Remember when you used to write sentiments in Christmas cards along the lines of “Next year is going to be a great year!”? Maybe you didn’t do that, but, if you did, you may have stopped given the events of the last 5 years.
What does it mean to anticipate the year ahead?
New Year’s celebrations have often been marked by a kind of positive thinking about the upcoming year. Even if we are realists, we have often moved from one year to another with the hope that things will be good, maybe even better than they have been. Anticipation may have changed in nature, though.
When we look back at 2020 and 2021 and 2022 and 2023, as we move into 2024, we are perhaps worn out of hoping. Anticipating positive days ahead can carry a vulnerability and a kind of spiritual exhaustion that leads to a posture of emotional protection. We become weary of hoping for better because, if better does not come, if the new appears to be negative rather than positive, we feel a kind of spiritual diminishment.
I really do want to say “Happy New Year!” to you and I really do mean it, but, pastorally, as I think of you and pray for you, I hold a sense that standard New Year’s declarations may feel a bit presumptuous and they might even be hard to hear.
Hopeful Christian faith is, by its very name, marked by hope. However the tendency to anticipate loss and darkness and separation is decidedly less than hopeful. Much of what has passed for Christian anticipation is anticipation of separation and even damnation of most people. There is nothing worth calling “new” in this. If what Christians have to offer is negative for most people (particularly for those who believe differently than Christians do) then such belief should admit that it is mostly hopeless.
The division between hopelessness and hope often comes down to what it is that is being anticipated. Is there truly something worth calling “new” and is that new thing hopeful?
I recently read the statement of faith of a Christian church that likes to think of itself as new and geared to young people, great branding and technology. In many ways, I assume that it is a good church doing good work. When I came across the section of the statement of faith labelled as “Last Things” I saw that what is described is generally hopeless and not new at all, in any positive way. The last line of “Last Things” identified belief in the “eternal joy of the believer” and “the final judgment of the unrepentant.”
In other words, according to this statement, most people are separated from God for eternity. Judgment is, for the most part, for most people, extremely negative. This is a fairly commonly held belief through Christian history. I just don’t see it as particularly Christian or in any way hopeful.
As a quick side note, Karl Barth warned against the dividing the world into believer and unbeliever. He pointed out that it was an entirely unhelpful division even for those who identify as believers. It does not help growth in faith. In fact, Barth said, if we insist upon using the term “unbeliever” we should use it only to refer to ourselves.
The larger concern about anticipating separation rather than real newness is that it betrays an idea of judgment that is primarily negative. Philip Ziegler (University of Aberdeen and University of Toronto) argues in his book Militant Grace that the us and them, eternal damnation for other people, view of judgment is less than Christian. He points out that a good reading of Christian scripture will demonstrate that the final judgment is not a final retribution. It is judgment unto life, new life. Ziegler says that the last judgment is an act of grace and that Jesus is not coldly retributive, but rather an intimate advocate of those he judges. Further, Ziegler strongly argues that what is new is Jesus and his judgment of love and renewal.
Because of this, we can anticipate with hope the truly new and good, and we can live in light of that newness, even now when we are so beleaguered by the state of the world.
There are a lot of good articles and books being written about how what passes as Christian faith in many national and political contexts right now is about as far from Jesus and hope as you can get. Faith that is marked by division from others, fear, hatred, retribution and triumphalism is faith that anticipates, at best, victory over perceived enemies, not the real renewal of all things.
It really is possible to have a hopeful faith. A requirement, though, in such hope, is that we admit we can or do or have held understandings of faith that are far less than hopeful. It is not less Christian to have more hope for more people.
My prayer for you is that you would be enlivened and guided by true hope, by the sense and spiritual awareness that something truly new and truly good can be anticipated. Even now.
My favourite sentence: “ It is not less Christian to have more hope for more people.” - I love it, can’t agree more!
Thanks Todd. This is very good and hopeful. Stay blessed