The Other Side of Hope

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S.Eliot


Over the course of the past year, I have witnessed more tears and felt the heaviness of grief more often than ever before in my life. As a chaplain in a hospital, I have sat with patients and patients’ family members in the midst of crushing news time and time again. It is never easy no matter how much time we have to prepare ourselves for it. When it finally happens, when we finally receive the crushing news, it is always crushing whether we have an hour, a day, a week, or years to prepare for it.

Words like hope and hopelessness, vitality and despair, heaven and hell can easily remain little more than words among other words. They can easily remain metaphorical concepts that we move and manipulate in the course a sentence in order to formulate our grand theologies of hope and love. However, when such words remain nothing more than concepts, they are empty of any sort of concrete significance, and when they remain empty of concrete significance, they leave the speaker of such words as nothing more than a parrot repeating useless mantras while watching the rush of lava approach steadily after a volcanic eruption.

If our theological language never touches the ground, if our words never bespeak experience, then they will be as cute as children in the schoolyard discoursing about determination and courage. Those children are not necessarily speaking lies by any means, but when they speak of determination and courage, it is not the same in the least as when a sixty-seven year old migrant worker reflects on his life or when a fifty-four year old Chinese lady tells the story about when she moved to America when she was twenty-eight without knowing how she would begin her new life. When the migrant worker and the Chinese lady speak of determination and courage, their words are colored with their experience. They have a knowing look in their eyes. Determination and courage are not mere words to them. Determination is when that migrant worker would eat only one meal a day in order to save enough money to buy his children shoes so they could go to school and learn English. Courage is when that young Chinese girl got on the plane and did not turn back to her parents waving goodbye. Their words have real concrete significance.

These past months as a chaplain in a hospital I have felt, experienced the theological words so often used throughout my time in seminary. And I must admit that theological concepts such as resurrection have felt distant; victory has been far out of reach. In such moments – and they are many – what is the function of theology? I have asked myself this again and again. In a clinical context and more broadly in a medicated society, what is the role of theology? I have not yet arrived upon a fully satisfying answer. However, I do think that in order for there to be a satisfying answer, it must come in the form of language and narratives that are full of experience, full of concrete significance. It is only when such language and narratives are rich with experience and concrete significance that they will have the capacity to frame our hopeless situations with genuine hope-filled perspective. Imaginary lines do nothing for a bleeding portrait. 

Last Things Last (?): destiny illuminating the present

This month I finished classes for an M.Div. at Fuller Theological Seminary, and I must say that I have had a very stimulating few years at Fuller. Faculty, staff, and peers have made the whole experience immeasurably rewarding. I could not have asked for a better seminary experience.

When I was mapping out seminary classes, I had not intentionally planned to study eschatology at the end of my time at Fuller – roughly speaking eschatology is a fancy word for talk about stuff at the end or destiny. I suppose that it was a bit fitting for me to study eschatology at the end of my seminary education, and for my last assignment, I wrote a paper briefly outlining my reflections on the consummation of creation. Last things last. However, in the past few months and weeks, I have begun to wonder whether or not eschatology belongs at the end. Maybe it belongs near the beginning.

Over the past several years, I have studied various aspects of Jürgen Moltmann’s theology, a Reformed post-Barthian theologian. A little more than a year ago, I studied a few dimensions of Moltmann’s Christology in The Way of Jesus Christ, and this week I have begun reading Moltmann’s Theology of Hope in which he puts eschatology at the beginning of the theological task rather than at the end – in contrast Barth places eschatology on the circumference of the theological task and atonement at the center (Dogmatics, IV.1). Moltmann explains, “A proper theology would…have to be constructed in the light of its future goal” (Fortress Press, 1993, Theology of Hope, 16). Thus, Moltmann begins with eschatology.

Moltmann explains that eschatology is not merely about stuff at the end but is about hope, and he claims that eschatology is the torch that illumines the path into the future; eschatology tells the future about the present. “Hope’s statements of promise…must stand in contradiction to the reality which can at present be experienced…they do not seek to bear the train of reality, but to carry the torch before it” (18). 

Moreover, drawing Barth’s beginning and end together, Moltmann places revelation and eschatology together indicating that God does not simply reveal God’s self but reveals God’s self as the God of promise. God’s promises fuel hope for the future, and God’s promises for the future are grounded in Jesus, particularly in the resurrection of Jesus. Consequently, Moltmann places priority on hope for precisely the same earth on which and for which Christ died and was raised. Christian hope, Moltmann exclaims, “sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands” (21).

The future of the earth is pledged and established on the resurrection of Jesus, and this hope based on the resurrection of Jesus has implications for the present. The fulfilled future invigorates action in the unfulfilled present. Moltmann explains, “As long as hope does not embrace and transform the thought and action of men, it remains topsy-turvy and ineffective. Hence Christian eschatology must make the attempt to introduce hope into worldly thinking, and thought into believing hope” (33). Hope for the future stimulates social action and reform.

Rather than supposing eschatology to be something that belongs exclusively to the distant future attached to the rest of theology like an appendix, it may very well be the case that eschatology is the opening to theology. Talk about destiny belongs near the beginning. Telos shapes the present. Hope fuels faith and life, and more particularly hope based on the resurrection of Jesus provides concrete specificity to the sort of hope for which the church hopes. As the Nicene Creed concludes, we look forward to the resurrection of the body and the world to come. For Moltmann, however, this profession about the future belongs at the beginning, and the world for which the church hopes is the earth on which Jesus' cross stood. It may just be the case that theology is possible only because there is hope.