The second chapter of Isaiah begins with one of those passages
that have become part of the language and culture of Western society. Preachers
and politicians echo its phrases even if sometimes they have no idea of where
they come from:
“and
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,and their spears into pruninghooks:
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.”
Here too, however, the focus is on Jerusalem. Isaiah’s dream
is that the Temple mount, “the mountain
of the LORD’s house”, will be exalted so that it becomes (figuratively, we
assume) the highest in the world. All the nations will stream to it,
acknowledging the God of Israel and ready to learn his ways. In this way God
will become the judge and arbiter among the nations and there will be universal
peace.
This Jewish vision of one God teaching the world how to live
was inherited by Christianity, and the churches especially of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries saw their role as evangelizing the rest of the
world. As missionaries spread over the world under the protection of the
European empires, they saw themselves as exporting not only the Christian faith
but also a whole European way of life. They were educating and civilizing the
rest of the world as well as evangelizing it.
Perhaps the high point of this movement was the great
International Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. As happens with many human
enterprises, its chief effect was different from its original aim. In one sense
it was a new beginning, but rather than the beginning of a new missionary
advance it was the beginning, for Protestants at least, of the ecumenical
movement that has so changed the face of the Christian churches. As far as
world mission is concerned, however, 1910 now looks like the beginning of the
end. The slogan that rallied all the missionary societies and inspired them to
work together was “the evangelization of the world in this generation”. Today
that looks like a very dated and unrealistic dream.
Four years after this conference Europe, the “Christian”
continent, was engulfed in a disastrous war that left many people disillusioned
with traditional beliefs and values and paved the way for a much more
questioning, sceptical and secular society. During that war came also the
Russian revolution that spread militant atheistic Communism over a wide area of
Europe and Asia and eventually led among other things to the complete closure
of China to Christian missionaries. Later in the twentieth century came the
breaking up of the great world empires. Countries to which European
missionaries had enjoyed free access became independent and able to refuse
entry to them. Many of these former colonies reasserted their own cultural and
religious heritage. Islam, in particular, is now a force to be reckoned with in
the political, social and religious scene. Economic developments have led to
massive immigration into Western European countries, so that today Western
Christians can no longer think of people of other faiths as faraway “heathen”
waiting to hear the gospel, but as neighbours on the same street and colleagues
in the same workplace. Even many people whose cultural heritage is Christian,
including some active members of churches, now hold to an eclectic spirituality
that mixes Christianity with elements of Buddhism and Hinduism. We now live in
a market-place of faiths and world views in which “winning the world for
Christ” seems not only unrealistic but arrogant.
Probably the nearest we have today to the ideal of the whole
world uniting around one “teaching” is the concept of human rights as expressed
in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva
Convention, the International Criminal Court and so on. Whatever people’s creed
or culture, there is a feeling that there are certain basic humanitarian principles
on which everyone agrees. These principles are of course very far from being
universally recognised in practice, though the fact that they are adopted in
theory is felt to be a step in the right direction.
Today, however, even this consensus is being questioned, Stephen
Hopgood* argues that the ideology behind “human rights” is a Western liberal
perception of human life and society that does not necessarily fit every
culture. He calls it “a secular bourgeois ideology, a kind of religionless
Protestantism”, that is becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s world of varied
cultures and in the light of the resurgence of religion as a strong force and
often divisive force.
World peace today can only be achieved by the much more difficult
and complex path of people of different faiths and cultures striving for justice
in their own terms and at the same time learning to understand, respect and
compromise with each other. And yet, however we expect it to be achieved, and however
long we expect it to take, there is something in those words of Isaiah that
keeps us hoping.
* The Endtimes of
Human Rights, Cornell University Press 2013; see also his article in New Internationalist, November 2013, pp 38-39
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