Offering Reasonable Hope

A number of years ago I was asked to sit in on the United Nations conference studying near earth objects, or NEOs.  The purpose of the conference was to discuss how people should be alerted if there was the possibility of one of these objects striking the earth. Two moments in the conference really stood out for me. 

The first was a short talk by a gentleman who specialized in communicating danger to the public.   He said, and I believe he is right "no one understands risk communicated in percentages. If there’s a chance of rain just tell people to take an umbrella." 

The second memorable moment came at the end of the first day. I was sitting at the back of the room being quiet while all the officials and scientists talked. Then one of them noticed my presence and asked me who I was and why I was there. I answered that I was a guest of one of the organizers and was just observing. Then I said that I was a teacher in a theological school. He quickly shot back, “A theologian. Good. We need a back up plan.“

This may be a little hard to take for those of us who are religious leaders.  But the reality is that in some situations we really are just the back up plan. Indeed, in contemporary society, God or an appeal to God is almost always just the back up plan.

In the face of a crisis Christians have had traditionally two things to say. One is that God is all powerful. “Expect a miracle.“  Second the second is that God is all loving. “His eye is on the sparrow so I know he watches me.” 

The first message comes across these days as the claim that God is like the Wizard of Oz. Too bad that curtain has been pulled back and the claim no longer has  any practical credibility.  That God is all powerful by definition is a theological fact.  But even taking the experience of the Christian community as a whole through time God’s deployment of God‘s power is utterly unpredictable. But then God, and God’s revelation warns us of this. God makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike.  

Within the natural realm that reality encompasses our bodily existence. In this world there is no Divine reward for good or punishment for evil. The wheels of justice may grind finely, but boy do they ever grind slowly. And if God does not deploy God’s power on the basis of morality, then on what basis can we imagine that it is deployed? "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” is a claim based on faith, not observable evidence. 

In any case the identification of an event as a miracle isn’t a claim based on a direct relationship between the event and God’s use of God’s power. The claim of the miraculous is based on the faith claim that God loves us and that God is the power behind all the powers of the earth.  It is made on the basis of the deep insight through faith that God loves God’s creation and God's creatures.  The claim that a friend was cured of cancer is a miracle, or that a child was conceived when it seemed impossible is a miracle, are witnesses from my faith, not my study of medicine. 

But this gets us to the second important claim that we as Christians make about God. God is Love.  And thus we are encompassed by God’s love.  The real problem is how to make this claim credible to others. In our time this requires that we offer reasonable hope rather than irrational or unreasonable claims.  

And the reasonable basis of Christian hope is not difficult. Clearly, against all odds, humanity in both the physical and moral sense has emerged within the natural world.  We have emerged as a species capable of understanding the order of nature and intervening on our behalf and behalf of other creatures for the good. And equally against all odds the natural world of which we are a part turns out to be predictable.  And it becomes more and more predictable the more and more we understand its complexity.  And the more we understand its complexity the more we can appreciate our human ability. And the more we can create tools that can effectively do good in the midst of that complexity. 

I’d like to say that the long odds make this a miracle, but that would make winning the lottery by betting on a single number a miracle as well. In short its an evangelistic dead end that puts Christian claims in the same category as those of gamblers who claim to have a system to beat the slots. 

What makes our situation amazing, wonderful, humbling, and indeed miraculous is the reasonable claim that our world springs from God’s love. This does not mean that we must somehow claim that God has been busy tinkering with evolution, in a sense loading the dice in one direction or another. That’s even worse than the gambler’s system; it is God cheating against God’s own rules in a way that undermines the stewardship of creation God assigned to humans. 

Worse, it becomes just another claim to be debated among scientists. It bears no relationship to the fundamental witness of Christianity that God incarnate came among us, ministered to us, died on the cross out of love for us and was resurrected from the dead. It is this witness alone that makes clear to the eyes of faith that God, who from a place outside of space and time created our universe, created it out of love and continues to love us beyond our death and non-existence in this same universe. It is the witness that God, as God, is all encompassing Love. 

Reasonable hope is offered in the claim that if you enter into the community of faith, if you cultivate an understanding of God‘s love among those who have sought to understand that love through the millennia, then you will begin to have true insight into the fact that God loves you and God loves the world. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.“ Evangelism is not an invitation to believe. It is an invitation to join the community that over long eons has learned hope from its constant engagement with the Spirit of Christ. By our constant effort to live into eternity through Christ we know what scientists and gamblers cannot know because they haven't made the effort. 

Anything else we offer as a Christian community will ultimately be unreasonable, and indeed beyond the scope of our competence. 

Yet for those seeking hope our invitation is utterly reasonable. If you seek knowledge you join the community of scholarship. If you seek power you join the community of the rich and powerful. If you seek wisdom you sit in the councils of the wise. If you seek hope you join the community for whom the cultivation and spread of hope is and always has been the sole concern. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” That is the Gospel, that is reasonable hope.