I am taking sometime each morning to read through a chapter of Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium by Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart. So far it has been an interesting read, granted I have only just finished Chapter 3. I am going to try and post something interesting I read each day or thoughts that my reading might have stimulated.
Here is a quote from the book, which is actually a paraphrase of a Jesuit writer William Lynch:
“…hope as a constant decision to move into the future, a bid to transcend the present with its perceived limits and difficulties, to imagine a way out of that which constrains and threatens to engulf or imprison us into a brighter and better alternative. Thus hope is that which insists on expanding our perceived horizons of possibility, broadening the landscape of reality in such a way as to set our present circumstance in a wider perspective and thereby to rob it of its absoluteness.”
Talk about a robust and powerful understanding of hope? Theology that sits at the margins of life as systems and theories, I would contend is not theology at all. To everyone who has been led to believe that theology is abstract and does not impinge upon or enter into life, I apologize.
In the face of a present that is characterized by evil and despair, hope refuses to sit as a moot theological concept. Hope does not serve to pacify people against injustice, but instead serves to enable and invigorate us to act.
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Yes...I've heard of this hope you describe, and of this view towards God/theology as well....in Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism! I guess by postmodern/post-evangelical standards, good ol' Waldo is a Christian as well, along with his buddy Thoreau! Why shouldn't they be counted among believers after all, as they believed in their own efforts, they cherished the material present, they deified man as humanists, they had a shared contempt over the "silly" notion that propositions of truth (words) do indeed convey truth (or that absolute truth even exists), they hated the notion of authority over their rebellion....you know, just like the EMERGENT CHURCH MOVEMENT today! I say, at the next emergent convention, Emerson and Thoreau ought to be granted honorary, charter membership for their foundational contributions to the emergent ideology we see today. Further still, every postmodern emergent should give honor where honor is due, and grant club membership to the other key framers of their secular and religious existentialism: Hegel, Kierkegaard, Barth, Jaspers, Heidegger, and...of course... Sarte.
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