Middle Christians

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning with this revelation from the Lord: “I am not going to return in your lifetime. You are a Middle Christian. Behave accordingly.”

It doesn’t exactly have an apocryphal snap, but it is a description of almost every Christian that has ever lived. Most didn’t witness Christ on earth, and none have seen Him return. It matters because in the last 150 years Christians generally, and Evangelicals in particular, have increased focus on Christ’s return, sometimes to the neglect of the Middle-Christian mission.

This isn’t a new impulse. Throughout the Gospels the disciples seem to believe the end is near. But Christ’s responses could be summarized as, “Yeah, but not in the way you think.” This was the case even as it became clear that Christ was going to suffer and die. The man Peter who cut off the soldier’s ear (John 18:10) was a man who was convinced that this world didn’t matter because Christ’s rise to power was imminent. In healing the soldier’s ear Christ seems to be saying, “Peter, this man is our work and you are not being helpful.”

From the lofty perch of history we can critique not only the first disciples but also Christians of the last two millennia who anticipated Christ’s return. It’s tempting to feel smug about our superior understanding, but we only have to spin the long lens of history around and point it in the other direction, toward the future, to experience what all Christians throughout history have experienced – tension.

If we look forward and think about Christ returning, but not for another 2,000 years, a tension develops. It might be described as balancing between being fully engaged in this world and fully anticipating the next world. This is more difficult than it sounds. Starting with the early followers and continuing to this day, we have more than enough examples of individuals, groups, and movements that abandoned the tension for the consolation of certainty.

The brilliant nineteenth-century Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, witnessing the terrible suffering of his fellow citizens, finally concluded that Christ’s teachings were intended to ease the pain of this life. Tolstoy became committed to social issues, rejecting a belief in the afterlife as a tragic distraction from Christ’s real purpose. On the other hand, in that same period a prosperous New York farmer named William Miller became convinced from Scripture that Christ would return between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. By the time the final date arrived Miller had stirred up an international movement with tens of thousands of followers, many of whom sold their possessions and waited in the mountains for an event that didn’t happen.

Looking back on these and many other examples we can see that being a Middle Christian is a difficult calling. It requires believers to be fully engaged in the present world while simultaneously anticipating the next. History shows us that from time to time it simply becomes easier to concentrate on one to the neglect of the other.

Fortunately we also have stories of the faithful who accepted their role as a link in the chain. In Hebrews 11 we have a list of exemplars who anticipated the distant promise of the Messiah without disengaging from the time and place in which God had placed them. The apostle Paul, a man of extraordinary education, training, and discipline, modeled what it means to be a Middle Christian. As though shot from a cannon on the Damascus road, Paul engaged every topic, venue, institution, situation, and opportunity that he could get his hands on, not willing to yield anything to an unbelieving world. To him everything belonged to Christ who might be coming soon.

And we may take as our inspiration believers throughout history who grasped the weighty responsibility of being a Middle Christian. People like Augustine, Martin Luther, Tyndale, Wesley, Catherine McAuley, William Wilberforce, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie Ten Boom, C.S. Lewis, and many, many others who lived in the tension between the promise of Christ’s coming and the responsibility to engage the world. We may look to the example of the Puritans of 1636 who soon after building their homes and church, founded America’s first institution of learning, Harvard College, so future generations would have “competent rulers, an educated clergy, and a knowledgeable citizenry.” Or to Dr. Francis Collins, an Evangelical Christian who also led the Human Genome Project and today directs the National Institutes of Health helping to save lives. Or even to someone in our own backyard like William Lamb at Lee University. He runs a food distribution program that also teaches college students what it really means to love their neighbor.

These are examples of what it means to be a Middle Christian. May we all go and do likewise.