Hope for the fearful
I BEGIN with hope, because eschatology is a ‘theology of hope’, not one of fear. In philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s thought, hope is a structure: a horizon rather than an object. It effects a teleological force, an impulse towards fulfilment. Compare a novel. The parts, many of which seem banal or meaningless, become significant especially in light of two little words: ‘the end’. The natural habitat of ‘hope’ is not philosophical discourse, but biblical theology; so Ricoeur appeals to Jürgen Moltmann, who advocates that we ‘hopefully’ reinterpret all theology in light of this eschatological fulfilment: no longer an embarrassing appendix but a full ‘theology of hope’.
I BEGIN with hope, because eschatology is a ‘theology of hope’, not one of fear. In philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s thought, hope is a structure: a horizon rather than an object. It effects a teleological force, an impulse towards fulfilment. Compare a novel. The parts, many of which seem banal or meaningless, become significant especially in light of two little words: ‘the end’. The natural habitat of ‘hope’ is not philosophical discourse, but biblical theology; so Ricoeur appeals to Jürgen Moltmann, who advocates that we ‘hopefully’ reinterpret all theology in light of this eschatological fulfilment: no longer an embarrassing appendix but a full ‘theology of hope’.
Even the resurrection has a future, says Moltmann. Human life therefore is lived in the tension between promise and fulfilment. In a ‘logic of superabundance’, the hope is not merely one of restoration or repristination. It is not a Hegelian synthesis of all that has gone before, the painful and unjust absorbed into a final recapitulation as if brushed under an eschatological carpet. It is nothing less than the promise of a new creation, the promise toward which a life of hope is tensively lived. Where the tension breaks apart the ‘not yet’ and the fulfilment of this promise, the pastoral task begins.
* Full article available in printed copies.
Chris Mac Bruithin
is rector of Castlerock and Dunboe (Derry diocese).