Over a decade ago, I participated in a small Bible study and fellowship group. Like all small groups, each of us brought our unique perspectives and outlooks to the conversation. Among others, the group consisted of a math teacher, a carpenter, and an engineer who had become a stay-at-home mom.

 

In the course of a couple years, we exchanged ideas on everything from Genesis to Revelation—and a whole lot more. One evening, the conversation turned to “hope.” We studied several contexts referring to hope. We saw the New Testament discusses a living hope, a hope that does not disappoint, and helmet of hope. Paul talks about the hope that abides alongside faith and love. There is the hope of eternal life, a blessed hope, and a better hope. The epistles invite their readers to know the hope of their calling, to lay hold of the hope set ahead of them, and to be ready to give reason for the hope within.

 

When you read the New Testament, you get an overwhelming sense that there’s a whole lotta hopin’ going on.

 

After a while, the majority of our group reached a conclusion. They decided that we today share the hope of the early church. We should be hoping for the exact same things that they hoped for; namely, the Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection, eternal life, and all of the eschatological (end time) blessings the come with the arrival of the kingdom of God.

 

This struck two of us—Marcus and me—as being slightly out of place. After all, many of the New Testament passages contain very specific time elements integrally connected to the hope under consideration. Take Galatians 5:5. “For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness.” Here Paul suggests that he and his original readers believed that their hope would come to fulfillment quickly. For me, this meant keeping “hope” in the context of 2,000 years ago. Lifting hope from that context and carrying it two millennial forward seemed—at least to me—a little like larceny.

 

Frankly, I wasn’t comfortable with appropriating the hope held by people living twenty centuries ago for myself—especially when those people clearly expected their hope to be fulfilled in short order. If their hopes left them empty and we’re still waiting for their “eager expectation” to be fulfilled this many years later, what makes us believe that the hope will ever be fulfilled?

 

Maybe instead of simply adopting their hope “whole cloth,” we’d do better to live on the fulfilled side of hope. If their immediate hope was worth anything to them, it is worth us accepting it on its own terms and then developing new hopeful strategies that emerge from their hope fulfilled.

 

So, perhaps naively, Marcus and I raised a couple questions that unintentionally stirred things up a little. “What if we shouldn’t be hoping for any of that? What if their hopes 2,000 years ago were fulfilled?”

 

In the blink of an eye, the tone and tenor of the conversation changed from one of rhapsodic delight about our future prospects to one of anger, heartbreak, and tears. “You’re trying to take away my hope,” Katie accused.

 

“Yeah,” Stan chimed in. “If you take away our hope, what do we have left?”

 

I replied, “We have fulfillment. And what would you rather do—hope for something or actually have it? Would you rather hope to win the lottery or have the million dollars? And how sad would it be to have already won the million dollars while you were still hoping to win it. It would have been yours the whole time but you were so busy hoping for it that you never got to enjoy it.”

 

“But if we don’t have hope, what’s left for us?”

 

Marcus added, “Hebrews says that faith is the evidence of things hoped for and the substance of things not seen. What if we actually have what they hoped for? What kind of difference might that make in your life?”

 

“I don’t know,” Katie replied. “Just don’t take away my hope.”

 

And so the conversation went. Our group—at least at that time—was wed to hope. A hope that Paul and the other New Testament authors claimed as their own. A hope the apostles expected to be fulfilled in their lifetimes. A hope that Paul in Acts 28:20 described as “the hope of Israel” (Acts 28:20).

 

The wisdom writer observed, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13:12). Those living 2,000 years ago were eagerly looking forward to trading in their hope for a tree of life. They hadn’t reached their goal yet, but they believed they would relatively soon.

 

They never saw themselves as holding onto an eternal hope or passing on their hope to succeeding generations. They certainly didn’t seek to perpetuate their hope thereby gutting their hope of its transforming power.

 

Paul assured his original readers that they lived in hope of the full arrival of the Kingdom of God.   “For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently” (Romans 8:24-25). They didn’t yet have it. However, they looked forward to relinquishing their hope for fulfillment.

 

Today, though, we may find ourselves clinging to a hope whose fulfillment we’ve neglected to embrace. The prolific Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, explores the subject extensively in his latest book Surprised by Hope. He describes his view of Paul’s hope in Romans 8 as being already-but-not-yet, which for Paul and his Roman audience hope was. However, we don’t live in the same context as they did.

 

According to Wright, Paul’s expectation extends to us today. Like them, we today have deliverance to a degree, but “this remains ‘in hope’ because we still look forward to the ultimate future salvation of which he speaks in (for instance) Romans 5:9,10” (Surprised by Hope, p.198). On the surface, this sounds perfectly plausible. Yet, it makes the same assumption presumed by my small group so many years ago; namely, that we today share the same hope in substance as the first century Christian communities. It fails to consider the possibility that Paul’s hope came to fruition, blossoming into a tree of life.

 

Does it really make a difference? Why not simply go on living in hope of what the ancients expected? Let me offer three observations.

 

One, it’s a matter of fairness. Can we retain our integrity by taking something belonging to a certain group of people in a very specific setting and projecting it into an indefinite future? Is it fair to take the content of their hope seriously without honoring the time element of their hope?

 

By grabbing a hope that belonged to people two millennia ago—people living in a transformational setting, people expecting the end of the age to arrive in their lifetime—we’ve today grifted a hope that doesn’t belong to us.

 

To do justice to the people like Paul who originally held that eschatological hope, we owe them two things: (1)to understand the content of their hope; and (2) to take seriously the possibility that their hope was fulfilled when they expected it. To do otherwise causes us to blindly appropriate what we may not understand and, therefore, what does not rightfully belong to us. And this leads to the second observation.

 

Two: False hope. If we uncritically acquire and perpetuate a hope that doesn’t belong to us, we end up promulgating false hope, and nothing disappoints like false hope.

 

Preachers expecting their end-time hopes to be fulfilled in the near future pore through Scripture looking for Biblical mandates supporting their political and religious agendas. They advise their congregations to prepare for the end that could come any day now. Meanwhile, they may have misplaced the end by 2,000 years.

 

Why do they think their hopes will be fulfilled “at hand,” when the Biblical texts they draw from—at least according to their interpretations—were not? That seems a little conceited to me. Daily, millions of people hope for the Second Coming, the judgment, and the end of the age. They misappropriate the first-century Biblical prayer for themselves, “Maranatha! Lord, come quickly.” In so doing, they’re hoping for something that already is.

 

The sellers of false hope often contribute—intentionally or not—to an escapist mentality. God will come, they suggest, and set things aright. This assumes things are not right at the moment, and the only hope is for God to descend from above, or for the faithful to ascend from below. Either way, it minimizes the capacity we have today for influencing and shaping our world. It substitutes creative hope for wishful thinking, which brings me to my final observation.

 

Three: Robbing ourselves. If we’re hopefully expecting something to occur that has already occurred, we’re robbing ourselves of a new hope and depriving ourselves of the fulfilled blessings that spawn new hope for us.

 

When we take away false hope, we can replace it with viable hope. A hope that recovers humanity’s true identity and offers constructive possibilities for our collective future. Instead of waiting for an eschatological act of God to blow everything up or to change everything into some supposed transphysical reality, we have the God-given blessing of being co-creators in our world.

 

For example, consider the eschatological mandate of the Great Commission. Jesus instructed his disciples to go into the entire world and preach the gospel in advance of the end. Missiological movements today continue to perpetuate that mandate in hope of bringing about the conditions that will precipitate the end. However, Paul apparently believed that his ministry had accomplished world evangelism in his day (Romans 16: and Colossians 1:5, 23). How might the world look if Christ followers reframed their place in the world, transforming themselves from attempting to convert people to a religion into people contributing to nurturing peace, equity, and justice?

 

The point is that anticipating something that has already passed reduces my ability to live in the present moment. It causes me to overlook what already is.

 

Continuing to hope for what has already come to pass is—well—fruitless. Back in January 2007, I hoped that my favorite college football team, The Ohio State University Buckeyes, would win the National Championship. My hopes were dashed when my team was thrashed. In January 2008, once again I hoped that the Buckeyes would win the trophy, and once again they came in second. If I continue to hope that the 2007 and 2008 games result in an Ohio State victory, I’ve misplaced my hope by taking it out of its context. Of course, I’m hoping for a championship in the upcoming season, and I expect that hope to be fulfilled in January 2009.

 

Jurgen Moltmann, the great German theologian, has written extensively on what he has described as a theology of hope. He builds on the work of Rudolf Bultmann, who understood hope in exclusively existential terms. Because they both were unable to reconcile the New Testament’s sense of hopeful imminence and fulfillment of that hope, they transformed the New Testament’s eschatological hope into the hope of an individual (or a society) for God to enter into and transform its lived experience.

 

Who can argue with such lofty goals? Nevertheless, this existential and societal hope is not necessarily the same hope held by the earliest Christ followers, nor it is necessarily the same hope communicated by the New Testament.

 

However, that is not such a bad thing—especially if we recognize it for what it is. A Post-Eschatological Hope. In a Post-Eschatological era, this kind of hope—or hopes—might be precisely what we need in order to inspire our world today.

 

A Post-Eschatological hope will unfold and evolve over time. It will vary from one social and cultural context to another, yet it will transcend and include today’s global society and awakening consciousness. So, there will never be a singular post-eschatological hope. Instead, it is more accurate to envision and nurture the burgeoning post-eschatological hopes.

 

These post-eschatological hopes will certainly be grounded in the fulfillment of the eschatological hope of the first-century ekklesia. Their hope emerged from the Hebrew Scriptures and the promise of God therein. Their hope involved resurrection life, equity, mercy, compassion, and kindness. It involved the inclusive blessing of all families of the earth. Most of all, their hope included love. In fact, Paul affirms that love transcends hope in that it abides even following the fulfillment of eschatological hope (1Corinthains 13).

 

Today, we can implant these principles of hope into our hearts, our faith communities, our secular organizations, and our world. As we do, new hope will sprout and take concrete forms that we have not yet begun to imagine. This will allow us to break free from simply perpetuating the cycle of the same old eschatological hopes and cause us to actualize hope fulfilled and eat from the tree of life.

 

As Tim King writes in the postscript of The Spirit of Prophecy, “At the end of the modern age, our world is marked more by despair than hope.” He continues, “Is it any wonder that humanity suffers, when the church has been blind to its heritage in Christ? This is where the Transmillennial worldview can offer the antidote to despair. It can take the church beyond cultural pessimism into a responsible engagement with society.”

 

He sums up, “Jesus’ whole ministry was about helping people recover hope. In Mark 8:22-25, we read the story of how he took the blind man out of Bethsaida and restored his sight. He touched the man once, and the man could see, but people looked like trees walking around. It took a second touch to get him to where he could see everyone clearly. The church today needs to receive a second touch to see the “restoration of all things.” Rather than seeing ‘men like trees walking,’ we need to discover a whole new world that is made possible through fulfilled redemption” (The Spirit of Prophecy, (2002), p. 429-431.

 

Instead of taking away hope, we can give hope. A real hope for men and women in every corner of the world. A hope that invites people of every age, nation, and tradition to awaken to the interconnected community of humanity that stretches around the globe and across the ages. A hope that opens us to a fresh experience of God with us now—not in a misplaced desire to escape our challenges, but to address them confidently together. A hope that includes everyone. And a hope that encourages each generation to build on the realized hope of previous generations and to pass on the torch of hope come true to the next.

 

 

 

URL: http://www.presence.tv/cms/org_post-eschatological-hope.php

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