What hope for the future?

Surely we stand in a unique place within history with which to answer this question…

Following industrial and technological revolutions, two devastating world wars, a Holocaust, the Internet, a lurid profusion of information and education of all kinds, the progression of political causes and philosophies, the environmental movement…

Because of all of these, and so much more, we can say that man’s age of innocence is well and truly over.

We now understand - or at least, recognise - something of the dreadful extent of the evil of which mankind is capable, as well as it’s capacity for triumph over adversity and for unimaginable and extraordinary genius. We understand the tragedy of human suffering, but also the glory which it is capable of ushering in - think of Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, for example.

• In particular, we have over 250 years of post-Enlightenment modernism to look upon, with its amazing achievements of scientific method applied to so many spheres of human existence and experience, but also it’s shameful legacy of secular evolutionary thinking, leading us, shocked and in denial at its complicity within Marxism, Soviet and Maoist Communism and the Nazi’s Final Solution: the "Shoah". As if all of that were not enough for us to contemplate, we also look back upon the agony of the most dreadful and threatening of world wars ironically brought to a close by the explosion of an atom bomb .
• More recently, we have “9/11" deeply etched into our psyches, with its now-myriad symbolic messages competing within our minds : terrorism, Al Qaida, Wahabi-ism, Bin Laden, fundamentalism, global terrorism… Since the start of the third millennium, “9-11" has combined with Enron to mark the end of a perceived era of the right of "pure Capitalism" to exist, unquestioned and unnacountable, with its underlying presumption that ethics was fine in the classroom but not in the Boardroom.
• We have also witnessed the excesses of US-style politics, bequeathing to us Vietnam, Watergate and Monica Lewinsky, but also the unexpected, unpredicted, almost bloodless end of the Cold War, Soviet-style Communism, the murderous USSR itself and the Berlin Wall.
• We have access to a world of history and the history of the world in a way and to an extent unparalleled at any other time. We are a part of a world community which, with the exception of the most despotic regimes such as North Korea, is forced to acknowledge the rest of the world community as never before.
• We have poverty and disease on an unimaginable scale in the developing nations, a curse and a blight upon the face of the earth and yet offering the greatest of opportunity for the world to demonstrate that all our invention and creativity and capacity for commercial exploitation can be used to benefit the least, not only the greatest.

Yet we stand in this moment in time, as members of a world community which apparently looks upon all these multitude of human interactions and interprets them only rarely with a mind of wisdom and even more rarely with a heart of compassion.

In spite of our greater knowledge of religion and our attempts to court tolerance as a partner in breaking down barriers between it’s various manifestations, the record of war and terrorism and injustice is what looms large in most of our debates and discussions about religion. (This in spite of the twentieth century ushering in an impossible to comprehend death-toll of over eighty or ninety million people at the hands of bloodthirsty atheistic dictators: Mao – 40m.; Stalin – 20m.; Hitler – 7m.; Pol Pot 6m. etc)

Nevertheless, we must admit (to the dismay of equally dogmatic secular-humanists) that even when religious faithfulness has abjectly and undeniably failed to produce any evidence of benefit to it’s adherence – in spite of war, famine, poverty, corruption, earthquake, violence and flood – human beings, people groups and meta-cultures insist on doggedly clinging to religiously inspired worldviews.

Yes, simultaneously, the philosophies of Secular-Modernism have thrust their way into the hallowed temples of Western politics, academia, commerce and entertainment, yet worldwide it has – thus far – failed to take over the hearts and minds of ordinary people, of the masses who both blithely and stubbornly refuse to give up their "opiate," all the more when it is denied to them by those who rule with either an iron fist or a forked tongue.

Thus, we array this extraordinary panorama of achievement and failure, of oppression and liberation, war and peace, faith and political dogma; of religion and humanism, rhyme, reason, life, death… and eventually we are silenced by its shear complexity.

Hope: transcendent, imminent or eternal?

What can possibly be said, even considered, by way of summarising it all, let alone speaking to its wounds and diseases, its doubt and fears? What force can possibly be called upon, invoked, exercised - or exorcised - to bring real, genuine hope of a future that might simply make some sense of it all, which would make all the sacrifices that have been made worthwhile, the injustice worth forgiving, the confusion worth overcoming?

I believe and suggest that there is such a hope. A hope that goes beyond ethnic, cultural, geographical and religious boundaries, with the capacity to reach into the heart of every single human being.

It is the hope of "Eternity" and of a renewal of Creation…

Eternity becoming real in the “here and now.” Eternity breaking into Time and eventually ushering Time into history! (Yes, scientists are now telling us that the theory of quantum mechanics has surpassed the Newtonian universal model and that time is not the fixed, unmovable reality we once believed it to be. Like everything else we can see and measure, it has a beginning and an end.)

Within an Abrahamic-faith worldview, Eternity is that which informs us of a reality transcending what we see and hear, the presence of a world without end, another reality ready to break into this time-bound, death-bound creation we call our home.

This hope of Eternity is the real hope of a Good Creation and its Benign Creator. It is the hope of a New Creation breaking into this decaying, wounded Old Creation, a hope planted deeply, I believe, in the heart of every human being.

This is the story in which we find ourselves and this is the beginning of another story, the fullness of which we can only imagine. This is the story of an Eternal Purpose and a People called to serve that Eternal Purpose.

Can we, dare we, locate ourselves within this story and discover how we are blessed to be a blessing, to all the multiplex peoples of the world, living out, demonstrating and communicating a reconcilation with the Creator and, indeed, with all of his Creation?

Working it out in practice…While the Pentecostal Christian movement continues to sweep rapidly through vast, increasing swathes of the developing nations – appealling particularly to worldviews open to apocalyptic-type scenarios – by contrast, within the West, an increasingly confident and strident form of secular humanism – a dwarf riding arrogantly upon the shoulders of the presently-mute giant of democracies, cultures and peoples rooted in Abrahamic faith and religion – threatens to continue to abrogate, through deceptive, coercive but ultimately empty philosophies, the true freedom of humanity: to search out, discover and respond to the Divine. Thus, we effectively find two emergent churches: the largely pentecostal, young, non-Western / Southern church - including renewed Catholic and Protestant congregations – emerging slowly out of centuries of poverty, disease and abjection, decades of colonialism and years of rapid, eruptive spiritual development – and, on the other hand, an older Western / Northern church – emerging out of centuries of modernity, decades of decadent, wilful ignorance and years of spiritual neglect and theological confusion amidst rampant materialistic secularism.

The one, young, vibrant, confident, militant, yet frequently under-educated and over-confident, if not actually arrogant, hurtling headlong into the twenty-first century, vital yet seemingly almost wilfully naive of all the various wiles and destructive philosophies that can yet undermine it; that one, urgently needing the wisdom and maturity of the other as its partner: older, wiser, yet willing to adapt, to serve, to follow and to lead, as each unique task, occasion and environment demands.

Thus, from within the West, a truly Messianic people are genuinely needed; a people who have been up close and personal with all that modernism and capitalism and materialism have to offer and said, "Yes" - to its best; "No" - to its worst and "There is more than this" to Secularism’s claim of universality and its dogmatic denial of mystery and Divinity.

And, thus, a continuing reformation – of faith, hope and love, as much as theology – is also most certainly needed. Steadily, but urgently, we must (re)discover a distinctive Christian / Messianic faith and ortho-praxy which is

• nothing less than pentecostal in its spiritual power;
• yet not so overwhelmed by the modernist claims of science that it seeks to remedy them by denial;
• not so pressured by postmodernist, Nihilistic denials that it hides behind its own modern constructs;
• nor so confused by the complexity of pluralism, humanism and multiculturalism that it cannot engage people of different cultures and belief except in confrontation.

A Christian faith and community that can engage with an unfamiliar world and a world larger than it’s own hitherto horizons. One that can learn, learn and learn again, in order to discover, uncover and reveal a kind of heavenly success that blends sacrifice and faith, poverty and prosperity, weakness and strength, truth and experience, Scripture and community, humility and confidence.

If the Western / Northern Christian Community cannot adapt, survive, re-emerge and manifest in such an authentic Christ-like spiritual expression, then secularism, humanism, capitalism and materialism viably threaten to eventually force itself upon the face of the entire globe, as it has done upon the West: religion itself without faith being of little defensive value against such philosophies. Secular-humanism is a kind of faith, yet it is also ultimately a denial of faith, of mystery and Deity; as equally dogmatic as any religion, yet essentially a defensive posture against the reality of man’s search to understand the Eternity fluttering within his naked heart.

Such a genuniely Messianic people must, therefore, now act swiftly, wisely and decisively in this time of great opportunity, to expose the soft underbelly of secular-humanism: its inability to speak to the inner hearts of human beings whilst, simultaeneously and no less energetically – unhindered by false humility, masquerading as apologetic, post-colonial hand-wringing uncertainty – to increasingly and enthusiastically engage the religious and animistic peoples of the world, as either partners, co-workers or fellow pilgrim travellers, in a refreshing, renewing conversation and a definitive, vital call to share in the wonder and reality of Eternal Life.

john
eternalpurpose.org.uk