Abstract
Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed (1 Cor 15:51).
At a recent conference on peacebuilding, as part of a panel discussion about the future of the discipline, peacebuilder and scholar Lisa Schirch shared her dismay. ‘So many of the dreams of my youth, when I started in peacebuilding thirty years ago, are crashing. . .the idea of building this better world. . .it’s tragic, it’s not coming about. We’re having less democracy, less human rights, there’s more authoritarianism. . .it’s a time in the world when it’s hard to see what we’ve done with our lives for thirty years, those of us who’ve been investing in this.’ Other panellists talked about the enormous challenges facing the world over the coming decades: climate change, state collapse, mass migration, humanitarian crises. The effect was sobering: here were field-leading scholars admitting that their assumptions were unravelling before their eyes, even as the world upon which those assumptions were based was unravelling. Schirch put it plainly: ‘We are not at all prepared for what is coming.’
The Lisa Schirch of thirty years ago was not guilty of hubris: she was simply acting with hope in a world that she understood to be predictable and stable enough to plant seeds and watch them grow. But we are no longer confident that positive social change will naturally grow and flourish, nor that Western ideals and political systems can be successfully transplanted and cultivated elsewhere. The loss of that workable world, the sense of natural growth, and a straightforward sense of purpose is profoundly disorienting. Part of the task of this new era is to cultivate a new sense of hope and agency in order to act in the face of these overwhelming global challenges, but the sheer unpredictability of the situation erodes our ability to imagine what that kind of different world, and different way of acting, would look like.
In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul tries to articulate what the unimaginable difference of the resurrection will be like. We will be sown in weakness, he says, but raised in power; sown in dishonour, but raised in glory; sown perishable, but raised imperishable. But in Paul’s hands, this language of sowing and growing is not describing observable, steady development: it is describing radical change.
Over the last few months the COVID-19 pandemic has brought instability into the fabric of our daily lives, and much of what seemed fixed or necessary has radically changed. On one level, this uncertainty undermines action, because it impairs our ability to predict the effects of our actions. On another level, though, this upending of the usual sequence of cause and effect may enable us to imagine and experiment with a different way of being. It is hard to predict what the coming decades will hold, but this uncertainty might galvanise as well as paralyse us. We will not all die, but we will all be changed.