Hope is transcendent because it looks for genuine novelty, not more of the same—a novelty that comes like a thief in the night, able to alter radically our lives in ways we are incapable of doing ourselves. But hope is also eschatological because while it exists in the present as an affirmative power, it also insists “not yet”; it looks forward to a radical refiguration of our lives and the world as a whole, a refiguration that will purify our ideals and resolve our conflicts, redeeming our partial goods and semi-achievements, giving us what we long for at every moment in history but cannot receive from or in history. Hope is the hope that, though we are creatures who move through history—stretched out across time, part of us “lost” as memories of the past and another part not yet arrived as the coming future—we will finally be given our whole existence fully, all at once, in a radically transfigured dispensation, which Saint Paul calls the “new creation.”
Hope is a means of accessing reality, of getting at it, seeing the hopefulness at its center without occluding or deflecting or otherwise avoiding the depth of pain, injustice, and wrongness in the world. Hope sees all that is there, the bad as well as the good, but realizes that a hasty acquiescence to what is immediately apparent is not realism, but one more form of the false consolation of complacency. Hope is surprising—indeed, it is the capacity to be joyfully surprised. In this way hope is readily called transcendent, and even, in a way, “otherworldly.”
“The capacity to be joyfully surprised”—now that is an intriguing definition of hope. It seems that most political projects currently on offer, Christian or otherwise, do nothing to cultivate this capacity. My mind goes to Jesus' use of parables, often to teach about the kingdom of heaven. A consistent feature of the parables is that things will turn out in some quite unexpected ways, for outsiders and insiders alike. Might one purpose of such teaching be to open up imaginative space for just this kind of capacity?
Charles Mathewes (emphasis mine):
This, I submit, is the danger we face: a willed blindness to the basic character of our situation. It is a fundamental human flaw throughout history, but it is an especially prevalent problem today. To correct for it, you must learn, patiently and meticulously, to notice the world for what it is, recognizing not just the things you expect to see there, but also those things that do not fit into your expectations. And that means you will never be able fully to affirm one thing—the contrary examples will serve as a counterpoint, to perforate any too-seamless confidence. That in turn entails that honest apprehension of our condition will never be wholeheartedly on one side or the other of anything.
Currently reading: The Republic of Grace by Charles Mathewes 📚
Currently reading: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 📚
rope swingin'
It is essential, in my view, to abandon altogether talk of “redeeming the culture,” “advancing the kingdom,” “building the kingdom,” “transforming the world,” “reclaiming the culture,” “reforming the culture,” and “changing the world.” Christians need to leave such language behind them because it carries too much weight. It implies conquest, take-over, or dominion, which in my view is precisely what God does not call us to pursue—at least not in any conventional, twentieth- or twenty-first-century way of understanding these terms. […]
It isn’t just the Constantinian temptation the church must repudiate but, more significantly, the orientation toward power that underwrites it. The proclivity toward domination and toward the politicization of everything leads Christianity today to bizarre turns; turns that, in my view, transform much of the Christian public witness into the very opposite of the witness Christianity is supposed to offer.
Faithful Christian witness is fated to exist in the tension between the historical and the transcendent; between the social realities that press on human existence and the spiritual and ethical requirements of the gospel; between the morality of the society in which Christian believers live and the will of God. The oppositions are a fact of existence for the church and each Christian believer and they pull in conflicting directions—one toward the necessities of survival and the other toward the perfect will of God. There is no place of equilibrium between these oppositions and no satisfying resolutions. In this world, the church can never be in repose. The tension is not lessened by the fact that there are unavoidable ambiguities that inhere in the application of biblical promises, values, and ideals to everyday life. Nor is it lessened by the fact that the love required of the Christian is unlivable, except in flawed approximation.
Finished reading: Confident Pluralism by John D. Inazu 📚
Currently reading: Confident Pluralism by John D. Inazu 📚