ideology of
Manifest Destiny is, of course, one of the shapes Christian teleology
has assumed in the course of history).

In V. Fausto tells us something else, and I believe, or like to believe,
that Cherrycoke here also is talking about just one possibility: the
possibility of history flowing from a single source, a single authority,
moving towards a specified goal - and that, at least in this passage, he
is not sure whether this is the case. In the excerpt from "Christ and
History", though, he seems to oppose that point of view. Torn between
his duty as a Reverend and his experience as a human being? Is Christ
either the source and telos of history or is he ahistorical?

By the way, in the excerpt from "Christ and History" Cherrycoke tells us
that History is not restricted to facts, a statement he contradicts here
when he states that only if the resurrection was a fact it would enter
history. 

Just a few random, not necessarily coherent thoughts,
Thomas