1. SCRIPTURE – KEY TO THE FUTURE

Chapter 11 Hope

One word sums up the power that the Christian message exercises and has exercised on the human mind since its generation in the person of Jesus -- hope. The nature of that hope, or the way the hope is envisaged, has changed significantly over the ages, indicating that the 'object' of hope is not the essence but the power of hope itself.

For Jesus’ disciples, it appears that the hope the person of Jesus generated while present in the flesh was very much focused upon the intense desire for political freedom from the domination of Rome. The Messiah was to be the person who, like Judas Maccabeus, would be the one to set the nation free. This was the "King of the Jews" people thought they were hailing on his entry into Jerusalem. It may well be that the crowd's fury on the next Friday morning, yelling for ‘their king’ to be crucified as a common criminal, was created by their sense of disillusionment and anger. Their hopes were once again dashed. It seems the disciples shared this 'hope', if the story of Emmaus road has any historical validity. Even if Jesus did try to instill a resurrection hope in the disciples, it is clear he did not succeed. Jesus’ followers experienced the crucifixion as the destruction of all hope.

Yet out of the devastation of the events of that Friday, a new hope was born. Hope, and celebration of hope, has been the hallmark of Christian life ever since.

In the early decades of the apostolic church, that hope still took messianic form, expecting an imminent return of Jesus as a cosmic event that would end the 'wicked world' and initiate the era of perfect righteousness. This hope dominates Paul’s early preaching, evidenced by the Thessalonians letters, but appears to recede rapidly from his preaching as evidenced by his subsequent letters. However, this apocalyptic expectation remained high, as displayed in the synoptic gospels. By the end of the century, however, as Christianity entered its fourth generation, disillusionment with its eschatological hope and expectation had set in, as we see in the Letter to the Hebrews. The letter to the Hebrews, the Revelation to John, and John's gospel all grapple with the understanding of hope but in different ways. All are in agreement, however, that the most important and essential element in the Christian life is to retain hope, and retain it in the face of all the forces that appear to destroy hope.

The Roman empire, by the beginning of the fourth century, struggling against internal and external forces that increasingly threatened its continued existence, found in Christianity the hope of a religious cohesion that would hold the disparate empire together. There are striking similarities here to the Jewish expectation of a messiah to provide political leadership. The Romans expected Christianity to serve its political objectives. It hoped in Christianity as a religion to unite the people.

When the Western empire succumbed to the barbarian hordes, Europe plunged into centuries of social chaos. While the chaos was most manifested at the social and political level, it was at its most acute in the psyche of the people. Barbarian paganism was a life of despair, of lostness, of possession by forces of elemental carnage. The reason why Christianity succeeded over the next few centuries in bringing all of Western Europe under the umbrella of the Christian Church was that it offered hope to this barbarian world.

That hope was focused on the life beyond death, and gradually the whole of early mediaeval European society became focused on and built around that hope of resurrection to eternal bliss. This focus was to remain the core of European Christianity right down to the 18th century. It was the main source of the power of mediaeval Catholicism and of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. In the 18th century, however, that form of hope died and it has never revived, even if it was to continue in formal dogma, confessional statements, liturgy and hymnody. It is effectively non-existent today except in formal, theological statements.

In the 19th and early 20th century, the vacuum of hope created by the 18th century colapse was filled with a novel doctrine -- that there was a heaven where we would be reunited with our loved ones. This form of hope is what created and drove the Victorian religious revival and missionary endeavour. It was a hope that totally possessed the minds of 19th-century society at all levels and receded only by the mid-20th century. It finally died out, except for the odd sparks created in moments of intense grief, only in the 1960s.

This dying out of the 19th century version of hope left yet another great vacuum of hope. In general, though, Western society during the last half of the 20th century was so prosperous and had such self-confidence in its own future and on the power of science and technology to overcome every problem, that it considered that it did not need any form of religiously-generated hope. Vast numbers pf people abandoned Christianity. There were many in this society who did, however, feel left out of this prosperity and these flocked to new religious movements, especially the Pentecostal and its later evolution into charismatic religion. The power of the Pentecostal/charismatic form of faith is that it gave to its adherents hope of power to overcome all the obstacles and shortcomings of their lives. The keyword here is 'power'. It is power not in the hereafter but in the present and manifest in material success. This new version of Christianity rapidly attracted to itself not just the old underclass that characterised the adherents of classical Pentecostalism but the new breed of young people and others who were determined on upward mobility in the socio-economic sphere. Hordes of business people joined up to the movement, the momentum of success creating more success as business networks yielded economic opportunities of tremendous value. This in turn poured wealth into the movement enabling it to develop mega-churches, command media and expand outreach ministries. Savviness to media meant sharpened ability to pitch their message to the mass market and command the techniques and resources for mass persuasion.

All of this rested and rests on the foundation of the hope generated that people had access to unlimited power to transform their lives and to achieve the impossible. Hope was and remains the key -- hope of power.

The problem inherent in this entire movement is that it can only retain its strength and momentum as long as the hope remains alive and real in the people's minds. A further problem is that it is inherent in the way the hope is formulated that the realisation of the hope has to be in the form of material results. In my country of New Zealand, the leadership of one such church, the Destiny Church, lives in conspicuous luxury. The church people see this not as a contradiction of the gospel but as a fulfilment of its promise. The leaders promise to their followers that God blesses the faithful with material abundance – to which the luxury in life of the leadership attests. Ordinary members live in the hope that their faithfulness will one day be similarly rewarded.

This movement of hope reached its climax at the end of the 20th century but is now in retreat. The era of this form of religion is the culture of greed and consumerism and acquisitiveness, and the two went hand in hand. Today, the global economy is in tatters because of the excesses of that era and there is taking hold in society a deep sense of disillusionment with all the purveyors of the promise of power, not just in religion but in technology and in the hordes of 'motivators' and gurus and the marketers of new age' nostrums.

It is easy to dismiss the many forms in which religious hope has expressed itself, from Paul to Destiny, and see each as false and ultimately failing. I do not see it in this way. What is common to every situation is that without the hope, whatever form that hope took, the community would have failed to survive. Going right back to the Hebrews, it was the story, fictional in origin and historical fact, that Yahweh had given Palestine to the Hebrews as their ultimate and inalienable possession for all time, that kept alive hope in the exiles that they would return --and finally enable them to do so. Was their hope ill-founded simply because it was rooted in a fiction?  Or was the story, in reality, the grace-gift of the Spirit and deeply true beyond the surface truth of factual occurrence?

It is not at all certain that the story of Jesus’ physical resurrection on the third day and appearances to his disciples is literally, historically true. Yet even if it is a historical fiction, it is most certainly 'truth' and utterly real. For Christians, Jesus lives and his presence and power is daily encounter.

Does the fact that the hope is dead that vitiated European Christianity from the mediaeval era to the 18th century means that all the people of these centuries were wrong in their hope? Without this hope the church would not have grown or even survived. Without this hope Europe would not have even come into being in anything like the way it did. Without this hope science would not have been born. This hope delivered incalculable value to the world. It was a grace-gift from God.

I will say the same about the way the 19th century expressed its hope, for it was the generation also of vast and beneficial developments for humanity, including the entire concept of human rights. Likewise, Pentecostalism/charismatic religion saved Christianity from being dissolved in the corrosive influence of liberalism that had lost all touch with the life of the Spirit. It too was a grace-gift of God.

Now, in our present and coming generation, we are facing the greatest time of danger humanity has ever stood in since its first tentative move from the tree-tops of our ape ancestors to running on two legs in open savannah. What we have in front of us is a witness of two and a half thousand years of continuous community (bringing the Hebrew and apostolic lines into continuity) that has faced crisis after crisis and always found hope and, in the power of that hope, has consistently triumphed over each threat to its existence and emerged each time transformed and transforming. The witness is to the power of the Spirit to resource the community fully in every situation and crisis.’

What we can learn from our story is that it is dangerous to translate hope into concrete expectation, for that always leads to disillusionment. We can also learn that the stories upon which we draw to illustrate and strengthen our faith did not need to be historically factual. '' Truth” transcends factual veracity. The story of Abraham and Isaac and the near-sacrifice of the son is fiction, yet it radically illustrates the nature of hope: that Abraham believes even into the face of the destruction of everything upon which all hope appears to rest.

For us, it is certain that a new shape of hope is emerging that will replace the vanished or vanishing hopes of the past. The hope that will grasp and possess coming generations will be that on the other side of the cataclysm descending on global humanity their will emerge a new, transformed humanity. This hope is a certainty rooted in complete confidence in the transforming power of the Spirit even into death.

Having stated this, the difference of our situation over against that of our ancestors is that, with a historical perspective on the way hope differently materialises in every age, we recognise the contingent nature of the way we conceive hope.

The core reality of hope as witnessed by the Hebrew/apostolic testimonies is captured almost perfectly by the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Carmel. There would have been no possible way Abraham could have conceived hope materialising after he had sacrificed Isaac. The materialisation of the promise existed beyond his mental horizon -- as it was the disciples of Jesus after his crucifixion. The terrible reality that may confront us could well have the same radical alienation of all grounds for hope -- in fact, it is only through such a portal, terrifying to contemplate, that any real transformation will occur.

The witness then of the two testaments comes down to this: faith hopes when all ground for hope has been annihilated. Therein lies the secret of Christianity now as it has always been in the past.

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