(ABP) — “This is the most thoroughly Christian thing they’ve done yet.”
That was my initial reaction to the last two U2 albums in 2000 and 2004. In retrospect, that was just as true of the triad of albums U2 released in the 1990s, but I admit that wasn’t what I thought on first listen to them. Their nuanced irony required a few more listens and a good bit of rewarding theological reflection to get there.
Once again, my early impression of No Line on the Horizon, to be released March 3 in the United States, has been, “This is the most thoroughly Christian thing they’ve done yet.”
Like the last two albums, No Line is much more overt in its Christian rendering of the world, what with lyrics like “Justified until we die/You and I will magnify/Oh, the Magnificent” from the album’s second track. (So Bono is a fifth-point Calvinist. Who knew?) Yet what qualifies this album as thoroughly Christian is not so much its pervasive biblical/theological images as its overarching eschatological vision.
For those uninitiated in my profession’s art of unclear communication, “eschatology” is the technical term for the division of theology that deals with “last things,” from the Greek eschatos, “last,” and logos, “ordered thought” about something. But eschatology isn’t only about what happens at the end.
Baptist theologian James Wm. McClendon Jr. helpfully defined eschatology much more broadly: it’s “about what lasts; it is also about what comes last, and about the history that leads from the one to the other.”
In other words, eschatology has to do with God’s goals for all creation, from creation to consummation and everything in between, as well as our participation in what God is doing to realize these goals in a world in which they are manifestly not yet realized.
Read the full Baptist Press Review here
But the two parts I connected with the most in this review were these:
- The basic message of No Line is that earth is not yet heaven, and therefore the album summons us to “Get On Your Boots” and work toward the day when things will fully be on earth as they are in heaven — when heaven and earth will be indistinguishable, and there will at last be no line on the horizon.
- The central eschatological metaphor of No Line is the sound of the divine song, heard only by those who have the ears to hear it, yet unconsciously sought by everyone, for all people were created to hear and sing this song.
