Despair and Hope, But Mostly Hope.

By David Poultney. in All Sorts

the theology of hope advocates active participation in the world, as agents and catalysts of change

Despair and Hope, But Mostly Hope
It is easy to give way to despair, much seems grim. The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza with the unrelenting murderous attrition, the divisiveness of the Treaty Amendment Bill debate and of a politics of grievance. A fragile economic recovery at risk of being undermined by a tariff war between the two Pacific giants we find ourselves stuck between. An increasing wilful blindness by the governments of the World to the escalating climate and environmental crisis which is ignored for the sake of financial expedience and because the discomfort of change is still, though perhaps not for much longer, is still greater than the discomfort of doing nothing.
Maybe I am just a glass half empty person.
But here is the thing. hope is a Christian virtue then it is also a challenge.
Life without hope is empty, Paul names hope as one of the three things that will endure, along with faith and love. Hope is not fixed; we constantly renegotiate what we invest our hope in but hope must persist even to life’s end.
Hope is a recurrent theme in theology, perhaps the theologian who is best known for his writing on hope is Jurgen Moltmann . He had, towards the end of World War Two been drafted into the Luftwaffe where he served as ground crew. He was interred in a prisoner of war camp. That experience along with returning to his hometown, Hamburg, afterwards and finding a city in ruins left him with a deep desire to try and articulate a theology of hope for the survivors of his generation.
Moltmann had hope that the example of the Confessing Church, German Protestants who had resisted Naziism during the war and who had formed, as a matter of survival, new and hidden communities would be grafted into the life of the Protestant Churches. He and many others were disappointed to see, instead, a rebuilding on pre-war models and a culture of forgetting.
Moltmann believed that God’s promise to work in the future is more important than what God has has done in the past. The implication of this focus on the future is not withdrawal from the world in hope that a better world will somehow evolve. Rather, the theology of hope advocates active participation in the world, as agents and catalysts of change.
The whole idea behind the “theology of hope” is or hope as Christians to sustain and carry us through life. It is on those days we are most at risk of despair that we should ask what we hope for.
David Poultney