“Hope” is the thing with feathers -In three volumes entitled The Principle of Hope, and a single volume of the religious dimension of the utopian hope, Man On His Own, Marxist Ernst Bloch treats not just with respect, but a kind of reverence, the Judaeo-Christian eschatological hope for the coming Kingdom of God. It is true enough that Bloch takes God out of the equation. All the same, because the root of the promised kingdom Christian's profess was personified in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the promise not of a sweet bye-and-bye (like most contemporary theologians, Bloch understands this later accretion and baptism of pagan notions of the afterlife as serving all sorts of socio-political interests threatened by the far more radical idea of the Kingdom of God) but a very real, tangible realm of justice, equality, where the contradictions of self-abnegation and pride are overcome in mutuality, Bloch quite correctly sees this as nothing more or less than the promised, post-revolutionary situation, once the last structures of domination have been sloughed off.
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
Emily Dickinson
A thinker as different from Bloch as can be imagined has offered a similar view concerning the Christian hope. Former in-house Scripture scholar and current Anglican Bishop Nicholas Thomas (N. T.) Wright has dedicated a tremendous amount of intellectual energy and faith-filled time offering up entirely new - yet he would insist they are old but lost - ways of reading the Bible and what it says about who Jesus was, what he said and did, why he died, and what his resurrection means. At the heart of Wright's exigetical concern, like that of the Gospel writers, is the passion story, with the resurrection as key. The following passage, quoted by Joel Watts, is the root of Wright's theology:
Resurrection by contrast has always gone with a strong view of God’s justice and God as the good creator. Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but a robust determination to oppose it.Wright, like Bloch, surrenders the uniqueness of the Christian hope, only in different ways. Bloch insists that the coming Kingdom needs no God; Wright's stated concern for justice falls short of including sexual minorities. Since being raised to the crimson, he has spent a considerable amount of time in the House of Lords speaking out against any attempt to extend legal and social equality to sexual minorities in the UK. So much for that passion for justice.
All the same, while both Bloch and Wright - one intellectually, one politically - betray the uniqueness of the Christian hope, at the heart of both men's insistence on the radical nature of the Christian message lies this fundamental reality - unless checked institutionally, or compromised from within by social and cultural factors, the real message of the Christian faith is as radical a threat to the existing order as can be imagined. Living one's life with both eyes focused not on some filmy heaven (or, conversely, in fear of the sado-masochistic fantasies of hell) but on the resurrection of Jesus as the inauguration of the New Age that will be fulfilled in God's time casts doubt upon all our ways of life. Our politics, our art, our morals - everything stands before the empty cross, silent even as that same cross demands an answer.
This is who the Church should be: the people gathered as the Body of Christ working to fulfill the petition from The Lord's Prayer - thy kingdom come on earth. Is it any wonder that when the Church really is the Church, the Body of Christ, it is understood as a threat, either to be destroyed or undermined by the addition of alien ideas? There is nothing more tenacious than hope. There is also nothing more dangerous.
