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.

Though the earth gives way

I preached Psalm 46 at CCC this past Sunday.  It opens with this great picture of the security of God's people:

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling.

Even if everything falls apart - and it is the very destruction of creation that is envisaged here, the undoing of God's good ordering of things through the division of the seas and creation of dry land - even if it all collapses, we will not fear.  Why not?  Because God is our hiding place.  God is our firm foundation.  He is a very present help in trouble.

As an aside, what a great phrase that is!  We can talk about the omnipresence of God if we want to, and certainly the Bible does sometimes talk that way, but the perspective of this Psalm on the question of God's presence is: are you in trouble?  Then God will be there to help you.  This is not a piece of philosophy; it is gospel gospel gospel, all the way down.

One of the things that the rest of the Psalm makes clear is that this uncreation is directly related to human action, human war and destruction.  It is not about 'natural disasters' so much as it is about the ruining of everything through the chaos of a humanity which has 'liberated' itself from God's wise and righteous ways.

And the response to this chaos of humanity is two-fold.  In the present, the Psalmist says, God's people remain secure no matter what.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.

Notice the water!  Outside, the foaming of the terrible seas and the tidal waves which sink the mountains; inside, the quiet river bubbling gently over its stony bed and refreshing the people of God.  "Whoever believes in me," Jesus said, "out of his heart will flow rivers of living water."  The Holy Spirit with God's people is their refreshment and their security.

And then in the future, God will put an end to the destructive ways of humanity.

He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.

When God calls the nations to be still, and know that he is God, it is because he has ended their chaos once and for all.  The security of God's people in the present is like an outpost of the future, a glimpse into the final security of all creation when God has made it impossible for the earth to fall into the sea or for human beings to rise up against him and one another.

So here's the thing: there are a variety of things that make us feel like the earth is falling into the sea.  The political turmoil in the UK makes me feel that way.  I imagine I will also feel that way (and I realise with rather less justification) when England crash out of the World Cup.  (I am just putting this here as a hypothetical example, I know it's not really going to happen.  It's coming home, right?)

The point is that pretty much all our hopes, whether they are in people, institutions, or processes, are insecure.  Our only solid hope is that in all the trouble that comes our way, and through all the turmoil that shakes the earth, God is our very present help through his Son the Lord Jesus Christ, who supplies to us the glorious sustenance and refreshment of his Holy Spirit.

When it is awful

When everything is awful and life is too much to bear, we need the beginning, the middle, and the end of the Bible story.

We need the beginning because we need to know that it wasn't meant to be this way.  We need to know that God did not intend for us a world of suffering and tears and chaos.  In fact, Genesis 1 and 2 can be read as stories of the systematic binding of chaos and the perfect provision of spreading goodness respectively.  We need to know that God isn't cruel, that he didn't set us up for a fall.  The beginning of the story is all goodness, and we need that if we are going to remember in the darkness that God is good.

We need the middle of the story because we need to know that we are not left alone.  We see in the incarnation of the Son of God that the Creator has not abandoned his creation.  Far from it, as far from it as can be: he has entered his creation, become a creature, the Author inside the story.  And paradoxically we see how deeply committed to the non-abandonment of creation God is at the point where the Son of God casts his eyes towards heaven on the cross and finds himself... abandoned.  God is with us, and he is with us right at that point of God-forsaken agony.  The middle of the story is God-with-us on the cross, and we need that if we're to remember that his care is not removed from us in our own suffering.

We need the end of the story because we need to know that it will not always be like this.  It is small comfort to have a God who would have loved to help, and would even travel into the depths to be with us, but could not ultimately change anything.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ points forward to a future in which God himself will make every wrong right, will wipe away every tear from the eyes of his suffering people, and will make of our sad ruin a glorious future.  That is the ultimate hope, and it bleeds through into the little hopes for today, yes, even the very little ones.  The end of the story is a new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells, and we need that if we are going to persevere in the darkness.

Those who wait

My friend Tanya Marlow has written a book about waiting.  Waiting, which we're so bad at.  Waiting, which is just a part of life.  Waiting, which is essential to our faith.  Honestly, it's not the sort of book I normally read (it's all creative and stuff, and I usually take my theology straight up and a little more staid) - but I think you might benefit from reading it.  Yes, you.  Because you're waiting too, aren't you, for something?

The majority of the book is given over to re-tellings of the stories of four Biblical characters - Sarah, Isaiah, John the Baptist, and Mary.  The stories are narrated in the first person, and each split into five short chapters.  There is some great writing here, and a sense of immediacy which really pulls you into the world of the Bible.  Importantly, on only a few occasions (e.g. the first chapter of the Mary narrative) does the imaginative detail end up carrying the main point of the chapter - always a risk with these sorts of reconstructions!  The story-telling here is genuinely inviting us to look again at the Bible, without on the whole obscuring the Biblical narrative behind its own story-telling.  

And this may not be that exciting to many readers, but I was really pleased to have an appendix in which Tanya explains some of the interpretive choices she has made, and some of the ways in which she has avoided making interpretive choices (e.g. what exactly happened to Sarah in Egypt?)  Having that working on display is both a fascinating insight into the creative process, and a great reminder that Tanya is a responsible exegete and insightful theologian as well as a story-teller.

So, waiting.  How useful it is to be reminded that waiting for God to act has been a central experience of the fathers and mothers of our faith throughout the centuries!  Through the lenses of these stories we see different aspects of what waiting means: disappointment, delay, doubt, disgrace.  No doubt different stories will resonate with different people; perhaps listening to and engaging with the stories that resonate less immediately with us will help us to understand better the struggles of others.  But Tanya is not just reflecting on how hard it is to wait.  We are also reminded through these stories that we are waiting for someone - for God - to act: and we are reminded that he does indeed act, even when we don't see it.  It is worth it.

The book is rounded off by a fifth section, which moves away from story-telling to apply some of the insights we've hopefully picked up along the way into our own personal stories.  This section is brief but astute; I could have had more of it.  Then there is a second appendix with questions for group Bible study, which highlights that this book could be used in lots of different ways.  It would work really well as an advent course for homegroups, for example.

So, no, I wouldn't normally read this sort of book, but I'm glad I read this one.  The theme is important, and Tanya is just the person to tackle it.  And despite my general preference for a weighty theological tome, I wonder on reflection whether this isn't just the way to write about waiting - because after all, the wait isn't just a doctrine, but a lived experience of groaning and hoping.

As Tanya helps us to pray:

Lord Jesus,

Who waited for centuries in the light of heaven

Nine months in the warm darkness of a womb

And three days in a tomb

Be with us in the waiting, we pray.

Exiles and the Kingdom

I think the New Testament is pretty clear that Christians should expect their experience of life in this world to be an experience of exile.  1 Peter is obviously the book that explicitly uses this imagery, but actually the whole of the NT is full of the discomfort, the being-out-of-place, that comes from being part of the new creation in Christ and yet living day by day in the old creation.  Some of the more radical explorations of that motif are in Paul: think of the way that the old extends even to my own body (and mind?) in the conflict of Romans 7.  I am in exile not only in the world, but in a sense in my own skin.  Stranger in a strange land.

Given the prevalence of this motif, I don't see why Christians would be surprised to find themselves a minority, their views ignored, their beliefs ridiculed.  We should be okay with that.

But there is another line in the NT, which represents one of the essential insights of Old Testament monotheism.  Along this line, the NT insists that the whole earth is the Lord's, with everything in it.  That is why you can eat meat sacrificed to idols - the meat is God's, the idols are nothing (even if they are demons!)  From this perspective, it is the Christian who belongs - this is our Father's world, and moreover it is the world which, whether it knows it or not, is decisively claimed for redemption through the death and resurrection of Christ.  In a sense this is the deeper line, which cuts across the experience of exile: we are at home, deeply at home, in the world.  It is just that the world itself does not know that it has been brought home in Christ to its creator.

Given this, I don't see how we could refuse to hope for genuine improvement in the world.  I don't see how the church can acquiesce in the world's refusal to know itself and be itself in Christ.  We should be constantly calling the world - institutions and societies as well as individuals - to repentance and faith.

I suppose the key thing is that we speak from the perspective of confidence.  Those who fear that the exile is the more fundamental reality will speak in a shrill manner, out of anxiety and not out of the deep calm of prophetic vision.  It is only when we know that the world is Christ's that we can calmly and clearly - without being shocked by rejection, but never giving up hope that we might be heard - tell the world what it is in Christ, and what it ought therefore to be in experience.

Prisoners of Hope

Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
today I declare that I will restore to you double.

This little section from the Palm Sunday prophecy is really striking to me.  What does it mean to be a prisoner of hope?  At one level, I suppose just that being a prisoner does not necessarily deprive one of hope.  In this instance, the prophet encourages God's people to expect a great reversal in their fortunes.  When their King comes, righteous and having salvation, they will no longer be prisoners.

At another level, I think the prophecy denotes that God's people under the Old Testament are actually kept imprisoned by hope itself.  Why don't they just disappear, assimilate, recognise that they can do very well for themselves as individuals in the new empires?  All it would take is the dropping of a few quaint stories and odd habits.  It would be undeniably easier, the best way to your best life now.  But for whatever reason, Israel cannot avoid the burden of the hope which God has given them.  Israel cannot accomodate themselves to the way the world is; they are constrained (imprisoned!) by a picture of how life and the world and humanity ought to be.  Therefore they suffer.  They do not merely hope in spite of suffering; they suffer because of hope.

Isn't this also true of Jesus, who for the joy set before him endured the cross?

Is this where our daily wrestling comes from still?  We are imprisoned by hope, Easter people living in the world that is not yet raised, Jesus people living in the world that does not yet know him.  Stuff doesn't work.  We don't work.  Life isn't as it should be.  Disappointment, and striving, ultimately springs from hope, which still imprisons us here between the ages.

One little irony: many of those imprisoned by hope finally came to prefer the jail to the reality of freedom.  Their hope had been twisted, or perhaps deferred too long, and they could not bear the gap between their imaginations and the reality.  The gap is still there for most of us, I guess.  The lesson to learn from Palm Sunday is perhaps that we should be prepared to let our hopes - the little daily hopes and the great big kingdom hopes - be revised and refreshed again and again by the King who comes in humility.

Hope

I struggle with hope. On a good day, I can manage something approximating to faith, even if it does more often than not sound more like 'if you say so' than 'may it be to me according to your word'; on a very good day, there is even something a little bit like love, although not in anything approaching 1 Corinthians 13 categories. But hope I find tricky. Frightening, actually.

Frightening?

Well, yes, because so often what you hope for doesn't happen. I don't have anything in particular in mind - in fact, if I'm honest, I have to say that many of the things (and most of the important things) that I have hoped for have come to pass. But there is a sort of generalised, low-level anxiety that hope just raises expectations which could be dashed; that it isn't quite clear what it would be safe to hope for on a daily basis.

I am aware that this is a very grave failing, and probably falls under the heading of cowardice. I would like to say I hope to get over it, but, well, you know.

But this morning I was reading my Church Dogmatics, as you do in the morning, and I came across Barth's discussion of hope, in his survey of the doctrine of reconciliation. He points out that for the Christian the big hope is to be with God, serving God, as a willing and righteous partner - he actually makes the interesting point that what we hope for is exactly what Pelagians and semi-Pelagians have always said we already have, namely the ability, given by grace, to really co-operate with God. That is the hope. And of course the big point is that this hope is already fulfilled in Christ. He, as a man, occupies that position now, and therefore guarantees that I will also occupy it. Hurrah!

But that wasn't the bit that really struck me. He goes on to say: "But in the one hope there will always be inseparably the great hope and the small hope. All through temporal life there will be the expectation of eternal life. But there will also be its expectation in this temporal life. There will be confidence in the One who comes as the end and new beginning of all things. There will also be confidence in His appearing within the ordinary course of things as they still move toward that end and new beginning..." Of course! Because all hope is wrapped up in, and joined to, that great big hope. Jesus is coming back one day, and therefore I expect to see him tomorrow - maybe not yet in the flesh, but at work in my life and my world. I have hope. And only for that reason: "the small hopes are only for the sake of the great hope from which they derive", but conversely "where there is the great hope, necessarily there are hopes for the immediate future".

Of course, these small hopes may not come true "in their detailed content", but "it is certainly in these many little hopes that the Christian lives from day to day if he really lives in the great hope. And perhaps he is most clearly distinguished from the non-Christian by the fact that, directed to the great hope, and without any illusions, he does not fail and is never weary to live daily in these little hopes".

Thanks, Karl. That transforms how I look at my future - the uncertainty surrounding employment in a couple of months time, the anxiety over future ministry, the various petty issues that will fog my vision tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on until I see Him face to face. Small hopes, relative hopes, not so certain hopes; but all witnessing and pointing to and grounded in a great, certain, coming hope.

Huzzah!

You can find all this in Church Dogmatics IV.1, around about page 120.