Thy Kingdom Come…

Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but also the protest of the divine promise against suffering.  If Paul calls death the ‘last enemy’ (1 Cor. 15.26), then the opposite is also true: that the risen Christ, and with him the resurrection hope, must be declared to be the enemy of death and of a world that puts up with death.  Faith takes up this contradiction and thus becomes itself a contradiction to the world of death.  That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience.  It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man.  Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.  Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present…

This hope makes the Christian Church a constant disturbance in human society, seeking as the latter does to stabilize itself into a ‘continuing city’.  It makes the Church a source of continual new impulses towards the realization of righteousness, freedom and humanity here in the light of the promised future that is to come.  This Church is committed to ‘answer for the hope’ that is in it (1 Peter 3.15).  It is called in question ‘on account of the hope and resurrection of the dead’ (Acts 23.6).  Wherever that happens, Christianity embraces its true nature and becomes a witness of the future of Christ.

Theology of Hope