Hope and Doom and Stuff, Part II

Here’s my second post on this general subject. This was actually the post (out of the twelve we did) that received a comment, and the response I gave to the comment was what sort of completed the thought (at least a good bit more so than it had previously been articulated).

I’m putting both the prompt and then the comment it received in bold. The rest is me.

Hope does not make us ashamed, or does it?

In this week's prophets, there is a recognizable shift from pessimism to hope. Based on your readings, how does this shift take place? What theological justification exists for it in the texts themselves? By extension, when is hope justified today? By this I don't mean merely hope for an eternal reward/resolution of the problem, but hope in the present world. How do we articulate a theology of hope for today's church and world?

“God is not ‘beyond us’ or ‘in us,’ but ahead of us in the horizons of the future opened to us in his promises.” – Jurgen Moltmann

In the readings this semester, I’ve been struck several times at how God is always present to the Israelites (when he’s present) as promise for the future. From the Abrahamic covenant on, the Israelites are in relationship with God when they are offered a series of future promises: a future people, a promised land, a kingly succession, a temple, a just society, restoration from captivity, etc. Even when they are not on such good terms with God, the prophets attempt to restore Israel to relationship through future promises of destruction. The difficulty the Israelites have is in doing their part in the transformative work of actualizing these promises.

The hopefulness of the post-exilic prophets, thus, seems to stem from an intense awareness of the imminent promise of God, along with the realization that that vision has yet to be actualized. The restoration of Jerusalem, of the temple, and of the type of society promoted by God has not yet been accomplished, and as Boda points out, much of Zechariah is intended to remind the Israelites that “a new age was still not inaugurated” and that “the reason these promises remain unfulfilled is that the people are replicating the patterns of the earlier generation.” The convergence of God’s promise with the awareness of their present failure makes possible hopeful living and the hopeful impulse of these prophetic works.

In today’s church, I do think it’s difficult to articulate a theology of hope. I may be wrong, but I do get the since that we conflate the concepts of “optimism” and “hope” (I wrote about this a little last week). This allows us to be optimistic and passively think that everything’s going to turn out right for everybody. Optimistic living is simple and naïve and stems from our privileged position in the world. Naïve optimism should make us ashamed. Hopeful living, however, demands that we confront the hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness in our own lives and in the lives of those around us, and in the face of this despairing reality, and with the resulting humility, perform the revolutionary actions that transform the world toward being something more like the Kingdom envisaged by God. We must be poets and visionaries, capable of witnessing to the coming promises of God, and we must have the courage to make something of those visions immanent in our lives.

I appreciate you nuancing the difference between naive optimism and true hope. Moreover, I appreciate how call us to articulate hope in the midst of meaningless and nothinglessness. I guess my question is how do we articulate this poetic vision in the midst of 'void' (as some might say)? Certainly, we need to be able to do this, but what sustains our hope in order to do this if we are just as much a part of the problem?

Secondly, while I agree with you that the present situation of the 'post-modern' west is one that is void of meaning and value, I don't think the vast amount of people in our culture, let alone many of the people in our churches, want to acknowledge this reality. I agree somewhat with the argument that many in America tends towards consumerism instead of confronting the nihilistic void. So if we are going to visionary poets casting a vision beyond the loveless and meaningless void how we articulate such a vision when most of our audience not only doesn't want to acknowledge the reality that we see but also wants to place their hope in something else (i.e. consumerism and materialism)?

You’ve definitely caught me hiding behind a metaphor here, which I think I was doing because, at this point, I’m honestly not very sure about how to answer these questions. I’ll give it a shot, though; I’m thinking as I go.

First, I’d agree that our (post) post-modern western audience isn’t likely to jump to acknowledge the pervasive despair that I think is there. I forget exactly how Kierkegaard put it, but he writes somewhere that “the nature of despair is that it is unaware of being despair.” I’d agree. So many of us are bored, sad, confused, and alienated from ourselves and from others (not to mention from God), and the worst thing is that we don’t even realize it. The obvious thing to do in response is to diagnose the problem, so that we can begin the search for the solution. That’s what the prophets did first. This is obviously difficult, though, for at least two reasons. For one, in our free market church culture, it’s awfully easy, at the first challenging word in church, to walk out the door and down the street to Joel Osteen’s stadium, where very little that’s remotely real will ever be said. Second, our Christian language has been so overused and sentimentalized, “worn as smooth as poker chips” as Walker Percy (my favorite novelist) used to say, that there’s little real edge to it anymore. So, to (weakly attempt to) answer your second question about how address an audience that doesn’t want to hear the message, I think we have to acknowledge that we’re not likely to be very successful (I don’t think that the prophets or Jesus were overly successful at persuading people either). I’m not an optimist. But if we’re going to attempt to say it anyway, I think we have to reform our language so that it regains some texture. I think that this reformation of our language is only partly aesthetic. Mainly, this would mean acquiring the experiences and virtues that would make our speech authentic. The difficult thing, I fear, is that I think this would mean, in part, that we abandon our notions of Christendom and find our way to the margins of society, a position from which we can speak prophetically. Revolutions are carried out by people at the bottom, and to live and to speak our hope is to be a part of a revolution.

In response to your first question, what sustains our hope, particularly when we are such a part of the problem, I guess I would say humility. We’ll never not be part of the problem, at least to some degree. The humility to admit that, along with the humility to accept that grace is a possibility, seem to be the basis for hope (I guess in some ways my definition of humility would be synonymous with “faith,” so that could be another way of answering the question). I’m not exactly sure that’s the sort of answer you were looking for though.

I’m sorry I’ve written so much…