Hope and Doom and Stuff, Part I

I doubt this will be compelling reading for many people, but a couple of people seemed interested. These are actually a couple of little pieces I wrote for a class last semester. I’m not really sure what the class thought of them. We posted one per week for everyone to read, and each person, the whole semester, would get two are three comments, or more, per post. At the end of the semester, each student in the class had received at least fifteen comments, and most people had twenty-five or thirty or more. All except for me, of course. Altogether, my posts received two comments the whole semester. I’m not sure why that happened. I asked the professor once what he thought, and (without using quite these words) the answer he gave was that there must not be very many people in the class who liked me. I had just thought that the posts weren’t any good. I’m not sure, though, what really happened. It is highly likely that these are utter crap.

Both of these posts were in response to reading some of the Hebrew Bible prophets, and they’re not exactly essays. They’re responses to a series of questions from the professor, which I put in bold. You should probably read this one first; the second is below. Enjoy.

Based on your reading of Amos and the other material for this course, how does the juxtaposition of hope and doom influence the reader (ancient Israelite or today's) to think about (1) the interaction between God and Israel, (2) the nature of grace and divine demand, (3) moral reflection on justice in society? How do hope and condemnation relate to each other, if they do? What implications might there be for us today given the shaping of this oracle?

“Be joyful,/Though you have considered all the facts.” Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Cornel West makes a useful distinction between optimism and hope. For him, “Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet we know that the evidence does not look good.” Hope, on the other hand, “enacts the stance of the participant who actively struggles against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides of wealth inequalities, group xenophobia, and personal despair. […] Only a new wave of vision, courage, and hope can keep us sane-and preserve the decency and dignity requisite to revitalize our organizational energy for the work to be done. To live is to wrestle with despair and yet never to allow despair to have the last word.” In this sense, hope is somewhat absurd because humans (both in our time and in that of the prophets) have little basis for optimism. It takes a lot of faith to be hopeful.

The Hebrew prophets aren’t optimists, but their vision does seem to me, essentially, to be hopeful. This is where doom comes in. The prophets spend significant effort proclaiming doom. Collins goes says of Amos that he does not “dilute his oracles of judgment with any glimmer of hope.” The prophets denounce the nations and Israel for a lack of justice and for a general lack of humanity, and the consequence for these failures is destruction. What’s important is that these prophesies of doom are based upon a vision of cosmic order. Ongoing human misery and future destruction are signs that humans have failed to realize the transcendent purpose demanded by the God of creation.

So, paradoxically, the pronouncement of doom simultaneously produces in the reader an intense awareness (1) of the chaos of a world marked by human misery and (2) of a cosmic force that is not indifferent to this plight. Thus, the doom of the prophets, in declaring the presence of a cosmic order, affirms a basis for faith, which in turn provides a basis for hope, which in turn provides the basis for just living (or, you might could say, for love).

So, the hopeful ending of Amos (and moments of consolation in all of the prophetic works) is, in a sense, absurd. There is little obvious evidence in either the world or in the previous portions of Amos to suggest a positive conclusion. The hope and the grace exhibited here is definitely surprising. In another sense, though, such an ending also seems inevitable. The clearly evident doom makes possible hope (with which it exists in a dialectical relationship), since it presents a God who cares. As Graham Greene once said, “The opposite of love isn’t hatred, but indifference.” The God of the prophets is not indifferent.