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December 12, 2018 - January 22, 2019
but that does not mean they are flattened or eliminated. Rather we are free to enjoy them as God’s gifts to us, but we are no longer enslaved to them as our saviors.
those who have been given a Christian identity have the resources to become more open to difference and to become more culturally flexible than they would ever have been otherwise.
Jesus contrasted the ordinary, exclusionary identity with that of a life based on his grace.
You cannot avoid truth claims and binaries.
The real issue is, then, which kind of truth—and which kind of identity that the truth produces—leads you to embrace people who are deeply different from you?
If I build my identity on what Jesus Christ did for me and the fact I have an everlasting name in him by grace, I can’t, on the one hand, feel superior to anybody, nor do I have to fear anybody else.
declining confidence about the future.
it adds up to a loss of hope.
we will look at the resources that Christianity gives us for a future ...
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what we believe about our future completely controls how we are experiencing our present. We are irreducibly hope-based creatures.
The kind of hope we need is something deeper.
The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope,
human beings need to organize the sequence of individual sensations and life experiences into a particular story.5 “When that story leads somewhere . . . it gives us hope.”
We are future-oriented beings, and so we must understand ourselves as being in a story that “leads somewhere.”
“We must imagine some end to life that transcends our own tiny allotment of days and hours,” writes Delbanco, “if we are to keep at bay the dim back-of-the-mind suspicion that we are adrift in an absurd world.”
three different hopes or stories that our society has given its people over the years. He names them “God,” “Nation,” and “Self.”
the first phase of American history, “hope was chiefly expressed through a Christian story that gave meaning to suffering and pleasure alike and promised deliverance from death.”
substituted a “deified nation” for God.
the older Christian idea of the coming kingdom of God became secularized into a narrative of historical advancement.
Today, however, this idea of progress is beginning to crumble.
every declaration of progress is an imposition of one group’s values on the rest of us.
Younger Americans today are perhaps the first generation to be certain that they are and will be “worse off” than their parents.
nightmare scenarios—pandemics,
Lasch argues that secular optimism in progress is doomed.
At the beginning of the twentieth century a future was envisioned where the problems of society were solved.
began to collapse in stages after each of the World Wars.
belief in greater economic prosperity, comfort, and individual freedom—has persisted.
Only now is it beginning to fail as we begin to see the limits, within the environment...
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be realized.16 But that kind of economic growth cannot be sustained.
Lasch argues that secular optimism has been a disaster not only for the environment but also for the human spirit.
weakens our ability as people to face difficulties and suffering, and it cannot move people to sacrifice immediate pleasures for a larger purpose.
The alternative to secular optimism in progress is hope. Real hope, as Lasch defines it, “does not demand a belief in progress” at all.
“The disposition properly described as hope, trust, or wonder . . . three names for the same state of heart and mind—asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits.
African slaves in America.
It was Christianity, Genovese showed, that gave them “a firm yardstick” with which to measure and judge the behavior of their masters and “to articulate a promise of deliverance as a people in this world as well as the next.”
Hope does not require a belief in progress, only a belief “in justice, a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, [that] the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity.”
not available to those living within a worldview that denies the supernatural.
use those facts as a raw material out of which they fashioned a hope that their environment, with all its cruelty, could not crush. . . . This . . . enabled them to reject annihilation and to affirm a terrible right to live.”
Imagine how ludicrous it would have been to sit down with a group of early nineteenth-century slaves and say, “There will never be a judgment day in which wrongdoing will be put right.
Such a thought experiment reveals how much more power Christian hope has for sufferers than a mere optimism in historical progress.
the great challenge to human hope is not just the question of where history is going but of where we are going.
Today hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone.”
Our hope now is for individual freedom to pursue our own private ideas of good and to discover our authentic selves.
It cannot incorporate into itself and render meaningful the single most immutable and certain fact of human life—death.
most common secular responses to this is
that it can indeed be seen as part of the living story of the world.
“Why Want Anything More Marvelous Than What Is?”30
the modern narrative suppress the natural human intuition that death is not natural
that nothing inevitable can be bad—can’t hold up either to rational scrutiny or to our deepest moral convictions.
All ancient myths and legends that deal with death depict it as an intrusion, an aberration, and a monstrosity. It always appears because something has gone wrong.
