Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium

Trinity Journal, Spring 2002 by Pennington, Jonathan T

Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart. Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. xiv 233 pp. $16.00 paperback.

One does not have to read very deeply in the scholarly literature on eschatology, the gospels, or Christology before running into the writings of Richard Bauckham. Over the last twenty years, Bauckham has established himself as an important contributor to our understanding of the biblical texts, developing a particular expertise on apocalyptic and eschatological literature. He has also interacted extensively with the theology of Jurgen Moltmann, who has said of Bauckham, "He knows my theology ... better than I do myself."

This combination of seasoned biblical scholarship with proficiency in systematic theology serves him well in the manifesto of Christian hope that this book comprises. But Bauckham is not alone in this endeavor. His colleague at the University of St. Andrews, Trevor Hart, provides an equally strong contribution in this truly interdisciplinary study which stems from a series of lectures the two gave together and builds on their previous cooperation for the book God Will Be All In All: The Eschatology of Jurgen Moltmann (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001). They state in the preface that the present title is in the fullest sense a collaborative work.

Their thesis is that now, at the turn of the century, when the assorted utopias of the twentieth century have failed, the Christian hope for God's future in the world needs to be rediscovered. Their stated goal is to "resource Christian hope" (p. xi) by considering anew the major images of eschatology while arguing for the centrality of imagination in their interpretation.

The outline of the book is as follows. First, Bauckham and Hart offer an especially insightful analysis of the state of mind (and heart) of modern Western civilization. They survey the upsurge of utopian visions in the early twentieth century (rooted in the Enlightenment) and show how they have inevitably declined into pervasive hopelessness and pessimism in this "postmodern" era. The myth of progress that dominated the minds of those "liberated" from the tyranny of belief in God has proved to be just that-a myth. In its place, postmodern philosophy offers only skepticism, meaninglessness, and ultimately hopelessness. The problem is that a worldview without the biblical God is bereft of transcendence. "By mistakenly investing its faith in a glorious future which would grow naturally out of the conditions and potentialities of the present, therefore, the myth pointed to a meaningfulness which did not and could never exist.... Its hope proved to be a false hope and so it had come to an end, for false hopes inculcate only despair" (p. 49). Or as they say in more imaginative language, "However laudable and good in themselves many of the achievements of humankind may be, rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic and calling it a new way forward, a new world order, or whatever, will not actually melt the iceberg of finitude on which our dreams and hopes seem bound to run aground" (p. 68).

Following this analysis, the authors move into a fascinating discussion of the nature of imagination, language, and hope. Building upon the work of George Steiner and others, they discuss our human need for hope and imagination, as reflected in our language. Deftly they pull together a spectrum of ideas, touching on art, cyberspace, how narrative functions, the unethical nature of postmodern imagination, mental health without hope, and the genre of fantasy literature. If this is not impressive enough, along the way they throw in astute critiques of Marx and Bultmann.

Central to this section of the book, and crucial to their entire thesis, is the discussion of the nature of imagination. They argue for a distinction between something being merely imaginary versus being imaginative. Imagination (related to the imaginative) functions pervasively throughout our human existence, whether in how we remember the past or how we think about the future. The imagination should not be looked down upon, but rather it is essential to living in this world, not least for the Christian.

This is where the discussion intersects with Christian eschatology. Eschatological language by its very nature is imaginative (not imaginary) because it deals with the wholly other. Just as our finite language to describe God must necessarily fall short of the reality, so too our language about God's future for the world is only an approximation. Therefore, it stretches the limits of reality, it imagines, in order to communicate the weight of its "other-worldly" reference. In fact, biblical eschatological language is like fantasy literature in that "our expectations of the new creation must not be constrained by our experience of this world" (p. 107). Yet, it is unlike fantasy literature in that there is a reality behind the symbols of the language, a reality based on the promises of God and worth hoping upon.