What if your hope is not hopeful enough

some Advent reflections

God casts a large shadow. One cannot speak of God without saying other things as well. Even if left unspoken, things are implied.

Theological speech does something in just this way- as it makes a claim about God, it suggests unspoken claims about the world that then must also be true.

We could think about it like an elaborate chess game, where one move commits you to another.

The best chess players are playing ahead by a few moves. They may sacrifice a pawn for a larger, more involved attack on a queen. The board is set with the classic Christian doctrines- all of them- though some are inherently more flexible than others.

“Doctrines” are claims about God that arise from both scripture and tradition. These categories contain sets of biblical claims and commitments. Some of these doctrinal chess pieces, like the Trinity, do one thing. (I am a Trinitarian minimalist, so for me the doctrine is merely a lexical affirmation that “these three forms of speech refer to God”. For others, the Trinity does more than this). Other pieces, like salvation, Christ, and glory, move fluently across the board. These three especially present options to the master. If you are playing with all three of these pieces, you can plan ahead. You can present to the board a more involved account of what salvation does that is related both to how Christ moves and what glory promises. What salvation is depends both on how you conceive of Christ and of glory. If you have sets of nested commitments in regard to these doctrines, your pieces will need to move as a team, implicating each other. This is the best kind of theology.

But theology is made up not only of positive moves. Like chess, it carries within it the implications of the claims it makes. Every move suggests the possibility of a counter. You have to anticipate these responses in order to avoid forfeiting the game. You must rule things out in order to move constructively. Learning how to play strategically in this way is part of what makes a great theologian from someone who is just learning the game.

Evil is by my estimation the most common counter that is considered when we talk about God. This is because what kinds of things you say about God, Christ, salvation and glory will implicate certain moves about evil. Skilled players always anticipate evil’s attack. Unskilled players, or new speakers, often get cornered.

Eschatology, or “glory”, has often traded on one of two views. In both, evil is conceptually close at hand.

One view is a “this world-ly” view of “the new heavens and the new earth”, where heaven comes to earth. In this view, God comes to earth and reigns here, forever, erasing from this world the taint of sin and death and restoring what creation has lost through the curse of sin. This view has at least two benefits. First, it refuses to denigrate the body to the waste bin of human redemption. It treats humans as having an “amphibious anthropology” (body + soul) as integral to who and what humans are.

Second, it considers material reality as redeemable. God’s kingdom is seen as something not otherworldly or beyond the material, but as something that will be brought “down from heaven”. God’s kingdom in this way can also be seen as something begun in this world. Modern Christians borrow from the early twentieth century social gospel when they speak about “bringing the kingdom” or “continuing the work of God in the world.”

The second view of eschatology common in the modern period is of Christians going “up” to heaven. In such a view, the soul is released from the body and ascends “to heaven”, where God is. The soul is freed from pain and sorrow and is promised eternal life with God. Though the resurrection of the body is affirmed by all Christians, those who hold this second view of eschatology can easily be forgetful of this. With its emphasis on release from suffering and pain, proponents of this view trade on a version of the human person that is soul-heavy, with the body at best an accommodation to life in this world and the next.

Eschatology is not about the body, and attempts to treat it as such miss the mark. But eschatology is in a very real way about evil, and treating the soul as independent of the body misses critical truths about how bodies are deeply affected by evil, and about how its presence determines our knowledge of God and of ourselves- for some of us, almost completely.

But to choose the first view of eschatology primarily because it bolsters our instincts about the goodness of the body and the goodness of our involvement in alleviating the material concerns of others makes eschatology into a human program. It is how we get pious claims like “the arc of history bends toward justice”. Reader, it doesn’t. There is no implicit promise of social or personal betterment that is due to the natural course of “history” or “progress”. Progress is not a theological category.

In the first case, where heaven “comes down” to earth and God completes our human projects, we forget that this world is not a place of positive betterment for many people. For many- those suffering the after effects of war and famine, those who are chronically and terribly ill, those whose depression is so heavy they cannot get up over it- the promise of a future life that is eternal in duration and is just like this one is not a promised future, at all. No thanks to that, the sufferer would say. In fact for those whose suffering is close and ever present, the only hope that is worth having is one where God comes to the rescue and interrupts the desperate conditions of this life and where heaven is different, quite categorically. Otherwise hope might be primarily the domain of the optimist.

But if it is in fact the case that all it takes for God to make all things new is his presence, and that therefore the war/ famine/ depression would be gone, once God arrives, this begs the question of what God has been doing in the meantime. If God “with us” is the consolation of the second coming, one wonders where God has been doing all this time. Doesn’t Christian teaching say that God is with us, now? Don’t the sacraments promise this? How, then, will the way God is with us in the future be any different? How will it feel like hope? If the life to come is utterly continuous with this one, with God’s presence the main difference between the two, it seems that what the sufferer has experienced up to this point is God’s absence. It makes of God a liar. It is not clear in any case what difference “God with us” makes.

If the imaginative possibilities of life with God are available only to those who are not currently suffering, we do not have an adequately Christian eschatology. And if the promise of life with God is only an answer to present suffering, we do not have an adequately Christian hope. Utopias would offer this, as would, frankly, annihilation. This is why better social programs and suicide both are the loudest anthems of the modern age. If we cannot alleviate suffering, we must end it- there is no possibility of hope as a way through.*

In the second view, where earth goes “up into heaven”, humans are treated as “soulish”, with their bodies irrelevant. More significantly, human work and living in this life is also rendered irrelevant. “What matters” about us is something incorporeal, intangible, and frankly, impractical. We might bring with us memories or good intentions, but that’s about all. Moreover, there are no scars. It is hard to imagine a human life lived with hope that is absent of scars. The hope offered in this “up to heaven” version is a vision of “life with God’, but it is not clear how such a life is life.

Christian eschatology says instead that it is God’s presence itself that is the promise. But “God with us” is only the source of Christian hope if “God with us” is actually hopeful.

For God with us to be the story of Christian eschatology, God with us has to be a hopeful story. But for so many this seems to be a statement without enough content. We want God to do something and we in turn want people to change their lives as a response to his coming. What of war and of suffering, what of famine and injustice and oppression? What does God with us have to do with any of this, beyond giving people a thin feeling of superficial warmth?

This may be one of the simple tests for how we are forming Christians; if God with us sounds like thin soup, we’ve poorly played the chessboard of God and evil. We haven’t communicated just how it is that God relates to the sufferer, and how God’s presence with us in Christ is a promise worth hearing. This- not our politics or our social priorities or our low birth rate or our technologies or anything else- but our inability to hear God with us as a word of promise, is why I think we are post-Christian. Even Christians think there needs to be something else entailed beyond this promise.

My current theory is that we have been deploying Jesus on the theological chessboard as if he were primarily a solution to a problem- sin, usually, but sometimes evil- and not as “God with us”. We’ve chosen to think of Jesus as God’s works, and not the divine person. For many, it seems, Christ is not doing quite enough, or quite enough of the right things, to make glory have any meaning. If we were to strengthen our view of the latter, we might get a sense both of what God has to do with evil, and of how God’s presence with us is both a balm and a promise.

*Alleviating suffering is a Christian imperative, of course. What I am saying here is that we lack the imaginative capacity to imagine a suffering life being a life worth living.