In the first installment of this two-part essay, we provided a rough outline of a thick theological account of Christian hope. We concluded with mention of important critiques of such traditional views on hope, that by orienting Christians to place their ultimate hope in God and the future consummation of His kingdom, such frameworks undermine socio-political action for earthly causes in the here and now.
Is eschatological hope escapist?
No. Christian hope provides resources to sustain the pursuit of goods through the struggles and setbacks, limitations and failures endemic to this life.
Webster already gestures at an answer to such critiques. He says that hope assures us that our small acts in pursuit of the good that often go unrecognized will be vindicated by God (Webster, 213). But Webster doesn’t wade much into broader political reflection.
This is provided by a couple of recent works on hope, particularly the important new book by Michael Lamb on Augustine’s politics called Commonwealth of Hope. These works provide a framework for how the classical Christian teaching on hope can provide resources for commitment to temporal causes — to inspire, inform, and sustain political action.
Yes, Christian hope de-absolutizes all human projects and ambitions. But it also provides the power to sustain temporal hopes when all secular sources fail. Lamb explains that Augustine, building off Hebrews 6 (in sermon 359a), describes hope as an “anchor to the soul” which protects “pilgrims from being battered onto the shores of presumption or despair,” “giving pilgrims the ability to resist temptation and endure trial with steady resolve and perseverance” (Lamb, 55).
These authors expound on this with reference to the classical definition of hope as oriented to a future good that is arduous yet possible to attain. This hope, they explain, is threatened by presumption and despair — which are opposed to hope and our pilgrim status in the world. Presumption neglects to lean on God for assistance. The presumptuous either arrogantly assume they can achieve the good on their own, or they assume the great good is not important to pursue with vigor. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would refer to this latter version as “cheap grace” — a form of spiritual laziness that denies the costly demands of discipleship. We could refer to the other as a form of pelagianism. These err by assuming either there is no need to work hard or that our hard work is all we need. According to these errors, we are no longer pilgrims on an arduous journey, but tourists on holiday or triumphant conquerors. On the other side, despair tells us that the good is not even possible, and thus it is pointless to pursue it. This is a form of spiritual laziness that denies that goods are available to us. It makes a truce with the gap and gives up on the pilgrimage altogether.
The most promising conceptual tool these authors contribute is a positive understanding of secondary means and proximate ends. Just as we can order our loves (thus, we can love God ultimately without destroying love for others like our parents and children), so too we can order our hopes. The earthly city, yes, cannot be hope’s primary and ultimate interest. But earthly projects, if referred to hope’s ultimate end, may become part of our overall pursuit of God and his kingdom.1
They recognize that earthly social projects can become idols. But at the same time, these authors remind us, such projects can be signposts of our true transcendent hope.
We have, beyond worldly politics, an eternal hope, a heavenly home, and our ultimate citizenship is in the kingdom of God. We will remain ultimately restless in this world, and thus we can make no permanent home in any earthly inns during our pilgrimage; to do so would be to commit idolatry. But Scripture also describes us as resident aliens who are to seek the welfare of the polities in which we reside during our earthly exile (cf Jer 29; 1 Peter).
Christians know that this age and this world matter, and thus we must do what we can to love and bless our neighbors. But our expectations are limited, and we remain agnostic about the outcomes of any particular political developments. This means that our politics must be desacralized. But Christians should engage the world of politics, seeking to influence our societies. Though our ultimate hope is in our heavenly homeland, and thus will not be fully satisfied in this life, in any social project, or any temporal entity, this does not negate hoping for foretastes of that future in the here and now. In our rejection of political idolatry, let us not become iconoclasts.
The apostle John says we cannot truly love God, whom we cannot see, if we do not love our neighbor whom we see (1 John 4:20). Similarly, we cannot truly hope in heaven if we abandon hope for our temporal societies and earthly homes.
Lamb applies this logic in support of political activism (as an arena to practice and grow in civic virtue) and pluralism (since we must avoid presumption about our grasp of the truth, what unity is possible in this life, or our ability to achieve a perfect political society).2 I would argue this also applies to things that are often referred to as “Christian nationalism.”
Lamb focuses his Augustinian reflections on the assumption common to Augustinian civic liberals that Augustine proposes reducing political aspiration to peaceful coexistence among people with competing views of the ultimate good but sharing common objects of love in the temporal sphere. But Augustine also is emphatic that there is no true polity without justice, and justice is giving what is due to those to whom it is due, and he argues that justice demands public honoring of God.3 So, we can, in an Augustinian framework of political hope, pursue the increased recognition of the reality of God and His ordering of the world — not just for the sake of Christians, but for what is due to God and good for our nations. Recognizing and honoring God also enables us to recognize His image bearers and what is due to them.
And our ultimate, eschatological hope puts our political hopes in the proper perspective. As the hopeful pilgrim faces hardship, she cedes control, seeks help, and rests secure that in the end, God will put it all to rights.
Again, this does relativize earthly projects. It prevents secular hopes from presumptuous expectations that are often followed by despair. But it also rejects despair, which abandons the arduous pursuit of the goods that are actually possible in the here and now. We are in the time of grace, as Webster says. Christ is on the throne and is coming back. Even in “negative world,” there are political goods we can and should seek, and we should not assume that God will not show up.
Hope turns the Christian into a pilgrim, but that pilgrim is also a neighbor who is not indifferent toward others. We can only really have eschatological hope if we also participate in secular hope. There is a positive relationship between seeking social good in this life and belonging to God in the next.
This is all well and good. But to conclude, I want to remind us of where our primary focus in our temporal social hopes should reside: in the common life of the church. There are many figures we could turn to in this respect, for instance the subjects of either of my theses: Thomas F. Torrance or Henri de Lubac; or, we could look at Stanley Hauerwas and other political theologians who have taken the so-called “ecclesial turn” in political theology. But none of those figures foreground the theme of hope as does Lesslie Newbigin.4
According to Newbigin, the primary thing that the church contributes to politics or social ordering is to be the sign, foretaste, and instrument of the kingdom of God.5 She should not be preoccupied with making public pronouncements or producing activists who jump onto secular political causes. No, the church stands in the wider community not primarily as promoters of social change, but as itself the foretaste of a different social order — the social body in which the fulfillment of our social longings is already proleptically present. This constitutes the church as the “colony of heaven,” the embassy or “outpost” of the eschatological kingdom (27).
But this does not lead to not acting in the broader public sphere.
Webster and Benedict explain that the practice most closely tied to the virtue of hope is prayer. And Newbigin argues that our actions in public life are “acted prayers” for the kingdom (51). These actions do not directly bring about the kingdom, but are, rather, visible cries for its coming, and “as such they serve as signs of its reality and enable others to act in hope.”6
We should be patient, but not apathetic about the broader social order and the good that can be achieved therein. But Newbigin reminds us that all our acts must come under the judgment of the cross and the coming judgment (29f). Christian hope is not merely otherworldly, but neither is it a simple, gradual improvement of this world. No, Christian hope must be understood through the lens of death and resurrection. New creation is not just extension of this life. “Unless the radical otherworldliness of the gospel message is acknowledged,” argues Newbigin, “the real role of the church in political will be hopelessly compromised” (101).
Newbigin is emphatic that our hope for a “perfect society” cannot be placed on this side of death. “There is,” he says, “no straight light of development from here to the kingdom” (46-47).
We need to embrace the analogic of the grain of wheat, employed by our Savior (John 12). It falls and seems like it is lost and dead, but out of it God raises something new. This something new is “not a mere extension of the grain, yet also not absolutely disconnected from it” (48).
Our goal is not merely the improvement of society, but the “holy city, the New Jerusalem, a perfect fellowship in which God reigns in every heart, and His children rejoice together in His love and joy” (55). To that we look forward with sure hope. And for its sake we must act, “though we know we must grow old and die, that our labors, even if they succeed for a time, will be buried in the dustbin of time, and that along with the painfully won achievements of goodness, there are mounting seemingly irresistible forces of evil.” Yet, Newbigin expounds, we do not despair. But neither do we take refuge in any comfortable illusions.
We know these things must be. But we know that as surely as Christ was raised from the dead, so surely shall there be a new heaven and new earth wherein dwells righteousness and justice. And having this knowledge we ought as Christians to be the strength of every good movement of political and social effect, because we have no need either of blind optimism or despair. (55)
This was the same for Christ. He was not quietist, He did not passively submit to the rule of injustice. He was moved to act. But, at the end, but only at the end, He uttered a cry of submission: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.”
Hear Newbigin:
The coming of the Kingdom lies in His Father’s hands, on the other side of death and defeat. The earthly ministry of Jesus is not the launching of a movement which will gradually transform the world into the Kingdom of God. It is, rather, a showing forth, within the confines of the present age, of the reality which constitutes the age to come — the reality of God’s reign. (102)
So, church, our task is to “embody and announce, within the limits of the present age, subject as it is to sin and death, the reality of the new age, of God’s justice and mercy” (102). In the life of this world, the ultimate sign of the kingdom in the life of this world is the cross. Since this is the case, Newbigin is emphatic that the kingdom cannot primarily take the form of a political movement.
Rather, the temporal action of Christians is to focus on “embody[ing] and announc[cing] presence of the kingdom under the sign of the cross and in the power of resurrection” (103). Newbigin takes this to entail a primacy of commitment to the people of God, the church.
Think about Ephesians 2, which we referenced above. There Paul explains that Christians are those who were once without God and without hope in the world. What, according to the immediately following verses, did the cross accomplish? Well, those who were once alienated from the commonwealth (a political term) of God were brought near and formed into a new social order. The dividing wall of hostility was broken down and we were reconciled to God and one another. We were formed into one new body of those through Christ have access in one Spirit to the Father. We were made fellow citizens (another political term) with the saints in the household of God. As Peter Leithart has expounded, “salvation must take social form,”7 and this social form is first and foremost the church. Here is the polity of peace for which we long and which will one day cover the earth.
Without this fundamental commitment to the church, all kingdom talk turns into secular utopianism, argues Newbigin. Only in the church is the “true otherworldliness of the gospel held together with its true this-worldliness” (104). The church is that unique social body which has Christ as its only head and it is in Christ that the kingdom is present.
The church, in the language of Newbigin, is the sign, foretaste, and instrument of the kingdom. “When we set Kingdom issues against church issues,” he explains, “we are always in danger of defining the Kingdom in terms of some contemporary ideology and not in terms of the manifestation of the Kingdom in the incarnate, crucified, and risen Jesus” (106).
So, hope in God. Do not despair about goods that can be accomplished in this world. No matter how “negative” the world gets, God is in control, He will set the world to rights, and He has established the beachhead of the kingdom in the church — against which the gates of hell will not prevail (Matt 16:18) and through which the manifold wisdom of God is being made known to the principalities and powers (Eph 3:11). It is therein that our hope can be tasted. Especially each week at the Lord’s Table where the future breaks into the present and creates a new social order.
James R. Wood is Assistant Professor of Ministry at Redeemer University (Ancaster, ON).
- Here, these authors rely heavily on Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, 17.3-4; 25.1. ↩︎
- See Lamb, chapters 8-10. ↩︎
- See especially City of God, books 10 and 19. ↩︎
- All quotes, unless noted in a footnote, are from the essays in Lesslie Newbigin, Signs amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). The theme of hope and its relation to temporal action is central in the included lectures from 1941 titled “The Kingdom of God and the Idea of Progress.” But discussions of hope and the centrality of the church are littered throughout his other writings as well. ↩︎
- This triple description of the church’s relationship to the kingdom is littered throughout Newbigin’s writings. ↩︎
- Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 115. ↩︎
- Peter Leithart has argued this in various places. See especially Delivered from the Elements of the World: Atonement, Justification, Mission (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016); “Sacramental Mission: Ecumenical and Political Missiology,” in Four Views on the Church’s Mission, edited by Jason S. Sexton (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017); and Against Christianity (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2003). Newbigin makes similar comments in his writings. See especially two important chapters: “The Congregation as the Hermeneutic of the Gospel,” in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society; and “Unto All the Nations,” in The Household of God (New York: Friendship Press, 1954). ↩︎