God’s Intervention in History, Part 2
Their status as God’s chosen people establishes the destiny of the Jews. How can an non-Jew partake in that destiny? It is by having faith in God’s anointed, the Messiah, the Christ, the deliverer of God’s chosen people, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the culmination of God’s plan. Christians believe that the conception, birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, events taking place from 4 B.C. to 33 A.D. or thereabouts, are the crucial, pivotal, and defining events in history, and that by means of these events God’s intervention in history attained completeness.
But is “intervention” the right word? No, it is not. Christian scripture asserts God’s foreknowledge and purpose in regard to the working out of the plan of salvation. History does not unfold independently of God’s will, by mere chance, resulting in a situation where one day God observes the unfolding of history, and decides that things are not going exactly as planned. “Oh, well,” says God, “I guess I’d better intervene to get things back on the right track.” No, that is not the kind of omnipotent God Christians believe in.
How, then, does God interact with humankind? This is the question the answer to which I have pondered many years. I have arrived at a synthesis of faith which reconciles in my mind belief in an omnipotent and benevolent creator God with the perception that the world seems not to be perfect. God created the world, and the “Big Bang” is sufficient to account for creation and to reconcile that creation with the viewpoint of science. With the big bang began the evolution of matter, with the evolution of matter the evolution of life, and with the evolution of life, the evolution of that pinnacle of created life, homo sapiens, man. Christ completed God’s plan by becoming incarnate as a specimen of homo sapiens. A Christian cannot entertain the notion that the human genome contains the potential for another evolutionary leap, because in that case God’s incarnation as homo sapiens would be rendered obsolete.
In historical terms, God’s intervention occurred on several occasions: 1) when he caused Abraham and Sarah to bring into the world Isaac, who became father of Jacob/Israel, the progenitor of the chosen people; 2) when he revealed himself to Moses and worked miracles to bring about the liberation of Israel’s descendents from Egypt; and 3) when he became a specimen of homo sapiens in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
In today’s world, how does God intervene in human history? I believe he is still working through the Jews, his chosen people. Look at the great ones who have revolutionized human history. I told M.H., one of the few Jews I have known in my life, that in the field of religion my strongest influence was Jesus, in the field of economics Karl Marx, in the field of psychology Sigmund Freud, and in the field of science Albert Einstein.
“All Jews!”, M.H. exclaimed.
“Yes.”, I said. “Just think about it.”
Just think about it indeed! Of course, I am not much of a Marxist any more, nor a Freudian. But great clarifications have emerged from all four of these Jewish minds, and the world has been radically changed by all of them. And we Christians believe that the change wrought by Jesus of Nazareth is absolutely the defining and momentous revelation in human history, no matter what other insights may unfold as the human mind continues to examine reality. (to be continued)