Cultivating the inner life

Last week, Andy Robinson wrote this excellent post, which I encourage you to read in full.  Drawing on Lloyd-Jones and his wartime experience, Andy points out that Christians have resources to endure difficult situations with joy - resources which are not available to others.  However, we often find, and perhaps have found in the last year, that we find it difficult to draw on those resources; our reactions to Covid and lockdown have perhaps not been as different from those of our unbelieving neighbours as we would like.  Andy speculates:

I have a small suspicion that the last few months have flagged up our (my?) neglect of the inner life for the Christian in favour of activism, a reliance on events and so forth.

I wonder.  For me, I think it hasn't been activism that has led to the neglect of the inner life (a charge which I will make no attempt to evade), but an over-reaction to a way of thinking about the life of faith which is deeply individualistic, perhaps even introspective.  The evangelicalism of my student years laid great emphasis on the quiet time, individual prayer, one-man-and-his-Bible religion.  Over the years I've come to think that actually public worship, the sacraments, and the community of the church are the main helps in the spiritual life, and that personal piety ought to derive from the corporate life of worship.  That is to say, the church comes first, and the individual second; preaching first, private reading second; the Eucharist first, private spiritual nourishment second; the Lord's Prayer in the sanctuary first, private prayer second.

Look, I'm not about to recant my journey over the last couple of decades.  I'm confident that the Scriptures teach and display this order to the spiritual life.  I think it's right.

But, as is often the case, I've probably swung the pendulum too far the other way.  Just because something is second, does that make it unimportant?  Surely not!  The relative deprivation that we've endured when it comes to public worship and church community over the last year has really highlighted what should have been obvious all along: personal prayer, personal Scripture reading, personal spiritual disciplines matter.  They matter hugely.  We are called to live out of the resources offered to us in Christ - which means first and foremost, by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  And that requires the word, it requires prayer.

I am glad that quite a few years ago now I took the decision that I was going to say Morning Prayer every day.  I do that now pretty much automatically, so much a part of my routine that I can't really face the day without it.  But that discipline of reading and prayer is so valuable.  I don't make as much of it as I could and should, but it is there.  I am grateful that the Lord got me into that habit before this time struck.  If you're not in the habit of regular reading and prayer, can I commend it to you?  For me, the liturgical form of Morning Prayer helps me to get started before the coffee has kicked in and I can think independently about what I should be praying!

A word about the attitude with which we ought to approach our reading and prayer.  A great hindrance to this cultivation of the inner life, it seems to me, is that we are taught by the culture of the world that rest means passivity (which is to say, for the most part, television), and we are often taught by the culture of the church that Scripture reading in particular means activity (which is to say, for the most part, a comprehension exercise).  One of the things I love about the Morning Prayer service is that there is simply too much Scripture for it to turn into a Bible study.  It is, in fact, a model of receptivity rather than passivity or activity.  Just to receive the words, just to hear the Lord; that is enough.  There will be times for grappling with meanings and chasing down applications; but first thing in the morning is probably not that time.  Cultivating the inner life, for me at least, has meant primarily cultivating the open ear.

Anyone else got thoughts on how we balance the corporate and individual when it comes to the spiritual life?  Tips for devotional reading or prayer that might help us?

Don't grumble

 This morning the Lord has been gently rebuking me from 1 Corinthians 10:10:

And don't grumble as some of them did, and were killed by the destroyer.

The context is the apostle Paul's reflection on the history of Israel as a type of Christian experience.  The Israelites were (typologically) baptised at the Red Sea; they ate (typologically) spiritual food in the manna and drank (typologically) spiritual drink from the rock.  They were fully initiated, and fully provided for - "nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them,  since they were struck down in the wilderness."

In the context of Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians, the primary application is to avoid idolatry and immorality.  And yet in the midst of the warnings against idol worship and moral laxity is this verse about grumbling.  Don't grumble; the grumblers were destroyed.

But how can I avoid grumbling in circumstances like these?

Well, "God is faithful".  He will not allow more temptation than you can bear.  He will provide a way out (v 13) - not, to be sure, from the circumstances, but from the temptation to sin which comes with the circumstances.  The Israelites were in the wilderness, and no doubt felt they had plenty to complain about.  But their grumbling was their destruction.  Because in the midst of the wilderness, God was their faithful provider, if only they had opened their eyes to see it.  Sure, they wandered in a desert; but in that desert, the Rock followed them and provided them with drink - and that Rock was Christ.  An intriguing identification, which there is no need to explore here.  The point is that though I wander through a seemingly interminable lockdown, the Rock follows me; there is living water constantly on tap.

Stop grumbling, Daniel.  The Lord is at hand.

Heresy

It is interesting to see how the Covid situation has resurrected the concept of heresy in a secular guise.  I see increasingly strong reactions against anyone who suggests a different interpretation of the information from that offered through official channels.  Indeed, even to question whether HMG's current course of action is wise and humane is enough to get you told that you have blood on your hands - irrespective of whether you have been carefully keeping to the regulations personally!  Why is this?  Because ideas have consequences.  In this case, it is felt that certain ideas will lead to people taking actions which will result in more people losing their lives.

I am not going to dive into the debates around lockdown (not again, anyway).  Rather I wanted to flag that this is a useful illustration of the theological notion of heresy.  Heresy is not just wrong opinion, but the advancement of ideas which are likely to have devastating consequences for individuals and for the church.  Primarily, heresy encourages people to trust wrongly: to put their trust in things that cannot bear that trust, or not to trust those things which they ought to trust.  The Arian heresy encourages people to trust a creature rather than the Creator for salvation.  The Pelagian heresy encourages people to put confidence in their own abilities rather than in God's grace.  And there are consequences.  Only God is able to bear our confidence; only he is trustworthy.  To put the weight of our need on anything else is deadly, eternally deadly, because it prevents us from seeking salvation in the one place where it is available - in God through Christ.

So just as misinformation about Covid could lead to people acting in a way that endangers themselves and others, so misinformation about God could lead to people trusting or failing to trust in a way that imperils themselves and others eternally.

I think the Covid situation does also highlight one of the dangers of the concept of the heresy.  Some of the anti-sceptical folks have reached the point where there are things which are doubtless true, but which may not be said for fear of consequences.  For example, I read an article over the weekend which castigated the lockdown sceptics for talking about the adverse effects of lockdown on mental health.  There was no suggestion that lockdown is not bad for mental health - I don't think that would be plausible - but that whether it is bad or not, one ought not to say so, because of the potential consequences.

In theological circles, sometimes it becomes impossible to ask valid questions, or to explore genuine issues, because they are very quickly linked to heresy.  The heresy flag is waved early in order to halt discussion.  That is not helpful.  There has to be space, even within the most tightly confessional circles, for investigation of theological issues; there has to always be the possibility that even the definition of heresy has to change under the pressure of renewed reading of Scripture.

Crisis?

The word 'crisis' has been thrown around a lot in the last year, including by yours truly.  But what is a crisis?  A crisis is really a moment of decision, a moment when circumstances and pressures and potential outcomes load this decision with more than ordinary significance.  The crisis is not really the moment to be doing any deep thinking; rather it is the moment that your foundations are exposed and your past thinking (or lack thereof) is brought into the light.  Often the crisis is the moment when the world is shown - and perhaps you are shown - that you don't believe or value the things you seemed to believe or value.  The crisis is the moment when the rubber hits the road.  The crisis is also the point at which a direction is determined, or perhaps the point at which it might be possible to change direction.  The crisis is the moment you look back to when asking the question 'how did we get here?'

2020 surely did present us with a crisis on lots of levels.  Societally, for example, it raised the question of what (and who!) we really value.  But I, and others, have been mainly thinking about the crisis in the church.  The situation in which the Government outlawed corporate worship seemed to ask deep questions of us: how much do we value worship, preaching, the sacraments?  To what extent ought we to go along with the presuppositions of a government and society which are non- and to an extent anti-Christian?  How should we respond?

It sure seemed like a crisis.

And yet in recent weeks I've been wondering if it was.  The thing is, there is definitely part of me that really wants a crisis.  A crisis is awful, in terms of the pressure, and this particular crisis had the potential to put me and others in a really awkward place.  But on the other hand, the crisis is decisive.  Having discerned what seems to be the right decision, you count the cost and you take it.  The crisis, you hope, sets you on the right road.  It is the crossroads at which, if you choose wisely, you will determine your arrival at the right destination.  Then again, there is something individually satisfying about responding to a crisis.  Perhaps it's just me, but there is an attraction to the last stand, the forlorn hope, the death-or-glory charge.

And there are other reasons to be on the lookout for the crisis.  I've done a fair bit of work on Bonhoeffer and the German church of the 1930s, and one of the things you notice is that because many people refused to contemplate the possibility that this might be the crisis, the time when it was necessary to take a stand, the church as a whole ended up sleepwalking into complicity with, and sometimes active support for, Nazism.  It ought to be an established rule of discourse that nothing else is quite like 1930s Germany, but still.  You don't want to miss the moment.  Many of those moments didn't look so serious to lots of people as they did to someone like Bonhoeffer, and the church as a whole was unwilling to elevate them to the level of crisis.  And yet in retrospect all of those small and seemingly insignificant decisions paved the way for a betrayal of the church's being and mission.

For those of you who are impatient with those of us who tend to see a crisis everywhere: please consider that we just really, really don't want to miss the crucial stand that we are called to make.  No doubt we sometimes over-analyse the issue and make it more significant than it really is.  If we're annoying you, just think of us as canaries in the mine; maybe we're hypersensitive, but it might be helpful to have someone hypersensitive down here with you.

But was it - and to the extent that it continues, is it - a crisis?  Re-reading Impossible People by Os Guinness I've been reminded of his description of our cultural issues: it's less like the boy with his finger in the dyke, and more like a mudslide.  That is to say, everything is on the move.  A heroic stand won't work here.  There are myriad ways in which we could betray the Lord every day, myriad little crises.  Maybe everything is a crisis.  The point is: I wonder whether I've been looking for one big decision, when it actually comes down to lots of little decisions.  Not one bold act of defiance of the world, but the resolution to keep on believing unpopular things, to keep on living for things that the majority think are myths, to keep on pursuing a vision of life which is shaped by invisible realities.

2020 in review

This is just my personal reflection on some of the themes that have characterised 2020 for me.  It's obviously been a big year.  A lot has changed.  I think mostly the extreme situation has put a spotlight on things that were already there, and has probably accelerated some cultural trends inside and outside the church.  I imagine different people will have picked up on different things; it has certainly been true that whilst we have all externally gone through the same situation this year, our actual experience of that situation has been very different indeed.

So here are the themes that I'm taking away to think about.

Safetyism

I'm guessing all of us as individuals tend to structure our ethical views around one or two dominant values.  The same is no doubt true of communities and societies.  The values which lie at the heart of our ethics flow out of, and probably also inform, the stories that we tell about the world, the examples that we admire, and the aspirations that we hold.  What 2020 has revealed - and I think it was already true - is that safety is the major value of our culture.  Safety is multi-dimensional and complex in the way that it gets applied.  It can mean 'safety in my identity', which is to say that I must be able to autonomously construct my sense of who I am without reference to, or critique or question from, anyone else.  By boiling it down to the most basic meaning - physical safety - I think 2020 has just shown how utterly dominant safety is in our thinking.  'Stay safe' has become the most common sign-off.  A life without risk seems to be the ideal.  I wonder how and when this particular vision of human flourishing gripped us?  Suffice to say, I find it stifling and grim.

The coercive power of the state

For me, 2020 represented my first real experience of the coercive power of the state.  I've never really wanted to do anything illegal in the past.  This year the state has intruded itself massively into family and community life, making both nigh on impossible.  The state has closed churches.  The state has criminalised normal social interactions.  It's all been quite a shock.  When I've attempted to raise concerns about this, I've often been shot down: the motives behind all this are good, it's about saving lives, etc.  Aside from the fact that some of this line of argument reflects the safetyism noted above, I do find it all a bit naive.  The point is that if the state can do this now, it can do it whenever.  There will always be an emergency to justify this.  And the more safety becomes our main value, the more justifiable it will seem.  And the minority who object will be painted as dangerous, and silenced.  Even if you think this lockdown has been justified - and I think some measures have been, but not all by a long shot - you ought to be concerned for liberty.  I really do call it naivety if you're not.

Church government questions

I've always been an independent in church government matters.  That is to say, I think Scripture lays down a normative scheme for the running of a church, by elders within a local church who are approved by and answerable to that local congregation.  In 2020, a number of things have made me rethink this.  The Timmis affair seems to demonstrate how easily a dominant personality can hold sway over an eldership and a congregation.  The lack of formal structures facilitated this dominance in this case.  If independency is broadly right - and I still think it is - how are we to mitigate the risk here?  I think stronger, and formal, links between congregations are going to be crucial.  I think we probably need to build up proper local associations.  Pastors from different churches should feel like colleagues.  Coupled to this concern, the pandemic has raised questions of who is authorised to represent the churches at a regional or national level.  I've regularly felt more in line with Presbyterians and even Roman Catholics than those who have been speaking for Independent churches.  It is probably the nature of our very loose groupings - held together only by a wafer thin confession of basic evangelical truths - that we would struggle to put forward anyone who could speak for the whole slate.  What's to be done?  Not sure on this one at this stage!

Being physical

The experience of trying to do church on Zoom has been miserable.  I hate it.  I know most people hate Zoom, but it's more than just the extremely negative experience.  It's that it doesn't work.  Worship and community are physical things.  The sacraments prove that.  And the sacraments are not incidental to Christian worship but central and vital.  (Incidentally, I wrote a thing early in the pandemic arguing for the possibility of online communion.  I think that piece was theologically correct and would stand by it, and yet we only attempted it once.  Why?  Because as I said then, this could never be normative; only, in a sense, parasitical on our real physical gatherings.  And so I judged it to be unwise to get used to doing it this way).  I've been thinking that for evangelicals we've been so used to thinking of the faith as something that happens mostly in the mind - at the level of ideas and worldviews and doctrines - or perhaps in the heart - at the level of desires and affections - that we have forgotten that it is also something that involves the body.  To sit, to stand, to sing, to deliver the amen, to light candles, to lift hands, to eat and drink, to hug...  All this is not incidental but integral to worship, because the body is integral to human being.  I also wonder how much we depend on a model of discipleship that is 100% top down - i.e., from the head/thinking - when bodily actions and physical habits are just as capable of adjusting our thinking as vice versa.  To put it another way: having a correct eucharistic doctrine is important for shaping your faith, but taking the eucharist is much more important.

Against the tide

I've never personally felt more out of step with the generality of society than I have in 2020.  No doubt some of that is just down to me being an awkward so-and-so, and probably in a good deal of it I'm wrong.  That's okay.  I've tried not to let my personal dismay at everything overflow too much into my ministry, but it has made me think: shouldn't I feel like this more often?  The crisis of the year has made me examine things like my beliefs about death, and the potential for idolatry in my life, in a way that I don't normally have to do.  When I thought about it, I found I didn't agree with the world around me (or much of the church); but how often do I think about it?  I suspect I go with the flow much more than I should.

Perspectives

When the dust settles on this crisis, we will all have had really different experiences.  One of the things I keep having to remind myself is that my experience of this year - having known nobody first-hand who has been seriously ill with Covid, let alone died, and very few people second-hand - is very different from those who are grieving losses.  My view is inevitably different from that of a doctor slogging away in terrible conditions.  How we deal with those differences is going to be important.  The culture in general tends to prioritise experience over objectivity; but I know that my reaction to that can be to prioritise the abstract over the personal.  Neither is helpful.  Integration will have to happen, and hopefully some of that will occur as we swap stories in the pub or cafe over the summer.

Perseverance

At various points in the year I've had useful chats with people who have pointed out that quite often the goal of the Christian life according to the NT is just to keep going.  Endure.  Persevere to the end.  That's it.  It's not a grand project, which is good because all our grand projects rather fell apart this year.  If we can keep going, keep trusting, keep our eyes up on the Lord Jesus: that's enough.  That's everything!  The whole ball game, as I believe they say.  And most of us are still on the race track, still headed to the finish line.  And that will do.  Thank you, Jesus.

The Holy Innocents

Traditionally on this fourth day of Christmas the church has remembered the massacre of the infants of Bethlehem, which Matthew's Gospel reports after the story of the visit of the Magi:

After they were gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Get up! Take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. For Herod is about to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and escaped to Egypt. He stayed there until Herod’s death, so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled: Out of Egypt I called my Son.

Then Herod, when he realised that he had been outwitted by the wise men, flew into a rage. He gave orders to massacre all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under, in keeping with the time he had learned from the wise men. Then what was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children;
and she refused to be consoled,
because they are no more.

I find this one of the most disturbing episodes in Holy Scripture.  Of course, the content is horrific - mass murder of babies and toddlers, driven by the king's paranoia and malice.  But it isn't just the content but the context.  This is the Christmas story, the story of the nativity of Christ.  It's a story full of light dawning, of salvation coming.  And yet right in the middle of the story is this darkest of episodes.

The way Matthew tells the story is striking.  The main perspective, if you like, tells the story of the deliverance of the infant Jesus from Herod's power.  It is primarily the story of God driving his salvific purpose despite the opposition of the wicked.  The flight into Egypt recalls the patriarchs journey to the same country - in their case not to escape persecution but to survive famine.  The main perspective is the thwarting of Herod's evil plan by God's providential care.  It's a story of the light continuing to shine against a terribly dark background.

But the citation from the prophet Jeremiah initially invites us to take a second perspective: that of the bereaved mothers of Bethlehem.  Herod's plan to murder the Christ is thwarted, but his malice is instead spent on unrelated children.  Taking this perspective is disturbing on two counts: firstly, could not the God who warned Joseph to flee also have preserved these other children? and second, was it not God's own salvation plan which led to this act of mass murder?  The text does not invite us to blame the evil on God, for it was Herod's sin which led to the massacre.  But if the Christ had not entered the world in Bethlehem, wouldn't the children have been safe from Herod?  They seem to have been collateral damage in the great war in the heavenlies, and that hardly seems acceptable.   I am reminded of Kirkegaard's question about Abraham: wouldn't it have been better for him not to be the chosen?  Would it not have been better for the little town of Bethlehem if the Christ had not been there?

The context of the Jeremiah quote points to a third perspective, to my mind even more challenging.  In its original setting, the first reference of this prophecy is to those bereaved by the catastrophe of the exile from Judah; and Jeremiah, on behalf of the Lord, promises comfort.  God's love for his children is still there, despite all appearance.  Indeed, the very exile is shown to be the work of his love, his discipline.  He will have a people for himself.  The best thing for them - the only true good - is to belong exclusively to him, and he will make it so, and in so doing he will turn their lament into joy.  Matthew, then, invites us to step back.  At the centre is the story of Christ, rescued and preserved.  On the periphery is the terrible story of the massacre and the suffering of Bethlehem.  But in the widest perspective, is there hope in the story?  Are we to see comfort for this grieving?  If so, for Matthew that comfort will come through the preserved child.

And here we perhaps hear another echo.  Long ago, another Joseph had been driven into Egypt by persecution.  And in time, that Joseph was able to say that although there had been evil intent on the part of the human actors, God had intended good through the evil.  We are invited, then, to see God's providence in the dark as well as the light in the story.  Not equally, not in the same way; not so that Herod is in any way absolved, not so that grief stops being grievous.  But that somehow, through this infant, even the evil will be turned to good and the darkness overwhelmed by the light.

Hope, despite everything

I've copied below a long paragraph from Church Dogmatics IV/3, on the subject of hope.  The wider context is the doctrine of reconciliation as that relates to Christ's role specifically as Prophet and therefore the one who bears witness to himself and brings his people to faith in him (and incidentally, it seems to me that in comparison with the roles of Priest and King, this part of Christ's triple office is typically neglected; it gets a brief paragraph in Letham's Systematic Theology, for example, compared to chapters on the priestly and kingly roles).  The narrower context is the work of the Spirit in awakening the church and the individual Christian to hope.  And the immediate context is the three great challenges to hope: firstly, that the Christian finds him- or herself outnumbered and the message of Christ sidelined in the world; second, that the Christian is confronted continually by his or her own continuing sinfulness, which stands in contradiction of the great hope; and third, that the Christian still awaits Christ's judgement, and so cannot pronounce on the righteousness or the fruit of his or her labours.  This paragraph addresses the first challenge.  I've broken it up and added some commentary.  If you want to read the context, you'll find this paragraph on pages 917-919.

What is hope, and what does it mean for the Christian who, since Jesus Christ has not yet spoken His universal, generally perceptible and conclusive Word, finds himself in that dwindling and almost hopeless minority as His witness to the rest of the world?

Barth is clear that Christ has spoken, but he has not yet spoken in such a way that everyone will hear; that awaits the final coming of Christ.  In the meantime, how is the Christian who looks around the world and finds himself, as someone who has heard that word of Christ, in a minority to maintain his hope?  What does gospel hope mean for the Christian in a world where that hope seems to reach so few?

If the great Constantinian delusion is now being shattered, the question becomes the more insistent, though it has always been felt by perspicacious Christians.  What can a few Christians or a pathetic group like the Christian community really accomplish with their scattered witness to Jesus Christ?  What do these men really imagine or expect to accomplish in the great market, on the battle-field or in the great mad-house which human life always seems to be?  "Who hath believed our report?  and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?" (Is. 53:1).

'The great Constantinian delusion' is the dream of a church triumphant in this world; of the normalisation of Christian faith as the pattern of this age.  If it was being shattered when Barth was writing this in the 1950s, it is well and truly gone now.  Christendom is in the past.  And yet, even at the height of Christendom, when it seemed the world was, or would shortly become, wholly Christian, there were those 'perspicacious Christians' who saw that all was not well - the reformers of the church, who regularly saw themselves as in a minority even though they were surrounded by professing Christians.  The point that Barth is making is that the church is, generally speaking, small and weak - too small to compete in the marketplace of ideas, too weak to triumph on the ideological battlegrounds, too insignificant to make much of a difference to the madness of the world.  That this was also the experience of the prophets and apostles (as shown by Barth's quotation from Isaiah) may not make us feel much better.

And what are we to say concerning the countless multitudes who either ante or post Christum natum have had no opportunity to hear this witness?

Perhaps the most acute form of this problem: how is gospel hope to be maintained for the world when so many have never heard of him - and many of those came and passed before his nativity?

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!  The Christian is merely burying his head in the sand if he is not disturbed by these questions and does not find his whole ministry of witness challenged by them.  He buries it even more deeply if in order to escape them, forgetting that he can be a Christian at all only as a witness of Jesus Christ, he tries to retreat into his own faith and love or those of his fellow Christians.  Nor is there any sense in trying to leap over this barrier with the confident mien of a Christian world conqueror.

Three useless responses to the problem: firstly, to pretend that is isn't there, to ignore the questions - a useless response, and a damaging one, because it exposes the Christian's hope to ridicule; second, to retreat into pietism, of an individualistic or a communitarian sort - a response which denies the Christian's character as a witness, and which smacks more of self-interest and self-preservation than hope; and third, to continue to imagine a revived Constantinianism, perhaps in a very different form, in which the church triumphant will indeed be seen in this life, to be a world-changer, a history-maker - a response which perhaps appeals to self-confidence or youthful exuberance, but which I would guess is often actually founded on insecurity rather than gospel hope, and a sense that we have to do Christ's work for him.

The meaningful thing which he is permitted and commanded and liberated to do in face of it is as a Christian, and therefore unambiguously and unfalteringly, to hope, i.e., in face of what seems by human reckoning to be an unreachable majority to count upon it quite unconditionally that Jesus Christ has risen for each and every one of this majority too; that His Word as the Word of reconciliation enacted in Him is spoken for them as it is spoken personally and quite undeservedly for him; that in Him all were and are objectively intended and addressed whether or not they have heard or will hear it in the course of history and prior to its end and goal; that the same Holy Spirit who has been incomprehensibly strong enough to enlighten his own dark heart will perhaps one day find a little less trouble with them; and decisively that when the day of the coming of Jesus Christ in consummating revelation does at last dawn it will quite definitely be that day when, not he himself, but the One whom he expects as a Christian, will know how to reach them, so that the quick and the dead, those who came and went both ante and post Christum, will hear His voice, whatever its significance for them (Jn. 5:25).

The detail of this sentence will not, of course, be acceptable to those who are committed to the doctrine of limited atonement, which is a shame for them; but the thrust of it is I hope broadly appealing.  Christ has spoken his word; astonishingly, by the power of the Spirit that word has reached even me; there is nobody who is therefore beyond the reach of this word, even in the passage of time and history in which we see such a small minority receive it; at the end of history Christ will speak his word in such a way that all will hear his voice 'whatever its significance for them' - and the context of Barth's reference to John's Gospel makes it clear we cannot prejudge what that significance will be.  I am reminded of the scene in The Last Battle when everyone comes face to face with Aslan, to head off to his left or right.  There is no need for anxiety about the progress of Christ's word; indeed, anxiety is ruled out by gospel hope.

This is what Christian hope means before that insurmountable barrier.  This is what the Christian hopes for in face of the puzzle which it presents.  But the Christian has not merely to hope.  He has really to show that he is a man who is liberated and summoned, as to faith and love, so also to hope.  And if he really hopes as he can and should as a Christian, he will not let his hands fall and simply wait in idleness for what God will finally do, neglecting his witness to Christ.  On the contrary, strengthened and encouraged by the thought of what God will finally do, he will take up his ministry on this side of the frontier.  He will thus not allow himself to be disturbed by questions of minorities or majorities, of success or failure, of the more probable or more likely improbable progress of Christianity in the world.  As a witness of Jesus Christ, he will simply do - and no more is required, though this is indeed required - that which he can do to proclaim the Gospel in his own age and place and circle, doing it with humility and good temper, but also with the resoluteness which corresponds to the great certainty of his hope in Jesus Christ.

To hope in this Christian sense is not a passive thing; it is not like hoping a bus will come along, just sitting and waiting for an event beyond one's control.  Rather, it is living as one called to hope.  Knowing that God has taken care of the end result, knowing that there is reason for absolute confidence - the Christian will bear witness to Christ.  Whether in the minority or majority, whether strong or weak, he will just do what can do in the place he is put; and all he can do is live and speak as a witness.  The humility in which this is to be done springs from the fact that nothing ultimately depends on his work as a witness, but everything rests on the One to whom he bears witness.