Reasons to Hope 9780567668943, 9780567668936, 9780567668974, 9780567668950

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Reasons to Hope

ii

Reasons to Hope Werner G. Jeanrond

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Werner G. Jeanrond, 2020 Werner G. Jeanrond has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © Africa Studio/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-6894-3 PB: 978-0-5676-6893-6 ePDF: 978-0-5676-6895-0 ePUB: 978-0-5676-6896-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In memoriam Terence Patrick McCaughey 1932–2016

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CONTENTS

Preface  x Notes for the reader  xiii Acknowledgements  xiv

1 Hope, hopes and radical hope  1 ‘Hope dies last’ 1 The relational nature of hope 2 Optimism and hope 5 The ambiguity of hope 8 Human hopes and Christian hope 10 The relationship among hope, love and faith 11 Hopes, hope and radical hope 16 The complexity of hope 22

2 Hoping for salvation 25 Biblical horizons of hope 25 Hope in the Early Church 29 Augustine’s hope for salvation 35 Thomas Aquinas on hope 39 From Thomas Aquinas to Jürgen Moltmann 44 Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope 44

3 Salvation and reconciliation 51 Desiring to be saved 51 Salvation or reconciliation? 53 Time and eternity 56 The eschatological potential of love 60 Divine creation and transformation 66 Love, hope and the work of Christ 68

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Contents

4 Individual and community: Three eschatological programmes 73 Individual or communal future with God? 73 Josef Ratzinger’s/Pope Benedict XVI’s eschatology 75 Robert W. Jenson’s eschatology 85 Anthony Kelly’s eschatology 89 Subject and community in eschatological perspective 93

5 Memory and hope 95 The wounded memorial 95 The current crisis of trust 97 The ambiguous potential of memory 99 The subversive power of remembering 103 Memory and hope 107

6 Death and hope  111 The reality of death 111 Towards a theology of death 114 Love and death 116 Love and death in an age of interreligious encounter 121 The depth of death and the intensity of love 122 Death, love and hope 124 The mystery of the human soul 127

7 Judgement, heaven and hell: The power of symbols  135 Hoping for heaven? 135 Images of an afterlife 138 Heaven in the Early Church 142 Medieval images of heaven 145 On the way to modern images of heaven 149 Judgement, heaven and hell 152 Purgatory and heaven 155 Love and heaven 158

8 The Christian praxis of hope and Europe’s future  161 Hope and politics 161 The crisis of the European project 161 The danger of neo-tribalism and populism in Europe 164

Contents

Exploring the potential of hope 170 Hope and Europe’s future 173

9 Reasons to hope  179 Love and hope 179 Hope and the love of neighbour 181 Hope and the love of God 183 Hope and the love of God’s creation 185 Hope and the love of the self 190 Salvation from evil 194 Inter-hope dialogue 196 Agents of hope 198 Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s radical hope 199 Select bibliography 203 Index of names 215 Index of subjects 219



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PREFACE

Hope is an essential gift to human life. Nobody can live without hope. As long as we live, we entertain hope for our own future and our future with others. Ultimately, nobody can hope for herself or himself alone. Our acts of hope are empowered by trust in and relationship with others – fellow human beings, God, God’s ongoing creation, and our own emerging selves. In the present volume, I explore the potential and resources of Christian approaches to hope. I am interested in distinguishing all sorts of human hopes and expectations from the divine gift of hope to all human beings. Hence, I am considering reasons to hope but not the motivations for shifting expectations and changing hopes. This book does not provide a history of the idea of hope, nor a comprehensive philosophy of hope. Rather, it examines the theology of hope from a Christian perspective, yet conscious of the fact that hope is not a Christian invention or possession. Moreover, I approach hope from the perspective of love and not from the perspective of faith. This is not to suggest that faith is unimportant. However, faith and hope are dependent on love. In that sense, all acts of hope and faith are inspired, encouraged and shaped by our respective praxis of love. My previous study A Theology of Love provides the theological point of departure for this present study of Reasons to Hope. Here, I am attempting to approach hope with the help of different genres – theological, political, philosophical, biographical, spiritual and historical. This present study is the result of a long journey of learning, teaching and administering in different academic contexts. I wish to express my thanks to my family and friends, colleagues and students in and beyond Scotland, England, Sweden and Norway for fruitful and inspiring conversations, debates, encouragement and constructive critique. I started research for this book at the University of Glasgow, where I taught from 2008 to 2012. However, my plan to finish this volume within a reasonable timeframe was delayed by two subsequent geographical moves. From 2012 to 2018, I had the privilege of working as Master of St Benet’s Hall in the University of Oxford. My hope for hope had to make space for my hope for the Hall. Developing this great Benedictine institution left little time for research and writing. However, the busy years at Oxford taught me that all genuine hope is relational, that it transcends any personal horizon and that it requires much patience. I am very grateful to all the people and

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institutions who have supported my work at St Benet’s Hall. In September 2018, I moved from Oxford to Oslo. My new colleagues and students at the University of Oslo have welcomed me and greatly encouraged my work on hope. In October 2017 I delivered the Croall Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. I am indebted to my colleagues at New College for this wonderful opportunity to present some of my thoughts for discussion and critique. In the spring of 2018, I spent a sabbatical term at the University of Gothenburg, hosted by the Institution for Literature, History of Ideas and Religion. This period of study and the related conversations with students and colleagues offered me a most valuable occasion to advance my thinking and writing on hope. In addition, I owe thanks to the following institutions that kindly invited me to present aspects of my research on hope in lectures and conferences: Boston College (Candlemas Lecture), Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton, Trinity College Dublin, Lund University, Liverpool Hope University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge (Hulsean Sermon), University of Glasgow (Stevenson Trust for Citizenship Lecture), University of Strathclyde (Aquinas Lecture), Research Institute for Philosophical Foundations of Disciplines at Ankara, Sogang University Seoul and the East West Forum, Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University, Renmin University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, University of Erfurt (Max Weber Kolleg), University of Tübingen, University of Munich, University of Heidelberg and Katholische Privatuniversität Linz. I am grateful for many opportunities to share aspects of my research on hope with church groups in Scotland, England, Ireland, Sweden, and Norway. I wish to acknowledge the support of my research through generous conversations, important bibliographical information and pertinent criticism by friends and colleagues, including Mats Andrén, Ingrid Betancourt, Jeffrey Bloechl, Svein Aage Christoffersen, Catherine Cornille, Gabriel Daly, Marijn de Jong, David Fergusson, Kevin Francis, Arne Grøn, Franz Gruber, Johanna Gustafsson Lundberg, Kjetil Hafstad, Gösta Hallonsten, James Hanvey, S.J., Elizabeth Harris, Jan-Olav Henriksen, Susanne Heine, Antje Jackelén, Rolv Nøtvik Jakobsen, David Jasper, Hans Joas, Ansgar Kreutzer, Pan Chiu Lai, Jörg Lauster, James M. Matarazzo, Jr., Jürgen Moltmann, Markus Mühling, George Newlands, Andreas Nordlander, Friederike Nüssel, Michael Oliver, Stephen Pope, Halil Rahman Açar, Arne Rasmusson, Mikael Ringlander, Göran Rosenberg, Cecilia and Mats Rosengren, Anders Runesson, Gerard Ryan, S.J., Christoph Schwöbel, Mona Siddiqui, John Stoer, William Storrar, Sturla Stålsett, Jayne Svenungsson, Andreas Telser, David Tracy, Kari Veiterberg, Björn Vikström, Graham Ward, Michael Welker, Claudia Welz, Saskia Wendel, Knut Wenzel, Martin Westerholm, Jakob Wirén, Trygve Wyller, and Johannes Zachhuber.

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I am grateful to Stephen Green for helpful comments on Chapter 5, and to Marius Timmann Mjaaland, Ulrich Schmiedel and Ola Sigurdson who read the entire manuscript and offered valuable comments and suggestions for its improvement. All remaining errors are, of course, my own. I warmly thank Anna Turton, Sarah Blake and Rachel Singleton from Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, Laura Lawrie and Rennie Alphonsa for their interest in my research, their encouragement, their work on the production of this book, and above all, their patience. This book is dedicated to the memory of the Revd Terence P. McCaughey and his untiring work for hope and peace in Ireland and South Africa, for the reconciliation of memories, for church reform, and for the establishment of a transformative culture of love. Personally, I owe him and his wife Ohna gratitude for their guidance and encouragement at significant moments of my life and work. Oslo, Pentecost 2019 Werner G. Jeanrond

NOTES FOR THE READER

All translations of quotations from foreign languages are my own, if not stated otherwise. Italics in quotations are original, if not indicated otherwise. All biblical quotations are from the Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge that working on the following publications helped me to prepare for this book: ●●

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‘What Salvation Do We Await? Aquinas Lecture 2010, Part 1’, Open House 203 (June/July 2010), 7–9. ‘What Salvation Do We Await? Aquinas Lecture 2010, Part 2’, Open House 204 (August/September 2010), 8–11. ‘Love and Eschatology’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 50 (2011), 57–66. ‘Individuum und Gemeinschaft: Eschatologische Positionen in der gegenwärtigen Dogmatik’, in Hermann Deuser and Saskia Wendel, eds., Dialektik der Freiheit: Religiöse Individualisierung und theologische Dogmatik. Religion in Philosophy and Theology 63, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012, 217–37. ‘Hope and the Critique of Hope: Christian Perspectives’, in Elizabeth J. Harris, ed., Hope: A Form of Delusion? Buddhist and Christian Perspectives, Sankt Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 2013, 63–82. ‘Love and Death: Christian Eschatology in an Interreligious Context’, in R. David Nelson, ed., Indicative of Grace – Imperative of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Eberhard Jüngel in his 80th Year, London/New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014, 131–41. ‘Hope and Radical Hope: The Transformation of Church and World in a Global Age’, in Crisis and Hope: The Church in a Changing World. East-West Theological Forum, Seoul: Sogang University, 2015, 1–15. ‘Christian Hope and Europe’s Future’, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 92 (2016), 130–40. ‘Liebe, Hoffnung und Glaube als Kategorien relationaler Theologie’, in Markus Mühling, ed., Rationalität im Gespräch – Rationality in Conversation: Philosophische und theologische Perspektiven – Philosophocal and Theological Perspectives, Christoph Schwöbel zum 60. Geburtstag, Leipzig: Theologische Verlagsanstalt, 2016, 161–73. ‘Ecclesia Semper Reformanda in Theological Perspective’, Search 40 (2017), 88–99. ‘Innenfor kjærlighetens horisont’, Kirke og Kultur 123 (2018), 199–214.

1 Hope, hopes and radical hope

‘Hope dies last’ Exclaiming ‘hope dies last’ is one way of stressing the importance of hope in our lives. We human beings cannot live without some form of hope, without some engagement with what is to happen, without some outlook on the future in general and on our personal and communal future in particular. Our experience of the present is shaped both by our personal and collective memories of the past and by our personal and collective expectations of the future. We humans are relational beings. We are constantly developing relationships – with other people, with nature and the universe, with God and with our own emerging selves. We do so within a horizon of expectation: what ought to come, what might be happening, and what we would wish should happen to our networks of relationships and to our own selves. Thus, ultimately, nobody hopes for themselves alone, even though many of our particular hopes circle around our own person and our individual needs, desires, fears and expectations. To no small extent, we human beings can be characterized by our hopes. Tell me what your hopes are and I begin to understand who you are. ‘Hope dies last’ also refers to the fact of our certain death: life is constantly changing and all life dies. From the beginning, every life carries death and decay within itself. Consciously or unconsciously, all our hopes develop under the shadow of death. On the one hand, hope refers to the future; yet, on the other hand, hope must also reckon with our death. For some people, the denial of death seems to be the beginning of hope. But is such hope realistic; is such hope responsible? Is hope ultimately a delusion – albeit a much cherished one?1 How realistic is our hope? Should we distinguish

Cf. Elizabeth Harris, ed., Hope: A Form of Delusion? Buddhist and Christian Perspectives (Sankt Ottilien: EOS, 2013).

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between realistic and delusory forms of hope and between good and bad hope? What do I hope for? Do I hope for better weather? For a long and happy life with my loved ones? For a life without much illness and suffering? Do I hope for shelter and for enough food to sustain me and my family? Do I hope for sufficient clothes to survive heat and cold? Do I hope for freedom from imprisonment, exclusion and isolation? Do I nurture hope mostly for myself, or do I hope also with and for others? Have my hopes changed recently? What may have brought about such change? What is the context or horizon of my hopes and dreams for the future? Nobody hopes outside of some context or horizon, and yet the contexts and horizons of our hopes are shifting and changing. In this post-industrialized age of globalization, growing environmental awareness and concern, digitalization, sophisticated health planning (at least in the wealthy West), artificial intelligence and an ever-increasing cultural and interreligious encounter and suspicion, our hopes are likely to differ from those of previous generations. Of course, like all generations before us, we too face death, limitations, discrimination, crime, suffering, illness, abuse and decay. We too have to learn to accept that our lives are mortal. Death remains a challenge to all life. Yet, how we human beings relate to death has changed considerably over the centuries. At all times, people have looked for ways to escape death: from medical attempts at overcoming death to hope in the power of cryonics – the preservation of our bodies in a deep freezer until the day when science finally will have manufactured the perfect conditions for human immortality. Whereas previous generations of Christians considered death as the entry point to the really real life with God, in the community of the saints, today many Christians in the West find it difficult to articulate a hope for some sort of life after death. Post-mortal geography – mapping heaven, hell and purgatory – has lost a lot of its former attraction and fascination. The eschatological landscape – that is, what we expect from eternal life with God – is shifting under our feet. Hence, again, the questions: What do we ultimately hope for? How may we approach hope afresh in our time, place, language and imagination? Should Christians today start by reviewing the content of their faith in terms of exploring what beliefs may be available right now about salvation and the afterlife? Is hope, then, merely a consequence of a set of beliefs, of specific beliefs about death and the thereafter to be distilled from our respective list of doctrines? How are hope and faith related? And how does our hope relate to our everyday life here and now?

The relational nature of hope In this book, I wish to discuss reasons to hope from a Christian perspective, also taking into account other religious and non-religious perspectives. I am

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conscious of the fact that hope (like love) is neither a Christian invention nor a Christian possession. Rather, like other religious and non-religious traditions, the Christian tradition has always engaged in some praxis of hope. In recent years, Christians have become more aware of other discourses and approaches to hope – other reasons to hope. Thus, in our ever more pluralist and globalizing world, Christians face the hopes of others as well as the otherness of their own hope.2 Is there a platform on hope which Christians can share with other religious and non-religious people? Should Christians engage in what has been named ‘inter-hope-dialogue’ to initiate a much wider discussion of reasons to hope?3 I think so, and I shall argue accordingly. Christian concepts of hope have emerged in response to particular experiences in the Jesus movement and its rich Hebrew heritage. Although hope as a human phenomenon signifies attention to and expectation of the future of persons, movements, communities, cultures, institutions, societies and the universe at large, Jewish and Christian understandings of hope have concentrated on the emerging human relationship with God, a relationship that originates in God’s gracious, creative, attentive and reconciling gift of presence in this universe. Thus, Jewish and Christian expressions of hope are not limited to any single term or concept, such as hope, Hoffnung, espérance, qavah, elpis, spes and so on. Rather, these terms attempt to express significant experiences of human beings related to God with regard to their future as persons, communities and people in this universe. In Jewish and Christian traditions, hope functions as a relational concept rather than as some sort of principle.4 Hope is grounded in God’s gracious invitation to men, women and children to accept God’s offer of a personal and transformative relationship of love. Hence, I wish to propose the following thesis: hope is relational by nature. It is neither a principle nor a general expression of the conviction that in the end all will be well. Rather, hope results from the intimate and dynamic connection between God and human beings, or, more concretely, between divine and human love. Hope dies when this love relationship ends. Then hopelessness and despair reign. My thesis does not imply that other human hopes are not genuine or unrealistic. The Christian praxis of hope, of course, shares many features with other religious and non-religious approaches and expressions of hope. However, it also differs from them. Ultimately, I wish to argue that the Christian praxis of hope is best understood in connection with love. Hence,

It is surprising that in the Encyclical Letter of Pope Benedict XVI on hope, Spe Salvi (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2007), we find no discussion of the hope of others, not even of Jewish hope. For a discussion of this Encyclical Letter, see Chapter 4. 3 Anthony Kelly, Eschatology and Hope (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006), 15–17. 4 Cf. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 2

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I agree with Terry Eagleton’s insight into the intimate relationship between hope and love: ‘Authentic hope … needs to be underpinned by reasons. In this, it resembles love, of which theologically speaking it is a specific mode.’5 The three so-called theological virtues of faith, hope and love all contemplate the divine offer of relationship to human beings and thus they overlap to a significant extent. However, they also differ from each other. In my book A Theology of Love, I attempted to explore love – the greatest among the three theological virtues.6 The Apostle Paul referred to them in 1 Cor. 13:13; and Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) called them theological virtues in order to highlight their character as divine gifts to human beings. The theological virtues are not a set of skills which we might choose to adapt and develop; rather, they are divinely infused in us in order to guide us on our earthly pilgrimage to union with God and one another. Faith is to guide our intellect, hope to guide our will, and love to help and unite the Christian to God. The theological virtues, thus, are to keep us on the path of perfection.7 Christian theology normally discusses these virtues in the order: faith, hope and love, whereas, as I shall argue later, I prefer a different order: love, hope and faith. Returning to the virtue of hope, I wish to gather some observations on biblical and post-biblical accounts of hope. Central narratives in the Hebrew Bible are inspired by hope. The story of Abraham’s and Sarah’s late vocation, their pilgrimage and their trust in God’s promises illustrate an emerging praxis of hope (Genesis 12ff.). The account of Moses’s conversion experience at the burning bush – that the future of his people and his own personal future are intricately linked to God’s creative plan and salvific promises – offers an example of radical hope (Exodus 3). The narratives of the pilgrimage of the Israelites through the desert and related biblical texts reflect future perspectives and possibilities springing from trust in the living God, who is seen to be intimately involved in this universe and in the lives of his people as creator, liberator, judge, comforter and sustainer. Likewise, the hymnic and doxological texts of the Hebrew Bible, especially the book of Psalms, are permeated with expressions and contemplations of hope and its significance for the life of God’s people.8 Moreover, the emerging Jewish and Christian faith traditions are characterized by messianic expectations, for instance, that salvation, eternal life, peace, justice, restitution and resurrection are all works of God. They come to God’s people (adventus) as gifts. They are not at the disposition of the people either individually or collectively. Jewish and Christian understandings of the future recognize and honour the particular nature of the divine–human relationship into which God has invited women, men

Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2015), 3. Werner G. Jeanrond, A Theology of Love (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010). 7 Cf. ibid., 79. 8 See, for instance, Psalm 25. 5 6

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and children. Thus, human expectations, trust, desire and hope are oriented towards the future opened by God, and hence, they cannot escape the purifying fire of the burning bush. Human hopes and the divine gift of hope can clash. Acknowledging God as creator and recognizing afresh that the human future is a gift from God are two sides of the same coin.9 Affirming God’s creation as good (Genesis 1–2) and expecting that the future made possible by God’s gracious action will also be good are deeply connected activities of trust.10

Optimism and hope It will be obvious that such hope held by Jews and Christians differs from optimism. Anthony Kelly distinguishes optimism from hope in this way: Optimism is no bad thing in itself. It is a kind of implicit confidence that things are going well in the present situation. Optimism may be simply a feature of temperament expressing itself in a spontaneous logic: we can manage and cope in a world that is reasonably predictable. Optimism is happy enough with the system. In contrast, genuine hope is always ‘against hope’. It begins where optimism reaches the end of its tether. Hope stirs when the secure system shows signs of breaking down. Hope is at home in the world of the unpredictable where no human logic or expectation is in control.11 In the Jewish and Christian tradition, hope results from trust in God and in God’s promises, whereas optimism springs from trust in our own human position, plan, power, potential and (systemic) predictions.12

Cf. Gabriel Daly, Creation and Redemption (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988). For a discussion of the relationship between trust and hope, see Hans Küng, Eternal Life? trans. Edward Quinn (London: Collins, 1984), 101–3 and 281. Cf. also Küng’s definition of fundamental trust in Does God Exist? An Answer for Today, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Collins, 1980), 445: 9

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Fundamental trust means that a person, in principle, says Yes to the uncertain reality of himself and the world, making himself open to reality and able to maintain this attitude consistently in practice. This positive fundamental attitude implies an antinihilistic fundamental certainty in regard to all human experience and behaviour, despite persistent, menacing uncertainty. Moreover, Küng, Eternal Life? 451–3, emphasizes that fundamental trust is both a gift and a task. 11 Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, 5. See also Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 1: Optimism ‘is more a matter of belief than of hope. It is based on an opinion that things tend to work out well, not on the strenuous commitment that hope involves’. 12 See also Ola Sigurdson’s discussion of hope and optimism in his study Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 192.

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The biblical stories to which I referred to earlier are not accounts of optimism; rather, they portray experiences of human expectations when confronted with and liberated and purified by an encounter with the God of hope. Thus, the emergence of genuine hope, as opposed to the cultivation of our diverse hopes, can be a challenging and painful experience, as the story of Moses’s encounter at the burning bush (Exod 3) powerfully demonstrates.13 In this particular account of a divine–human encounter, the specific hopes which Moses held for his own life and for the future of his people are radically challenged and shattered. The hope that emerges from Moses’s confrontation with God is ultimately the fruit of a new and surprisingly caring relationship between God and his people – a covenantal love relationship. Both optimism and hope involve emotions. Emotions associated with optimism include feelings of satisfaction that things are reliable and that systems, calculations, strategies, institutions and processes remain predictable. Emotions associated with hope include feelings of being part of an intimate relationship of love, trust and goodness, but also feelings of fear and frustration in view of the unpredictability and possible upset and surprises emerging from the evolving relationship with the mysterious and radical otherness of God.14 Thus, hope enjoys the spectrum of emotions emerging from communities of trust, from expectation, desire, love and joy, but also from respect, fear, frustration, conversion and transformation. The Christian praxis of hope does not have much in common with positive thinking – an approach to the complexity of life celebrated nowadays by some contemporaries, not least in situations of severe illness and existential challenge. Interestingly, some recent commentators have gone as far as to reject the omnipresent dictatorship of positive thinking which, it is argued, seeks to deprive persons of their right to be sad and fearful, to mourn and to regret.15 In any case, hope does not engage in positive thinking against all odds but in relational depth, personal trust and intimacy, notwithstanding the positive or negative outlook of a particular situation. Jews, Christians and Muslims, as peoples of God, are peoples of hope.16 The particular expressions of hope in these traditions need to be assessed

Cf. Brian Klug, ‘Moses: The Significant Other’, in Dynamic of Difference: Christianity and Alterity: A Festschrift for Werner G. Jeanrond, eds. Ulrich Schmiedel and James M. Matarazzo, Jr. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 17–24. 14 Here, I disagree with Terry Eagleton’s view that one ‘can hope without feeling anything in particular’. Hope without Optimism, 55. 15 Christian Heinrich, ‘Wie mächtig ist die Hoffnung? Wie Gedanken auf den Körper wirken und welche Haltung in schweren Zeiten hilft’, Die Zeit Doctor 3 (September 2017/Die Zeit 37): 7–13. 16 See Alan Mittleman, Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 114–46; Mona Siddiqui, ‘Who Practices Hospitality 13

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against their joint claim to refer to the one ultimate human hope, namely, to be eternally related to God. In this context, Anthony Kelly speaks of the need to liberate all human hopes to their fullest dimensions.17 Jews, Christians and Muslims, thus, advance a bold claim: as peoples of hope they expect the advent of a great future and they are prepared to shape and conduct their present personal and communal lives accordingly. Although the Abrahamic faith traditions share in this praxis of hope, their particular religious experiences and expressions came to differ to some extent. For the emerging Christian movement, the experiences of the ministry, violent death and unexpected resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth gave rise to the development of a particular understanding and praxis of hope. Jesus’s announcement of God’s coming reign and his call to conversion, the authentication of both through God’s act of resurrecting the crucified Jesus, and the conviction that these events ushered in the end of the ages encouraged a fresh appreciation of the advent of God’s future: for the mortal person, who, like the resurrected Christ, now could look forward to being raised by God. This already-not-yet tension of God’s action and coming reign points to the significance of hope – now enriched by the dimensions of patience (notably in the Gospel of Mark and the book of Revelation) and perseverance (particularly in the post-Pauline literature). The Apostle Paul further widens the scope of hope to include all of creation: We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Rom. 8:22-25)18 The Letter to the Ephesians stresses that hope can only be found in God. Christians who were gentiles by birth lacked hope before their conversion (Eph. 2:12).19 However, both the ‘delay of the parousia and the outbreak of persecution against the Church challenged the NT [New Testament] authors to rethink

Entertains God Himself’, in Schmiedel and Matarazzo, eds., Dynamic of Difference, op. cit., 247–54; Karl-Josef Kuschel, ‘In the Presence of God – Making Room for the Other: An Autobiographical Approach’, in Schmiedel and Matarazzo, eds., Dynamics of Difference, 231–38. 17 Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, 13. 18 For a discussion of Paul’s widening scope of hope in and beyond Israel, see Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2017), 158–64. For the inner connection between creation and redemption, see also Douglas F. Ottati, Theology for Liberal Protestants: God the Creator (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2013), 176. 19 Cf. also Joseph Ratzinger, ‘On Hope’, Communio: International Catholic Review 35 (2008): 301–15, here 301.

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the notion of hope and, to a degree, to spiritualize it’.20 Nevertheless, the understanding of hope as confidence in God, ‘whose goodness and mercy are to be relied on and whose promises cannot fail’, is present everywhere in the Bible, notwithstanding regional variations of expression and emphasis.21 It longs to be expressed, and Christians need to be ready to account for it: ‘Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an account of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence’ (1 Pet. 3:15b-16a). Such biblical accounts and reflections on hope demonstrate that for Jews and Christians, notwithstanding their different approaches to the messianic age, hope concerns the perennial human quest for meaning: From where do we come and to where do we go? Hope provides answers to this quest. It responds to questions about the purpose of life, liberation from suffering, oppression, injustice, sin and death, and the meaning of the universe and its final destination. Moreover, in biblical imagination, the personal, collective and universal dimensions of hope are often interwoven and connected with the experience of God’s creative and reconciling presence. Hence, hope concerns the great expectations of universal love, peace, justice and happiness. All relations within the divine–human network of relationships will be well. This is the overall horizon of biblical hope. The hope for a comprehensive shalom and a just perfection coming from God affects and guides the way Jewish and Christian men, women and children live in the here and now.22 Changing circumstances lead to ever-new concentrations on hope and point to the need for an ongoing critique of particularistic hopes in the name of the great divine gift of hope.

The ambiguity of hope At best, biblical expressions of hope suggest widening the network of hope as broadly as possible. All people and peoples are called to relate to God in love and hope (cf. Micah 4). This universalizing trend in biblical approaches to hope builds on the insight that by its very giftedness and vocation, the praxis of hope must transcend my own personal hopes and our particular communal hopes to include the perspective of the neighbour, but ultimately also of the other and the stranger and even of the enemy. Hope is universal in scope. Nobody can hope for himself or herself alone. The emerging awareness that the earth is our common home has drawn

Terence Prendergast, ‘Hope (NT)’, in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 283–5, here 285. 21 Ibid., 282–3. 22 For a discussion of shalom in Jewish theology, see Walter Homolka and Albert H. Friedlander, Von der Sintflut ins Paradies: Der Friede als Schlüsselbegriff jüdischer Theologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993). 20

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attention to the fact that human hope must include ecological dimensions.23 Moreover, considerations of hope must also include the physical universe and its future.24 There are, thus, clear material dimensions and implications to our acts of hope. Hence, human hope does not only involve the perspective of time but also the perspective of space and matter.25 The Christian experience of the tension between expecting the coming reign of God, on the one hand, and the challenge of living constructively here and now, on the other hand, has been interpreted in different ways. The question of how human beings are called and able to contribute to God’s reign in their lives (always conditioned and limited by space, time and language) has been at the forefront of theological debate throughout the history of Christianity. Attempts at identifying particular human plans and hopes with religious, social and political manifestations of the reign of God have led to tragic and at times bloody confusions concerning the interplay between God and human beings. Attempts at prescribing human passivity as the only appropriate attitude to divine grace in view of God’s absolute sovereignty have weakened human resolve and resistance to all kinds of tyrannies.26 Individual life projects and political theologies can thus be empowered or limited by hope. Hope remains an ambiguous phenomenon.27 This insight into the ambiguity of hope underlines the necessity of a Christian critique of all utopian projects that aim at perfecting human nature and society through exclusively human plans and means.28 However, we also need a critique of those internal Christian projects that either identify particular ecclesial manifestations with ultimate features of God’s reign or contrast in a dualistic fashion a totally new world to come with our present world as completely fallen. How are Christians to navigate their lives between their vocation to contribute to the coming reign of God in the freedom of their created existence, on the one hand, and the hope that God’s sovereignty will judge, redeem and save this universe and our lives at the end of time, on the other hand? Moreover, how are Christians to co-operate with others who do not share their hope? How should Christians relate to competing hopes, be they secular or religious in origin?

Cf. Pope Francis’s Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2015). 24 See David Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 186. Wilkinson rightly criticises much of contemporary Christian eschatology for its silence about the end of the physical universe. 25 I shall return to these considerations in Chapter 9. 26 See, for example, Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘From Resistance to Liberation Theology: German Theologians and the NON/Resistance to the National Socialist Regime’, in Resistance against the Third Reich: 1933-1990, eds. Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 295–311. 27 See also Eagleton’s discussion of hope as ideology in his Hope without Optimism, 64. 28 Cf. Spe salvi: Encyclical letter of Pope Benedict XVI, § 21. 23

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Human hopes and Christian hope In a recent study of the concept of hope, Ingolf U. Dalferth describes hope as our human sense for the possibility of the good.29 He presents a thorough review of Western philosophical and theological approaches to hope and provides valuable insights into the rich and problematic phenomenology of hoping. Dalferth argues that a life without hope is not only not a good life; a life without hope is not really a human life at all. ‘Hope is a fundamental human resource of life.’30 Dalferth argues that, in the first place, hope should not be understood in terms of a human activity; instead, he emphasizes the receptive or passive nature of hope. ‘Hope is our sense for the gift of the possibility of the good – a sense because it is rather more receptive than active.’31 Dalferth repeatedly stresses that the good to be hoped for must not be identified with what we human beings ourselves can achieve. Instead, the event of the good must be expected to come about even there and then where no good reason exists (anymore) to think that it might. Hence, in the possibility of hoping Dalferth detects the necessary protest against the premature opinion of a naturalistic comprehensibility of reality that, at best, can see in freedom and justice, personhood and dignity, solidarity and love of neighbour the illusory byproducts of a senseless evolution.32 Thus, right from the start, Dalferth leaves no doubt that he understands hope as the primary bulwark against our Western forgetfulness of the fact that the good ultimately comes to us as a gift. Hope, then, is not so much a human act than a way of understanding and leading one’s life. Dalferth, therefore, prefers to speak of hope in terms of an adverbial construction rather than as a verb: ‘I do something in the modus of hoping.’33 ‘Hope is what happens to me. If I wish to be open for this future coming toward me, I need to embark on a hopeful way of life.’34 Hence, our way of hoping discloses our principal orientation in life. While I agree with Dalferth that our hope discloses our basic human orientation in life, I disagree that hope should not be seen also in terms of a responsible human activity. Earlier, I proposed to understand hope in relational terms. Accordingly, hope relates not only to the good coming my way, although this is clearly a possibility, but hope can emerge from that love relationship to which God has invited all human beings in his covenant

Ingolf U. Dalferth, Hoffnung, Grundthemen Philosophie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 5. Ibid., 3. 31 Ibid., 5. 32 Jfr. Ibid. 33 Jfr. Ibid., 144. 34 Ibid., 166: ‘Wer in christlichem Sinn hofft, lebt hoffend, und wer so hoffend lebt, setzt sein Vertrauen auf Gott, weil er gewiss ist, dass Gott weiß, was für uns gut ist, weil er uns gut macht. Wer so lebt, kann für andere hoffen, ohne sich zum Maßstab zu machen, und für sich hoffen, ohne die Erfüllung seiner Hoffnung zum Kriterium eines gelungenen Lebens zu machen.’ 29 30

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with Abraham, with Moses, and in the invitation to become disciples of Jesus Christ. In other words, hope is always already linked to concrete personal relationships and ensuing journeys. Hence, hope is about the divinely initiated personal and communal relationship of love that brings about the good in the first place. In this love relationship the human subject can develop into becoming a genuine agent and subject of hope.

The relationship among hope, love and faith Christian discipleship has always been characterized by more or less adequate responses to the challenges of faith, hope and love. The theological virtues have been understood to be gifts of God, infused into us by the Holy Spirit. Hence, throughout the ages, Christians have been conscious of the fact that their response to God’s call depends on the gracious means provided by God. For the Apostle Paul, faith and hope will die with us when we die, whereas love will not end with our death (1 Cor. 13:8-13). Moreover, the Johannine literature in the New Testament stresses the divine nature of love to the point of identifying God’s very nature as love (1 Jn 4:8b and 16). For the Johannine community, love remains the primary category of human transformation, beyond faith and hope. How do hope and love and faith relate in Christian life and thinking? It is interesting to note that the early Christians understood God as love, although never in terms of faith or as hope, since faith and hope are human activities, although both originate in God’s gift. Love, however, can refer to either a divine or a human relation and action. As I have discussed in some detail in A Theology of Love, Christian theologians have disagreed on the human aspiration and ability to becoming loving subjects – able to relate to God and to fellow humans in virtue of God’s gift of love. While Augustine remained doubtful and highlighted God’s acts of love in human beings, whenever they loved,35 Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, among others, confirmed the God-given human ability to love.36

Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 45–65. Rowan Williams has criticized my reading of Augustine in my book A Theology of Love: first in a Festschrift article, ‘Augustinian Love’, and again in Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 191–206. Williams defends Augustine against my charge (that the church father diminished the subjectivity and agency of human love) by pointing to the larger theological framework in which Augustine operates. However, it was precisely this framework which I had criticized for its inability to attribute human beings sufficient agency in love. I do agree with Williams’s exposition of Augustine’s approach to love, but not with Augustine’s starting point, namely, the totally fallen, sinful and corrupt nature of humanity. I share William’s interpretation that being related to God ‘is what it is to be a spiritual subject, whether or not we acknowledge this’ (On Augustine, 195). However, I question the precise nature of this relationship: How much mutuality (not symmetry!) does God’s gracious love for human beings invite and encourage and on which basis – total depravation or mutual friendship (as in Thomas Aquinas)? – I shall return to Augustine’s theology in Chapter 2. 36 Cf. Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 77–83 and 96–103. 35

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One can learn many lessons when investigating love from philosophical, theological, religious, social, gender, queer, political and other angles and when assessing the importance of a properly understood praxis of love for Christian life in this world. I wish to mention three: first, like hope, love is not a Christian invention or possession. Rather, Christians share a culture of and concern for love with secular contemporaries as well as with members of other religious traditions. Christians understand the gift of love as God’s gift to all humankind. Second, in the Christian tradition love has often played an ambiguous role – it has not only been hailed as the divinely inspired centre of Christian discipleship, but at times it has also been evoked and instrumentalized to justify and to commit appalling crimes against women, men and children. Third, love as a relational category also involves faith and hope. Hence, we can appreciate the wisdom of theologians in considering all three theological virtues together. However, there can be no doubt that in mainline Christian theology, faith has received much more attention than either love or hope. There are many reasons for this predominance of faith in Christian thinking and praxis. One of them has been the appeal to faith in terms of defining the boundaries of the Christian church. Who is in and who is (or should be) excluded from the community of disciples? Appeals to love, of course, are hardly useful when trying to exclude people from a community or church. Rather, by its very nature, love seeks and desires otherness. Love lives of otherness and of relating to the otherness inside and outside of me and us, including God’s radical otherness. Although love is keen to transgress boundaries, faith, especially when understood as a system of beliefs and doctrines (as fides quae), lends itself more easily to establishing a list of propositions requiring assent from believers.37 And if such assent is not forthcoming, a case of dissent can easily be constructed and upheld. Not only as a result of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, such reductions have been flourishing in Christian communities, thus playing down the relational nature of faith (as fides qua), in order to profile the content of faith with its respective beliefs, doctrines, catechisms and lists of excluded propositions and anathemas. The urge to establish the orthodoxy of one’s own faith over the assumed incomplete or heretical faith of others has led to an increased objectification of faith: hence, faith itself has sometimes become an object of faith. Generations of Christians were brought up to believe in Christian beliefs, to argue and fight for their respective orthodoxy, and to campaign against any deviation from the assumed integrity of their received faith traditions. Wars have been fought over faith and in the interest of defending one’s particular set of beliefs against others. Even today, the defence of faith is

For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between love and orthopraxis, see Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Orthodoxy and Ideology’, Concilium 2 (2014): 59–68. 37

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often cited when legitimizing acts of violence against others – to sanction tribalism, populism, sectarianism, gender oppression and interreligious and interdenominational warfare. Faith as an object of faith has been a dangerous liability (not only) for Christians.38 Rarely have wars been fought on behalf of either divine love or hope. Of course, throughout Christian history, there have been countless theological controversies about the question of whose understanding of love or hope was truer. Loving God, one’s neighbour and one’s own self in response to the biblical love command has been the accepted Christian praxis, although debates over the right conceptualization of this love command are continuing. Occasionally, even love has been reduced to an object of right doctrine and orthodox faith, and thus been removed from the horizon of a relational and dynamic praxis. For Martin Luther, who otherwise championed a relational approach to the divine gift of faith against a self-authenticating doctrinal system in Rome, ultimately love remained under the control of faith.39 Hence, even in the Protestant Reformation and in the ensuing Protestant Orthodoxy, the praxis of a loving relationship with the human and divine other was ultimately adjudicated by appeals to right doctrine. The necessarily bordertransgressing desire and experience of love were thus reined in with reference to the need to adhere to a well-administered faith and its doctrinal support structure. Hope has not nearly been as controversial in Christian life as either faith or love.40 Hope seldom causes public debate, and no thinking Christian has ever seriously questioned the significance of hope for Christian life in this world – either with respect to the horizon of expectation for salvation, redemption and reconciliation, or with respect to expectations of an eternal life with God and the saints beyond our individual death. Most Christians would agree that hope involves perspectives of the future, of expectation and of fulfilment of the divine–human relationship. Thus, hope, faith and love all point to particular aspects of this ongoing relationship between God and humankind within God’s great project of creation and reconciliation. Like love and faith and together with both, hope inspires a human praxis in response to the divine invitation to enter into relationship with God through fellowship with Jesus Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit. God’s promise of covenant and fulfilment points to hope as the temporal and spatial framework for both love and faith.

Cf. Sturla J. Stålsett, Religion i urolige tider: Globalisering, religiøsitet og sårbarhet (Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akdademisk, 2017), 114–38. 39 Martin Luther, ‘De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium. 1520’, in Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6, ed. D. Martin (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1988), 497–573, esp. 516. See also Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 102. 40 Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 41: ‘By and large, hope has been the poor relation of the theological virtues, inspiring fewer scholarly explorations than faith and love.’ 38

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However, as we have seen, the Christian praxis of hope will never be pure, and therefore, it will always require critical and constructive attention. Becoming a full and fulfilled subject together with others and with God, the radical other, is an essential aspect of the Christian eschatological dynamics. This insight points to the need to assess the structures and experiences of evil, sin and distortion that continue to affect our journeys towards emancipation, subjectivity, transcendence and communal and personal transformation. Christian thinkers have devoted much energy to uncovering personal and systemic distortions that hinder human development and emancipation in relationship to each other, to God, to God’s universe and to our own emerging selves. Emancipatory theologies, including political, feminist and liberation theologies, have carried this work further: beyond a mere contemplation of individual existence and its fragility and estrangement towards a thorough analysis of structural evils and distorted sociopolitical, gender, communicative, and economic power and conditions. Suffering, denial of personhood, oppression, isolation, violence, exploitation and injustice need to be exposed and overcome whenever human beings are to retrieve their divine gifts of agency in and for justice, reconciliation and peace in this world. Feminist theologies have examined the structural oppression of women in the Christian tradition of patriarchy and kyriarchy.41 Developing and embracing forms of critical and self-critical hope, then, always already implies an acute awareness of the need for confession, conversion, forgiveness, reconciliation and healing. Hope and its critique, then, can never be adequately explored outside of the interconnection of hope, faith and love. Faith refers to that fundamental relationship between God and human beings that grows through prayer and contemplation, through reason and revelation, through community formation and maturing selfhood. Faith finds in hope its temporal dynamics and the personal and political space-time for the rich and diverse praxis of love. Love attends to otherness – the otherness in and around us – that is, the otherness of the universe, of the religious self and other, and of God, the radical other. Faith and hope culminate in the praxis of love, but they also offer critical correctives for this praxis. Christians do not believe in hope, but they hope. They do not believe in faith, but they have faith in the triune God. They do not believe in love, but

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Prophet of Divine Wisdom-Sophia’, in Negotiating Borders: Theological Explorations in the Global Era: Essays in Honour of Felix Wilfred, eds. Patrick Gnanapragasam and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Delhi: ISPCK, 2008), 59–76, here 62–3: 41

The neologism kyriarchy which connotes the rule and domination of the emperor/lord/master/father/husband is a more apt analytical tool than patriarchy, which in white feminist theory has been understood as the domination of all men over all wo/men equally. Whether one looks at feudal, late capitalist, monarchical, democratic, national or global systemic forms of kyriarchy, its structures of domination and exploitation always are determined by propertied, educated, powerful elite men and not by all men.

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they love. Faith, hope and love are three distinct, although closely interlinked dimensions of Christian discipleship. This three-dimensional praxis has a rich and varied history, not least with respect to what human beings can do, being endowed with these three theological virtues. It is important to appreciate that the history of faith, hope and love is not a history of human triumph, but a history of encounter, insight, conversion, regret, reconciliation and transformation of relationships. It is the specific task of hope to remind us that the history of transformation of each person and of the universe as a whole is not a simple and linear history upwards, but a complex history including neglect, injustice, hatred, exploitation, misuse of power, violence, forgetfulness, suffering and death. Only when all of these aspects of human life and history are gathered into the critical orbit of hope can the praxis of love appropriately unfold – God’s love for us and our love for God, for God’s creation, for our fellow human beings (past, present and future) and for our own emerging and fragile selves.42 Moreover, hope is non-hierarchical and egalitarian. It is personal and transpersonal at once. It faces death and longs for the manifestation of ultimate truth through the divine judgement of love.43 Hope discloses a love that affirms death but is not limited by death. Christians believe that in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the transformative reign of God has irrevocably manifested itself and that the church, however visible or invisible and however fragile and in need of constant conversion and transformation, is called to contribute to the emerging body of Christ in this universe.44 Christians know that nobody hopes for himself or herself alone. The church, therefore, remains a community of hope, a community extending also to those women, men and children who have died before us in the expectation of being eternally united with the divine–human community of love. Hence, the church is a community charged with an always deeper, more critical and self-critical praxis of hope. My approach to theology might be criticized for starting with the gift of love rather than with the experience and awareness of human sin and sinfulness, which God confronts with his salvific initiative in Jesus Christ,

Dalferth, Hoffnung, 167–8, also emphasizes the intimate connection between hope and love, although within his generally more passive and reception-oriented understanding of both. Christian hope is ‘kein eigenständiges Phänomen, sondern ein Modus der christlichen Liebe, und christliche Liebe gibt es nur, indem sie als Gottes- und Nächstenliebe gelebt wird.’ Dalferth also refers to Kierkegaard’s insight into the dependence of hope and faith on love. Dalferth, Hoffnung, 124–7: ‘Hoffnung als Tun der Liebe’. For a discussion of Kierkegaard’s approach to Christian love, see Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 106–13. 43 See James M. Matarazzo Jr., The Judgment of Love: An Investigation of Salvific Judgment in Christian Eschatology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2018). 44 Cf. Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Ecclesia Semper Reformanda in Theological Perspective’, Search: A Church of Ireland Journal 40, no. 2 (2017): 88–99. 42

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especially his cross and resurrection. Such a critique shows a dependence on one form of doing theology, one that takes as its starting point the (total) depravation of humankind and of the world as expressed in the doctrine of original sin. Although some biblical readings and some theological discourses are clearly inspired by such a theological default position, it is certainly not the only hermeneutical perspective possible when reviewing the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and the experiences of past and present Christian disciples. Moreover, the dualistic dimensions associated with such a starting point have led generations of Christians to ignore the creative and imaginative possibilities disclosed by an ever-deepening love relationship between God and human beings. The Scriptures offer ample witness to this graceful relationship and to the hope which it ignites. God’s love story with humanity does neither begin with nor culminate in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ; rather, it has begun with creation, is continuing with creation and reconciliation, as proclaimed and embodied by Jesus Christ, and will culminate in the fulfilment of God’s reign of love, which Jesus Christ proclaimed in God’s name. The attraction of God’s creative and reconciling project does not therefore lie primarily in insights into human fallenness and sinfulness but in insights into the amazing gift of God’s gracious and faithful love for God’s creation in spite of human sinfulness and continuing acts of evil. Appeals to salvation would thus need to include a response to God’s ongoing offer of reconciliation within a dynamic culture of love in which human beings are not mere recipients, but genuine subjects, agents, and ‘friends’.45 In view of this relational nature of God’s involvement in this universe, it makes good sense to understand theology as a relational science (Relationswissenschaft).46

Hopes, hope and radical hope Let us now return to the fact that all human expressions of hope occur under the shadow of death and consider what sort of hope might be able to encourage us to face up to our mortality. As we have seen earlier, Dalferth proposes to define hope in terms of expecting the possibility of the good.47 Of course, it is not always easy to

Cf. E. D. H. (Liz) Carmichael, Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love (London: T&T Clark, 2004); and Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 205–15. 46 For a more detailed argumentation in this respect, see Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Liebe, Hoffnung und Glaube als Kategorien relationaler Theologie’, in Rationalität im Gespräch – Rationality in Conversation: Philosophische und theologische Perspektiven – Philosophical and Theological Perspectives, ed. Markus Mühling, Christoph Schwöbel zum 60 (Geburtstag, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), 161–73. 47 Dalferth, Hoffnung, 170. 45

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determine what is good for us as persons or for humanity as a whole. Nor do I immediately know what may or may not be good for me in a concrete situation. My self-knowledge remains limited; it is only ever emerging. Hence, by necessity, my acts of hoping lack comprehensive perspicuity. Insight into the relational nature of hope and into the foundation of hope in the dynamic praxis of love can liberate me from despair about my always limited self-knowledge. In this context, I wish to discuss in greater detail the differences between hopes and hope and, in addition, introduce the concept of radical hope. Hopes are expectations that arise in different realms of life: regarding the climate, winning the lottery, in our education, our careers, income, wealth, power and so on. Our many and diverse hopes are not necessarily relational by nature but may concern material goods and external circumstances as well as a variety of personal needs, wishes and desires. Hope, however, as distinct from hopes, is by nature relational. Hope arises out of our network of trusting relationships: to fellow human beings, to God, to the universe and nature, and to our own emerging selves. Thus, hope comprises experiences of personal otherness and of ensuing interpersonal dynamics.48 For example, my hope for a good life revolves around my close relationships with my spouse, my children, my friends and relatives, my colleagues and students, my political relationships and other personal and communal associations. My loves form the framework of my hope. However, such hope is always threatened by death – social and physical. Death means the total breakdown of relationships. How, then, could there be hope beyond death? Is this not a contradiction in terms? This points us to radical hope. We also know of situations and circumstances in life when hope refers to mere survival and to the most basic requirements of life, which may be lacking.49 A hungry person hopes for food; a thirsty person hopes for water; an enslaved person hopes for freedom; refugees and strangers hope for respect, recognition and possible integration; an imprisoned person hopes for release; a sick person hopes for healing; a lonely and isolated person

For Ulrich Schmiedel, trust ‘encapsulates an experiential connection between the relation to the finite other and the relation to the infinite other’. Moreover, he defines trust ‘as a relation to the other which is characterized by openness to the other’s otherness’. Ulrich Schmiedel, Elasticized Ecclesiology: The Concept of Community after Ernst Troeltsch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 96f. Claudia Welz, Vertrauen und Versuchung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 85, underlines the intimate connection between trust and hope: ‘Vertrauen als grundlegende Offenheit ist auch Zukunftsoffenheit. Wäre es das nicht, wäre es irgendwann hoffnungslos veraltet. Vertrauen ohne Hoffnung hat keine Zukunft. Zukunft hat es nur, wenn es offen ist für das, was kommt und wiederkommt.’ 49 See here also Dermot A. Lane, Keeping Hope Alive: Stirrings in Christian Theology (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996), 65–71. 48

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hopes for company, friendship and love. These expressions of basic hope have, of course, a serious relational dimension: all people able to help are urged by the biblical love command to respond to these expressions of basic hope. According to Matthew’s gospel, Jesus confronts his audience with the prospect of divine judgement of each and every one of us in terms of our response (or non-response) to expressions of such basic hope (Mt. 25:31-46). Responding to articulations of existential hope must have priority in any praxis of hope. Radical hope differs from hope not in substance but in its degree and intensity. Radical hope denies any closure by whatever system of hope. Even when all our hopes and our trust in the continuation and substance of our religion and our culture and their respective systems and institutions are shattered, it does not necessarily signal the end of hope. Rather, it focuses our attention on the challenge to face up to radical hope that comes to us without our own doing, without calculation and without our initiative. Radical hope confronts us with radical transcendence. Radical hope, thus, can only manifest itself in the context of radical love. The experience of the dark night of the soul that John of the Cross (1542–91) discusses comes to mind here. This experience involved the radical dismantling of all of John’s religious and institutional trappings and cherished support structures.50 He suffered abduction by his own fellow Carmelite monks, who did not share his programme for reforming the Carmelite Order’s spirituality and discipline. Fellow monks imprisoned John under miserable conditions for nine months. ‘It was during these nine months of torture by supposed brothers that John learned the real cost of discipleship.’51 His experience included incarceration in a tiny and dark cell; ‘wretched food; no change of clothes; constant harassment, especially about the failure of the reform; suffering from both cold and heat; savage beatings by the whole community once a week’.52 There remained nothing for John to lean on except radical love with its radical commitment to God, the radical other. Transcendence was no longer supported by the usual institutional scaffolding and religious, clerical, ecclesial, social and communal forms of mediation. In such a situation, hope becomes radical because it can no longer rely on any external support structure or system; instead, it relies solely on the other, the loved one.53 Radical hope emerges from radical love. After his escape, John began to share his experiences, thoughts and writings from prison with monastic friends.

For a discussion of John of the Cross’s life and mystical theology, see Bernard McGinn, Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain (1500–1650), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. VI, 2 (New York: Crossroad, 2017), 230–335. 51 Ibid., 233. 52 Ibid. 53 Cf. Werner G. Jeanrond, Guds närvaro: Teologiska reflexioner I, 2nd ed. (Lund: Arcus, 2006), 20–3. 50

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Later on, detailed spiritual reflections ensued and reached publication in subsequent years. Of interest to us at this point in our investigation is John’s approach to hope. Whereas Thomas Aquinas understood hope to be a divine gift to guide the human will, John saw in hope God’s gift to guide human memory. However, for John the challenge of the dark night of what I refer to here as radical hope is to empty one’s memory totally so that God’s love can fill the thus emptied space. ‘For John, the heart of the spiritual life is to present oneself before God in the nakedness of faith, hope, and love, relying on them alone.’54 In the spiritual night, John argues, the three theological virtues of faith, hope and love void the human faculties of intellect, memory and will. ‘Faith causes darkness and a void of understanding in the intellect, hope begets an emptiness of possessions in the memory, and charity produces the nakedness and emptiness of affection and joy in all that is not God.’55 Hope, in particular, ‘puts the memory in darkness and emptiness as regards all earthly and heavenly objects. Hope always pertains to the unpossessed object. If something were possessed there could no longer be hope for it’.56 Hence, human union with God presupposes the emptying of all claims to possession. Radical hope results from the dark night of the soul. In a different context, the American scholar of literature and psychology Jonathan Lear speaks of ‘radical hope’ when recounting the loss of land and cultural structures of a Native American nation that suddenly faces life in a reservation. Does abandoning the traditional nomadic life in the great space signal the end of hope? Does the radical loss of our structure of plausibility, of conceptual devastation, of making sense of our experience and our world necessarily lead to despair? Not necessarily. Rather radical trust and love can make space for a new courageous and radical hope: My commitment to the genuine transcendence of God is manifest in my commitment to the goodness of the world transcending our necessarily limited attempt to understand it. My commitment to God’s transcendence and goodness is manifested in my commitment to the idea that something good will emerge even if it outstrips my present limited capacity for understanding what that good is.57

Cf. Dominic Doyle, ‘Changing Hopes: The Theological Virtue of Hope in Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross, and Karl Rahner’, Irish Theological Quarterly 71 (2011): 18–36, here 25. 55 Saint John of the Cross, ‘The Ascent of Mount Carmel’, in The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, rev. ed., trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991), 99–349, here 166. 56 Ibid., 167. 57 Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 94. 54

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[Radical hope] is basically the hope for revival:58 for coming back to life in a form that is not yet intelligible. Lear’s expressions, although developed in a different context, nevertheless can inspire a way, however searchingly, to approach the mystery of God’s resurrection of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth and the related mystery of our own fulfilment by God in God’s gift of the future. ‘We must do what we can to open our imaginations up to a radically different set of future possibilities.’59 However, it is important to recall that hope is not identical with belief in human progress. Hope does not spread optimism about the human future. Rather, in the words of Terry Eagleton, Judaism and Christianity (and I would add Islam) break the link between hope and progress: There may indeed be progress in history from time to time, but it is not to be confused with redemption. It is not as though history as a whole is edging steadily closer to the Almighty, clambering from height to height until it glides into a glorious finale. For the New Testament, the eschaton or future kingdom of God is not to be mistaken for the consummation of history as a whole, and thus as the triumphal conclusion of a steadily upward trek, but as an event that breaks violently, unpredictably into the human narrative, upending its logic, defying its priorities, and unmasking its wisdom as foolishness.60 The American Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s (1915–68) reflections on ‘pure hope’ may help us further in our understanding of radical hope. Merton pays attention to the intricate relationship between hope and freedom: We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.61 Thus, we can only engage in radical hope through acts of trust and radical love. Religious and secular systems that have facilitated and supported the possibility of trust and love must themselves be challenged and transformed by radical hope in order to appraise afresh the personal and relational nature of hope over against any of its however well intended support structures. No

Ibid., 95. Ibid., 93. See also Ola Sigurdson’s discussion of Lear’s concept of radical hope in Sigurdson, Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek, 193–8. 60 Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 27. 61 Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), 14. 58 59

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person, no system of thought, no religious tradition, and no hierarchy can limit this dynamics of hope. Hope will ultimately contradict any totalizing system in the name of radical hope. In Merton’s words, not without an echo of John of the Cross: ‘Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God.’62 Merton also warns of vain hope, which is in reality a temptation to despair. It may seem very real, very substantial. You may come to depend far too much on this apparent solidity of what you think is soon to be yours. You may make your whole spiritual life, your very faith itself, depend on this illusory promise. Then, when it dissolves into air, everything else dissolves along with it. Your whole spiritual life slips away between your fingers and you are left with nothing.63 The German theologian Karl Rahner (1904–84) differentiates between our individual hopes and ‘the one and entire hope [ganze Hoffnung] that gently embraces all upsurges and also all downfalls in silent promise’.64 This ultimate hope comes from God’s ‘liberating grace’.65 At the same time, however, Rahner alerts us that we need to decide whether or not we wish to accept this liberating grace of radical hope in the experience of the Holy Spirit: ‘then an experience occurs that is inescapable in life (even if it suppressed) and is offered to our freedom with the question of whether we want to accept it or to barricade ourselves against it in a hell of freedom to which we condemn ourselves’.66 The ongoing liberation of all human hopes and the emancipation of human hope into radical (or pure) hope remain central challenges of Christian personal and communal life. In that sense, hope represents a huge and lasting challenge to all forms of Christian praxis. This side of death, we human beings do not know the end, we do not know the dimensions of ultimate fulfilment of history; nor can we grasp the essence of God – the radical other. However, radical hope, encouraged by the example of Jesus at Gethsemane (Mk 14:32-42) inspires courage to live a life of discipleship in trust, love and anticipation without total certainty and absolute control.67

Ibid., 15. Thomas Merton, Seeds, ed. Robert Inchausti (Boston/London: Shambala, 2002), 104. 64 Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 18, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984), 202. 65 Ibid., 203. 66 Ibid. 67 Merton, Seeds, 152: ‘The hope of the Christian must be, like the hope of a child, pure and full of trust.’ – Cf. also David Jasper, The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), 165f. 62 63

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Moreover, radical hope is only possible for people prepared to engage in radical acts of remembering – either in emptying all memories before God or in allowing our memories to be reconfigured and reconciled by God. Trust in the ultimate fulfilment of the whole, that is, what Christian theology calls eschatological faith, requires an ongoing critical and self-critical reestablishment of trust and love in the relational network in which we human beings are capable of living. All of these interwoven relationships are thoroughly affected by memories – conscious and repressed. So, establishing a critical and self-critical praxis of remembering, an anamnetic culture (Johann Baptist Metz),68 points to a way forward towards establishing a framework in which we may be able to retrieve a basic trust in our love relationships and a new dynamics of hope and radical hope that will make space for radical love and transformation. Without the (often painful) purgation and reconciliation of our memories, there will be no such retrieval of trust, love and hope. Therefore, our acts of personal, communal, political and religious remembrance need to be mindful of the pain of the past, the broken trust and frustrated love between people and the many disappointed hopes and the shattered trust in humanity itself. We shall resume this discussion in Chapter 5.

The complexity of hope The purpose of this study is not to offer a comprehensive treatment of all aspects of hope. A single theologian cannot explore all reasons to hope from inside and outside the Christian movement. Rather, the aim of this book is to discuss some such reasons in order to contribute to the ongoing conversation on the nature and vocation of the Christian praxis of hope. I do not intend to simplify or harmonize the theological study of hope. However, I do wish to present what I consider to be significant features of a relational understanding of the Christian praxis of hope. My investigations of selected historical contributions to the debate on hope are therefore intended to provide constructive and critical challenges to contemporary theological reflections on hope, although not an exhaustive study in historical theology or the history of ideas. In what follows, each chapter introduces and discusses different approaches to the phenomenon of hope and to the Christian praxis of hope. This procedure invites readers to begin where they feel the greatest attraction or curiosity. In order to facilitate such a choice, here are some indications of what to expect in each chapter.

Johan Baptist Metz, Zum Begriff der neuen Politischen Theologie: 1967–1997 (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1997), 152. 68

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In Chapter 2, I present and explore a few particularly influential Christian voices on hope from different periods of Christian history. Has the Christian approach to hope changed throughout history or should we expect a changeless and stable understanding of the praxis of hope? In Chapter 3, I contrast two approaches to hope: Should we approach hope first and foremost in terms of our desire to be saved or in terms of our longing for divine and human reconciliation? What implications do these two approaches have for our understanding of the praxis of hope in our universe? In Chapter 4, I examine three recent systematic-theological approaches to hope in order to identify and discuss some pressing contemporary concerns about hope. There is considerable overlap among Joseph Ratzinger’s, Robert Jenson’s and Anthony Kelly’s theologies of hope. Exploring these three prominent theologies will allow us to trace some of the fault lines in the contemporary discussion of hope. Chapter 5 is devoted to reviewing the relationship between memory and hope. However, rather than introducing the relationship between both phenomena in an abstract way, I invite the reader to consider very particular instances of how important our memory can be for our articulation of hope. In Chapter 6, I return to the theology of death and its different challenges to any understanding of the Christian praxis of hope. Moreover, I shall argue for the need to retrieve, however critically, a concept of the human soul. In Chapter 7, I explore the prominent eschatological symbols of judgement, heaven, hell and purgatory and their shifting interpretations. What meaning could these symbols carry today? Each of these symbols represents an invitation to engage in eschatological thinking. Hence, in spite of much needed critique of such symbolic impressions, they still can fulfil a constructive function in contemporary theology. Chapter 8 offers an exploration of the politics of hope with particular reference to the ongoing project of European integration. Again, not unlike chapter 5, this chapter wishes to locate theological thinking in the critical analysis of important aspects of European social, political and cultural reality today. In Chapter 9, I conclude my reflections on the fourfold Christian praxis of hope and pay particular attention to the significance of hope for our understanding of the future of the physical universe.

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2 Hoping for salvation

In this chapter, I would like to examine how some influential Christian thinkers, at different periods in the history of the church, have approached Christian hope for salvation. What may we learn from them about emerging and shifting hopes for salvation in the church? Does their respective hope focus on the fulfilment of this creation, on a totally new creation, or on a return to a once lost paradise? Does their hope include all of humanity or parts of humanity? Does their hope include animals, plants, and the physical universe? In this book, I do not wish to provide a history of Christian ideas about salvation. Rather, I aim to reflect on the eschatological potential of the Christian praxis of love. Hence, the narrow choice of my conversation partners in this chapter mirrors this particular theological focus and does not claim to represent all of Christian thinking about hope and salvation.

Biblical horizons of hope Understandably, early Christian writers were particularly concerned with the fact that the widely expected imminent return of Christ (the Parousia) had not happened. The author of 2 Peter tried to respond to people who wanted to know why the hope of Christians for Christ’s Parousia did not materialize. A more systematic Christian reflection on the nature and spectrum of hope emerged only slowly. Building stones for early Christian eschatologies came from Scripture, from surrounding religious and cultural traditions and their considerations of cosmic processes and time, but also to a considerable extent from the need to relate to the terrible experiences of persecution and martyrdom. Moreover, the shock about the fall of Jerusalem in ad 70 and again in ad 135 will have played a role in this process. Eschatology has always been contextual; all hope emerges and is tested in specific circumstances. Moreover, all eschatology displays positive or negative attitudes to the present world and to surrounding people when

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reflecting on future states, personal and collective transformations and possibilities. Expectations of judgement, justice, resurrection, and union with God and Christ mingle with different visions of religious, ecclesial, social, political, and cosmic processes signalling the end of times. It is important to recall that the biblical texts that informed the theology of the early Christians were the texts of the emerging canon of the Hebrew Bible. Hope, as expressed in these texts, refers to Yahweh and his creative and restorative presence and promise among his people. Israel’s hope is ultimately and intimately related to Yahweh – his grace, his strong arm, his salvation (Mic. 7:7), his word (Ps. 130:5). Yahweh is and remains Israel’s hope before, during and after the exile in Babylon. Hence, this hope expects nothing less than Yahweh’s coming reign, Israel’s and all peoples’ conversion and commitment to Yahweh, in short, the renewed, universal and lasting covenant with God.1 However, hope can also be experienced in terms of disappointed hope, as in the book of Job. At one point, God is accused of having destroyed Job’s hope (Job 19:10). But even in such acts of lamentation over alienated hope, biblical hope still relates to God. At times, suffering can become so great that death appears as the last hope for the suffering person (Job 6:8), whereas Job’s friends consider any loss of hope as a sign of lacking faith. Both these personal and communal expressions of hope in Israel relate to God and to what God promises to do in this world, which the prophets proclaim as God’s creation.2 Hence, hope reflects on what God is to do within the framework of history. Even the evolving messianic hope for the restoration of the Davidic kingship in Israel remains this worldly: ‘On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old’ (Amos 9:11). However, this hope enters a new stage in Deutero-Isaiah when the text contemplates the suffering servant (Isa. 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13–53:12) who here represents Israel or the remnant of Israel – and not yet a royal messianic figure or indeed a prefigured Christ.3 This image of the suffering servant was to be taken up and reinterpreted by early Christians in order to make sense of Jesus’s suffering and revolting death at the cross. Two further and possibly related developments contributed to a radical change of focus in Jewish hope in the last centuries before Christ, during the socalled inter-testamental period: the rise of apocalyptic and the emerging hope

Cf., for example, Isa. 25:9; 49:6; 65:17-25; Jer. 31:31-37; Hos 3:5. Even the pagans hope for Yahweh’s salvation: Isaiah 42. Cf. Hans Bietenhard, ‘Hoffnung. 1. In der Bibel’, Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon: Internationale theologische Enzyklopädie, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 543–5. 2 Cf. Gerhard von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, vol. 2: Die Theologie der prophetischen Überlieferungen Israels, 6th ed. (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1975), 250–2. 3 Cf. Brian Hebblethwaite, The Christian Hope, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11f. 1

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for resurrection from the dead. Apocalyptic text passages, such as Daniel 7–8, are ‘writings in which the details of God’s future action are revealed (albeit symbolically) and portrayed in vivid, dramatic, and pictorial form’.4 Hope for God’s intervention on behalf of the just who are suffering from the hands of perpetrators of evil intensified under extreme external pressures – such as at the time of the Maccabean wars or, later on, when Jerusalem was destroyed and when the emerging church suffered persecution. While Israel’s great prophets hoped for God as the Lord of creation and of history, the future was not transparent or clearly predetermined. For the apocalyptic writers, however, ‘the course of history is fixed in advance and simply unfolds to a predetermined plan, disclosed in symbolic visions to the apocalyptic seer’.5 Hope for a life beyond death emerges in Israel relatively late. Throughout most of Israel’s theological development, hope was concerned more with the destiny of the nation rather than with the fate of the individual believer. And when the hope for resurrection appears on the Jewish theological horizon, such as in the book of Daniel, it had nothing to do with the Greek understanding of the immortality of the soul: ‘Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’ (Dan. 12:2). When the disciples of Jesus tried to make sense of his ministry, violent death and surprising resurrection, they benefitted from their rich and varied Jewish resources for the expression of hope in God and in God’s continuing involvement in this world. Moreover, the emerging Christian movement actively participated in this ongoing development of a theology of hope – now in light of their experiences of Jesus Christ. Hence, prophetic and apocalyptic expressions of hope together with a strengthened belief in the resurrection of the dead and in the beginning of God’s reign now characterize the emerging Christian praxis of hope. However, it is important to note that this praxis was never homogenous, neither in outlook nor in expression. Rather, competing approaches to hope can be identified in the different New Testament texts – some of a more prophetic and others of a more apocalyptic character. It is impossible to know exactly to what extent Jesus’s own proclamation of God’s reign rejected deterministic models of hope and instead preferred prophetic expressions. In any case, as far as we can see from the gospel texts, Jesus did not invent new genres of hope discourse. He used existing ones in order to convey his particular message of what God’s reign entails here and now. Moreover, according to his portrayal in the gospels, through his deeds and proclamation in the name of God, Jesus incorporated the reasons to hope made available by the biblical heritage. These include God’s gift of love,

4 5

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 14f.

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the radical inclusivity of God’s fellowship, the forgiveness of sin, guilt and shame – in response to Jesus’s proclamation of God’s transformative love and presence. ‘Unlike the Pharisees’ insistence on the strict observance of the law, unlike the political messianism of the Zealots, and unlike the sectarian strictness of the Qumran community setting itself apart to await the end, the preaching of Jesus concerned God’s unbounded love and forgiveness at work already among the poor and the outcast.’6 It seems clear that Jesus shared the hope of many fellow Jews in the arrival of the messianic age and in the resurrection of the dead (cf. Mk 12:24-27). However, it was the Early Church that saw in Jesus the Son of Man who would inaugurate the ultimate transformation of the world upon his final return and judgement. Thus, Jesus, the powerful proclaimer of hope in God, has now himself become part of the divine orbit of hope. The experiences of Easter and Pentecost have reassembled the disciples of Jesus and provided them with a radically new insight into God’s transformative presence in the universe. Moreover, for Jesus’s disciples their reasons to hope have become both more concrete and more remote: more concrete in terms of the disclosure of God’s reign in Jesus Christ and more remote in terms of the timescale for the final implementation of this reign at Jesus Christ’s second coming, the Parousia. This new already and not yet tension is articulated and contemplated especially in the letters that became part of the emerging New Testament canon, culminating in the confession of early Christians that ‘Christ is our hope’ (1 Cor. 15:19; Col. 1:27; 3:4). For the emergent church community, every reference to hope now includes Jesus Christ and, not least through the incessant campaign of Paul, is shown to concern not only the Jews, but also the entire cosmos – people and matter alike (Rom. 8:2). Moreover, Christian references to hope often carry a positive emotional note: to hope means to expect the fulfilment of God’s promises in Christ with confidence: ‘Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers’ (Rom. 12:12-13).7 New Testament texts differ somewhat with regard to their Parousia expectations. The gospel of Mark points to the imminent arrival of God’s reign (9:1 and 13:30), whereas, the gospel of Luke seems more relaxed about the timescale for the Parousia. Here, we find ‘the earliest form of what was to become the standard Church solution of the eschatological problem, a combination of emphasis on present fulfilment and present tasks with retention of a future, but distant Parousia and judgement.’8

Ibid., 23. Cf. Andrie du Toit, ‘Hoffnung III. Neues Testament’, in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th ed., vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 1824–6. 8 Hebblethwaite, The Christian Hope, 30. 6 7

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Although apocalyptic passages and sentiments can be found also in the gospels, the final text in the New Testament, the Revelation to John, draws explicitly on the book of Daniel, the classical manifestation of apocalyptic writing in the Hebrew Bible. Like Daniel, this book was ‘written out of vivid memories of violent persecution and designed to fortify the Christian churches against backsliding and lukewarmness’.9 However, at the centre of the imagination of the world’s catastrophic future in the final text of the Christian Bible, stands Christ and his expected return as the ultimate divine intervention in our world. Sin and Satan will not thwart God from the eternal fruition of his creative and reconciling project. The book culminates in the closing cry: ‘Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!’ (Rev. 22:20).10 The reading of this book has led at times to very problematic appropriations in Christian history.11

Hope in the Early Church The particular challenges presented by the Gnostic movement (or Gnosticism) forced early Christian thinkers, such as Irenaeus of Lyons (second century), to clarify theologically the connection between God’s project of creation and God’s project of salvation or ultimate consummation.12 Creation is not the product of an evil demiurge, as the Gnostics argued, from whom salvation proves necessary. Rather, creation is part of God’s great project with humankind in this universe. For Irenaeus, salvation ‘is not so much God’s unexpected intervention in history to rescue his faithful ones from destruction as it is the end-stage of the process of organic growth which has been creation’s “law” since its beginning’.13 The goal of God’s eschatological plan is communion with God; its method is God’s incarnation in Christ. God became human so that we human beings can become divine. Our human bodies must be transformed in the resurrection in preparation for our glorious participation in God’s eternal communion. In the person and work of Jesus Christ, God recapitulated his creative and redemptive work once again. This recapitulation (in Greek anakephalaiosis) demonstrates

Ibid., 33. Cf. Stephen R. Spencer, ‘Hope’, in Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 305–7. 11 See Adela Yarbro Collins, ‘Revelation, Book of’, in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 694–708, esp. 706f.; and Judith Kovacs and Christopher Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 14–38. 12 Cf. Norbert Brox, Offenbarung, Gnosis und gnostischer Mythos bei Irenäus von Lyon (Salzburg/Munich: Anton Pustet, 1966). 13 Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 29. 9

10

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God’s activity according to both the Jewish and the Christian testaments.14 In opposition to the Gnostic denial of matter’s spiritual significance, Irenaeus’s eschatology remains committed to the inclusion of matter into God’s great plan of salvation. ‘It is fitting, therefore, that the creation itself, being restored to its primeval condition, should without restraint be under the dominion of the righteous.’15 As a result of a literal reading of Rev. 20:1–21:5, some Christians approached salvation and the consummation of time in terms of an intricate sequence of millennia, the seventh of which would follow the return and subsequent reign of Christ with his resurrected disciples in a temporal kingdom, ‘in which members of the Christian sect, now persecuted, will enjoy a richly endowed Paradise on earth before the final defeat of Satan and the transformation of this world into a totally new creation’.16 For such apocalyptically inspired theologians who identified the process of history with their particular disclosure of revelation, the end of history becomes calculable and ethically enforceable.17 Others, such as the great Alexandrian theologian Origen (ca. 185–ca. 254), reflected on the extent of God’s salvific work: does it only apply to individual persons or to all of humanity? Origen concluded that universal salvation was a necessary consequence of God’s creative intention. However, Origen imagined divine salvation in terms of a restoration (apokatastasis): the original harmony, which was lost in the Fall of Adam, will be restored at the end.18 Origen was convinced that the end is always like the beginning, ‘that human fulfillment is really the restoration of the soul to a unity with God that it possessed before its fall and embodiment’.19 The salvific future of humanity, therefore, is the return to its original beginnings in God’s act of creating spiritual beings.20 God has created the world, but not as it is today. Humanity and the world need to be saved from sin and depravation, and all spiritual beings need to be reinstated into their original state. That is what salvation means for Origen.21 It is interesting to note that Origen distinguishes between material bodies and spiritual bodies. The latter alone make it possible for us human beings

Cf. Brox, Offenbarung, 186–9. Irenaeus of Lyons, Adverses haereses V, 32.1. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Ererdmans, 1985), 561. 16 Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 18. 17 Cf. Josef Römelt, ‘Hoffnung III. Systematisch-theologisch’, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 2009), 203–6, here 203. 18 Cf. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 58. 19 Ibid. 20 Origenes, De principiis III 6,1-9, Vier Bücher von den Prinzipien, ed. and trans. Herwig Görgemanns and Heinrich Karpp (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), 642– 67. See also De principiis I 6, 2, ibid., 216: ‘Semper enim similis est finis initiis’. 21 Cf. Norbert Brox, Das Frühchristentum: Schriften zur Historischen Theologie, ed. Franz Dünzl, Alfons Fürst and Ferdinand R. Prostmeier (Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder, 2000), 391. 14 15

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to be eternally united with God. The spiritual body corresponds to its soul, whereas the material body is marked by transitoriness and mortality. Moreover, the ultimate and eternal union with God ends all diversity.22 Origen even points to the possibility of multiple reincarnations of human beings in terms of their physical embodiment until, eventually, the original state of spiritual embodiment will have been achieved again.23 Today, many Christians, not unlike their contemporaries, find it difficult to distinguish between body and soul, or even, more generally, to speak about a human soul or a spiritual body. Soul-language still flourishes in some contexts, but not in the sense in which Origen considered the human soul. While nowadays references to the soul in the West often point to the inner life of human beings or simply to the identity of the human self or subject, early Christian theologians influenced by Greek philosophy understood the soul as the centre of human life and personhood. Whereas we today may long to have our bodies saved from decay and death, early and medieval Christians longed to have their souls saved from the corruption of sinfulness and damnation.24 We shall return to the mystery of the human soul in greater depth in Chapter 6. Origen’s biblical hermeneutics reflected the Alexandrian School’s interests in the allegorical interpretation of the Bible.25 Not surprisingly, theologians schooled in literal scriptural interpretation criticized him for his optimistic allegorical reading of Christian eschatological symbols and images and for his hermeneutical challenge of millenarian hope and apocalyptic understandings of the end of the world. Eschatology, for Origen, meant the mystery of growth towards God, which is at the centre of Christian faith praxis. Hope, for Origen, is the desire to be one with God.26 God will perfect and complete the work of Christ’s disciples. Thus, the end of creation remains God’s privilege and gift. Mutual vilification and misunderstanding aside, issues at stake in subsequent eschatological debates included the nature of the resurrected body, the afterlife and the relationship between the present creation and the new creation. It also included the criteria for admission to and the scope of the Kingdom of God, divine judgement and the means of the purification of sinners, as well as the nature of the eschatological church.

Origenes, De principiis III 6,4, ibid., 654: ‘ubi omnes unum sunt, iam diversitas non erit.’ De principiis III 6,3, ibid., 650f. 24 For a discussion of the career of the human soul in early Christianity, see John Anthony McGuckin, The SCM Press A-Z of Patristic Theology (London: SCM Press, 2005), 316–19. For a comprehensive study of Christian incarnational thinking and its impact on soul-language, see Ola Sigurdson, Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in Christian Theology, trans. Carl Olsen (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2016). 25 For a discussion of Origen’s hermeneutics, see Werner G. Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (London: SCM Press, 1994), 20–1. 26 Cf. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 59f. 22 23

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Christian asceticism led to an intensification in eschatological and apocalyptic thought and speculation. ‘The early Egyptian ascetics imagined both the joys of heaven and the punishments of hell in highly personal, often communitarian terms’.27 The desired state of ultimate being, that is, paradise, meant for the desert monks a place separated from this world – a place full of light and fragrant fruit trees. Admission to paradise depended on one’s merits. Accordingly, preparation for paradise involved a life of fidelity to the gospel’s commands and an acceptance of purgative suffering. At the same time, the monks presented a model of community life to the wider church, a model of a lived faith already radiating an experience of spiritual new-birth or resurrection here and now.28 Thus, once more we can observe the presence of that tension between already and not yet, which has been characteristic of mainline Christian eschatology. The fourth century brought radical changes in the cultural, social and political context of Christianity. It was now becoming the defining religion of the Roman state. Moreover, the end of persecution allowed Christian thinkers to focus more on the immanent dimensions of the new order of salvation. Preparing for the Kingdom of God in this world became the new challenge for Christian praxis, and developing appropriate criteria for a successful (or non-successful) life before God became a concomitant theological urgency. All major Greek (Eastern) and Latin (Western) theologians in the Early Church attended to both tasks and reflected on the nature and consequences of God’s judgement of the souls. Judgement, heaven (or paradise) and hell received increasing attention and became guiding eschatological images inspiring in one way or the other the moral life of Christians. The Christian goal was to reach heaven. Heaven was the ultimate object of hope. Basil of Caesarea (ca. 330–79), for example, defended the eternal nature of both punishment and heaven and offered vivid images in relation to both. His depiction of heaven, or the state of beatitude, in one of his sermons is instructive: it is the opposite of all our earthly chores and tribulations. Commenting on Ps. 114:5, Basil explains: It is the place of the living, in which there is no night, or sleep, the imitator of death; in which there is no food or drink, the supports of our weakness; in which there is no illness, no suffering, no medicine, no lawcourts, no marketplaces, no crafts, no money – the origin of evil, the cause of war, the root of hatred. No, it is the place of those who live, not of those who are dying through sin – the place of those who live the true life, which is in Christ Jesus.29

Ibid., 70. Ibid., 71. 29 Basil of Caesaraea, ‘Homiliae in Psalmos, CXIV’, in Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne, vol. 29 (1857): 207–494, here 493. English translation: Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 82f. 27 28

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His depiction of hell stresses the absence of God: ‘in hell there is none that maketh confession, in death none that remembereth God, because the succour of the Spirit is no longer present’.30 Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–94), Basil’s younger brother and fellow theologian, further developed Origen’s eschatological thought. Like Origen, Basil hoped for universal salvation (apokatastasis), yet he did not agree with Origen’s idea that before the Fall human beings existed as unembodied souls or spiritual bodies. Therefore, what is restored in the resurrection is not this sort of prehistoric existence but the true potential of human life, which God wishes to be realized by all of us in our earthly lives. Thus, for Gregory, the goal of creation remains the realization of God’s creative project: God’s plan will ultimately be realized in every creature.31 This plan includes the resurrection of the body. Like other early Christian thinkers, Gregory approached the human person in view of their spiritual and material dimensions. However, unlike some, he stressed the necessary interplay between both dimensions. For him, ‘the human person is not a soul that later acquired a material body as chastisement, but a true composite of spiritual and material dimensions which were created together, and which depend on each other for their full existence’.32 The risen body, however, will be a transformed body, freed from the process of ageing and decay and consumed by an ever-increasing desire for God. Gregory speaks of ‘the beautiful passion of insatiability’.33 Again, unlike others, Gregory does not refer to the eternal punishment of sinners, although he has a clear understanding of the nature and impact of sin and original sin. Yet, he remains convinced that all creatures eventually will reach their true destination with their creator. Bishops and pastors in the Early Church, like their colleagues in other periods of the Western Christian tradition, tried to give an account of their hope in their respective circumstances, some more systematically, others in more homiletic and pastoral ways. All, however, were influenced in some ways by Greek philosophy and its approaches to anthropology and cosmology. Hence, the emerging eschatologies tried to assimilate views of the biblical evidence and the general expectations of their time. Ambrose of Milan (ca. 334–97) is a good example. Schooled in Neoplatonist philosophy, skilled in the exegetical tradition of Origen, trained in political rhetoric, and actively participating in ongoing Christian conversations and debates, this colourful institutional and intellectual leader dealt with eschatology often in response to concrete homiletic challenges.

Basil of Caesarea, De spiritu sancto 40, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church, Second Series, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1983), 26. 31 Cf. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 86. 32 Ibid., 87. 33 Ibid., 88.

30

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His varying thoughts on hope had a great impact on his contemporaries. He shared the Zeitgeist of his period, according to which the end was near and the world had grown old and lost its vital energy.34 Moreover, all human beings were tainted by original sin. In one of his sermons preached at Milan around 383, he explained: ‘Before we are born, we are defiled by a contagion; before we enjoy the light, we receive the injury of our very birth. We are “conceived in wickedness” [Ps. 51:5], . . . and each one’s mother gives birth to him “in sins”.’35 Hence, God’s judgement was about to be experienced by every person. While the powerful imagery would change from homily to homily, his conviction that God’s coming judgement would sort out what needs to be discarded, corrected and preserved, remained the same. In his homily on Psalm 1, Ambrose explains that no real substance can perish; it simply needs to be transformed. However, since he considered evil to be without substance, it simply must pass away, while ‘those substances which have been disfigured by evil can only be changed for the better. For the sinful human being, this means conversion through purification’.36 Not everybody requires this sort of purification. Inspired by his particular reading of Revelation 20, Ambrose distinguishes between a first and a second resurrection. Sharing in the first are those who ‘will come to grace without needing to be judged. Those, however, who do not come to the first resurrection but are reserved for the second will be burned, until the time between the first and second resurrections has passed – or if they have not fulfilled [their purification], they will remain in punishment longer’.37 Here we see the emergence of the thought that some people require purification after death. Hence, the roots of the medieval concept of purgatory reach back to the Early Church’s attempt to comprehend the implications of divine judgement and its rightful punishment for those human beings who belong neither to the category of the obvious saints or the obvious hell-bound. Ambrose leaves us somewhat in the dark as to his take on universal salvation. While he displays a clear sympathy for Origen’s universalist thinking, he never states that even the devils will be included in the ultimate reconciliation. Moreover, he remains vague on the resurrection of the body. Rather, in Neoplatonist fashion, he concentrates on the radically different order, which the resurrection implies, for the return of the souls to God. Finally, death seen from the perspective of the ultimate return of the soul is not such a bad thing after all.

Ibid., 97f. Ambrose of Milan, A Defence of the Prophet David, I.76. English translation: Henry Bettenson, ed. and trans., The Later Christian Fathers (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 177. 36 Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 98. 37 Ibid., 99. 34 35

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In the later period of the Roman Empire, the instability, chores and challenges of everyday life led to intensified attention to the afterlife, to God’s offer of ultimate personal and cosmic stability and peace. None of the early Christian writers explored this tension between human life and history and the coming of God’s new creation more thoroughly than Augustine of Hippo (354–430).

Augustine’s hope for salvation Augustine developed his eschatology in a systematic and coherent fashion. We shall revisit Augustine’s influential approach to hope and salvation at numerous occasions throughout this book. However, at this point I would like to outline the major contours of his eschatological thinking. For Augustine, human lives are conditioned by time, whereas God’s realm is characterized by eternity. This radical distinction between human time and its changeable and restless nature, on the one hand, and God’s realm with its unchangeable and stable order, on the other hand, permeates Augustine’s thinking. Moreover, he considers the human condition as hopelessly fallen and the world to be about to approach its final stages, although he consistently refrains from speculating when exactly the end will come. Nevertheless, all the signs of the present time point towards the end. Like other Early Church theologians, Augustine wrestles with Revelation 20 in order to find some clue as to the position of the church in God’s overall cosmic timescale. The thousand years of the earthly kingdom in Rev. 20:4 now stand for the years of the Christian era. Augustine identifies this earthly kingdom with the existing church and, thus, ‘laid the foundation for the widespread tendency of later Latin theology to identify the Kingdom of God, at least in its first stage of existence, with the institutional Catholic Church’.38 Central to Augustine’s eschatological thinking is the biblical witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, his expected second coming and its significance for the journey of Christ’s disciples through life in time. As a pastor, Augustine sympathizes with the sorrow and mourning of Christians who have lost loved ones and he consoles them with reference to Christ’s return. However, Augustine also reflects on the connection between Christ’s second coming and the concomitant judgement that awaits us all. This final judgement will make human history perspicuous and cleanse the church and its members of any remaining sin. The day of judgement ‘will transfer at once the saint, not to temporal works, but to eternal life; but will condemn

Ibid., 134.

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the ungodly to eternal punishment’.39 Moreover, it will also correct and transform the material nature for the new state that is to follow. Augustine distinguishes between two levels of judgement. Already in this life, human beings are judged by God and punished for their sinful ways. Hence, he can speak of a first death in time, ‘which is their separation from God in sin and their consequent liability to the violent separation of soul and body in physical death’, and of a second death of eternal damnation.40 Unlike Origen, Augustine expects the damned to experience in a reunited soul and body a never-ending annihilation. Thus, he expects the resurrection of the damned in order for them to be delivered to their eternal punishment of ongoing annihilation. As he speaks of a first and a second death, he also refers to a first and a second resurrection. The first resurrection occurs when sinful, or dead, souls are converted to divine grace, and the second when reanimated bodies are raised from death upon Christ’s return. In the first resurrection, ‘only those take part who will be blessed for eternity, whereas in the second . . . [Jesus] will teach us that the blessed and the wretched alike take part. The one is the resurrection of mercy, the other the resurrection of judgement.’41 Augustine believed that God has only chosen a few for the resurrection of mercy, whereas all human beings will be submitted to divine judgement. The chain of being, for Augustine, begins with God and God’s relationship to our souls. Our souls, in turn relate to our bodies. As the body dies when the soul leaves it, the soul dies when its relation to God is severed by sin. At the point of resurrection, ‘the joy of the good will be fuller, and the torments of the wicked heavier, when they shall be tormented in the body’.42 Augustine can encourage the faithful to pray for deceased Christians because he considers both the living and the dead still to belong to time and not yet to eternity. ‘For the souls of the pious dead are not separated from the Church, which is even now the kingdom of Christ’.43 At the second coming and the final judgement, the resurrected soul-bodies enter either heaven or hell. However, prayer works only for those who have attempted a life of Christian virtue. Augustine explains that the church’s reason for praying even for her enemies among humankind is that there is time for fruitful penitence. For what she chiefly prays for on their behalf is surely ‘that God’, in the Apostle’s words, ‘may grant them penitence, and that they may come to their senses and escape from the

Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 6,2, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1983), 16. 40 Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 136. 41 Augustine, De Civitate Dei XX, 6, St Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 904. 42 Augustine, Tractatus in Evangelium Johannis 49, 10, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church, vol. 7 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1986), 274. 43 Augustine, De Civitate Dei XX, 9, ibid., 916. 39

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snare of the Devil, by whom they have been trapped and are held at his pleasure’ [2 Tim. 2:25f.]. In fact, if the Church had such certain information about people as to know who were already predestined, although still under the conditions of this life, to go into eternal fire with the Devil, then the Church would pray as little for them as it does for him. But she has not this certainty about anyone; therefore she prays for all her enemies, her human enemies, that is, while they are in the bodily state; but that does not mean that her prayers for all of them are heard and answered.44 Interestingly, Augustine continues by affirming the possibility of predestination even for those now opposing the church. ‘In fact, her prayers are heard only when she prays for those who, although they oppose the Church, are predestined to salvation so that the Church’s prayers for them are answered and they are made sons of the Church.’45 Overall, however, Augustine’s understanding of punishment is vindictive and not curative. God’s justice demands that sinners who turn away from God, the source of their being, should suffer as a result. Punishment logically follows sin. God punishes sinners, ‘not by bringing evil upon them from Himself, but driving them on to that which they have chosen, to fill up the sum of their misery’.46 Sometimes, Augustine does leave room for an understanding of suffering that may cause a change of heart in the sinner and as such could be seen as purgative. He hopes for God’s resurrection of the deceased faithful. This hope he considers uniquely Christian. In one of his many sermons, he summarizes as follows: Our hope is the resurrection of the dead; our faith is the resurrection of the dead. It is also our love, which the preaching of ‘things not yet seen’ (Hebr 11:1) inflames and arouses by longing. … If faith in the resurrection of the dead is taken away, all Christian doctrine perishes. … If the dead do not rise, we have no hope of a future life; but if the dead do rise, there will be a future life.47 Throughout his career as a writer, Augustine’s understanding of the nature of the resurrected body continues to develop. He always confirms the resurrection of the body, but in his mature writings, he interprets the term ‘spiritual body’ in terms of the incorruptibility of the risen body.48 Hence, he affirms the body but leaves its ultimate constitution in the resurrection

De Civitate Dei XXI, 24, ibid., 1002f. Ibid., 1003. 46 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 44,18, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church, vol. 8, Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1983, 14. 47 Sermon 361.2. Cited by Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 141f. 48 Cf. also Sigurdson, Heavenly Bodies, 584–6. 44 45

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open, except to say that it will no longer be a burden like the present body. The new body will preserve human and even sexual identity, but it will be free from its present state of shame and passion.49 It would be wrong to accuse Augustine of prioritising individual salvation. Rather, ultimately he aims at appreciating the unity of the everlasting body of the love of Christ. Hence, he stresses the social nature of God’s ultimate fulfilment and the eternal fellowship in heaven.50 He looks forward to ‘the perfectly ordered and completely harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and of each other in God’.51 Yet, the human race as a whole deserves damnation because in Adam it had turned away from God. That God chooses freely to elect some of this fallen race to eternal fellowship demonstrates his mercy over and above his justice. The doctrine of predestination emerging here was to exert a long, complex and troubling influence on Christian thinking for centuries to come.52 We need to return to this in Chapter 7. Heaven signifies homeland (patria or Heimat) for Augustine. Adhering to God and loving all other creatures in God is the aim of the Christian life and pilgrimage. Human salvation, for Augustine, can be summed up as ‘the achievement, by God’s gracious gift, of the union with God for which alone humanity was made, and that the only genuine meaning of human history is to be found in God’s eternity’.53 Salvation implies the establishment of the originally intended communion in God. Hence, it includes the restoration of our creaturely existence before the Fall. Augustine even suggests that we hold some dim memories of this original state, and that these memories give us hope.54 Returning to the intentional beginning is, then, the goal of the drama of election and divine redemption in Christ. Although the older Augustine somewhat tones down the cyclical nature of this drama, he

De Civitate Dei XXII, 17, ibid., 1057. In response to the question if women will retain their sex in the resurrected body, Augustine explains: 49

Thus while all defects will be removed from those bodies, their essential nature will be preserved. Now a woman’s sex is not a defect; it is natural. And in the resurrection it will be free of the necessity of intercourse and childbirth. However, the female organs will not subserve their former use; they will be part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder – there will be no lust in that life – but will arouse the praises of God for his wisdom and compassion, in that he not only created out of nothing but freed from corruption that which he had created. Cf. Sigurdson, Heavenly Bodies, 596. De Civitate Dei XIX, 17, ibid., 878. 52 See Josef Lössl’s discussion of Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, in Volker Henning Drecoll, ed., Augustin Handbuch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 340–7. 53 Daley, The Hope of the Early Church, 150. 54 Augustine, Confessiones XII, 10, Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 251: ‘“I heard your voice behind me” (Ezek. 3:12) calling me to return. And I could hardly hear because of the hubbub of people who know no peace. Now, see, I am returning hot and panting to your spring.’ 50 51

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remains faithful to his conviction that human life was created by God for God. Hence, incarnation, the cross and resurrection open the way for the return of the elected disciples of Christ to their original destination. For Augustine, as for many theologians in the Early Church, hoping for salvation implies a return to the intentions of God’s original creation. The future of humanity and of the cosmos must be found in their original past. Freed from sin and depravation through God’s act in Christ, creation can return to what it was always meant to be. However, theologians in the Early Church differed greatly with regard to who among the human persons was ultimately destined to reach this new and old beginning: all, some, or only the chosen few. While Origen wished to include all, Augustine entertained hope only for the few who were predestined to enjoy God’s mercy. A proper systematic examination of hope in Christian thinking was undertaken first in the scholastic milieus of what we call the Middle Ages. This theological analysis was necessary to address an ever wilder eschatological and apocalyptic imagination in popular piety, on the one hand, and to express Christian convictions about the last things within the emerging scholastic paradigm of classical (Aristotelian) philosophy and Christian theology, on the other hand. Here we need not be concerned with the flourishing of millenarian movements which, following apocalyptic patterns of biblical interpretation, tried to calculate the date of the Parousia and worked out the particular manifestation of an Antichrist, who was to appear in the last times before the end.55 However, we must examine the most significant academic study of hope in medieval theology, in some detail.

Thomas Aquinas on hope As is generally the case in his theological writings, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) draws on his reading of the Scriptures, on Augustine (and other church fathers) and on Aristotle also, when discussing the three theological virtues of faith, hope and love. Paul’s exposition of these three in 1 Corinthians 13 provides the basis for Thomas’s reflection. However, Thomas’s particular discussion of hope in his Summa Theologiæ (2a2æ. 17–22)56 makes more sense when we include into our consideration also his preceding discussions in the Summa of the three theological virtues and how they relate to each other. Thomas never expresses any doubt that the three theological virtues belong closely together and even overlap to a considerable degree. Although distinct, all three are also immensely important for our human journey towards salvation. They order our way to perfection and enjoyment in God.

See Hebblethwaite, The Christian Hope, 60–4. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, trans. W. J. Hill, O.P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1966] 2006). 55 56

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Seen from their end, it would not really matter in which order we proceed to contemplate them. Faith, hope and love all deal with our journey to God and with God’s gracious accompaniment on the way. However, Thomas attempts to distinguish these virtues with reference to their different objects: the measure and rule for theological virtue is God himself; his truth for our faith, his goodness for our charity, his sheer omnipotence and loving-kindness for our hope [spes autem secundum magnitudinem omnipotentiæ et pietatis ejus]. This measure surpasses all human power, so that never can we love God as much as he ought to be loved, nor believe and hope in him as much as we should.57 Thus, each virtue approaches God, our ultimate human goal, under different aspects: faith through truth, love through goodness, and hope through omnipotence and compassion.58 Thomas provides qualifications in terms of how to order the three virtues internally. He sees, for example, faith as a divinely infused perfection of the human intellect by which we assent to those truths necessary for our supernatural happiness.59 In the context of his treatment of hope, he distinguishes the three theological virtues in terms of their generation and their perfection. With regard to their generation, one cannot move towards, or be united with, an object that one does not first apprehend, for ‘what is in the mind [in intellectu] is the source of what is in the affections, in that a good as known moves the affections’.60 In other words, we cannot desire something unless we first have some idea of what we desire. Therefore, in the theological life, intellectual assent (faith) must come before any movement towards the end (hope), which precedes union with this end (love). Hence, Thomas argues that faith must come first, before hope and love.61 However, looked at from the point of perfection, love comes first. Since, however, the three theological virtues concern God as their proper object, it cannot be said that any of them is greater than another by reason of its having a greater object. … In this way is charity [caritas] greater than the others. The others, in their very nature, imply a certain distance from the object, since faith is of what is not seen, and hope is

Summa Theologiæ 1a2æ. 64.4. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 23: Virtue, trans. W. D. Hughes, O.P. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969), 175. 58 Cf. Dominic Doyle, The Promise of Christian Humanism: Thomas Aquinas on Hope (New York: Crossroad, 2011), 81. 59 Doyle, The Promise of Christian Humanism, 80. 60 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 7.2. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 31: Faith, trans. T. C. O’Brien (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1974), 177. 61 Cf. Doyle, The Promise of Christian Humanism, 92. 57

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of what is not possessed. The love of charity on the contrary is of that which is already possessed, since the beloved is, in a manner, in the lover, and, again, the lover is drawn by desire to union with the beloved. Hence it is written, He that abideth in charity abideth in God, and God in him [1 Jn 4:16].62 Thomas thus attempts to have it both ways: he acknowledges the scriptural order of the three virtues, yet also agrees with Paul that love is the most important among the three because it is eternal, whereas both faith and hope will die with us. Only when inspired by love do faith and hope attain a sense of perfection. Faith, hope and love all flow from the gift of divine grace that aims to transform human acts of knowing, hoping and loving. Dealing more specifically with hope, Thomas distinguishes between acts of hoping for a good object from acts of hoping in a person who can give us that object. ‘In the former, our love for the good object prompts our hope to attain it; in the latter, our hope in the power and mercy of the person who grants the good object blossoms into love for that person as they share the good thing with us’.63 Hence, the intimate relationship between hope and love. In more technical language, ‘hope is concerned with two things: the good being sought, and the means of its acquisition. In terms of causality the hoped-for good functions as final cause whereas the help relied upon to get it has the standing of efficient cause’.64 In other words, in hope we relate to God both as future goal and as present helper.65 Earlier in the Summa, Thomas approached hope not as a theological virtue, which concerns us here, but more generally in terms of a natural human inclination or passion.66 As a specific form of desire, human hope must be understood and judged from the perspective of the object which is desired.67 Hope always aims at the future in which the object can be reached and possessed. Thus, hope does not strive after impossible objects. When God becomes the object of human hope, however, the natural process of human desire is lifted to the supernatural level of desire, i.e. that level on which God graciously opens God-self in personal love to women and men. Hence, desire is ennobled here by God, beyond the normal human appetites. Yet, desire is not annihilated. Rather, it is graced and thus perfected by

Summa Theologiæ 1a2æ. 66.6. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 23: Virtue, 219. Doyle, The Promise of Christian Humanism, 94. 64 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 17.4. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, trans. W. J. Hill, O.P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1966] 2006), 15. 65 Cf. also Doyle, The Promise of Christian Humanism, 85. 66 Summa Theologiæ 1a2æ. 40. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 21: Fear and Anger, trans. John Patrick Reid, O.P. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), 3–23. 67 Summa Theologiæ 1a2æ. 40.1, ibid., 5: ‘Hope, therefore, clearly differs from desire in the sense that contending emotions [passiones irascibilis] differ from impulse emotions [passiones concupiscibilis].’ 62 63

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God. This is why hope is a theological virtue, the ultimate possibility of supernatural being.68 All acts of hoping have in common their orientation to the future: ‘hope’s object is a good that lies in the future and that is difficult but possible to attain. This quality of an object as possible, however, Aristotle explains to mean its availability either through personal effort or through help from others’.69 God’s help and the goal of hope, eternal beatitude, make hope a theological virtue. It is not an emotion, but a disposition of the spirit. Thomas summarizes, ‘To be sure one who hopes is imperfect with respect to what he hopes to obtain and does not yet possess. But he is perfected as to this that he already reaches the rule proper to his actions, namely God on whose help he relies’.70 Moreover, Thomas adds that this eternal goal is the enjoyment of God (fruitione ipsius dei); hence, the ultimate goal of human hope implies the joy of relating to God.71 Here, Thomas agrees with Augustine. However, neither does Thomas look back to the beginning of creation as the ultimate goal of human life, nor does he share Augustine’s belief in predestination. Although the act of hoping normally characterizes a person’s own future orientation towards God, the intimate relationship between hope and love may cause the desire in one person to hope also for the beloved other.72 Hence, the ‘movement of hope and of charity are inter-related’.73 Thomas privileges the glory of the soul over the glory of the body. ‘As a theological virtue directly concerned with God, hope has as principal object the glory of the soul, consisting as it does in the enjoyment of God, rather than the glory of the body’.74 However, this priority does not ignore the glory of the body. Although the glory of the body ‘is of slight significance in comparison to glory of soul, and because once possessed, the soul’s glory is itself an adequate cause of the body’s glory’.75 The damned and the blessed cannot have hope, as the virtue of hope is limited to human life before death.76 Thomas’s use of the term patria for the state of the blessed, i.e. heaven, is revealing. Heaven in this sense is the true home for human beings in God’s company. However, the human movement

Josef Pieper, ‘Über die Hoffnung’, in Pieper, Schriften zur philosophischen Anthropologie und Ethik: Das Menschenbild der Tugendlehre, ed. Bertold Wald, 2nd ed., Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 4 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2006), 256–95, here 263: ‘Theologische Tugend ist das Äußerste eines übernatürlichen Seinkönnens. Dieses übernatürliche Seinkönnen gründet in der realen Teilhabe am göttlichen Sein, die dem Menschen durch Christus zugefallen ist (2 Petr 1.4)’. 69 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 17.1. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 5. 70 Ibid., 7. 71 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 17.2. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 8–9. 72 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 17.3. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 13. 73 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 18.1. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 31. 74 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 18.2. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 35. 75 Ibid. 76 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 18.3. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 37. 68

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towards patria, where love fully comes into its own, still requires both faith and hope. In this context, Thomas also considers aspects of fear as well as the vices opposed to the virtue of hope, namely despair and presumption. Fear is important here because of its proximity to hope. Thomas explains: Concerning God, consideration must be given both to his justice with its demand that sinners be punished, and to his mercy with its readiness rather to forgive. Reflection upon his justice is bound to occasion fear, while awareness of his mercy gives rise to hope. Thus at the same time we can both fear God and hope in him, for different reasons.77 Thomas analyses different forms of fear. Servile fear simply fears punishment, whereas filial fear, that is the fear of God, helps us to reverence God and to avoid any alienation of ourselves from God, which is constructive.78 This latter kind of fear and hope thus are ‘interrelated and perfective of one another’.79 However, this does not make fear into a virtue. Rather, fear remains primarily concerned with evil, which it seeks to avoid. Thomas’s reflections on despair and presumption need not concern us here except for his consideration of the relationship between hope and faith. Hope is closely related to faith, ‘and so faith can remain after the loss of hope. The man who despairs, then, is not thereby faithless’.80 Thomas explains, ‘to make the universal judgment that God’s mercy is not without limits would be against faith. This, however, is not at all the sort of judgment in the mind of a person giving way to despair. Rather, he thinks that certain peculiar limitations on his own part make him unable to hope in the divine mercy’.81 Moreover, Thomas reminds the reader of the close relationship between hope and joy (gaudium). Joy comes from hope, whereas, sorrow gives rise to despair.82 Human hope, for Thomas, ultimately relates to God and to God’s plan of salvation for humankind. In that sense, all genuine hope is relational, for whatever object we may hope for, if it is of eternal significance, will necessarily link us with God’s grace and mercy. The human pilgrimage, assisted by the theological virtues, looks forward to the new and full life with God. Moreover, the human subject will be an eschatological partner or friend of God. The ultimate vision for human future is union with God, and not, as in Origen, a unity with God that annihilates all divergence and

Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 19.1. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 45. Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 19.9. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 71. 79 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 19.9. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 73. 80 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 20.2. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 91. 81 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 20.2. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 93. 82 Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 20.4. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 101. 77 78

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difference. As regards hope, ‘eternal beatitude has the rôle of the ultimate end and the divine assistance is the first of the agent causes bringing it about’.83 Hope, for Thomas, is ultimately theological.

From Thomas Aquinas to Jürgen Moltmann In the following chapters, I shall refer to and explore significant approaches to hope since the Middle Ages in so far as they affect my overall constructive theological concerns. Hence, I shall highlight central aspects of hope in the writings of Dante, Luther, Calvin, as well as respective modern theologians. However, I shall not discuss millenarian and related apocalyptic approaches to hope and their particular methods of interpreting biblical and non-biblical sources. Nor shall I explore here the ever-increasing number of secularist, utopian, philosophical and postmodern approaches to hope.84 My focus remains on the development of a relational theology of hope that is inspired by God’s gift of love. Therefore, my choice of conversation partners is necessarily selective and personal. However, before resuming the constructive development I wish to present and discuss central aspects of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope. Even though aspects of this book may now appear dated, on a global scale, this work has helped to shape Christian approaches to hope and eschatology like no other post-Second World War theological publication, and therefore it deserves our special attention – in and beyond the framework of the historical analysis of this present chapter.85

Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope The publication of Jürgen Moltmann’s (b. 1926) Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Theology (1964 in German, and

Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 17.4. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33: Hope, 15. For discussions of such developments, see, for example, Jean-Yves Lacoste, ‘Espérance’, in Dictionnaire critique de théologie, ed. Lacoste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 400–4; Hebblethwaite, The Christian Hope, 69–124; Gotthold Hasenhüttl, Glaube ohne Mythos, vol. 2: Mensch, Glaubensgemeinschaft, Symbolhandlungen, Zukunft, 2nd ed. (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2001), 561–698; Jayne Svenungsson, Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit, trans. Stephen Donovan (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016); and Dalferth, Hoffnung. 85 For a concise introduction to Moltmann’s theological programme and the place of eschatology in it, see Richard Bauckham, ‘Jürgen Moltmann’, in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, eds. David Ford with Rachel Muers, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 147–62; and Arne Rasmusson, The Church as Polis: From Political Theology to Theological Politics as Exemplified by Jürgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 42–60. 83 84

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1967 and 2002 in English) inaugurated a new and, as we know now, globally influential departure in Christian eschatological thinking.86 However, I do not offer a comprehensive discussion of Moltmann’s book, the subsequent eschatological development of Moltmann’s theology, or the history of effects of this work. My aim is more modest: to understand Moltmann’s approach to hope and eschatology and, at the same time, to highlight central issues in the Christian praxis of hope. Like most Christian thinkers, Moltmann approaches hope from within the horizon of faith. He does not discuss hope as one of the three theological virtues; rather hope is important for his endeavour to demonstrate the eschatological nature of Christian faith. ‘To believe means to cross in hope and anticipation the bounds that have been penetrated by the raising of the crucified. If we bear that in mind, then this faith can have nothing to do with fleeing the world, with resignation and with escapism’ (6/16). Christian hope, for Moltmann, is made possible by God through the resurrection of the crucified Jesus and as such it concerns human life here and now. Like for the Apostle Paul and Martin Luther, so too for Moltmann: the gospel of the resurrected crucified is the centre of Christian faith and proclamation. Cross and resurrection shape Paul’s, Luther’s and Moltmann’s christologies; they disclose God’s gracious horizon for the future possibilities of humankind in this universe. However, unlike some other Christian theologians, Paul and Moltmann approach the mystery of the resurrected crucified from the perspective of God’s promises made to Israel. Christian eschatology, thus, does not stand in opposition to, but in continuity with Jewish eschatological thinking, albeit in a discontinuous continuity. The continuity rests in the Jewish and Christian hope in God’s promises; the discontinuity arises because of the impossibility to foresee God’s surprising action in the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. However, even the surprising act of God to raise the crucified Jesus can only be understood in the tradition of Jewish approaches to God’s promises, to God’s faithfulness and to God’s love for his people, now comprising Jews and gentiles alike. Structurally, Jews and Christians share the same eschatological default position. The ancient historic traditions give expression to experiences which Israel had of its God and his promises. But if these promises reach out into that future which is still ahead of the present, then the historic narratives concerned cannot merely narrate experiences of the past.

Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 1967 and 2002). The German original: Theologie der Hoffnung: Untersuchungen zur Begründung und zu den Konsequenzen einer christlichen Eschatologie, 10th ed. (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1977 [1964]). Page numbers in the text refer in order first to the 2002 English edition and second to this 10th German edition. 86

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Rather, the whole narrative and representation of this past will lead us to open ourselves and our present to that same future. The reality of history (Wirklichkeit der Geschichte) is narrated within the horizon of the history of effects (Wirkungsgeschichte) of God’s promises. (95/97 – translation corrected) Inspired by Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, Moltmann privileges history as the arena for the fulfilment of God’s promises on God’s terms.87 Future, then, becomes the appropriate perspective of Christian praxis. Moreover, this praxis cannot be separated from Jewish faith praxis. For, in Jesus Christ, ‘the God of Israel has revealed himself as the God of all humankind’ (128/127 – translation adapted). However, we must distinguish between Jewish and Christian appeals to God’s faithfulness. Like in Judaism, Paul is certain that God keeps his promises. ‘Yet the ground of this assurance is new: because God has the power to quicken the dead and call into being things that are not, therefore the fulfilment of his promise is possible, and because he has raised Christ from the dead, therefore the fulfilment of his promise is certain’ (132/131). Hence, because of the common sharing in God’s promises, both Jewish and Christian scriptures and horizons remain intertwined. Moltmann stresses the difference between an eschatological presence of the future, on the one hand, and a cultic presence of the eternal, on the other hand (cf. 147/146).88 Siding with the former and refuting the latter, he wishes to underline the process character of Christian life in this world against any belief in the presence of perfection in the church. The believer does not already in the cultus and in spirit find full participation in the lordship of Christ, but he is led by hope into the tensions and antitheses of obedience and suffering in the world. The life of everyday accordingly becomes the sphere of the true service of God (Rom. 12.1ff.). Inasmuch as call and promise point the believer on the way of obedience in the body and on earth, earth and the body are set within the horizon of the expectation of the coming lordship of Christ. (147/146 – my italics) Hence, Moltmann defends the world as the theatre of the eschatological process, in which God is the coming one (der Kommende) and his promises are the motor of this very process.89

Cf. Bloch, The Principle of Hope [German original: Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 3 vols., Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1954–59]. 88 ‘Das ist eine eschatologische Gegenwärtigkeit des Zukünftigen, nicht eine kultische Präsenz des Ewigen’. Theologie der Hoffnung, 146. 89 Cf. the title of Moltmann’s later book on eschatology: Das Kommen Gottes: Christliche Eschatologie (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995). English edition: The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, [1996] 2005). 87

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In line with his reading of the Apostle Paul, Moltmann focusses on the dialectic of cross and resurrection in Christian faith. Eschatology, therefore, must be approached as eschatologia crucis, an eschatology mindful of the cross of Christ (146/145). ‘Fellowship with Christ is fellowship in suffering with the crucified Christ’ (147/146). Moreover, the resurrection of Christ must be interpreted as nova creatio, that means God’s new creation. This understanding urges the Christian to develop a new concept of history: ‘By the raising of Christ we do not mean a possible process in world history, but the eschatological process to which world history is subjected’ (166./162f.). Christ’s resurrection not only took place in history but it makes history in the sense that it opens a struggle for human future: It is a struggle for the future of history and for the right way of recognizing, hoping and working for that future. It is a battle for the recognition of the mission of the present, and for the place and the task of human nature in it. (169/165) The question ‘What may we hope?’ can now be approached in the light of the experience of Christ’s resurrection. The resurrection accounts in the New Testament point back to the promises, expectations and hopes of Israel and forward to the fulfilment of God’s promises in the future. This future, then, is a christologically determined future. ‘Christian eschatology is at heart Christology in an eschatological perspective’ (179/175).90 Moreover, the resurrection accounts are vocation accounts: they call the disciples of Christ into the mission of transforming our world according to God’s promises. ‘Through the knowledge of the resurrection of the crucified the contradiction that is always and everywhere perceptible in an unredeemed world, and the sorrow and suffering caused by that world, are taken up into the confidence of hope, while on the other hand hope’s confidence becomes earthly and universal.’ (183/178). The future, which the resurrection of the crucified makes possible, contains the promise of God’s justice for the world, of new life and of God’s reign (189/185). In this context, Moltmann emphasizes the connection between creation and reconciliation: if the resurrection is understood as a new act of creation that inaugurates the Kingdom of God, ‘then the Reconciler is ultimately the Creator, and thus the eschatological prospect of reconciliation must mean the reconciliation of the whole creation, and must develop an eschatology of all things’ (208/203). In this eschatology, promise (promissio) and mission (missio) are correlated. ‘The Christian

Moltmann’s indebtedness to Martin Luther’s christocentrism is obvious. For a thorough discussion of Luther’s christocentrism, see Johannes Zachhuber, Luther’s Christological Legacy: Christocentrism and the Chalcedonian Tradition, The Père Marquette Lecture in Theology 2017 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2017). 90

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consciousness of history is a consciousness of mission’ (211/205). However, in view of these reflections, it remains curious that Moltmann has not much to say about the future of the physical universe.91 Moltmann rejects any predetermination of the historical process and instead calls for keeping the process of history open for the possibilities that will emerge. ‘The understanding of history, of its possibilities for good and evil, of its direction and its meaning, lies in the field of hope and can be acquired only there’ (249/242). Hope means work and struggle, participation in the promises and the mission of the community of hope. ‘It is only in mission and promise, in the charge committed and the prospect opened, in the labour of hope, that the “meaning of history” is grasped in a historic way and one that keeps history moving’ (269/261). Moltmann does not tire in emphasizing the universal significance of the resurrected crucified Christ. However, he is equally keen to point to the Jewish approach to the promised future which Christians share, though now in a universal mission (285/277). It is interesting to note a tension in Moltmann’s thinking with regard to soteriology. Although he refers to the need of salvation or redemption, he prefers to highlight reconciliation as the chief work of Christ. In raising Jesus Christ from the dead, ‘God has appointed Jesus to be Lord and Reconciler of the whole world’ (286/277f.). Repeatedly, Moltmann rejects efforts at reducing Christian faith and hope to some form of cult: be it the cult of the new subjectivity, the cult of co-humanity (Mitmenschlichkeit), or the cult of the institution. Thus, anything that suggests a static condition is challenged in the name of the Christian dynamics of expecting the coming reign of God. This reign remains both our promissio and our missio. Christian mission thus aims at reconciliation with God, forgiveness of sin and abolition of godlessness. However, salvation (soteria) must also be understood as peace (shalom) in the Old Testament sense. This does not mean merely salvation of the soul, individual rescue from the evil world, comfort for the troubled conscience, but also the realization of the eschatological hope of justice, the humanizing of man [des Menschen], the socializing of humanity, peace for all creation. This ‘other side’ of reconciliation with God has always been given too little consideration in the history of Christianity, because Christians no longer understood themselves eschatologically and left earthly eschatological anticipations to fanatics and the sects. (312f./303) All Christians are called (berufen) to be co-workers for and in God’s Kingdom. ‘The call according to the New Testament is once for all, irrevocable and immutable, and has its eschatological goal in the hope to which God calls

Cf. Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe, 24–37.

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us’ (316/307). The Christian community is called to disclose to the world that is not yet finished and thus in the process of becoming ‘the horizon of the future of the crucified Christ’ (322/312). It is striking how much Moltmann dwells on the intimate connection between faith and hope, yet how little attention he pays to the transformative power of love. To be fair, he refers to love at various points in the book, but love clearly plays no foundational role for human hope. The work of hope implies love, supports love, but does not itself result from love.92 For love, we always require hope and assurance of the future, for love looks to the as yet unrealized possibilities of the other, and thus grants him freedom and allows him a future in recognition of his possibilities. In the recognition and ascription of that human dignity of which the human being is deemed worthy in the resurrection of the dead, creative love finds the comprehensive future in view of which it loves. (321/312 – translation adapted) Moltmann’s approach to hope has been criticized for its lack of grounding in God’s love. Christian hope is ‘the orientation of the entire life in all its situations in the presence of God’s love, which is at once the possibility and the incentive as well as the critique and correcting assessment of human action’.93 Hence, this orientation on and movement to God presupposes God’s loving care of humanity in the first place. Ingolf U. Dalferth sees in Moltmann’s theology of hope a danger of confusing human expectation with the gift of God’s offer of future perspectives. We need criteria for distinguishing hope as God’s gift from our many human hopes (however much they may be justified) in order to avoid any possible misdirection of our future-oriented actions. Thus, although Moltmann’s focus on the world as the place for Christian eschatology and on Christian action on behalf of God’s promises must be welcomed as important corrective of any totally otherworldly or afterlife orientation of eschatology, we must at the same time guard us against uncritical forms of eschatological activism. However, we also need to protest against undermining acts of hope through insisting, as in Dalferth’s case, that hoping ought to be understood merely in terms of passivity. Moltmann’s Pauline and Lutheran concentration on the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ loses sight of the actual proclamation of God’s love for humanity and for creation by the pre-Easter Jesus. The portrayal of Jesus’s proclamation of God’s reign in the gospels is not of primary concern

See also ibid., 224/204: ‘The pro-missio of the kingdom is the ground of the missio of love to the world’. On the power of love, see also 329/304. 93 Ingolf U. Dalferth, Hoffnung, Grundthemen Philosophie (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 161. 92

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to Moltmann’s theology of hope. Of course, he is right that we would not remember Jesus had he not been raised by God (204/199). However, we remember Jesus not only as the crucified and resurrected son of God, but also as the proclaimer of God’s love to the poor, excluded, women, sinners, possessed, sick and marginalized who was crucified because of what he had proclaimed. Christian hope in God must eclipse the fuller content and challenge of the gospel. For it is this gospel of God’s love that provides us with criteria to liberate our hopes for radical hope in God – even then when all our many worldly and churchy hopes may fail us. In this chapter, I have discussed a number of significant Christian voices on hope. I noted the shifting horizons of hope in the Early Church, in Augustine, in Thomas Aquinas, and in Moltmann: from a desire to return to the pristine origins of God’s creation, thanks to God’s saving work in Christ for the chosen ones, via the opening of a universal perspective of hope as a divinely infused virtue, to the concretization of hope in this present world in terms of a response to God’s eschatological act in raising the crucified Jesus. For Moltmann, hope is not so much a virtue than a call for eschatologically motivated action in the arena of this world. Moreover, he emphasizes reconciliation between God and human beings as a central focus of hope. In the following chapter, I shall investigate the potential of salvation and reconciliation as central ends of hope.

3 Salvation and reconciliation

Desiring to be saved Not long before his death in 1968, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886– 1968) is reported to have been asked whether he expected to see his loved ones again on the other side of death. Barth responded: ‘I am afraid not only the loved ones.’1 For some Christians this may be a shocking perspective: to be eternally confronted with those other people, whom they preferred forgotten already in this life. Nevertheless, Barth was right, there appears to be no easy way to be saved from those whom we do not like. Moreover, the prospect of facing up to the ones we have tried to get rid of is a daunting one. It seems that not even heaven promises the peace of mind we may have been longing and praying for during the travails of our earthly life. Is heaven, then, after all such a good thing? Should we go on wishing to go to heaven? Does the beatific vision, ‘in which God opens himself in an inexhaustible way to the elect, will be the ever-flowing well-spring of happiness, peace, and mutual communion’,2 really represent an exciting object of hope? What do we Christians mean by salvation, today? Are we excited by the prospect of salvation? What salvation do we actually await? Are we longing to be saved from terrible people, from the many forms of suffering, and from injuries and disappointments that may have made our lives on earth a sad experience? Do we hope to be saved from illness, limited time, limited space, evil, fake news and ambiguous language? Do we want to be saved from something for something? Do we expect to be saved alone or with others, and, if the latter, who are those others whose co-presence emerges

One version of this often-narrated anecdote is cited by Eberhard Busch, ‘Eine Reformierte Stimme’, Letter from the Karl Barth-Archives, 10 December 2002 (Nr. 4): 6–7, here 7. 2 Catechism of the Catholic Church, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, [1999] 2014), § 1045. 1

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on the horizon of eternity? Ultimately, are we expecting to be saved from this world or with this world, from this universe or with this universe? Does hope for salvation offer a way out of the trappings of this universe or does it signal a completion of God’s creative project with this universe? What does Jesus Christ have to do with human salvation? How is the church involved in this salvific process? Christians have often paid lip service to the insight that their faith is totally eschatological, that means totally oriented towards the decisive transformation coming to us from God.3 Christians seem to have little difficulty in believing in eschatology, in the ultimate consummation of existence in God, yet considerably more difficulty in acknowledging the intimate connection between such a belief and everyday life. As discussed in Chapter 1, the Christian praxis of hope and Christian belief in salvation must never be confused with human optimism. Optimism believes in the reliability and proper functioning of our own systems and calculations. It wants more of the same, embraces a predictable future, an undisturbed engineering project. But hope is relational. It implies change, liberation, surprising experiences of transformation and divine correction, coordination and completion of our human projects. Unlike optimism, hope has the potential to be subversive. Christians do not believe in ideologies that preach never-ending human progress. Rather, hope for salvation concerns the future of individual persons and of the entire community of the living and the dead disciples of Christ, that is, the community of saints, as well as God’s created universe(s) and God’s people – whether Christian or not. Moreover, as Pope Francis has emphasized, the earth is our common home. ‘Rather than a problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.’4 Thus, any hope for salvation from this world seems misdirected. Nobody in the history of theology has ever disputed the human ability to hope. However, as we have seen in the previous chapter, eschatological concerns and apocalyptic emphases have varied throughout the centuries, and apocalyptic hopes have died and have been revived, and individual or cosmic or ecclesiological or mystical perspectives have succeeded one another, not so much in a direct line of development as in response to particular social and ecclesial challenges met by Christian communities

See Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. (from the 6th ed.) Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 314: ‘If Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever with Christ. Spirit which does not at every moment point from death to the new life is not the Holy Spirit.’ 4 Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, 12. 3

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in each generation, and as outgrowth of the personal theological interests and allegiances of individual writers.5

Salvation or reconciliation? As discussed in both preceding chapters, there is a great spectrum of approaches to the relationship between hope and hopes and related concepts of salvation. With regard to salvation, it has been said ‘few words proper to Christianity’s core vocabulary have at present a less defined meaning’.6 Today, the spectrum of belief in salvation stretches from individualist beliefs in God or in Christ as ‘my personal saviour’, on the one hand, to a belief in God’s redemptive work in Christ on behalf of the whole of creation, on the other hand. Salvation may refer to what I expect God to do for me, my family, my church and my country in this life, or it may refer to what we expect God to do with parts or with all of humanity in the eschaton, that is, at the end of time. Tensions characterizing conflicting hopes for salvation today are, expectably, already present in our religious history – including the biblical heritage. In the Hebrew Scriptures God is called upon as saviour both by individual persons and by the people as a whole. The Psalms contain the full spectrum of connotations of this cry for salvation. ‘While in the gospels the stress is more on the present, something already real for those who believe in Jesus, as time passes the sense of salvation undoubtedly shifts towards the future, the destiny of the faithful after death, and this next-worldly and individualistic dimension came to dominate more and more.’7 Adequate preparation of one’s personal record meriting salvation became a task increasingly organized by church administration for faithful Christians. This trend led to the widely shared conviction that outside the church there was no salvation. It culminated in the High Middle Ages, when in 1302 Pope Boniface VIII solemnly declared that every human being wishing to attain salvation needs to be subordinated to the Roman Pontiff.8 Although the

Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology, 3. Adrian Hastings, ‘Salvation’, in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, eds. Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason and Hugh Pyper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 639–40, here 640. George Newlands and Allen Smith, Hospitable God: The Transformative Dream (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 140, echo this assessment: ‘Salvation and damnation are enormous themes. … The more they are studied, the clearer it is that they are infinitely heterogeneous.’ 7 Hastings, ‘Salvation’, 640. 8 ‘Porro subesse Romano Pontifici omni humanae creaturae declaramus, dicimus, diffinimus omnio esse de necessitate salutis.’ Heinrich Denzinger, Kompendium der Glaubensbekenntnisse und kirchlichen Lehrentscheidungen, ed. and trans. Peter Hünermann, 41st ed. (Freiburg/Basel/ Vienna: Herder, 2007), 387. 5 6

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Protestant Reformation challenged any such papal condition for salvation, by and large even the churches of the Reformation have continued to stress an individualistic and ecclesial understanding of salvation. In spite of recent attempts to widen the perspective on salvation, for example in the different branches of liberation, political, feminist, queer, ecological and other types of emancipatory theology, a deep rooted dualism continues to permeate some Christian approaches to salvation. For many Christians, salvation concerns the next life, while this life and this universe ultimately remain only of passing significance and interest. Individualist and bourgeois calculations of personal affirmation and vindication, of administrative approval of one’s own particular stamp collection – so to speak – at the entrance point to heaven, have made a mockery of any serious consideration of the divine–human relationship, on the one hand, and of the belief in God’s incarnation in Christ in this world, on the other hand. Individualization, objectification, instrumentalization and sentimentalization of Christian belief in salvation have rendered the concept of salvation so problematic that it might perhaps be wise to put it in quarantine for some time and instead concentrate on alternative and potentially more appropriate concepts of God’s creative and transformative projects, such as, reconciliation, for instance. Salvation seems to presuppose an understanding of human life on earth as fallen, depraved, hopeless, faithless and ultimately incapable to love. In other words, the need for salvation reflects much of Augustine’s theological anthropology and its widespread legacy in Western Christianity.9 The alternative with which a Christian approach to hope is confronted could be summarized like this: if one insists ‘on the depravity of humanity and the single-sided character of God’s redemptive and forgiving action’, one is likely to go for salvation.10 If, however, one wishes to stress mutuality (not symmetry!) in the relationship between God and human beings, one is more likely to opt for reconciliation as the more appropriate eschatological concept. However, reconciliation ought not to be understood in terms of a one-sided aspiration. Whatever is offered must also be accepted, including forgiveness as an integral element within reconciliation, whether human or divine. ‘The Lord’s Prayer with its suggested mutuality linking divine forgiveness with “as we forgive those who trespass against us” and the injunction of the Sermon on the Mount, “first be reconciled to your brother” (Mt. 5:24)

For a discussion of Augustine’s anthropology and related theology of love see Chapter 2, and Jeanrond, A Theology of Love (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 45–65. 10 Adrian Hastings, ‘Reconciliation’, in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, eds. Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason and Hugh Pyper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 597–8, here 598. 9

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provides a model.’11 Hence, if salvation has less regard for concrete and transformative Christian praxis, reconciliation has more. In the Roman Catholic Church, one can observe an increase in references to reconciliation in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Hence, the sacrament of penance or confession was renamed the sacrament of reconciliation. It now affirms both trajectories of the Christian praxis of reconciliation: being reconciled with God and being reconciled with the members in the community of saints (i.e. the church) now belong together. Moreover, we also need to be reconciled with our environment, our shared earthly home. In his Encyclical Letter Laudatio Si’, Pope Francis elaborates on this connection: ‘Disregard for the duty to cultivate and maintain a proper relationship with my neighbour, for whose care and custody I am responsible, ruins my relationship with my own self, with others, with God and with the earth.’12 Referring to biblical narratives, such as the story of Noah, Francis concludes: ‘These ancient stories, full of symbolism, bear witness to a conviction which we today share, that everything is interconnected, and that genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others.’13 Reconciliation, thus, seems to stress more adequately the implications of belief in God’s initiative in Jesus Christ for our understanding of the ultimate purpose of the created universe. God became human not in order to reject God’s own project of creation, but to bring it back to its proper course and calling, to reconcile it with God’s creative initiative. The purpose of incarnation, then, is not to reduce women, men and children to a state of utter dependence, passivity and large-scale contempt for their own lives and environment, but to endow them with hope in God’s future, with faith in God’s presence, and with love for God, for each other, for their emerging selves and for God’s creation. Hope, faith and love are not human possessions or products, but, as we have seen in the previous chapters, theological virtues, infused by God’s grace.14 Hope, faith and love are God-given approaches to reality. They are not objects of belief, but dynamic categories of Christian praxis in this world. They are divine endowments through which we are invited to live our lives together in God’s creative and reconciling presence. They are not visions of a divine future, but agencies of a dynamic divine–human relationship starting here and now. Hence, these three theological virtues are God-given eschatological agents of transformation.

Ibid. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 37. 13 Ibid. 14 Cf. Summa Theologiæ 2a2æ. 24,2. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 34: Charity, trans. R. J. Batten, O.P. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1975), 41. 11 12

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Time and eternity In this context, the relationship between human time and divine eternity becomes important. Time and eternity should be distinguished but not separated within the framework of hope. It may be helpful to recall that even our notion of eternity has a history and to explore ‘how our conceptions of forever, or eternity, have evolved in Western culture, and what roles these conceptions have played in shaping our own self-understanding, personally and collectively’.15 The emergence of the Western concept of eternity is closely linked to Plato’s view of the human person as composed of a temporal body and an eternal soul. The soul, somehow entrapped in the body, longs to return to its original and ultimate home, that is the eternal, intelligible realm. Thus, Plato ‘elevated humanity to a very lofty suprasensual destiny, but at a certain cost: the denigration of all things visible and temporal’.16 Whereas for Plato eternity signified a destination, for Aristotle eternity was a concept called for by human logic and reason. The fusion between Jewish and Greek approaches to time and history in the emerging Christian movement gave rise to some perplexing confusion. On the one hand, eternity was important for early Christians because of their hope for salvation and the afterlife. Ultimately, ‘the promise of eternal bliss for humans was the most fundamental Christian claim’.17 On the other hand, a whole host of expressions of eternal expectations suddenly competed with one another: the coming reign of God, resurrection, eternal life, eternal punishment, paradise, judgement (both personal and universal), heaven, hell, and so on, all of which point to some eternal state about to come. The expectation of the glorious return of Jesus Christ at the end of the world, the Parousia of Christ, was contemplated in many forms and shapes among early Christians, most prominently in Mk 13:24-27.18 The Apostle Paul, as well as those who composed letters and texts in his tradition and name, frequently referred to this expectation. Paul expected the Parousia to happen during his lifetime (cf. 1 Cor. 15:23; 1 Thess. 2:19; 3:13; 4:15; 5:23 etc.) Hence, earthly time was regarded as inferior, not to be trusted and about to end, and a new eternal order was to emerge (cf. Rev. 21:1-4). Christian faith implied the expectation that the end of time was potentially

Carlos Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 15. 16 Ibid., 45. 17 Ibid., 49. ‘This paradoxical conjoining of the eternal with the temporal – this elevation of the mutable, contingent creature from time to eternity – was the very essence of the Christian message, but it was nonetheless inchoately expressed.’ 18 For a discussion of the Parousia of Christ, see Markus Mühling, T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Eschatology, trans. Jennifer Adams-Maßmann and David Andrew Gilland (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 252–76. 15

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imminent, and, accordingly, it celebrated its liturgies in the respective spirit of anticipation.19 Liturgies, sacraments, rituals, holy offices, icons, relics, the cult of the saints – especially the burial places of martyrs, provided spaces of physical and spiritual encounter between the temporal and the eternal, between earth and heaven, between worldly misery and a sense of paradise.20 Augustine offered reflections on time and eternity very much in the spirit of Neoplatonist thinking. Human time was a fleeting phenomenon, difficult to grasp or explain.21 The only realm in which we human beings could find our true home, our true fulfilment, however, was not time but eternity. ‘And since anything less than God was less than eternal, God himself was the ultimate fulfillment of human existence.’22 Time, in a sense, remained an obstacle for Augustine. ‘He wished all time to cease, so that he could live forever in the presence of his God.’23 According to Augustine, Christian praxis must mirror this orientation towards God and eternal life. This praxis concerned dreams and wishes, burial practices as well as ‘the power of prayer and memory as the only certain bond between the living and the dead’.24 Moreover, Augustine included almsgiving in the list of eternal investments. ‘He encouraged his hearers to think in blatantly commercial terms. They were to treat placing “treasure in heaven” as if it was an advanced purchase.’25 He stressed on the link between prayer for forgiveness, penance and almsgiving.26 In sum, Augustine moved the completion of God’s creative and reconciling work from this world to the afterlife. He thus dehistoricized the object of hope from this life to a realm outside of human history. Of course, in this life we make decisions that will affect our eternal salvation, but the ultimate crossing of our human boundaries towards the eschaton implies leaving behind all earthly and temporal dimensions.27 Augustine’s understanding of time and eternity was important for the development of Christian monasticism. On the spiritual and ethical plane, Augustine gave expression to certain world-denying sentiments that were an integral part of Christian monasticism, a way of life he much admired and longed to embrace – a

Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity, 51. See Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 21 Augustine, Conf. XI, xiv–xxxi. Augustine, Confessions, 230–45. 22 Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity, 63. 23 Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 113. 24 Ibid., 83. 25 Ibid., 92. 26 Cf. ibid., 100–11. 27 Cf. Hermann Häring, ‘Eschatologie’, in Augustin Handbuch, ed. Volker Henning Drecoll (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 540–7, here, 540. 19 20

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way of life that sought to reify Christian thinking on eternity and, at the same time, to blur the line between time and eternity on earth.28 The emerging monastic movement attracted people because it provided concrete occasions of investing one’s life in eternity.29 The Rule of St Benedict, for example, outlined such a life of work and prayer, spiritually and geographically outside the normal business of the world.30 Monasticism established physical and spiritual locations for participating in eternity already under the conditions of the here and now. Christian mysticism personalized the communal efforts of monastic communities to acknowledge and cultivate the connection between the temporal and eternal realm, between human beings and their creator. It opened a way for all believers to discover afresh the transformative presence of the eternal in the temporal. ‘The presence of God which Jewish apocalypticists and early mystics realized in their ascents to the divine realm and which Platonists sought through a flight to the contemplation of ultimate reality, Christians insisted could be attained only through the risen Lord, the true theophania theou.’31 Mystic participation in divine life involved ascent to the heavenly or eternal realm, an ascent made possible by Christ and the community that formed his body, that is, the church. Its sacramental rituals, especially baptism and the Eucharist, represented points of access to the eternal. In the celebration of the Eucharist, the experience of transcendence was shared thanks to God’s gracious presence in bread and wine and thanks to the power of the church to organize this event. Moreover, the mass also assumed ‘a practical spiritual and social function connecting time and eternity, the living and the dead’.32 Thomas Aquinas tried to capture the theological difference between time and eternity like this: time is the measure of changeable human life, whereas eternity signifies the quality of God and of divine presence.33 God’s eternity

Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity, 70. Cf. ibid., 67. 30 The Rule of Benedict, trans. Carolinne White (London: Penguin, 2008). In the prologue of the Rule, Benedict addresses the men who ‘are ready to take up the powerful and glorious weapons of obedience, renouncing your own will with the intention of fighting for the true king, Christ the Lord.’ Ibid., 7. The prologue ends with the following perspective: ‘As we make progress in our way of life and in faith, as our heart expands with the inexpressible sweetness of love, we shall run along the path of God’s commandments, never abandoning his guidance but persevering in his teaching within the monastery until death, so that we may have a share, through patience, in the sufferings of Christ and thereby also a share in his kingdom. Amen.’ Ibid., 9f. 31 Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, The Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1992), 6. 32 Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity, 85. 33 Summa Theologiæ 1a. 10,4. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 2: Existence and Nature of God, trans. Timothy McDermott, O. P. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), 145–7. 28 29

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is present in human time, but on God’s terms, and not on human terms. There is, then, the potential for an intimate relationship between eternity and time, but no room for any form of identification between time and eternity. Human longing for unending time and for immortality has nothing to do with God’s gracious offer and gift of eternity. Yet, popular piety, (not only) in the Middle Ages, followed its own rules by continuing to organize events and to identify locations for the encounter with the divine and with the eternal beyond the properly administered ecclesial occasions: examples include burials, burial places, pilgrimages, holy wells, the veneration of saints and their relics, and healing experiences in nature. Popular piety sought ‘to tap the supernatural power that was believed to reside in specific loci, with the hope of obtaining specific favors. In brief, piety was strongly inclined to localize the divine and eternal, make it tangible, and harness its power’.34 The ensuing conflicts between clergy and laity, ecclesial and political rulers about the right and the power to mediate between both realms need not concern us here.35 However, we should note that, unlike today, in the Middle Ages eternity greatly mattered in everyday life as eminently real and accessible.36 The Protestant Reformation dramatically affected the official and popular forms of mediation between the eternal and the temporal. By challenging the entire ‘management’ of the dead in the church, Martin Luther, Jean Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli removed death, burial, masses for the dead, indulgences, apparitions, and the veneration of the saints and their relics from the reservoir of encounters of the eternal in the temporal. The communion of the saints, so vividly experienced in medieval piety, was now moved from its central place in Catholic devotion to the status of mere eschatological hope. The closure of the purgatory in Protestant belief implied the end of the care by the living for the ‘life of the dead’ and their eternal pilgrimage. Thus, the bond of solidarity between the living and the dead was severed with enormous consequences for the understanding of the presence and management of the eternal in the temporal.37 The Protestant dead ‘inhabited another dimension in eternity, and were totally segregated from the living’.38 As a result of the Reformation, hoping for salvation turned into something different in sixteenth-century Europe. The changing attitude to the eternal gave rise to new and different spiritual trajectories and religious forms of

Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity, 91. See also Arnold Angenendt, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), 416–19. 35 For a discussion of a late-twentieth-century debate in Ireland about the authority to interpret experiences of the sacred in the Roman Catholic Church, see Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Apparitions or Christian Witness?’ The Furrow 36 (1985): 645–6. 36 See also Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity, 103. 37 Ibid., 111: ‘Purgatory provided a realm of spiritual activity for the dead, a realm into which the church extended and on which the living could have an impact.’ 38 Ibid., 123. 34

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imagination.39 The Protestant challenge to monasticism and to the monastic claim of being closer to heaven and to eternity further promoted the radical change from a life at the dynamic interface between the sacred and the secular now to a life firmly rooted in the temporal and secular. ‘Salvation had been considerably “secularized”. And so had the world.’40 How we relate to the eternal defines our spirituality and faith praxis. Of course, also the emergent Protestant spiritualities affected the personal and ecclesial approaches to the dead members of Christian communities. The gradual shift from a communal care for the dead to a personal and increasingly private attitude towards one’s own individual death facilitated the reduction of the horizon of one’s salvific hope more and more to the private sphere. ‘Suddenly, death and the afterlife stopped being a communal experience.’41 Moreover, in the long run, the Reformation of eternity ‘was a significant first step towards the elevation of this world as the ultimate reality and towards the extinction of the soul’.42 We shall return to the fate of the human soul in Chapter 6, and to the significance of imagination for understanding the central eschatological symbols of heaven, hell, purgatory and judgement in Chapter 7. What concerns us here are the shifting approaches to salvation that can be seen in the changing understanding of time and eternity. Against the background of shifting approaches to salvation, I have proposed to focus on reconciliation. And against the background of shifting imagination of eternity I wish to propose to focus on the experience of love as the primary occasion for transcendence and the encounter between God and human beings. Hence, the will to explore, shape and further develop the close, even intimate, relationship between God and human beings and between God’s eternity and human time concentrates our reflection on God’s love and on the human praxis of love.

The eschatological potential of love Christian thinkers have often debated the ability of human beings to love. As with salvation, much depends on the anthropological starting point: are we, like Augustine, convinced of humanity’s utter depravation and hence reserve genuine ability to love only to God? Or are we, like Thomas Aquinas, convinced that in spite of human sinfulness God has endowed women and men with the potential to become genuine agents of love? How much grace

Eire, A Very Brief History of Eternity, 128, speaks of ‘the Protestant reconfiguration of the eternal’. 40 Ibid., 146. 41 Ibid., 152. 42 Ibid., 153. 39

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and how much freedom to love have we human beings received from God? Are we prepared to accept these gifts? While we always may learn much from Augustine’s expressions of the deep human desire for God,43 we can also benefit from Thomas Aquinas’s insistence that we human beings have been created in God’s image44 and are we invited to participate in the divinely ordained network of loving relationships – loving God, our fellow human beings, God’s creation, and our own emerging selves. Thomas speaks in this regard of our vocation to become friends of God. He shares Augustine’s theology of desire and Augustine’s concentration on God as the centre of all love. However, he does not share Augustine’s pessimism as far as human love is concerned. God and our neighbour are those with whom we have friendship. However, in our love for them there is included love for love itself (dilectio caritatis), for loving our neighbour and God means that what we love is that we and our neighbour should love God, in other words have love.45 Love is infused into our souls and includes a co-orientation to the divine creator of love. Søren Kierkegaard speaks in this regard of God as the ‘middle term’ in all genuine love relationships.46 And, in his famous poem Canal Bank Walk, the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh considers the Holy Spirit a third party in the kiss of a loving couple.47 Whereas Augustine merely contrasts God’s love with human fallenness, Thomas celebrates the God-given human ability to love and thus opens anew the horizon of mutuality (not of symmetry) between divine and human friendship. Within this horizon, a human culture of love can be developed.48 However, a culture of love is always threatened by forces keen to control, to administer and to calculate. Any reduction of human freedom unavoidably leads to the mutilation of the human capacity to love.

Augustine, Conf. I, i, Saint Augustine, Confessions, op. cit., 3: ‘You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.’ 44 For a thorough discussion of the imago Dei concept and its potential in contemporary thought, see Claudia Welz, Humanity in God’s Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 45 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 34, op. cit., 86–7 (2a.2æ. 25, 3; quotation adapted). For a more detailed discussion of Thomas Aquinas’ theology of love, see Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 77–83. 46 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 58. 47 Patrick Kavanagh, The Complete Poems, ed. Peter Kavanagh (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1987), 294–5. 48 Cf., for example, the title of the French edition of the famous Puebla Conference in 1979: Construire une civilisation de l’amour: Document final de la conférence générale de l’épiscopat latino-américain sur le présent et l’avenir de l’évangélisation, trans. Charles Antoine and Patrick Duboys de Lavigerie (Paris: Éditions du Centurion, 1980). 43

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Protests against forms of instrumentalization of both divine and human love in the Christian church culminating in the sixteenth-century Reformation have not necessarily led to a new departure in the Christian culture of love. Although Martin Luther, for instance, stressed both the sovereignty of God and the freedom of the Christian, at the same time, he re-emphasized the radical fallenness of human nature and the resulting need for God’s saving intervention in Christ’s cross and resurrection. Rather than concentrating on the development of a culture of love and reconciliation in this world, the Protestant Reformation, as indicated earlier, gave rise to the development of a theology of individual salvation. God’s intervention in Christ, more specifically, in the cross of Christ, became the central focus of hope for salvation. Although Luther affirmed the human ability, however imperfectly, to love, and contemplated the mystical union between the human being and God, he also bears some responsibility for shifting attention from God’s gift of love of humanity to Christian love. Luther is among the first theologians to refer explicitly to ‘Christian love’.49 This shift of language is revealing. Now love had lost the character of God’s universal gift to humankind. Instead, love became subordinated to Christian beliefs and confessions. In this interpretation, christological doctrine provides the matrix for an adequate understanding of love. Now, love has become a Christian possession. For Luther and for many of his followers, notably the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren (1890–1978), the aim was no longer to affirm the praxis of love in light of Christian faith; rather it was to distinguish Christian love from other, inferior forms of love. The confessional and dogmatic concern for the uniqueness of Christianity thus undermined the attention to God’s great gift of love and to its renewed divine affirmation in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In his famous text on The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther stressed the link between love and salvation: The Word of God comes first; after it follows faith, after faith love. Then love does every good work, for ‘love does no wrong, but is the fulfilment of the law’ (Rom. 13:10). However, the human being cannot come into agreement with God or act other than through faith. That means that not the human being through any sort of his works, but God brings about salvation through His promise.50

Cf. Martin Luther, ‘Adventspostille. 1525’, in D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 10.I.2 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1925), 1–208, here 68. For a discussion of this particular shift and of Luther’s overall approach to love, see Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 96–103. 50 Martin Luther, ‘De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium. 1520’, In D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1888), 497–573, here 516. 49

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In his influential work Agape and Eros (1930–6), Anders Nygren further enlarged the contrast between the Christian understanding of God’s love, identified now as agape, and other forms of human love, that is, Jewish nomos and Greek eros. The split between the human experience of love and the particular Christian understanding of love is now total: Even though the ‘humane’ ideals of altruism and the ethic of sympathy may present on the surface certain similarities to Christian neighbourly love, they nevertheless have entirely different spiritual roots, and Christian love has really nothing at all to do with such modern ideas.51 In spite of criticizing Augustine’s theology of love as an unholy mixture of agape and human desire (eros), Nygren remains indebted to central aspects of Augustine’s theological heritage. Like Augustine and Luther, Nygren approaches love from anthropological and theological presuppositions that consider the human being first and foremost in terms of original sin, fallenness, guilt and damnation, that is, as totally alienated from God. The best that can happen to the human being, therefore, is to be used by God as a channel of divine love. The human person is not a divinely empowered subject or agent of love in their own right, but remains a mere instrument of God’s own love. There is an important difference in approaching love either from the experience of original sin, guilt and damnation or from the perspective of God’s good creation and the, of course, always ambiguous, human potential for further relational development. Moreover, it does make a difference whether one approaches love from a coordinated view of human and Christian praxis or from a view that stresses the total hiatus between Christian and other approaches to love. Do Christians own love or do they share this divine gift with all of humankind? This necessarily sketchy account of two trajectories of love in Christian thinking might help to illustrate the radical contrast between two influential approaches to the eschatological potential of love in Christian faith. Love in the Augustinian-Lutheran-Nygrenian tradition refers to God’s saving love, that is, God’s intervention into the hopelessly derailed course of human history. In this approach, the future of creation and any possible concern for the shape and renewal of this universe mostly fall out of focus. Images of ‘God’s New Jerusalem’ are not connected with this our world. Nevertheless, love, yet only divine love, remains an eschatological force. It is understood here as a saving force from outside for those human beings who acknowledge God’s love as manifest in Jesus Christ. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the saving love of God has broken into our fallen world. Individual

Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros: The Christian Idea of Love, trans. Philip S. Watson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 95. 51

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justification happens through faith in this loving act of God. Like Luther, though unlike Nygren, modern theologians have tended to affirm human agency and subjectivity in love. However, at times they also have stressed the need to give away this human selfhood in perfect sacrificial love with dramatic consequences for any emerging praxis of hope.52 The other approach to love, inspired by the rediscovery of human subjectivity since the High Middle Ages and conceptualized by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, also affirms the eschatological potential of love. However, here God’s creative and reconciling project provides the matrix out of which love flows as a force of hope and transformation in this universe. Among theological contributors to the elaboration of this approach to love are, for example, Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Karl Rahner (1904–84), and Margaret Farley (b. 1935). For these thinkers human desire does not contradict God’s love; rather it represents the point of encounter between divine and human love. Here we find less suspicion of the human condition and a heightened interest in a nuanced assessment of the divine empowerment of human love and the comprehensive network of love relationships to which human beings are called by God, reconciled by Jesus Christ, and inspired and encouraged by the Holy Spirit. Tillich combines a decidedly Lutheran approach to theology with a broad anthropological starting point. Hence, in spite of their reference to justification by faith alone, Protestant approaches to love do not have to lead to a radical separation between divine and human love and to a repression of eros in Christian love.53 Rather, Tillich affirms the divine centre of all human love; yet he does not reduce human love to a mere copying of divine love. Moreover, he is aware of the need to attend even to the human self in any love relation. Of course, he is critical of egotism and selfishness. However, he knows that in the same way as self-control highlights the dimension of power in love, so justice towards oneself stresses the necessary dimension of justice in love.54 Facing the dangers associated with an estranged view of the self in love, Tillich can say ‘Love reunites; justice preserves what is to be

See, for instance, Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 334: ‘Only love that has undergone death for the other and just thereby lives anew can be sure in itself.’ See also the discussion of Karl Barth’s and Eberhard Jüngel’s approaches to love in Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 120–34. 53 In this context, see also Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Divine and Human Love’, in Gudstankens aktualitet: Bidrag om teologiens opgave og indhold og protestantismens indre spændinger. Festskrift til Peter Widmann, eds. Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen, Bo Kristian Holm and AndersChristian Jacobsen (Copenhagen: Anis, 2010), 277–96. 54 See here also Paul Ricœur, ‘Love and Justice’, in Radical Pluralism and Truth: David Tracy and the Hermeneutics of Religion, eds. Werner G. Jeanrond and Jennifer L. Rike, trans. David Pellauer (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 187–202; and Margaret A. Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York/London: Continuum, 2006). 52

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united.’55 Thus, here we find a theology of love that affirms the participation of the human subject in the church as that community of love where God welcomes, coordinates and transforms all of our works of love within the divine project of creation and reconciliation. Love overcomes the separation, creates the into-each-other in which more comes into being than what is contributed by the individual persons. Love is the infinity which is given to the finite. That is why we love in the other whom we love not only the other, but the love which is in the other and which is more than his or our love.56 Karl Rahner emphasizes the unity of the love of neighbour and the love of God. Like Thomas Aquinas, Rahner sees in human love always already the presence of divine gift and grace. Within the framework of his transcendental approach to theology, Rahner distinguishes between love as a reflected and explicit mode of action, on the one hand, and love as a not yet conceptualized transcendental horizon of action, on the other hand.57 Thus, I am able to love my neighbour as my neighbour – and not as a mere instantiation of my love of God. Hence, Rahner affirms the agency and subjectivity both of the one who loves and of the one who is loved. However, the fact that I can love my neighbour is already a result of God’s gift of love, and thus never separated from God’s love.58 Margaret A. Farley insists that love must be just – not only to the beloved but also to the lover herself. ‘A love will not be true or just if there is an affirmation of the beloved that involves destruction of the one who loves.’59 She does not refer here to a justifiable giving of one’s life for the beloved, ‘but rather to a letting oneself be destroyed as a person because of the way in which one loves another’.60 One approach to love, then, awaits salvation of the individual person from this fallen world, while the other approach awaits the transformation of this universe into the reign of God, reconciled through a network of just and powerful divinely inspired love relationships. If we adopt the second

Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 71. 56 ‘Love is stronger than death’, thus the title of Tillich’s famous sermon of 1940. ‘Liebe ist stärker als der Tod’, in Impressionen und Reflexionen: Ein Lebensbild in Aufsätzen, Reden und Stellungnahmen. Gesammelte Werke, ed. Paul Tillich, vol. XIII (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1972), 249–52, here 250. See also Carter Lindberg, Love: A Brief History through Western Christianity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 166–7. 57 For a discussion of Rahner’s transcendental theology, see Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Rahner’s Theological Method and a Theology of Love’, in Karl Rahner: Theologian for the Twenty-First Century, eds. Pádraic Conway and Fáinche Ryan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 103–19. 58 Cf. Karl Rahner, ‘Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbour and the Love of God’, in Theological Investigations, ed. Karl Rahner, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger, vol. 6 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1969), 231–49. 59 Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, 200. 60 Ibid., 200f. 55

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approach, we are committed not only to salvation but also to God’s overall creative and reconciling project. How can we imagine this divine project and human participation in it more concretely?

Divine creation and transformation Three popular ways of understanding God’s coming reign come to mind: First, some people refer to God’s coming reign in terms of an anti-world. Everything present in this world must be negated and overcome before God’s reign can properly unfold. Such a dualistic belief denies the goodness of God’s creation and puts all hope in God’s new creation to come. Here, God’s New Jerusalem has nothing to do with our universe. Second, others imagine God’s coming reign in terms of a pure and original paradise with beautiful landscapes, coastlines, mountains, animals and plants, though without human beings and without the effects of human presence in this universe. This belief is also dualistic, though in a different way. It acknowledges God’s good creation, yet it assumes that God’s creation of human beings has proved to be a failure. Human beings have added nothing to God’s original project. A third group of people include the presence of human beings in their concept of God’s coming reign, but all in an assumed state of purity.61 Evolution, the physical universe, technological development and forms of human productivity have no place in such a vision of primordial purity. This image betrays a strong belief in God’s creation, but a weak belief in the ongoing and intimate relationship between God’s plan for and human involvement in this universe. These and similar popular attitudes to God’s coming reign do not really reckon with a God-initiated and graced human creativity and an ongoing process of reconciliation in this universe. Human beings are not regarded as trustworthy partners in God’s realm of love. Rather, whatever they are and do cannot have any lasting value in God’s eyes. However, such types of eschatological imagination do not adequately reflect the fullness of biblical faith and Christian experience. In spite of differences and tensions in biblical approaches to eschatology, there is a unity of faith in the divine transformation of the individual person, of human community and of the universe as a whole. God’s faithfulness to his creation and his creatures is indivisible. Human persons are created to be relational beings, created for love – the love of God, of neighbour, of creation (nature, cosmos, universe), and of the emerging human selves. Humanity is

As we have seen in Chapter 2, Augustine speaks of the lost paradise as a future reality where human beings will enjoy life again without cupiditas, that means without lust or other false intentions, as they have been virulent since the Fall of Adam and Eve. 61

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not a collection of separate souls or a collective mass of faceless individuals; rather it is an emerging and dynamic community of unique persons in an evolving cosmic context. Therefore, the perfection of the individual cannot be imagined outside of the perfection of the others – and the other way around: the consummation of history and of evolution cannot be imagined without the consummation of individual persons.62 The Catechism of the Catholic Church, citing the Second Vatican Council’s constitution Gaudium et Spes (39 §2), emphasizes the significance of human development for this ultimate transformation of the universe by God. Far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectancy of a new earth should spur us on, for it is here that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come. That is why, although we must be careful to distinguish earthly progress clearly from the increase of the kingdom of Christ, such progress is of vital concern to the kingdom of God, insofar as it can contribute to the better ordering of human society.63 However, a few lines prior to this quotation, the Catechism states that the ‘visible universe, then, is itself destined to be transformed, “so that the world itself, restored to its original state, facing no further obstacles, should be at the service of the just”, sharing their glorification in the risen Jesus Christ’.64 This tension between the reference to the world’s ‘original state’ and the affirmation of cultural and technological development in our universe remains unresolved in the Catechism. Moreover, the Catechism identifies the Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of God and limits ‘the community of the redeemed’ to those ‘who are united with Christ’.65 Here the language of salvation returns to the foreground and references to Christ’s ministry of reconciliation through love recede to the background. Nonetheless, the primary Christian approach to otherness and reconciliation is and remains love. The eschatological nature of love does not imply ultimate human power or control over the eschatological process itself. However, it does invite human participation in it. God’s love is not to be funnelled into human beings; rather all are invited to become responsible agents of love in the complex network of loving relationships.

Cf. Franz-Josef Nocke, ‘Eschatologie’, in Handbuch der Dogmatik, ed. Theodor Schneider, vol. 2 (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 2000), 377–478, here 476–7; and Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, 354: ‘The resurrection of individuals is needed for the sake of the restored life of the community.’ 63 Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1049. 64 Ibid., § 1047. The citation refers to Irenaeus of Lyons, Adv. Haeres. 5,32,1. 65 Ibid., § 1045: ‘Those who are united with Christ will form the community of the redeemed, the holy city” of God, “the Bride, the wife of the Lamb”.’ 62

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This participation, therefore, is not a denial of grace, but the consequence of grace. Human love thus need not be played out against divine grace. Becoming a full and fulfilled subject with others and with God in and through love is an essential aspect of this eschatological dynamics. However, this insight must result in a critical and self-critical assessment of the structures of evil, sin and distortion that continue to challenge all human journeys towards subjectivity, transcendence, community and transformation. This awareness does not put a condition on love in terms of prescribing what needs to be done before one would be able to begin to love. Rather, the Christian praxis of love begins with the act of love itself in order then to assess the personal, structural, social, political, gender, economic, cultural context in which love is taking place. Love provides the proper context for the deliberation of human freedom, hatred, conflict, sin, despair, denial and indifference and the related theological issues of judgement, forgiveness, conversion, liberation and renewal.

Love, hope and the work of Christ As outlined in Chapter 1, I see in love the appropriate horizon for reflecting upon hope and faith. Moreover, I wish to argue that love provides the proper horizon for the Christian understanding of the work of Christ, for reconciliation and for salvation. The Apostle Paul and other early Christians interpreted the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as an event of cosmic significance: God has opened up a new ontological order. Inspired by a remark of Paul Tillich, we can distinguish three periods of major human concern and existential anxiety in Christian history with related soteriological questions – and we may wish to add a fourth: (1) Ontological anxiety in the patristic era: how can one find cosmic stability of being in view of the power of the devil and of demonic forces? (2) Soteriological anxiety in the medieval era: how can I find a gracious God in view of my own sinfulness and damnation? (3) Spiritual anxiety in the modern era: how can one find meaning in life?66 (4) Relational anxiety in our own late-modern/post-industrialized era: how can I find just and lasting relationships even though I wish

See Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, [1952] 2000), 57. Tillich discusses only these three periods of anxiety; I have added the fourth. 66

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to avoid anything that binds and obliges me and thus threatens to diminish my freedom? Different ages identified different concerns when reviewing the eschatological potential of the Christ event. Thus, any cry for salvation now directs us to the shifting concerns for salvation and forces us to rethink our particular hope for salvation and its christological foundation – critically and self-critically. ‘What salvation means will largely depend on different perceptions of the problem that needs to be overcome. This may be the fear of death; the burden of sin and guilt; the threat of evil powers, natural and supernatural; a sense of condemnation in the face of divine justice, or of worthlessness arising in oneself or imposed by others; or a sense of meaninglessness.’67 Moreover, an increased sensitivity towards such shifts in soteriological concerns and approaches redirects our attention afresh to christology. Traditional soteriologies (approaches to salvation) have all stressed the necessity to embrace faith in God’s work of love in Jesus Christ. Hence, Christian believers attempted to relate in faith to God’s work of love. They believed in God’s love and in its decisive intervention in Christ. Salvation, thus, became a matter of right belief. Although the Christian church has never defined or codified one single understanding of salvation,68 soteriological schemes have normally been established in the context of faith in the first place and not in the context of love. In Christus Victor, for example, the Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén (1879–1977) set out to defend God’s salvific initiative in Christ against any objective or subjective Latin theory of salvation.69 Aulén repeatedly stressed God’s love as the source for God’s reconciling work in Christ. But he never considered human responses to this love other than in complete faith and submission to God’s love. A genuine human praxis of love, initiated by God’s work in Christ, did not enter Aulén’s thinking. As with his Lundensian colleague Anders Nygren, to whom I have referred earlier, Aulén’s aim was to defend both the sovereignty of God and Martin Luther’s view of God’s work in Christ rather than to consider how God may have confirmed the divine– human project through the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Moreover, Aulén’s interpretation of the salvific drama of human salvation attempted to rehabilitate an understanding of Christ’s cosmic battle against the powers of evil as it was suggested by Paul, by many church fathers and

Trevor Williams, ‘Salvation’, in Christianity: The Complete Guide, ed. John Bowden (London: Continuum, 2005), 1078–80, here 1078. 68 Cf. Jaroslav Pelican, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 141. 69 Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert (London: SPCK, [1930 Swedish Original] 1965). 67

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by Martin Luther. Aulén’s and Nygren’s default position remained human sinfulness and the human incapability to love. If, however, we turn the table on this sort of theology and approach Christ’s work through the perspective of God’s love, who has initiated a process of transformation through the gift of love, then the potential of a divine–human praxis of love emerges at the centre of God’s creative and reconciling activity. Such an approach does not deny God’s sovereignty and initiative, but it creates space for human responses to this divine offer of eternal partnership and friendship. It would also overcome the age-old dilemma of spelling out how human beings are expected to connect to Christ’s work more concretely. Rather than concentrating on the suffering of Christ, on the faithful imitation of Christ’s passion, on the emotional devotion to Christ’s passion and on the ethical application of the merits of Christ’s sacrifice to our lives, as disciples of Christ, we might discuss the implications of having been invited, enabled and inspired by God to embark on a life of love with God, with each other, with God’s creative and reconciling project, and with our own emerging selves. This is not a Pelagian exercise; rather it takes seriously God’s love that has initiated, accompanied and transformed the Christian praxis of love. The focus would thus shift from what Jesus Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection have achieved once and for all to what Christ, here and now, wishes to achieve together with us thanks to the strength and energy emerging from his love, faithfulness and ultimate rehabilitation by God in the resurrection. Attending to the work of Christ would then require more than faithful assent and subsequent ethical application. It would call for the involvement of each and every woman, man and child in God’s revolutionary and transformative project of love in this universe. The drama of salvation would need to move out from the theatre of faith to the centre stage of the divine–human praxis of love. Salvation would no longer require human applause for what God has done; rather it would urge human involvement in what God is about to do. To be sure, the thought that God has invited us to co-operate in the process of creation and reconciliation70 represents a costly grace, while remaining mere observers of an inner divine drama amounts to nothing more than cheap grace.71

See in this connection also the emerging Scandinavian Creation Theology, partly inspired by the theology of Gustaf Wingren, in, for example, Elisabeth Gerle and Michael Schelde, eds., American Perspectives Meet Scandinavian Creation Theology (Uppsala: Church of Sweden Research Department, and Aarhus: The Grundtvig Study Center, Aarhus University, 2018). For an in-depth study of Wingren’s work and life, see Bengt Kristensson Uggla, Becoming Human Again: The Theological Life of Gustaf Wingren, trans. Daniel M. Olson (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), esp. 342–60. 71 I make use here of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s terminology in his book Nachfolge (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, [1937] 1982), 26; or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and 70

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Finally, the shift from belief in salvation to participation in the ongoing transformative praxis of love could greatly benefit from the energy unleashed by the various emancipatory movements in and beyond Christianity, including liberation theology, feminist theology, post-colonial theology, gender and queer theology, ecological theology, political theology and so on. Strengthened by their respective attention to the gift of life and its care, a rereading of crucial passages in the gospels that elaborate on God’s ultimate vision for creation and humanity in it could concentrate our attention afresh on Jesus’s proclamation of God’s reign in this universe. The exclusive focus on the death and resurrection of Christ in forensic, classic, subjective and other versions of atonement has favoured acts of faith, but it has not promoted acts of love and hope.72 Hence, adjusting the priority of love over hope and faith redirects Christian life to the arena and requirements of this universe and reserves the afterlife to God’s ultimate fulfilment of the promises made to Israel, the disciples of Jesus Christ, the followers of Mohammad and other religious movements. Inter-hope dialogue may be one of the more exciting results and requirements of such a new concentration on the primary gift of love.73 Love is the horizon in which Christians are called to imagine God’s coming reign and to cultivate their hope. Love is not a divine imposition on men, women and children. Rather, love is the divine gift that allows us to hope for the consummation of God’s promises, not against but for and with the participation of humankind. Moreover, love promotes that network of dynamic relationships between God and human beings, which Jesus Christ has confirmed in his ministry, proclamation, sacrificial death and resurrection. Faith in this creative and reconciling love of God in Christ and in the Holy Spirit expects from God no less than the ultimate transformation and consummation of this universe, of all its relations and of every human person’s life into the reconciled community of saints. This love is the basis for hope. This love will remain in God’s eternity even when faith and hope ultimately will have become redundant. The Christian praxis of love, then, characterizes the eschatological vocation of the church in this universe and its Eucharistic dynamics.74 It responds to

John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Greeb and Reinhard Krauss, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 4 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 55. 72 For a discussion of the implications of different soteriologies, see Marius Timmann Mjaaland, Systematisk teologi (Oslo: Verbum, 2017), 234–40. Mjaaland stresses that ‘hope cannot be argued for exclusively in christological terms; rather it needs to be anchored I the one God who is honoured as creator and sustainer under many names’. Ibid., 336. 73 For a discussion of inter-hope dialogue in recent theology, see Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, 15–17. 74 Cf. David N. Power, OMI, ‘Hope’s Eucharistic Dynamic’, in Negotiating Borders: Theological Explorations in the Global Era: Essays in Honour of Prof. Felix Wilfred, eds. Patrick Gnanapragasam and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Delhi: ISPCK, 2008), 150–7.

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God’s creative and reconciling initiatives and accepts the responsibility to act in conjunction with God’s creative and reconciling project. However, the ultimate fulfilment and completion of the praxis of love rests in God’s power. The church does not own love, hope and faith, but, at best, it remains a credible community of practitioners in this universe – always in need of conversion to God’s reconciling and transformative Spirit. If we share the Apostle Paul’s excitement about this vision, we need no longer fear the presence in heaven of all of those others. And we may begin to radiate the joy that our lives are part of God’s amazing project of creation, reconciliation and eternal transformation. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13:12-13)

4 Individual and community Three eschatological programmes

Individual or communal future with God? Eschatological reflection provides us with an opportunity to consider our human future with God and God’s project of creation and reconciliation. It allows us to see and assess our own present time in a new way. Here, the question of the eschatological subject is of particular importance. In Ancient Israel, for example, concern for the future of an individual person was of secondary importance, whereas, concern for the survival of the group or community came first. Religions that focus on salvation have opened different perspectives with regard to the future fulfilment of the individual human subject. The spectrum of possibilities comprises the dissolution of the subject through enlightenment or immersion into the absolute (in Indian religious traditions) as well as the promise of eternity to the personal subject beyond their death (in the Abrahamic religious traditions). In spite of differences in detail, Abrahamic eschatologies are concerned with the relationship between our present life-world and the world of the dead, the life in God’s presence here and now, and the promise of an eternal life in community with God and God’s friends. Thus, what is at stake here is the future and fulfilment of human beings faced with their death and the recognition of their vocation to be in eternal community with God. Even if the study of religion distinguishes collective and individual eschatologies, it is important to recall that in the Abrahamic religious traditions individual and communal eschatologies are closely intertwined. The human subject desires community with God and fulfilment in God’s eternity. However, this community is never proclaimed in the absolute; rather it is always already promised in relation to other subjects, creatures and creation.

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Some theologians in the High Middles Ages, including Pope Benedict XII (1336), understood the human being as an individual who will be called to account for themselves in front of Christ’s eternal judgement.1 Following this judgement, the individual subject will be assigned a place either in God’s presence, in purgatory or in hell. The expectation to be saved, which resulted from this horizon of expectations, and the sharpening of fear of purgatory and hell have led to a sometimes sick and stressful individualization of Christian faith praxis. To this day, such individualization can be detected in some forms of Christian piety. Hence, modes of eschatological thinking emerging from this background are already clearly positioned within the processes of religious individualization. When we consider different eschatological projects within Christian theology today with critical and self-critical eyes, questions such as these come to the fore: does the Christian eschatological subject today continue to hope for a mainly individual or for a mainly communal future with God? And if the latter, which other human subjects and realities are considered within the framework of such an eternal future? Mainly friends or even people who think and believe differently, even enemies? What do our expectations of fulfilment in God’s presence reveal about our understanding of God and of God’s love? What do our eschatological choices reveal about our relation to nature, the universe, matter, evolution, the climate, the environment, in short to God’s overall creative project? Is Christian theology prepared to enter into a dialogue with other religious traditions about a shared human future? Or is eschatological thinking used in order to project and protect a pure and exclusive Christian doctrine in contrast to other traditions? Are non-Christian approaches to human fulfilment of significance to Christian thinking and praxis? How do we relate to the plurality of Christian approaches to ultimate fulfilment? Undoubtedly, individualization is a chief characteristic of our Western culture. Hence, one could expect that Christian eschatology might be keenly interested either in exploring the transmortal destiny of each human being or in presenting to the lonely postmodern individual a vision of eternal belonging and community. Notwithstanding the concrete articulations of such visions, it is noteworthy that both our present cultural context and Christian anthropology favour eschatologies focussed on the individual subject. That need not surprise us. Since Christian theology is concerned with the personal destiny of every woman, man and child, we are inclined to consider the promise and benefits of divine community primarily from such a perspective. Here we cannot explore in detail how Jewish, Christian and Muslim anthropologies of the subject have developed and influenced one another since the High Middle Ages and under the impact of Renaissance,

Cf. the constitution ‘Benedictus Deus’ by Pope Benedict XII from 1336. Denzinger, Kompendium der Glaubensbekenntnisse und kirchlichen Lehrentscheidungen, 406–7. 1

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Reformation, Enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity. In any case, religious and political efforts in support of human emancipation have contributed significantly to the fact that today the individual has become the uncontested starting point and focus of religious, cultural, legal and political thinking in the West. Sharp polarizations of the relationship between the individual and the community are always problematic. Even though advertisement campaigns love to suggest that the consuming individual could be empowered to satisfy his or her eschatological desires through purchasing a particular range of products (for example from companies such as Forever Living Plc. and the Calvin Klein perfume range Eternity for Men), in Christian understanding neither immortality nor eternity can be bought or consumed. Rather, Christian faith understands human mortality as the indisputable fact of our respective individuality. Moreover, it confesses that eternity meets us as a gracious gift from outside ourselves, from God. Each person experiences himself or herself to be endowed with a gift of transcendence and to be invited into eternal community with God, God’s creative and reconciling project, and each other. Hence, any adequate eschatological reflection will always already face a tension between individual and community, emancipation and heteronomy, giftedness and self-determination. With these issues in mind, I wish to discuss three prominent and influential Western Christian approaches to eschatology: those of Joseph Ratzinger/ Pope Benedict XVI (b. 1927), Robert W. Jenson (1930–2017), and Anthony Kelly (b. 1938).

Joseph Ratzinger’s/Pope Benedict XVI’s eschatology Joseph Ratzinger’s eschatology is of particular interest for my discussion of hope since he explicitly shares the view that hope depends on love. Accordingly, as Pope Benedict XVI, he gave priority to love before attending to hope and faith in his encyclical letters.2 However, his engagement with eschatology dates further back, namely to the last book, which he published as a university theologian, before becoming archbishop of Munich-Freising. Ratzinger’s book, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, first appeared in 1977 as a volume within the series Kleine Katholische Dogmatik (Brief Catholic Dogmatic).3 The volumes in this series were edited jointly by

For a discussion of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical letter on Christian love, see Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 161–9. 3 Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatologie – Tod und ewiges Leben, Kleine Katholische Dogmatik, vol. IX (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1977). 2

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Ratzinger and Johann Auer, formerly colleagues in the Roman Catholic Faculty of Theology at the University of Regensburg. After six editions in this series, in 2007 Ratzinger’s book appeared independently in a new German edition, unchanged in text, but with a new preface by the author, who since 2005 had been Pope Benedict XVI.4 Once more, Benedict confirmed his previous reflections on eschatology, thus lending further significance to this work in contemporary Roman Catholic thinking.5 In the first pages of this book, Ratzinger discusses the connection between the historical crisis of our time and the newly awakened interest in eschatology. The fact that eschatology has moved into the centre of theological thinking underlines that the sudden intensification of our capacity to pick up the eschatological undertones and overtones of the New Testament must have something to do with the emerging crisis of European civilization. Since the turn of the [nineteenth to the twentieth] century, human minds have been increasingly aware of the decline and fall, like the premonition of some imminent earthquake in world history. (2f./18f./18f.)6 However, unlike the theological currents dominant in the 1970s, for example, existentialism, Marxism and the different theologies of hope and liberation, Ratzinger wishes to anchor the eschatological perspective anew to a christological perspective and thus to counter the, in his judgement, unfortunate shifts of theological perspectives. For him, the truly constant factor remains christology. ‘It is upon the integrity of Christology that the integrity of all the rest depends, and not the other way around’(12/25/25). Moreover, Ratzinger considers the risks resulting from a shift of attention in eschatological thinking now towards the question of the individual’s concern about coping with death. Here he sees the danger of reducing Christianity to individualization and otherworldliness. ‘Both of these rob the Christian faith of its vital power. Here, in fact, lies the task of contemporary eschatology: to marry perspectives, so that person and community, present and future, are seen in their unity’ (12/26/25). Ratzinger is prepared to address the concerns of the time and he welcomes the renewed openness to eschatological questions. However, he refuses to allow the contemporary questions to judge eschatological propositions. Instead, he argues, ‘we need to integrate the

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedikt XVI, Eschatologie: Tod und ewiges Leben (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2007); 2nd ed. 2012. 5 Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, 2nd ed., trans. Michael Waldstein, translation ed. by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007). The first English language edition had appeared in 1988. The second edition contained a newly written preface by the by now papal author. 6 The page numbers in the text refer in order to the second English edition, the original German edition and to the new German edition of 2007. 4

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opposing elements in the light of the Christian center, to strike a fair balance and come to understand the real promise of faith more deeply’(15/27/27). Ratzinger develops his eschatological discourse in three parts: first, he approaches the eschatological problem as a question about the very essence of Christianity. Second, he tackles death and immortality, that is to say the individual dimension of eschatology. And third, he deals with the future life. Looking at his method, we can see that he concentrates his eschatological thought fully on his understanding of faith in Christ. ‘Man can become God, not by making himself God, but by allowing himself to be made “Son”. Here, in this gesture of Jesus as the Son, and nowhere else, the Kingdom of God is realized.’ And: ‘The answer to the question of the Kingdom is, therefore, no other than the Son in whom the unbridgeable gulf between already and not yet is spanned. In him death and life, annihilation and being, are held together’ (64f./63f./62f.). In 2007, thirty years after the first publication of his eschatology and parallel to the publication of its new edition, in his book Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict XVI confirms once more that the Kingdom arrives in the person of Christ, ‘that the deepest theme of Jesus’s proclamation was his own mystery’, and ‘that God’s Kingdom “realises” itself in his coming’.7 Thus, for Pope Benedict the person of Christ remains the centre of all adequate eschatological thinking and the counter project over against all attempts to think eschatologically based on either some analysis of the contemporary situation or some sort of private eschatological reflection (65f./64/63). Ratzinger stresses that salvation cannot come about by satisfying any egoism, such as our private eschatological speculation might like it. Rather, true eschatology must be ‘universal’; it must be willed for all and offered to all. In this theology, human beings with their ‘yes’ and their ‘no’ are subjects in God’s plan of salvation and are endowed with their respective time. The human being ‘is a true subject in his own right, but not as one who would produce the Kingdom of God from his own resources. The “right” in which he is a subject he receives from the “Thou” of God. He possesses genuine subjecthood only because he has become a son’ (66/64/63). Ratzinger concludes the first part of his eschatology with a strong confession of the gift-character of God’s Kingdom: Divinization, ‘emancipation’ as a sharer in the Kingdom of God, is not a product but a gift. Sheer love can only be so. It is because entry into

Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 227. The author refers here explicitly to the English exegete C. H. Dodd, who had made the orientation of the Kingdom parables in the New Testament the central focus of his exegetical work. Dodd ‘connected eschatology with Christology: The Kingdom arrives in the person of Christ. By pointing to the Kingdom, the parables point to him as the true Gestalt of the Kingdom’. Ibid., 226. 7

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the Kingdom comes about through love that the Kingdom is hope. In a laboratory – which is how Ernst Bloch defined the world – there is nothing to hope for. Hope exists only where there is love. Since, in the crucified Christ, love prevailed and death fled vanquished, human hope can truly ‘spring eternal’. (66/64/63 – my italics) Once more, the christological foundation for considering the individual dimension of eschatology has been emphasized. Ratzinger’s theology of death culminates in the claim, that the ‘Christian dies into the death of Christ himself’ and in the insight into the connection between Christ’s death and Christ’s kenotic love. ‘Death as death is conquered in Christ on whom the victory was gained through the plenary power of love unlimited. Death is vanquished where people die with Christ and into him’ (97/87/85 – translation corrected). Ratzinger rejects any justification by works. ‘Justification by works means that man wants to construct a little immortality of his own. He wants to make his life a self-sufficient totality’ (99/88/86). Instead, human beings should turn to Christ’s death: ‘sharing in the martyria of Christ by that dying which is faith and love. Such faith and love are simultaneously God’s acceptance of my life and my will to embrace the divine acceptance. And all this is from the God who can be love only as the triune God and who, in thus being love, makes the world bearable after all’ (100/89/87 – translation corrected). Here I cannot discuss the sudden trinitarian intensification of this thesis; instead, I wish to highlight the Christian responsibility for worldly tasks, which the author then deduces from this thesis. For Ratzinger, Christian eschatology is not a retreat into the other world from the common tasks in this world; nor is it a retreat into a private salvation for individual souls. ‘Eschatology encourages us, nay, challenges us in most compelling fashion, to dare to realize in our lives that justice and truth whose claims upon us – along with those of love – are eschatology’s very own content’ (100f./89/88). This challenge is quickly located in ecclesiology.8 Ratzinger underlines that suffering and dying with Christ by necessity implies participation in the hope of the resurrection.9 The communion with God, which is the place of indestructible life, finds its concrete form in the sharing of the body of Christ. Here, belief in the resurrection is understood exclusively in personal terms: ‘The theologizing of resurrection faith manifests itself at the same time as a personalisation’ (115/101/99 – translation corrected). Moreover, resurrection of Christ and resurrection of the dead are seen as one single reality. In the community with Christ Ratzinger sees the boundary of death

‘Theo-christology also possesses an ecclesiological aspect’ (115/101/99). ‘One permits oneself to be inserted into the passion of Christ since that is the place at which resurrection breaks forth’ (115/101/99). 8 9

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already transgressed – here and now. ‘The borderline between Sheol and life runs through our very midst [mitten in der menschlichen Existenz], and those who are in Christ are situated on the side of life, and that everlastingly’ (117/103/101). Hence, Ratzinger defines faith in the resurrection as the central expression of the christological confession of God. However, he adds, rather abruptly, that this faith in the resurrection ‘follows, indeed, from the concept of God’ (118/103f./101). As before, with regard to the claim that God can only be love because of his trinitarian nature, so even here the contours of his concept of God remain somewhat vague – so does Ratzinger’s sudden thesis that faith in the resurrection not only refers to the transformation of life and of the whole human being, but also the totality of the world (119/104/101). How faith in the resurrection more concretely concerns all humanity and even the whole world remains unsaid. However, it is evident that Ratzinger wishes to reinterpret all eschatological symbols afresh on the basis of what he calls the biblical ‘resurrection christology’ (Auferstehungschristologie) (130/112/110).10 That applies also to Ratzinger’s understanding of the concepts of the soul and of the immortality of the soul. In opposition to the imagination of psyche in antiquity and in opposition to vulgar images of a body-soul dualism, Ratzinger seeks to rehabilitate the concepts of the soul and the immortality of the soul as original Christian concepts. He refers to Thomas Aquinas, who integrated anima into an account of the dynamic movement of the entire creation towards God. In anima, the entire material world comes into its own precisely ‘by stretching forth towards God in man’ (153/129/126). Human beings, thus, are understood as beings capable of and called to the knowledge and love of God. ‘In this way, the dialogical conception of humankind which emerged from the christological perspective is linked up with a resolution of the problem of matter, in terms of the dynamic unity of the entire created world’ (153/129/126). Here, the dialogical movement springs from the christological. The human being is created in and for a relationship that comprises indestructability. What we name ‘soul’ refers to our existence as opened up by God.11 Immortality (here Ratzinger does not speak of eternity) must not be understood as a human achievement; rather it originates in the divine–human relationship in which we human beings are invited to participate and which fully claims our being. Hence, Ratzinger understands God’s own immortality as a ‘relationship which is Trinitarian love’ (158/132/130). Here, the eschatological subject is understood from the perspective of his or her immortal soul. Immortality, then, is the measure of what it means to be authentically human.

For Ratzinger’s approach to heaven, hell, purgatory see 138ff./118ff./116ff. Ratzinger, Eschatologie: Tod und ewiges Leben, new edition 2007, 13 and 219: ‘Seele ist nichts anderes als die Beziehungsfähigkeit des Menschen zur Wahrheit, zur ewigen Liebe.’ 10 11

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Ratzinger concludes the second part of his book by underlining the holistic character of Christian hope. ‘What is saved is the one creature, man, in the wholeness and unity of his personhood as that appears in embodied life’ (158/133/130). However, Ratzinger stresses the necessary distinction between body and soul since matter on its own cannot provide the underpinning for the continuing identity of the human being. What is needed here is a duality but not a dualism. Hence, for Ratzinger, the soul remains the unchangeable and immortal link in our relationship to God. I shall return to the concept of soul in Chapter 6. Fellowship with other human beings is part of the Christian idea of immortality, though interpreted by Ratzinger once again, in christological terms: Man is not engaged in a solitary dialogue with God. He does not enter an eternity with God which belongs to him alone. The Christian dialogue with God is mediated by other human beings in a history where God speaks with men. It is expressed in the ‘We’ form proper to the children of God. It takes place, therefore, within the ‘body of Christ’, in that communion with the Son which makes it possible for us to call God ‘Father’. … Only in that reconciliation whose name is Christ is the tongue of man loosened and the dialogue which is our life’s spring initiated. In christology, then, theology and anthropology converge as two strains in a conversation, two forms of the search for love. (159/133f./130f.) Eternal life, which is God’s gift in Christ, leads the human being out of isolation ‘into true unity with his brothers and sisters and the whole of God’s creation’ (160/134/131). As is often the case in Ratzinger’s theology, we can see the influence of the Johannine concept of unity, according to which true unity must be proclaimed in christological terms to the believing community. There is no connection to God-fearing people outside of the Christian community. Thus, Ratzinger does not reflect on the claim of the Apostle Paul (Romans 9–11) that God’s covenant with Israel continues in spite of the coming of Christ. Instead, Ratzinger argues for eternal community with God in explicitly trinitarian ways: ‘the dialogue of human beings with each other now becomes a vehicle for the life everlasting, since in the community of saints it is drawn up into the dialogue of the Trinity itself. This is why the communion of saints is the locus where eternity becomes accessible for us’ (159f./134/131).12

Strangely, Ratzinger interprets Romans 9–11 without any reference to the continuing covenant between God and Israel: ‘the subject of the Gospel proclamation and of the universal efficacy of Christ’s saving work has received a final depth in Paul’s struggle with the Israel-Reality when Paul announces the definitive salvation of Israel as following on the completed formation of the Church of the Gentiles’ (197/163/159 – translation corrected). 12

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Ratzinger frequently stresses the holistic nature of the Christian hope for resurrection and the integration of bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) and matter into the resurrection dynamics. If it belongs to the very essence of the soul to be the form [forma] of the body then its ordination to matter is inescapable. The only way to destroy this ordering would be to dissolve the soul itself. What is thus emerging is an anthropological logic which shows the resurrection to be a postulate of human existence. … And since the living body [Leiblichkeit] belongs so inseparably to the being of man, the identity of that body is defined not in terms of matter but in terms of soul. (179/148/144f.) Ratzinger vehemently rejects any human claim to knowing what the coming world looks like, any presumption to know the precise nature of the relationship between human beings and matter in the new world, and any effort to imagine ‘the risen body’. However, he underlines that we have ‘the certainty that the dynamism of the cosmos leads towards a goal, a situation in which matter and spirit will belong to each other in a new and definitive fashion. This certainty remains the concrete content of the confession of the resurrection of the flesh even today, and perhaps we should add: especially today’ (194/160/156). These and related remarks with regard to the eschatological symbols underline how consistently Ratzinger pursues his christologicalecclesiological eschatological programme.13 Accordingly, he also defines ‘heaven’ in christological terms: ‘One is in heaven when, and to the degree, that one is in Christ. It is by being with Christ that we find the true location of our existence as human beings in God’ (234/190/185). Hence, ‘heaven’ means ‘participation in this new mode of Christ’s existence and thus fulfilment of what began in baptism’ (236/192/187). However, the individual’s salvation (Heil) is whole and complete first ‘when the salvation of the cosmos and all the elect has come to full fruition. For the redeemed are not simply adjacent to each other in heaven. Rather, in their being together as the one Christ, they are heaven’ (238/193/188 – corrected original italics). What this means for the destiny of our physical universe remains unclear. Ratzinger does not develop an individualized eschatology, but a dogmatic reflection on the goal of being human, which is properly centred on his particular understanding of Christ. Only through their relationship to Christ can human beings become truly human. The humanization of the world and even of the entire cosmos is thus a christological process. Outside

On the intimate connection between eschatology and ecclesiology in Ratzinger see also Wilko Teifke, Offenbarung und Gericht: Fundamentaltheologie und Eschatologie bei Guardini, Rahner und Ratzinger (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 208. 13

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participation in Christ and Christ’s ecclesial body, no human life reaches perfection. And, as cited earlier, the salvation (Heil) of the individual is whole and complete first when the salvation of the universe and of all the elect has been achieved. Ratzinger does not speak here of salvation for all human beings; instead he refers to the salvation of ‘the elect’. Here we find no reference to other religious traditions and developments and their possible significance. In his entire book, there is no reference to the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution Nostra Aetate (1965) and its particular reflection on the mystery of religious plurality in our world. Moreover, apart from alluding to it, Ratzinger’s eschatology does not spell out the implications of the salvation (Heil) of the universe and of God’s overall creation project. Even the new papal preface of 2006 to the new edition of 2007 does not contain any consideration of the significance of non-Christian religions, nor does it refer to cosmological discussions in recent Christian theology.14 In his epilogue to the sixth German edition, Ratzinger stresses his concern – by way of an adequate understanding of the soul – to counter all contemporary efforts that in one way or another seek to discharge the individual subject in favour of general categories, such as humanity, class or society.15 It is interesting to note how much he feels obliged to struggle against ideologies, which in his view promote the dissolution of the subject. However, he seems unaware that, especially in recent decades, Western culture in general and philosophical anthropology in particular have undertaken significant efforts at redefining subject and subjectivity in necessary relation to the human other and to alterity.16 It is possible that he might even counter such recent efforts to approach subjectivity afresh by insisting that an appropriate approach to the human subject could only emerge from the subject’s christological-ecclesiological commitment and orientation. For Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the church remains the only decisive ‘subject’.17

For a discussion of the relationship between Christian eschatology and the physical universe, see, for example, Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe; Richard Bauckham, ‘Eschatology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Christian Theology, eds. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 306–22, here 314; and Peter C. Phan, ‘Roman Catholic Theology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2008), 215–32, here 229. I shall return to this issue in Chapter 9. 15 Cf. Ratzinger, Eschatologie: Tod und ewiges Leben, new edition 2007, 201–2. 16 See, for example, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 17 Cf. Ratzinger, Eschatologie: Tod und ewiges Leben, new edition 2007, 199. See also Teifke, Offenbarung und Gericht, 228: ‘Hiermit ist das theologische Verständnis der Kirche so weit zugespitzt, dass es kein Handeln Gottes außerhalb der Kirche gibt.’ 14

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In his Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi (2007), Pope Benedict XVI resumes his exploration of hope and eschatology.18 He emphasizes that the gift of hope distinguishes Christians from others: Christians have a future; their life will not end in emptiness. Moreover, ‘The one who has hope lives differently’ (2). For Benedict, first the encounter with Christ provides hope. With references to the letter to the Hebrews, 1 Peter and Ephesians, Benedict explains: ‘We see how decisively the self-understanding of early Christians was shaped by their having received the gift of trustworthy hope, when we compare the Christian life with life prior to faith, or with the situation of the followers of other religions’ (2). This would imply that Judaism was a religion without hope – surely an untenable position. Moreover, although it is of course possible to compare hopes beyond religious divides, Paul never understood himself as a ‘Christian’, but as a Jew who followed Christ. Although in his Eschatology Joseph Ratzinger has argued that ‘hope exists only where there is love’,19 in his Encyclical Letter as Benedict XVI he stresses that hope is faith-based (cf. 1, 2, 3, 7 etc.). He cites Heb. 11:1: ‘Faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen’ in order to explore the mystery of faith in this way: Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a ‘proof’ of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet’. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future. (7) Thus, for Benedict, the central issue at stake here is ‘hope-filled faith’ (8). ‘Faith is the substance of hope’ (10). Accordingly, he can conclude that the present-day crisis of faith ‘is essentially a crisis of Christian hope’ (17). Concentrating on the ultimate object of Christian hope, that is, on eternal life, the ‘blessed life’, or ‘heaven’, Benedict warns against efforts to express the inexpressible in all too concrete images which remain ‘far removed from what, after all, can only be known negatively, via unknowing’ (13). Nevertheless, a few indications about the blessed life can be given: it is not an individual but a social reality as it relates to communal salvation. ‘Hence, “redemption” appears as the reestablishment of unity, in which we come together once more in a union that begins to take shape in the world community of believers’ (14). Moreover, Christian hope must be distinguished from human

Benendict XVI, Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi, Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2007. Figures in the text refer to the respective paragraphs of Spe Salvi. 19 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 66. 18

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aspirations to progress – scientific, economic or cultural. Of course, reason must always be seen as ‘God’s great gift’ to humanity (23), however, in its natural relation to faith. ‘It becomes human only if it is capable of directing the will along the right path, and it is capable of this only if it looks beyond itself. Otherwise, man’s situation, in view of the imbalance between his material capacity and the lack of judgement in his heart, becomes a threat for him and for creation’ (23). Reason and faith need each other. Simply put, ‘man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope’ (23). Benedict, once more, stresses the social dimension of Christian hope and criticizes the church’s traditional focus on individual salvation: We must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task – even if it has continued to achieve great things in the formation of man and in care for the weak and the suffering. (25) Roughly in the middle of this Encyclical Letter, Benedict moves from the connection between faith and hope to the relationship between hope and love: ‘man is redeemed by love’ (26). The true human hope can only be God – ‘God who has loved us and who continues to love us “to the end”, until all “is accomplished”’ (cf. Jn 13:1 and 19:30) (27). True life, then, for Christians is a relationship with the source of life. ‘If we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we “live”’ (27). However, Benedict soon resumes his focus on hope coming from faith (29). He distinguishes between greater and lesser human hopes and the ‘great hope’ which can only be God, ‘who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain. The fact that it comes to us as a gift is actually part of hope’ (31). The final sections of this Encyclical Letter deal with particular settings for the praxis of hope, such as prayer, action and suffering. Again, Benedict underlines the perspective of hope that transcends merely individual concerns and reaches out to others. ‘Hope in a Christian sense is always hope for others as well’ (34). These others are not to be found only among the living but also among the deceased. Spe Salvi also touches on judgement, purgatory, heaven and hell. We will return to the significance of these eschatological symbols in Chapter 7. Here, however, it is important to note the confirmation of the belief ‘that love can reach into the afterlife, that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death – this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity through the ages and it remains a source of comfort today’ (48).

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The final section of this Encyclical Letter refers to Mary, ‘Star of Hope’. Interestingly, here and only here Benedict refers to Israel’s sacred scriptures and the hope they express, such as in the promise made to Abraham and his descendants (50). In conclusion, in Spe Salvi Ratzinger/Benedict continues his eschatological thinking, but puts greater emphasis on faith, rather than on love, as the foundation of Christian hope. This document leaves no doubt that Christian hope must transcend any individual focus on salvation. Salvation concerns not just me but also the others; it must be social. Who these others are, however, in terms of their respective religious and non-religious hopes or hope remains undiscussed. Moreover, the document does not enter into any exploration of how Christian hope relates to God’s great project of creation and fulfilment as far as the physical universe is concerned. Is this world merely a stage for the divine drama of salvation or is it part of God’s creative and reconciling project? I shall come back to this question in Chapter 9.

Robert W. Jenson’s eschatology The American Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson belongs to a sizeable group of contemporary thinkers, who have attempted to anchor all theological thought in trinitarian thinking. The first volume of his Systematic Theology (1997), accordingly, is entitled The Triune God, the second The Works of God (1999).20 He has treated eschatology in the last part of his two-volume theology, that is, at the end of volume 2. Jenson argues that ‘the Gospel promises inclusion in the triune community by virtue of union with Christ and just so in a perfected human community’ (311). As with Ratzinger, Jenson’s eschatology appears permeated through and through by God’s self-revelation in Christ. This is, of course, a direct consequence of the trinitarian approach to God in Jenson’s dogmatics. Like Ratzinger, Jenson takes up a number of biblical reflections on eschatology and interprets them in the light of his overall understanding of the gospel. However, he affords more space to the eschatological projections in human imagination and he even provides direct critical references to contemporary American culture, in particular to often invoked forms of family and political community and their respective connections to the individual self (315–17). While Ratzinger’s eschatology, in opposition to contemporary political, scientific and cultural movements, develops an exclusive and abstract notion of salvation (Heil) and human fulfilment,

Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1: The Triune God; vol. 2: The Works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 and 1999). Page numbers in the text refer to vol. 2. 20

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Jenson discusses their similarities and differences with the help of popular expectations of salvation, since ‘in our life together with God, there will no longer be any difference between our interests and the common good’ (316). In its encounter with the American dream, ‘the gospel’s promise should be interpreted as the promise of human flourishing’ (317). Jenson is well aware of human projection in all eschatological visions. Therefore, he asks for criteria that could help to orientate our eschatological imagination. He identifies three such criteria. First, the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘Since created fulfillment is inclusion in the triune life, no vision of fulfillment can be true if what it depicts could not fit into that life’ (317). That applies, for instance, to the vision of nirvana and the related dissolution of the person. ‘For the church hopes for fulfillment by inclusion in a perichoresis of irreducible personalities’ (317). Hence, human subjectivity is enabled and protected by participation in the interpersonal perichoresis (mutual interpenetration) within the Trinity. Jenson goes further than Ratzinger in stressing explicitly that human personality is not merely determined christologically but also in a trinitarian way. ‘Believers will enter the triune life only as members of the totus Christus; Christ will enjoy whatever we enjoy’ (317). Second, Jenson points to the necessarily political character of biblical eschatological visions, concepts and metaphors. Whereas Ratzinger builds up a front against political visions in connection with the gospel, Jenson wishes to articulate especially the political dimension of biblical discourses on fulfilment. No eschatological vision ‘can be right that abstracts the blessed from their communal reality as the people, the temple, the polity, the joint body, and the communion of God’ (318). Third, Jenson points to the Ten Commandments that stipulate God’s intention for human community and as such have never been put into question. God does not contradict himself. Jenson concludes that the Eschaton is the inexhaustible event of the triune God’s interpretation of created history by the life of the one creature Jesus. The Eschaton is infinite created life, made infinite in that it is the life of creatures seen by the Father as one story with the story of the Son and enlivened by the Spirit who is the Telos of that story. (319) For Jenson, as for Ratzinger (although less so for Benedict XVI as discussed earlier), the central category of Christian eschatological thinking is love. ‘Love’ is the New Testament’s and the church’s single word for the future the gospel holds out, whether for this age or for the End. It could not be otherwise. The Spirit is the agent of love in the triune life, and the Spirit is the agent of eschatological perfection. Therefore love must be the summary reality of all that blessed creatures can have in God. (319)

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Love characterizes our future life as the body of the Son. Hence, the same love must also be the being of our human relations to each other within our community. Jenson paints a vision of a community that, in analogy to his understanding of the inner-trinitarian community, lives through its relationships. The idea that my own identity as a person was founded on a substance outside of any concretely lived context, is thus exposed as a myth. Comparing the eschatological significance of hope and love, Jenson reaches a similar conclusion as the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. Hope, for Jenson, characterizes our present expectation, but ultimately it is completely determined by love: ‘faith and hope are present in the Fulfillment just and only as they are fulfilled in love’ (320). The experience of love is itself hope for new opportunity of love. Thus, ‘when love comes, hope comes with it’ (321). For Vattimo, love remains the eschatological norm as such. Even when hope and faith will no longer be necessary, when the reign of God will be perfectly realized, love still abides.21 The chief difference between Jenson’s and Ratzinger’s eschatology does not concern their respective christological intensification, even though, as we have seen, they both set different accents; rather, it concerns the question of the relative continuity or discontinuity between creation and human perfection or between the church and the Kingdom of God. Between both, and this is important for Jenson, must come God’s judgement, even between church and Kingdom. ‘The church is now the body of Christ only in that within herself she confronts the body of Christ as an other than herself. Believers’ existing communion in the Trinity is the painful intrusion there of a plurality of still decidedly self-centred persons’ (323). In fact, here Jenson applies the so-called Protestant Principle in order to explain the difference between the two forms of participation, that means participation in God in terms of creatures and believers, on the one hand, and participation in God in terms of perfected saints, on the other hand.22 This perfection of humanity is achievable only through Jesus’s death and resurrection (331). They alone liberate human beings from death and sin for love and for that community which consists in perfect mutuality. For Jenson, this also applies to the new creation: ‘Natural laws are in any case the regularities of God’s intentions, and so will be those of the new creation, but now they will be thoughts of that God whose Logos is the personally unitary totus Christus’ (349). In this scenario, which for the

Cf. Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 98. 22 For a discussion of the significance of the Protestant Principle for church renewal, see Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Ecclesia semper reformanda: Protestant Principle and Church Renewal’, Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift 73 (2010): 271–81, and Jeanrond, ‘Ecclesia Semper Reformanda in Theological Perspective’, 88–99. 21

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time being we can only imagine from a perspective on this side of ultimate perfection and fulfilment, we should think of the cosmic history after its end in ways which can no longer be abstracted from our human history. ‘As the universe is the stage for the story of God with his people, so the universe after the End will be the stage for the fulfillment of that story, for the eternal event of the interpretation of all lives by the life of Jesus’ (350). However, conscious of our hermeneutical limitations, we might say: ‘The End, human and cosmic, will be the great triumph of the Spirit, that is, of freedom and love’ (351). There can be no doubt for Jenson that the resurrection must be thought of in categories of matter. Whereas for Ratzinger matter enters the eschatological horizon only through the redeemed human person,23 Jenson pursues a holistic eschatology in which hope for the entire cosmos is also grounded in the resurrection of Christ. However, he includes the creation as creation into this hope for the community, a hope mediated by the Trinity. ‘The material world is what God intends in order to intend a community of persons who can intend others as distinct from themselves and so be enabled for community with one another. Therefore the embodiment of resurrection must be material’ (351).24 Having reflected on the nature of perfected community and cosmos, Jenson turns to the question of the resurrection of individuals within the totus Christus. It is significant that Jenson’s treatment of individual human resurrection and fulfilment always already occurs within the context of his concern for the entire body of Christ. In his biblical understanding, the point is not a simplistic hope to be saved individualistically or to getting into heaven. Rather, the resurrection of individuals ‘is needed for the sake of the restored life of the community’ (354). Redeemed life means participation in the divine life. This life will be the mutual life of irreducible personal identities. ‘Because the church finds its ground and pattern in the life of the Trinity, it is a communion of persons and a communion of communions; and the Kingdom is what the church anticipates’ (354). The personal love between the members of the community is and remains foundational and must not be dissolved into some form of abstract notion of divinity. Unlike Ratzinger, who argues for the individuality of human subjects with reference to their immortal soul, which in turn directs the subject to God and to God’s creatures, Jenson sees the eschatological subjects anchored in their vocation to participate fully in the trinitarian community. Moreover, unlike Ratzinger, Jenson explicitly tackles the problem of the relationship of human beings from other religious backgrounds to this form

Ratzinger, Eschatologie: Tod und ewiges Leben, New Edition 2007 (Appendix), 219f.: ‘The truth which is love, that is to say God, gives eternity to the human being, and because matter is integrated in the human spirit, in the human soul, therefore matter reaches in the human being the possibility of perfection within the resurrection.’ 24 Cf. also Bauckham, ‘Eschatology’, 315–16. 23

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of Christian eschatology. He quotes Paul’s Letter to the Romans according to which the church has not been charged to tell the Jews that they are excluded from participation in the divine (363). Unlike the Roman Catholic Ratzinger, the Lutheran Jenson sides with the Second Vatican Council that explicitly locates the followers of the other two Abrahamic religions directly in God’s salvific orbit. Jenson is unable to say more. Of course, it is open to God to unite all human beings in his Kingdom. However, whether or not he wishes do so, must remain open. For the time being, from a Christian perspective only one pathway is clear, namely ‘by incorporation in Christ’. Jenson adds ‘we can speculate a bit into how that might happen, though our speculation cannot take us far’ (364). In sum, for Jenson the goal of God’s creation is thus clearly articulated: God will reign: he will fit created time to triune time and created polity to the perichoresis of Father, Son, and Spirit. God will deify the redeemed: their life will be carried and shaped by the life of Father, Son, and Spirit, and they will know themselves as personal agents in the life so shaped. God will let the redeemed see him: the Father by the Spirit will make Christ’s eyes their eyes. Under all rubrics, the redeemed will be appropriated to God’s own being. (369)

Anthony Kelly’s eschatology The Australian Roman Catholic theologian Anthony Kelly presents an eschatology with a global perspective.25 He begins with a critical assessment of the ambiguous phenomenon of hope. In view of the ongoing cultural and social uprooting, we experience a new search for community and for new forms of community today, which might encourage us and liberate us towards the future. At the same time, however, we recognize to what extent the future is already being controlled by forces ‘equipped with enormous impersonal capacities to manipulate and oppress’ (3). We discover more and more how much our different traditions, faiths and stories are interwoven and how all of us human beings are common inheritors of our planet earth. This discovery that we all are part of a much larger story comes together with a new concern for the common good. In this situation, we should distinguish between our different hopes, on the one hand, and genuine hope, on the other. As we have seen in Chapter 1, hope has nothing to do with optimism. Hope has a conscience and an intelligence that optimism lacks. ‘Hope looks beyond self-regulating

Kelly, Eschatology and Hope. This book is published in the series Theology in Global Perspective, edited by Peter C. Phan. Page numbers in the text refer to this book. 25

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satisfactions to the transcendent values that alone can nourish life and give it direction’ (5). It refuses to be satisfied with anything less ‘than the truly meaningful and genuinely good’ (6). Thus, hope does not desire possessing this or that; rather hope is a mode of living and acting. ‘For this reason it is called a virtue, a virtus, a capacity to act well’ (6). It comes to us as a gift from outside. ‘Hope is the experience of transition. It is expressed in the movement of the imagination, taking us beyond feelings of isolation and the totalization of problems. It steps out of the unreality of false expectations and the apathy that desires nothing’ (11). Hope refuses to be reduced to the sphere of the private, for it is always already also a social virtue. Ratzinger/ Pope Benedict XVI has also emphasized this point as we have seen earlier. Kelly defines hope as a social virtue: It enables the individual to join or rejoin the human race with confidence and freedom. The hope of each one needs to be sustained by a helping community. If that community is to be a milieu of hope it too must be able to renew itself by drawing on other and deeper resources if it is to bring healing and confidence into any depressed situation. (11f.) As God’s people, Christians are the people of hope. They are called ‘to witness to the great transformation now afoot which promises the liberation of all human hopes to their fullest dimensions’ (13). This line of thought is particularly interesting: all of our hopes are in need of liberation. This liberation excludes passive spectatorship; instead it demands active participation in the ongoing great human and cosmic drama. Our hope is called to share in the patience of God. Only in the loving patience of God can the promise latent in the unfolding of human time and the meandering history of human freedom be finally kept and revealed. Because it lacks final evidence, hope is always being refashioned. Whatever the unpredictable turns of history, whatever the mysteries of the cosmos yet to be discovered, hope is always open to new dimensions of Christ, moving forward with ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’ (Heb 11:1). (13) Kelly concludes that hope must never be limited to any particular theology. Rather, an appropriate theology today requires an ‘inter-hope dialogue’. ‘Inter-hope dialogue would highlight the unimaginable “otherness” of eschatological fulfillment. It looks beyond what is, to what is to come’ (16). While interreligious dialogue more generally works for a deeper understanding and increased cooperation between all peoples of faith, interhope dialogue is ‘more a matter of all looking towards a promised future of communion in eternal life’ (17).

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Here, the dynamic interconnection between the God-given virtues of faith, hope and love needs to be revisited: Hope without faith would be blind. It would not know who it was trusting or what it was hoping for. Yet faith without hope would be closed in on itself. It would tend to imagine the future looking like a mere repetition or copy of the present. … Likewise, love without hope would be atrophy. It might so settle for union with the beloved in the present as to forget that the other is still to be fully revealed. Yet hope without love would be stunted and self-centred. (17f.) For Kelly, eschatology is the articulation of hope. It is the task of eschatology to keep asking what the symbolic and figurative language of Christian salvific expectations (heaven, hell, purgatory etc.) is really trying to say. Thus understood, eschatology aims ‘to provoke a conversation on the practice of hope and its bearing on our individual and collective destiny’ (23). Like Jenson, though, unlike Ratzinger,26 Kelly acknowledges the new departures by the Second Vatican Council with regard to the understanding of hope, the understanding of human history on the way to its eschatological fulfilment, and the opening of a much larger horizon for interreligious encounter. At the same time, Kelly points to the inner-biblical and innerChristian pluralism of eschatological discourses. ‘How the end might be scientifically described is not the pressing issue, but that the end will reveal God as “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) is of the essence of Christian hope’ (27). Such a hope can no longer afford to ignore the fact of the existence of all these ‘others’. Kelly is conscious of the body-soul distinction in the Christian tradition. Like Ratzinger, he refers to the attempts by Thomas Aquinas to work with this distinction: the soul can be understood as the form of the body. Translated into today’s language one could state that ‘the human person is both an animated body and an embodied spirit, a somebody – for the human soul is intrinsically related to matter. The whole trust of its being is to be embodied and expressed in matter’ (40). However we wish to express this relation, it is important to keep in mind that the human being is some sort of microcosm in which material and spiritual dimensions are united. In the human mind ‘the cosmos awakens to itself as an expanse of wonder’ (41). The soul recognizes its participation in a network of relationships in openness towards all dimensions of the universe and that it is called to be grateful for its origin in divine creation. For the sake of these relationships, Kelly proposes to hold on to the concept of a soul created by God. ‘If the

In the papal preface to the new edition of Eschatologie: Tod und ewiges Leben (2007), Benedict XVI refers to the Second Vatican Council only in connection with the ‘crisis of tradition which became virulent in the Catholic Church in the aftermath of Vatican Two’ (12). 26

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goal of the universe is union with God, the divine mystery must act to create the human soul. If our God-given destiny is to share in the divine life, then the human person must have the spiritual capacity to receive its final gift’ (48). Kelly understands the death and resurrection of Jesus as a parable of Christian hope. Unlike Ratzinger, who argues for a unity between the body of Christ and Christ, Kelly interprets the work of Christ as opening up a new experience of God’s transforming reality in the midst of our human reality. However, as Ratzinger indicated and as Jenson demonstrated, Kelly also stresses a trinitarian and Eucharistic understanding of this new reality. Yet Kelly appeals here first to Christian imagination rather than to a belief in a doctrinal proposition: Here we are challenged to imagine our interrelationships in terms of mutual indwelling modeled on the union existing between the Father and the Son. In such a life, each nourishes and sustains the being of the other. Human existence when it is most conformed to the divine manner of being means nothing less than the gift of ourselves. We are within one another for the life of each other. By being from the other, for the other, and in the other, our earthly human lives participate in God’s own trinitarian love life. And this is exactly the character of the life that the eucharist already celebrates, even as it looks to its fulfillment. (187) In conclusion, for Kelly, in the celebration of the Eucharist the often separated spheres of human existence are coming together to make up the texture of Christian hope. ‘The eucharist celebrates what is as the presence of what is not yet. It anticipates what is still to be fully realized’ (197). However, we must not forget that we shall never be able adequately to depict the full extent of what God has promised. The gift of hope does not mediate to us any concrete knowledge about the future. In spite of this caveat, we may describe the Eucharist as source and summit of Christian hope. In it nothing less is at stake than ‘the transformation of the universe itself’ (200). In spite of the similarities between Ratzinger’s, Jenson’s and Kelly’s approaches to eschatology, we can see one important difference: for Kelly, the power of trinitarian life is already at work in the life of the church and, ever anew, it propels the process of transformation of history. For Ratzinger, what is first and foremost at stake is the transformation of the body of Christ rather than the transformation of history.27 Although even Ratzinger emphasizes the principal openness of all of creation, his perspective remains the salvation of the universe and of all the elect mediated by the church. Similar to Jenson, also Kelly’s perspective embraces the salvation of all as

Cf. Ratzinger, Eschatology, 238/193/188.

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embodied and begun in the salvific pilgrimage of the church. According to Ratzinger, the ecclesial body lives in the Trinity; for Jenson the world is on its way into the Trinity; and for Kelly the Trinity lives in the ecclesial body inspiring the world. For Kelly, hope in its respectively different context is always again called to conversion – a religious, Christic (210f.), ecclesial, moral, intellectual, psychological and bodily conversion. All our hopes need to be liberated anew at each moment. Kelly illustrates these embodiments and liberations of hope with the help of examples from the deformed reality in our world with all its systemic and particular distortions and predicaments. Thus, hope lives at the intersection of two non-symmetric vectors: ‘the gift of God from above and our spiritual searching from below. The downward vector of grace meets, intensifies, and transforms the upward vector of our anticipation from below’ (207f.). The eschatological subject in Kelly’s approach, as in Ratzinger’s and in Jenson’s thinking, is understood in terms of his or her vocation into the Godgiven community. However, Kelly’s eschatological subjects are located in the midst of this world and all of its spiritual and material relationships that require healing from God. Hence, they are not subjects within an emerging separate eschatological realm of ecclesial, christological or trinitarian nature. For Jenson, the fulfilment of God’s Kingdom signifies the end of this world and the beginning of a different world,28 whereas for Kelly, the fulfilment of God’s Kingdom means the divine transformation of this our world. These differences are significant for an understanding of the eschatological subject and of the divine vocation of the physical universe.

Subject and community in eschatological perspective The three approaches to hope and eschatology discussed in this chapter demonstrate the ability of contemporary Christian eschatology critically to challenge forms of religious individualization and forms of collectivization or dissolution of the individual subject. However, the three approaches differ considerably in their respective conceptualization of the relationship between subject and community. The eschatological subject is always already understood in terms of her community with God, Christ and the Trinity, on the one hand, and with church, world and humanity, on the other hand. The horizons of Christian hope, however, differ significantly: whereas Jensen and Kelly, following the Second Vatican Council, keep the eschatological horizon open or even

Cf. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, 348.

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enlarge it towards an inter-hope dialogue, Ratzinger limits this horizon to the ecclesial body of Christ. All three approaches understand love as a God-given virtue of decisive eschatological potential. Eschatologically liberated human life emerges in the praxis of love. However, all three lack a closer discussion of divine love and human love and of their interrelationship.29 Nevertheless, there is no doubt for them that in the praxis of love transformations of human life manifest themselves and continue to challenge forms of religious individualization: in view of the divine project of creation and reconciliation, we human beings are called to assess ourselves, always afresh, in our foundational relationality and in our subjectivity and communality within the dimensions of time, space and language, proper to our being. Charged to be ready to make our defence to anyone who demands from us an account for the hope that is in us (1 Pet. 3:15), we need to realize that this hope will require ever-new reflection, articulation, a widening of horizon and ongoing liberation. Finally, any approach to hope, Christian or otherwise, occurs in a complex web of memories, repressions, expectations and fears. In Chapter 5, I wish to explore more closely the intricate relationship between memory and hope.

For a discussion of the praxis of love in Christianity and of the relationship between love and eschatology, see Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, and Jeanrond, ‘Love and Eschatology’, Dialogue: A Journal of Theology 50 (2011): 53–62. 29

5 Memory and hope

The wounded memorial In the main street of my town in the Saarland, a few houses down the road from my parental home, there stood a rather imposing war memorial. Three huge bronze tables listed the names of the men who had died in the First World War. Originally, a bronze statue depicting a weeping mother had adorned this memorial, but Hitler’s people removed the statue in 1943 in order to facilitate the production of more canons in support of the ongoing war. In most towns and cities in our German–French border area, one could find similar memorials in honour of the many soldiers who had died in the First World War, that is, what in Britain is referred to as the Great War. However, our local memorial differed from other war memorials on either side of the French–German border: in 1944, during the Second World War, the bronze plates were pierced by artillery fire. The bronze was now torn. The list of names was perforated by fist size wholes. Our war memorial was wounded. So often in my childhood, when passing the memorial, I wondered why we kept remembering dead soldiers with the help of a damaged memorial. Why didn’t anybody repair the nameplates in order to restore our act of remembrance? Why such an injured memorial? As a child, I did not yet grasp the challenge to passers-by when faced with a broken memorial (Figure 5.1). Later on, the bronze plates were moved from the busy centre to the wooded hill overlooking the town, where, in the 1950s, a chapel had been erected to commemorate the victims of the Second World War and of Nazi oppression. The wounds in the nameplates, however, were never fixed. Removed now from the centre of daily life, outside of the new chapel, the damaged plates nevertheless continue to glare at those who pass by. Do not all our memories of great and small wars bear the wounds of further injury, continuing suffering, violent death, suspicion, enmity, hatred, broken treaties and broken trust? All wars are human tragedies – especially those which were fought in the name of freedom, liberation, justice and

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FIGURE 5.1  The wounded memorial. © Hans-Josef Jeanrond, by kind permission.

emancipation. There is neither a glorious war nor a glamorous victory. However much we may be right in justifying certain wars, and I shall always remain grateful for the liberation of Germany and Europe from Nazi terror, there is no doubt in my mind that it would be better to build a world in which war is no more. Hence, my question is: How do we remember the fallen soldiers and all other victims of wars and oppression without causing further injuries to each other’s souls? Moreover, I am conscious that the crisis of trust between the governments that promoted the onset of the war in 1914 may be paralleled today by a crisis of trust between citizens and governments in Europe and beyond. To use a phrase from historian Christopher Clark’s investigation into the dynamics behind the beginning of the First World War: are European citizens the sleepwalkers of today?1 How should we deal with our memories in order to open new ground for the emergence of hope?

See Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Penguin, 2013). 1

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The current crisis of trust Nobody can live without trusting others. Trust is relational.2 Trust between human beings may come naturally, as in family circles, or it may be the result of a conscious effort at cultivating relationships between friends and partners in education, religion, sport, business, politics, the arts and so on. However, trust cannot be forced. ‘Accordingly, to trust the other in order to create the trust of the other would turn trust into its opposite: closure and control. … Hence, the production of trust may paradoxically provoke the perversion of trust, but in the circle of trust, trust gives trust.’3 Trust needs space for encounters with the other. ‘Togetherness – being together – is a technique of trust if it opens up the space for recognition of the otherness of the other including the self as other.’4 Never before have we humans had so many means at hand to communicate with one another and thus of cultivating and supporting relationships, such as friendship, love, partnership, collegiality and cooperation, beyond natural borders and social boundaries. And yet, we all seem to be affected by an ever-deepening crisis of trust. We feel that we can no longer rely on certain institutions, authorities, developments; we feel let down, disappointed, angry, frustrated and isolated. The social bond which we have presupposed now seems threatened. A few examples may illustrate this predicament. We have lost faith in many of the institutions which have been established to promote a secure, just and fair life. Most recently in the United Kingdom, the decline of trust in the media has been painfully highlighted during the Leveson Inquiry into press abuses and the phone hacking scandal and related court cases. In Germany, the disclosure of fabricated news published by journalist Claas Relotius in the Spiegel and other outlets has given new energy to the discussion of how to restore trust in the media. Some journalists, whose vocation it is to mediate and explain news, their connections and possible impact, have been exposed as fabricators and manipulators of news. The Snowden revelations confronted us with the sour truth that our elected governments no longer trust us, the citizens, and therefore, in the name of protecting us from each other and from real or imagined terrorist dangers, feel the need to control each and every act of communication. Cameras at every street corner record all of our movements. Everybody is now a potential culprit whose every move must be recorded. Every camera manifests the lack of trust in good citizenship today – nowhere in Europe more so than in the United Kingdom.

Cf. Schmiedel, Elasticized Ecclesiology: The Concept of Community after Ernst Troeltsch, 179–95. 3 Ibid., 183. 4 Ibid. 2

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The banking crisis, which is far from over, has demonstrated how certain groups of so-called professionals have radically reinterpreted their profession from a profession of service to a profession of self-service. In this transition, they have been applauded and supported by a newly emerging social class that seems to feel entitled to exploit others. The abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church and other religious movements and educational establishments has shown how people whose vocation it has been to lead men, women and children on the path of loving God, each other, God’s creation and their own fragile and emerging selves, have lost their way and exploited those to whom they once felt called to serve. Some of the abusers have themselves been victims of abuse. Many have been protected by a network of hierarchies (literally: ‘holy rulers’), who have exchanged their vocation to serve against a self-proclaimed patriarchal power to rule and to exploit the trust of the faithful. The political crisis, which we are experiencing at present in many countries, is a testament to the breakdown of trust between citizens and their elected representatives. In the United Kingdom, for example, this crisis has many dimensions: on the one hand, we see a radically centralized government and a political leadership rooted in the middle of London that has lost touch with the different parts, cultures and developments of the realm. Moreover, when in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the emotions and fears of the people, this political class suddenly enters into a pact with the devil by fighting otherness in the name of a nationalistic re-centring of the country, it comes as no surprise that the demons of nationalism now unfold their evil dynamics. Suddenly, political leaders are driven further and further on the destructive road of populism, nationalism and the instrumentalization of religion, as can be observed not only in London, but also in Washington, Budapest, Dresden, Warsaw, Moscow and elsewhere.5 The suspicion of other citizens or other non-citizens accelerates this increasing corrosion of trust. Building a society at the expense of others will, as we know from historical evidence, in the end always lead to self-destruction. The Holocaust as well as contemporary anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim movements in many Western countries, Christian persecution in some predominantly Muslim countries, and anti-migrant sentiments offer pertinent illustration of shaping an identity against ‘the others’. The crisis in education has been so much discussed that it almost feels obsolete to mention it here once more. In my many years as university teacher, I have had to endure a plethora of talks by educational leaders who understood their calling in terms of advocating an ever more instrumentalist,

For a discussion of populism and related manipulation of religion in Russia, Hungary and Poland, see Gabriel Byström, Med Guds hjälp: Om religion och politik i Ryssland, Ungern and Polen (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2017). For a definition of populism, see Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (London: Penguin, 2017). 5

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materialist and bureaucratic vision of society and of how education should support such a vision. Is it really the vocation of teachers to produce wellfitting individuals to serve the instrumentalist goals of the leaders of a collective? Or might it be the task of a good educator to be a kind of mentor or midwife supporting the birth and development of a genuine person? If the latter characterizes good education, then society ought to be prepared to be challenged by the genuine otherness of all emerging persons, their dreams and aspirations. Do we consider education to serve an idol of strategic sameness or do we respect and encourage emerging otherness and difference for the benefit of all? What kind of persons do we wish to become and what kind of institutions do we wish to build in order to transform our society from a non-trusting collective to a trusting and hopeful network of communities of persons? What role can hope, memory, memorials and acts of remembrance play in such a process of personal and communal transformation? What could the wounded war memorial in my hometown teach us today?

The ambiguous potential of memory I lived the first part of my life in the Saarland, that small border area between Germany and France, and thereafter in the United States, Ireland, Sweden, Scotland, England and Norway. I have therefore had occasion to experience and to compare how the two world wars have been remembered in different contexts. In one way, it has been rather straightforward in post-Second World War Saarland and Germany. The late 1940s and the 1950s were marked by the will to rebuild a broken country and to organize a new society with just institutions and by the numbness in view of all the millions of dead and injured people in Germany and the world. The momentous project of facing up to the horrors of the Holocaust and the Hitler years, that is to all the evil, death, violence and suffering which Germans had brought over the world, was only slowly beginning. Initially, it was also slowed down by the challenge to integrate the many previous supporters of the Hitler movement into the newly emerging German societies in the democratic West Germany and the communist German Democratic Republic. I remember how my maternal grandmother wept silently on Volkstrauertag, the Sunday in November when the town’s people walked in procession to the war memorial, led by the local brass band playing a series of funeral marches. My grandmother mourned her son Josef, my uncle, who at the age of twenty-one had died in the Battle of El Alamein. I also recall my grandmother’s sister, who lived on the French side of the border, telling us about her horror having lost already one son who, although French, had been drafted into the German army that was occupying Lorrain, and then

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having another son drafted into the French army later on after the liberation of Lorrain from German occupation. In those early years, after the Second World War, Remembrance Day was most of all an occasion for mourning the dead. In the 1960s, this slowly changed. Of course, the wounds of parents having lost their children never stop bleeding, but a larger horizon of communal remembrance merged with this expression of personal grief and loss. How could what happened have happened? How was it possible that an entire people allowed themselves to be seduced to follow a mad Führer who had identified himself with Vorsehung (providence) itself? Hence, the annual day of remembrance in November became an increasingly complex occasion, and the public speeches begun to address the need to reflect more deeply on the seeds and structures of evil, oppression, violence, anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism and war, as well as on German collective guilt. The student uprising and the developments and events culminating in the year 1968 greatly contributed to this awakening. Across the bridge, in the French part of my home area, the acts of remembrance were initially very clear-cut occasions: the liberating armies had triumphed over Nazi evil and German occupation. There were plenty of reasons to celebrate victory and to honour the dead as martyrs in the great battle between good and evil. No ambiguity here – at first. Only as the years went by and more details came to the fore about acts of French collaboration with Hitler and his occupying forces as well as heroic acts of resistance. As trust was established between both the leaders and the people on both sides of the border, a more nuanced picture began to emerge. French self-critique with regard to anti-Semitic actions and cooperation with the German Holocaust machinery joined the ongoing German Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which is the process of coming to terms with the past.6 Increasingly, German and French people took part in each other’s acts of remembrance and joined in the common task of building a new Europe on trust, without borders and without mutual vilification. The public recognition of the violent past and its long shadow provided the ground on which a new trust and a fresh hope for a better future in Europe and beyond could be cultivated.7 The image of French president François Mitterrand and German chancellor Helmut Kohl holding hands in September 1984, when remembering the beginning of the First World War seventy years earlier and recalling the horrors of the violent past in Franco–German relations, offers a stark witness to this new culture of remembrance and emerging

For a discussion of the ongoing efforts of dealing with the past in Germany, see Stephen Green, Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future (London: Haus Publishing, 2014), 234–76. 7 Cf. Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, 3rd ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2018), 15. 6

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trust beyond former borders, suspicion, hatred and enmity. This new culture of recollection does not remove the guilt of the past; rather it is inspired by a search for a radically different approach to the future. Here, the work of remembering stands in the service of hope, promoting the reconciliation of peoples and the transformation of Europe and the world. The emerging French–German culture of remembering, then, does not deny the horrors of the past; rather it attempts to face the violent past together and thus retrieves new energy for a constructive dynamics of hope.8 This development of a new culture of publicly remembering the dead soldiers and the victims of the many wars and of the Holocaust is a first step on the road to peace in Europe and beyond. However, not everybody wishes to walk along this road of peace. Memories of the war can also be used for radically different purposes.9 It has, at times, been suggested that countries without a written constitution might have a greater need than other countries to cultivate collective memories and public occasions in order to promote a shared feeling of belonging among its citizenship. I have no way of testing this hypothesis scientifically. But I can, of course, share in the observation that the memories of at least the two world wars are very central to the public recollection and assessment of what may count as Britishness in the United Kingdom – especially, in times marked by Brexit. Of course, so much suffering and so much horror had been inflicted on the people in the United Kingdom during the two world wars. When visiting Coventry Cathedral, one is vividly reminded of the horrible suffering of people in Britain as a result of German raids and attacks. This must never be forgotten (Figure 5.2). But what are we doing with this memory of large-scale suffering afflicted on the people in Britain? Do we allow this memory to motivate a new nationalistic revival? Do we overlook how certain elements in this country compensate their lack of imagination on how to shape the future of Britain in cooperation with other European countries, by using war memories in order to recall a great past able to single out Britain from the rest? Moreover, why is there in British public culture such an obsession with the glorious past and so little visible effort to reflect on the future – a future built together with, rather than separated from, others? The daily diet of TV war references can be perplexing.10 The large-scale absence of public imagining of a collective

It saddens me when in the press I sometimes detect an unwillingness to grasp this dynamics of reconciliation and hope behind the Franco-German commitment to the European project which so much transcends any, however important, concern and conflict about economic and monetary matters. 9 Aleida Assmann has discussed the ambiguity of remembering in a series of important studies. See, especially, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: C. H. Beck [1999] 2018); Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit; and Aleida Assmann, Formen des Vergessens, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018). 10 See, for example, John Cleese making fun of this obsession with war in the Fawlty Towers episode ‘Don’t mention the War’ of October 1975. 8

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FIGURE 5.2  Coventry Cathedral today. © Werner G. Jeanrond.

European and global future is troubling. The obvious compensation for the lack of future imagination by projecting an ever more glorious and harmonious past is alarming. Might not the preservation of the ruined and wounded cathedral alongside the newly constructed cathedral at Coventry offer a powerful symbol for a constructive approach both to multinational remembering and to a cooperative focus on a common future of people in Europe and beyond? Many people in Britain and from other nations, including Germany, contributed to the cost of the new cathedral in Coventry. Moreover, the Coventry Cross of Nails and the related community and growing international movement have been powerful icons of the possibility of reconciliation and peace building in our war-torn world.11 Memories are never innocent; they can even be dangerous.12 What do we do with them? How ought we to cultivate them in a digital age?13 Britain has been engaged in a number of wars in living memory: from Falkland to Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya and back to Iraq and Syria. Of course, all the dead soldiers and all other victims of these wars need to be remembered. However, in the process of doing so we must be careful in not trying to justify war as such, when we remember previous

For more information visit http:​//www​.cove​ntryc​athed​ral.o​rg.uk​/ccn/​about​-us-2​/ Cf. Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, 276f. 13 For a discussion of the challenges of remembering in our digital age, see Assmann, Erinnerungsräume, 411–13. 11 12

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wars. War is and remains evil. It may at times be the lesser of two evils. But that still makes it evil. Do our acts of remembrance glorify war in general and our own wars in particular? Or do they include a deeper recollection of the origins, horrors and evil of war? Do our acts of remembrance nurture hope? Do our acts of remembrance stand in the service of building future trust, reconciliation and peace or do they promote future warfare? Do our memorials give rise to critical and self-critical reflection or do they suppress constructive thinking in order to glorify militarism in conjunction with rising nationalism? In view of the current crisis of trust – the crisis of trust between citizens and their governing institutions and the crisis of trust between different national governments – we need a critical and self-critical assessment of the relationship between memory and hope.

The subversive power of remembering The German theologian Johann Baptist Metz (b. 1928) has provided a number of signposts for possible approaches to the relationship between memory and hope in the context of his reflections on human suffering and human future. Writing about the dialectic of human progress and hope, Metz does not call for some sort of enmity between Christian praxis, on the one hand, and science or technological development, on the other. Rather, he calls for a consideration of what kind of human beings we wish to be in view of what we have done to one another in the past. Metz demands a deeper awareness of human suffering: Remembering suffering compels us to look upon the public theatrum mundi not only from the perspective of the ones who have made it and arrived, but also the vanquished and the victims.14 The essential dynamics of history is the memory of suffering as the negative awareness of the freedom that is to come, and as a stimulus to act within the horizon of this history in such a way as to overcome suffering.15 Metz points to the ambiguous nature of any act of remembering. Memory may well present itself as a bourgeois counterfigure to hope when memory offers to dispense us from risking the future.16 Memory can easily become

Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology [German original 1977], trans. and ed. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Crossroad, 2007), 102. 15 Ibid., 104. 16 Cf. ibid., 105. 14

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false consciousness when, for instance, wars are recalled merely as the feat of bravery and shared adventure. Then the past appears as a glorious paradise filtered through clichés of harmlessness. All dimensions of danger and challenge have been removed. Then memory becomes the opium of and for the people.17 Genuine remembering, however, can be dangerous. It pierces the ruling structures of plausibility and optimism and it confronts us with the incalculable afflictions from the past. Such memories challenge our approaches to the present, to ourselves and to who we wish to be in the future. Such memories are the enemies of power structures and regimes that wish to suppress trust, emancipation and otherness and to rally people around a harmonious projection of a past that is to legitimize present power. People’s subjugation begins when their memories are taken away. Every colonization takes its principle here. And every resistance to oppression is nourished by the subversive power of remembered suffering. This memory of suffering is always standing up against the modern cynic of power politics.18 Remembering past suffering, this memoria passionis, requires more than mere analytical argument; it needs narrative mediation, a personal and communal act of facing up to our history – rather than a merely individual, private or collective approach to what appears acceptable in our real or imagined past. Narrating the horrors of our past calls for what many poets, novelists and movie directors have attempted to do, namely to pay attention not to abstract notions of suffering, but to the concrete personal and communal experience of suffering and ensuing questions of meaning. In the context of remembering the horrors of the First World War, the Irish author Sebastian Barry’s novel: A Long Long Way comes to mind.19 This novel highlights the difference between, on the one hand, recalling a past war in a spirit of militarism and triumphalism, and, on the other hand, as an act of remembrance, where the named victims of war on all sides are remembered in terms of concrete personal experiences and as the antidotes of a history of the triumph of bravery and victory. When engaging in this sort of critical and self-critical remembrance, we can no longer escape the burning and vexing questions of humankind. Not only the social and political power of the rich and ruling classes, but indeed all human action must be challenged in terms of what it has contributed to human suffering, to human exploitation, to warfare, and to retrospective attempts at coating the sour memories of the losers of history with the

Cf. ibid. Ibid., 106. 19 Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). 17 18

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sweetness of nationalistic pride and patriotic self-righteousness. Such an effort to rehabilitate the memory of suffering and oppression against the powerful interests of ruling groups, not transparent corporate structures, manipulative media networks, abusive power structures in the church, and untrusting governments in our quickly globalizing world creates a new space for hope. In this sense, subversive memory and hope belong together. Here, the act of remembering is rooted in persons and communities rather than in isolated individuals and interest-laden collectives. In other words, the person becomes the subject and the agent of remembering rather than the mere object of collective memorial schemes and political strategies. However, the personalization or emotional charging of memory is never free of interests. All acts of remembering are always already characterized by mediation and processing. There is no pure memory. ‘We do not react to historical facts, but always already to representations, assessments and evaluations of facts.’20 Every act of remembering involves hermeneutical efforts, struggles and choices. Metz adds one further dimension to the reflection on memory and hope: how can we today remember the Holocaust? How can any attempt of the human mind function undisturbed and uninterrupted in view of the Shoah?21 Efforts to silence this memory through forms of historical interpretation and explanation or through arguing that it belongs to the past and no longer to the present risk leading us into ‘cultural amnesia’. Metz wishes to avoid such forgetfulness and therefore reminds us of the intimate relationship between our remembering Auschwitz and attitudes to our own humanity.22 We live in a time when we store and save our information and memories on ever more powerful hard disks, memory sticks and distant clouds. However, this act of saving our memories risks turning into its opposite: storing, saving and archiving can also mean forgetting.23 ‘Cultural amnesia’ means the closure of the pain of our memories in the cultural memory of human beings.24 This closure can be achieved by removing all traces

Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, 273. Cf. Pierre-Yves Materne, La condition de disciple: Éthique et politique chez J. B. Metz et S. Hauerwas (Paris: Cerf, 2013), 250–4. 22 Johann Baptist Metz, Zum Begriff der neuen Politischen Theologie 1967-1997 (Mainz: Grünewald, 1997), 149–55. For a discussion of the difficulty of remembering the Holocaust in Germany and beyond, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1993), esp. 17–90; and Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1981). Already in 1967, Ulrich Simon wrote: ‘We have neither gassed, nor been gassed, and stand outside the whole horrible thing. On the other hand we share the “banality” of the guards, with their family cares, ordinary talents and tastes. … We are … potentially part of the dishonouring and the dishonoured humanity and cannot answer “What is Man?” without comparing the phenomena of Auschwitz with our own physical and spiritual make-up.’ Simon, A Theology of Auschwitz (London: SPCK, 1978 [1967]), 28f. 23 Cf. Metz, Zum Begriff der neuen Politischen Theologie 1967-1997, 150. 24 Ibid. 20 21

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of human memory, just as the Nazi machinery attempted to do when the murdered Jews in Auschwitz and other death camps were deprived of their names, personal history, possessions, hair, teeth, glasses, rings, shoes, burying places and relationships. The victims were de-humanized in this process of annihilation. However, this can also be affected when we pretend to have interpreted the experience of oppression through adequate forms of analysis and explanation, that is, scientifically and academically. Thus, we are fully capable of killing our potentially subversive memories in different ways and on different levels of our culture.25 If, however, we wish to retrieve these subversive memories, we need to face up to the pain of suffering which they contain. This is particularly acute with any attempt to remember the Shoah now when nearly all its survivors are dead and thus no longer able to confront us directly and personally with living memories. How can we remember Auschwitz now? Metz suggests that this can only be attempted with the help of a form of ‘historiobiography’ which at the same time is supported by a culture of remembering that is aware of the various dangers of forgetfulness – including those that emanate from our scientific and academic historicizing forms of representation.26 The experience of the personal suffering at Auschwitz will always be part of our deeper history as human beings and it affects all human hope. Fundamental trust in the goodness of human beings has been shattered by this machinery of organized murder and extermination. Deep down we all know, even when we try to forget it, that our human species has been wounded at Auschwitz – wounded forever. We can no longer naively trust in our own humanity. Our only chance to deal with this burning wound is not to declare it healed, to forget about it, or to explain it away, but to face it, accept it and attend to it by recalling the concrete histories of the victims of the Holocaust including its so-called survivors, who carried the pain of their memories as long as they lived.27 The challenge of such remembering will always involve the remembering and imagining of the pain of others.28 This will only be possible if we

See also, Assmann, Formen des Vergessens, 21–6; and Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, 169–82. 26 Cf. ibid., 152. See also Aleida Assmann’s, discussion of the difference between the culture of remembering (Erinnerungskultur) and the politics of history (Geschichtspolitik) in Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, 274–9. 27 See, for example, the narrative and reflections by a son of a Holocaust surviving father, in Göran Rosenberg, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, trans. Sarah Death (London: Granta Books, 2014). For a promising local effort to remember the Holocaust, see Monica Hirsch, ed., Glöm aldrig: Fem vittnen från förintelsen (Gothenburg: Levande Historia i Göteborg, 2018). 28 See Michael Rothberg, ‘Trauma, Memory, Holocaust’, in Memory: A History, ed. Dmitri Nikulin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 280–90, here 282: ‘Historical and philosophical reflection on the meaning of the genocide and its aftermath is necessary to prevent the conjunction of trauma, memory, and the Holocaust from degrading into common sense and losing the disruptive force it ought to possess.’ 25

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establish what Metz has called for, namely a new anamnetic culture, that is, a culture of genuine remembrance ready to recollect the suffering and pain, which we human beings have afflicted on each other, on God and on God’s creation, and on our own emerging selves.29 Our human vocation is at stake in every act of forgetting and of remembrance. That is why every act of recollection ought to include the suffering of the others if we genuinely want to face a future and not only escape from the present to a supposedly glorified past. The English word re-membering signals metaphorically the need to reorganize the members of a group or a body. My contention is that this group must ultimately include all of humanity – past, present and future – within the whole of creation. The suffering of one member of humanity requires the re-membering of all. There is no hope if there is no hope for all.

Memory and hope As we have seen so far, embracing the subversive dimension of our memories opens up space for hope, for a future which we can face not without but only together with the victims of the past and their sufferings. However, like with memory, so with hope: both are ambiguous concepts, and we need to consider their ambiguities with critical and self-critical attention. Moreover, as Jan Assmann has stressed, it would be wrong ‘to simply associate the memory aspect of culture with the past and the progress aspect with the future. The memory aspect is about the past and the future.’30 In Chapter 1, I proposed to distinguish between hopes, hope and radical hope. Hope differs from the array of hopes which we may entertain at a given moment. Hope directs our attention to the future, to future possibilities of a shared life with others, to possibilities that come to us even beyond our own creative possibilities. Hope is a gift, not the result of my own efforts. In the traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, hope appears as a future made possible by God. Hope does not expect more of the same; rather hope expects change, transcendence and transformation. ‘It nourishes a feeling of being part of something greater, further, something more human and lasting.’31 It anticipates a future fulfilment that is yet to be given, that is beyond the control and imagination of the present. In that

Metz, Zum Begriff der neuen Politischen Theologie 1967-1997, 152. See also Aleida Assmann’s important contribution to the establishment of a critical and self-critical culture of remembering in Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. 30 Jan Assmann, ‘Memory and Culture’, in Memory: A History, ed. Dmitri Nikulin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 325–49, here 327. 31 Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, 6. 29

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sense, hope has to do with the experience of transition.32 Like memory, hope is potentially subversive: it challenges the status quo by imagining that things could be different. All who depend on the present state of things must fear the subversive power of hope. Jewish, Christian and Muslim approaches to hope envisage the liberation of our many and different human hopes through hope in God’s gift of transformation and reconciliation. Hope is relational. It involves the particular relationships of persons to each other, to God, to God’s continuing creation and reconciliation, and to our own emerging selves. Ultimately, hope looks forward even to the reconciling of our memories – our memories of otherness, suffering, violence, hatred, oppression, injustice, war, enmity, colonialism, aggression, exploitation and multiple victimhood.33 Hope can never be limited to a particular tradition. Although religious traditions, at best, have been guardians and proclaimers of hope; at times they have tried to control the dynamics of hope in order to preserve existing power structures, hierarchies and special interests. Sadly, they have sometimes proclaimed mere hopes rather than hope. Ultimately, as we have seen, hope points towards radical hope. As discussed in Chapter 1, radical hope differs from hope not in substance, but in degree. Radical hope denies any closure by whatever systems of hope. We can only engage in radical hope through trust and love. Radical hope is only possible for people who are prepared to engage in radical acts of re-membering and of reconciling their memories. Therefore, our acts of remembrance need to be inclusive of all the pain in the past, the broken trust between people, and the shattered trust in humanity itself. As a theologian, I am conscious of the fact that at the very depth of Christian life in this world we find the recognition of the painful memories of human failure and suffering. Augustine and other theologians since have spoken of original sin as if it were a biological condition of humankind. However, we need to recall that the symbol of original sin does not refer to a biological predicament, but to a religious, cultural and social dynamics.34 All human beings have been affected by the failures and sins of others, and so have we.35 Even our war memorials and our acts of remembrance are affected and afflicted by further violence, war and oppression. All our war memorials are injured. How can we re-member in a way that opens our perspectives afresh for trust and hope beyond old enmities and across strategic measures of political compensation?

Cf. ibid., 11. Cf. Alan D. Falconer, ed., Reconciling Memories (Dublin: Columba Press, 1988). This collection of essays addresses the prospect of reconciliation in Northern Ireland. 34 Cf. Paul Ricoœur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 254. See also Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 63f. 35 Hence, Aleida Assmann refers to the long shadow of the past: Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. 32 33

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We have seen that personal and communal memories and acts of remembering are potentially subversive. They can disclose our deepest question of who we are and whom we might like to become. Therefore, as eschatological subjects, we must be careful not to be pressed into acts of remembering which are orchestrated for us by those systems and powers that have an interest in controlling our memories and our social and religious forms of embodiment. The establishment of a genuinely anamnetic culture can only ever be achieved from below. As eschatological agents we need to regain power over the responsibility for our memories. We need to engage in narrative and reflective action and thus rediscover the dynamic space of hope. But we must also make sure, that we do not fall into the trap of ignoring the suffering of those whom we do not like or prefer not to remember. Of course, our memories are always selective, but our anamnetic culture must widen its perspective to all accounts of suffering, because in every act of suffering, the whole of the creation project in this universe is at stake. If on Remembrance Days, for example, we care to remember only our own dead soldiers and not all the victims of wars and oppression and the great caesura of the Holocaust,36 we merely create space for our own hopes, but not for human hope, and most certainly not for radical hope. Once again, this is not to deny that some wars may be justified, though always only as the lesser evil. Rather, this is to argue that a future can only be built on acts of re-membering and reconciliation that comprise all members of our human family, past, present and future, even our enemies. The example of soldiers during the First World War crossing the trenches and singing Christmas carols together in a fraternal spirit comes to mind here. We need larger religious conversations on hope and eschatology. In this respect, we have already referred to Anthony Kelly’s call for the promotion of an inter-hope dialogue.37 Moreover, radical hope always includes acts of transcendence – transcending national borders and social, cultural and religious boundaries on the way towards an appropriate perspective on all creation. This in turn does not exclude care for the particular, for my immediate neighbours and street, village and town, region, culture and church, synagogue and mosque. However, nation states and religious communities that proclaim the gospel of selective humanity, colonial aspirations and exclusive ownership of memories do not promote hope. No nation can claim to be or to represent the whole of humanity; no nation can claim the exclusive right to define humanity or human rights; and no nation can offer space enough to deal adequately with its own subversive memories. We thus require larger bodies of re-membering than nation states.

Cf. Cohen, The Tremendum, 27–58. See Chapter 3.

36 37

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In Chapter 8, I shall consider to what extent Europe might provide the framework for such an emerging larger community of remembering and hope.38 Returning to the wounded war memorial in my hometown, I begin to relate to the pain arising from false and selective acts of remembering. Ultimately, such distorted acts of remembrance will only lead to more wars and violence, to more injured humanity and violated creation. However, when reading the perforated names of the fallen men on the repeatedly shelled bronze plates, I realize afresh the need to build new trust in this world, recount and face memories – even the painful memories of others – and thus confront the challenge of hope. Applying Aleida Assmann’s terminology, this war memorial was originally conceived of as a memorial (Gedenkort) for the fallen soldiers from the First World War. However, once wounded during the Second World War, the memorial was transformed into a traumatic place (traumatischer Ort). From a lieu de mémoire (place of remembering), it became a milieu de mémoire (context of remembering) that now embodies and highlights the trauma of both world wars and of war in general.39 From contemplating this traumatized memorial, new political energy may unfold and a new sense of belonging and inclusive cultural vocation may emerge for trust, transcendence, confession, conversion and transformation.40 Instead of being mere objects of imposed memories of glory, we could become subjects, agents of hope, capable of building genuine communities of hope beyond the boundaries and borders that have brought so much evil and suffering in the past. We need objects that can remind us of our history and that are capable of interrupting our thinking about ourselves, our social memory, our explicit or implicit identities. We need mnemonic institutions.41 It would seem that the wounded war memorial in my hometown as well as the new cathedral building at Coventry besides its ruined predecessor provide examples of such powerful institutional and imaginative challenges to our social and cultural memory42 and thus open up a new and fertile space for hope.

Cf. ‘Europa als Erinnerungsgemeinschaft’, in Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, 3rd ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2018), 250–71. 39 Cf. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume, 337–9. 40 Cf. ibid., 408: ‘Solche an einen individuellen oder kollektiven Träger gebundene Erinnerung ist grundsätzlich perspektivisch angelegt; von einer bestimmten Gegenwart aus wird ein Ausschnitt der Vergangenheit auf eine Weise beleuchtet, daß er einen Zukunftshorizont freigibt.’ 41 Jan Assmann, ‘Memory and Culture’, 332: ‘This interaction between a remembering mind and a reminding object is the reason why the realm of these things – especially the things meant as reminders, that is, mnemonic institutions – has to be included in our concept of memory.’ 42 Cf. also ibid., 338f.: ‘We are presently living through a period of transition from communicative to cultural memory; the main problem is how to preserve the personal memories of holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses of the catastrophies in the context of World War II, and how to transform them into durable forms of cultural memory that may be transmitted to later generations.’ 38

6 Death and hope

The reality of death We human beings share with all other living beings the fate that we are born and that we die. However, only we humans seem to be conscious of the fact that we are conditioned by time, space, and language, and that in one way or another we must relate to these conditions of our existence. Some expressions of existential philosophy tended to attribute more significance to the fact that every human being must die her or his own individual death than to the fact that we also have been born and thus been invited to live together in this universe in some form of relationship and community. It is undoubtedly the duty of philosophers and theologians to reflect on death, but not outside the context of life. However, more recently, in Western culture, death has disappeared more and more from public view and collective consciousness. Death has been relegated to the private and medical sphere. If at all discussed in public, death is considered to be an unfortunate event whose disruptive nature ought to be overcome as soon as possible by scientific means. Moreover, the ever more mediatized approach to all aspects of our existence presents us with the illusion of having some sort of power even over death: by remote control we can switch off any platform on which death is being staged, celebrated and painted in the most graphic terms. Electronic and other games provide their players with multiple lives. Thus, death after all may not be as real as once feared. Today many people consider death to be a tragic accident of fate or the result of medical failure, if they are at all willing to entertain the prospect of their own mortality – and not only focus on the mortality of others. Attitudes to death have always been shaped by cultural, religious, social, political, economic and scientific patterns.1 In this sense, ‘death’ has a

See, for example, Marianne Gronemeyer, Das Leben als letzte Gelegenheit: Sicherheitsbedürf­ nisse und Zeitknappheit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft), 1993. 1

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rich and varied history. For example, not so long ago, Christians prayed for the grace to be spared from sudden death so as to be able to order their relationships with others and with God once and for all at the end of their life, shortly before facing their creator and judge. Nowadays, many Christians pray for the gift of a sudden death. Many people prefer to be absent when death becomes present.2 Overall, Western culture today seems rather reluctant to deal with death. Nevertheless, there is an increasing tendency among contemporaries, including Christians, to organize their own funeral services in the most detailed fashion. This seems paradoxical, however only at first glance: deep down such people would like to exert at least some power beyond their own passing and thus to organize to some extent even how others affected by their departure ought to remember them. In contemporary Western culture one finds it hard to let go of life, to die. Moreover, the increasing concern, even among Christians, to defend the right to determine the hour of their own death, when life threatens to become unbearable, and to claim this to be a human right, points to this ongoing power struggle. Who owns my death if not me? My death is mine. I am the master over my own death. At least that! At the same time, we witness a near total decline in expressions of mourning outside the private sphere.3 We know from experience that mourning a loved one amounts not only to emotional upheaval but also to physical pain. Yet we try to avoid displaying our pain over the loss of family and friends in public. The work of mourning and related vulnerable and painful experiences have been relegated to the private realm. In my childhood and youth in the Saarland, I recall people wearing black ribbons or black clothes as external signs of their state of mourning. That helped everybody concerned to deal respectfully with their situation and with the possible pain experienced during the process of mourning. However, a precondition of adequate respect for the mourners is the recognition of our mortality, of the fact of our death. Also, the tradition of the wake in Irish culture, for example, is now fast disappearing. ‘Indecorous many a wake may have been, but by making death a familiar it prevented repression and gave social expression to a faith which affirms the transience not only of life but also of death.’4 Death is good neither for a certain kind of public morale nor for business because it is disruptive. Minimizing such disruption in the interest of an

Eberhard Jüngel, Death: The Riddle and the Mystery, trans. Iain and Ute Nicol (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1975), 10, quotes Epicuros: ‘Death, the most terrifying evil, does not concern us. For as long as we are, death is not there; when it is, we are not.’ German original: Tod, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart/Berlin: Kreuz Verlag, 1973 [1971]), 18. 3 For a concise overview over attitudes to death and mourning in some major religious traditions, see Georg Schwikart, Tod und Trauer in den Weltreligionen (Kevelaer: Topos, 2007). 4 Daly, Creation and Redemption, 205. 2

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undisturbed public life led to two forms of social action: the organized public manifestation of marking the departure of a person in some act of burial or memorial service and the relegation of the work of mourning to the private sphere. The other side of this development is the ever-decreasing social ability to articulate appropriately our relationship to mortality and death in general and to speak about my own personal death in particular. Moreover, a repressed sense of human mortality also threatens to limit the development of a culture of hope. In this chapter, I shall try to retrieve an appropriate sense of death that allows the development of a culture of hope. As in the other chapters of this book, I shall deal with death from a Christian theological perspective but with the occasional view to other traditions and their approaches to death, dying and hope.5 The German theologian Eberhard Jüngel’s (b. 1934) celebrated book on death culminates in the phrase: ‘The essential nature of death is relationlessness.’6 And Jüngel invites the reader to consider the new relation which only God can create when we ourselves are unable to relate anymore at all: Death must be reduced to that limit which no man [Mensch] can set, for no man can abolish it. Death must be and must become what Jesus Christ has made it: the limit to man which is set by God alone, who, in our total powerlessness, never abuses his power. For when there is nothing we can do, he is there on our behalf. His purposes are wonderful and his power great.7 Benefitting from Jüngel’s insights into human death and the implications of these insights for a human life, I wish to discuss the relationship between death and love more closely, especially the relationship between death, understood here as the total absence of relationships, on the one hand, and love and its potential for eternal relationships, on the other hand. I shall approach this relationship in the light of the increasingly multireligious context of Christian theology. Moreover, I shall offer some reflections on the potential of love to enable eternal relationships and on the hope to which these relationships give rise. In critical conversation with Jüngel, I argue that love prompts us to consider human death in general and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in particular, within a much wider religious and interreligious horizon. In line with my overall argument in this book, hope

In my book Call and Response: The Challenge of Christian Life (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, and New York: Continuum, 1995), 45–65, I have treated of death and life in Jesus Christ. Since then I have become more critical of Eberhard Jüngel’s concept of Ganztodtheorie. I have also seen the need to develop an appropriate understanding of the human soul. 6 Ibid., 135 (Tod, 171). 7 Ibid., 136 (Tod, 171). 5

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will be approached as the space-time potential for relationship which love has opened for us.

Towards a theology of death Eberhard Jüngel has attempted to guide contemporary Christian thinking towards a more responsive and responsible theology of death. In a number of publications he has approached death as a mystery.8 We human beings are able to talk about the process of dying and we can speak about the dead, yet we cannot grasp the phenomenon of death itself. Jüngel reminds us of the difference between a riddle (Geheimnis) and a mystery: A riddle can be disclosed, whereas, a mystery requires an ever-deeper involvement. Thus, a mystery becomes more mysterious and more interesting the more one enters into contemplating it.9 Therefore, we ought to look at life rather than at what is dead in order to penetrate more deeply the mystery of death and its impact on life.10 Moreover, Jüngel distinguishes between death as the natural end to human life and death as the premature or unnatural end to life. We ought to accept the former but fight the latter. When approaching the phenomenon of our death, one of the difficulties lies in our human inability to find an appropriate language. Our death remains foreign to us, even though it concerns us all so intimately and dramatically.11 Our death has the character of something that happens to us, something we experience passively.12 We do not like to become victims of our death and to suffer the concomitant destruction of our lives. We may even go as far as to hate our death. The non-believer can only hate death, while a life of faith may entail the mocking of the power of death.13 Jüngel considers the mystery of death both in the light of the Christian experience with Jesus Christ and his painful death on the cross and in the light of the Pauline emphasis on the word of the cross. ‘For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God’ (1 Cor. 1:18).14 We experience our death as the ultimate threat to all of our relationships – our relationship to our fellow human beings, to the universe, to God, and to

In addition to Death: The Riddle and the Mystery, see especially, ‘Der Tod als Geheimnis des Lebens’, in Entsprechungen: Gott – Wahrheit – Mensch. Theologische Erörterungen, ed. Eberhard Jüngel (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1980), 327–54. 9 Cf. ‘Der Tod als Geheimnis des Lebens’, 330. 10 Cf. ibid., 331. 11 Cf. ibid., 333. 12 Cf. ibid., 344. 13 Cf. ibid., 349–51. 14 Jüngel, Death, 28 (Tod, 41). 8

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our own selves. Death implies the breakdown of all of these relationships at once. ‘Death is the entrance into, the event of total relationlessness.’15 Death can be the result not merely of biological limitation, but also of a sinful drive towards relationlessness. Inspired by his predilection of Pauline christology, Jüngel moves his theology of death into the horizon of human sinfulness.16 Who would not wish to agree with Jüngel that any sinful drive towards relationlessness leads to some form or manifestation of death? Hence, it seems wise to distinguish between death as a result of sin and death as the biological or natural end of our life. This distinction allows us better to appreciate the wider spectrum of the phenomenon of death – social death,17 psychological death, political death, (social) media death, and biological death. All forms of death threaten the foundations of human life, but not all can be said to be ordained by God.18 Before entering more closely into a discussion with Jüngel’s christological approach to human death, it might be advisable to dwell a bit longer on the phenomenon of death as the ultimate boundary of human life as willed and created by God. Human life is more than mere life on its way to death, more than Sein zum Tode (Martin Heidegger).19 It is life also empowered to flourish in relationships precisely because of its boundaries. In this context, Hannah Arendt stressed the fact of natality, ‘in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted’: It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’20

‘Der Tod als Geheimnis des Lebens’, 340: ‘The drive into relationlessness is the drive towards death. And death itself is the result of this drive into relationlessness: the occasion in which even the last relationship collapses – my relationship with my own self.’ 16 Cf. ibid., 340f. 17 See also Hans-Peter Hasenfratz, Der Tod in der Welt der Religionen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), 34–8. 18 For a more detailed discussion of Christian approaches to death from the perspective of sin and original sin see Werner G. Jeanrond, Call and Response, 51–9. 19 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 13th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1976), 234. 20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 247. 15

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Our life is a life which does not owe itself to itself.21 It comes to us as ‘given’ (or as a ‘gift’) and as a challenge, as a task, and, at times, even as a burden. Human life has a beginning and an end, and it would be inappropriate to consider its potential only from the perspective of its ending, from death, and not also from the perspective of its beginning, from birth. Both birth and death ultimately remain mysteries to us, yet both present themselves to us as ‘gifts’. These gifts include at once clear boundaries and an invitation: an invitation to enter into the network of relationships available to us here and now, a network which is dynamic and temporal; however, it will come to an end in our death. Hence, assessing the possibility and the development of this dynamic network of relationships into which we are born opens up the potential of love. ‘For love is strong as death’ (Song 8:6). If death represents the ultimate breakdown of our human network of relationships, and love represents the God-given potential of relationality, then we need to explore more closely how love and death relate to one another.

Love and death It is not easy to talk about love in our time when discourses on love so often have been reduced to the level of romanticizing, sentimentalizing and consumption. However, when we attempt to free our perspective on love from the constraints of mere emotion, mere feeling, and mere paradise-like sentiments in order to appreciate the concrete work of love, that is, the work of relating to others as others with respect, attention and the desire to enter into a mutually challenging union, then we might be able to begin to explore the transformative potential of love. The other to whom I am invited to relate may be the human other, God as the radical other, or may even be referring to the otherness of my own self. Exploring the genuine otherness of the other does not necessarily suggest a happy experience. Moreover, as Thomas Aquinas reminded us, we must not confuse loving with liking, for the otherness we see in love we may not necessarily like. Thus, nobody can force us to like our enemies. The commandment to love, then, aims at a much deeper encounter with otherness. In trying to love our enemies, we make the effort to relate to them beyond what they have done to us; we attempt to relate to their own

See also Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Recht auf Leben – Recht auf Sterben’, in Entsprechungen: Gott – Wahrheit – Mensch. Theologische Erörterungen, ed. Eberhard Jüngel (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1980), 322–6, here 323: ‘The humanity of the human life has its criterion in the freedom through which human beings affirm their own affirmation through God as a blessing which limits them. The human being is only a human being within limits.’ 21

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divine vocation as human beings in their own right and relational praxis. Like us they carry God’s image. Their human dignity transcends their particular failures and sins.22 Thus, loving the other relates more deeply to the divinely ordained dignity and vocation of the other, to the mystery of the other. The commandment to love the other, including the love for my mysterious self as other, opens a new horizon for human relationship. The Christian gospels confirm the Jewish commandment to love in the Torah as well as the biblical insights into the potential of love. The gospels do not introduce a different or new kind of love; rather, they show how Jesus of Nazareth responded faithfully to the concrete challenges of love throughout his life, ministry, death and resurrection.23 Jesus remained totally committed to the praxis of love and thus at one with God’s own nature, so concisely described in 1 John (1 Jn 4:8 and 16): ‘God is love.’ Therefore, in the way Jesus related to his fellow humans, friends and foes alike, he powerfully explored the depth of love and its transformative potential for humankind – in and beyond, though never apart from, his own Jewish upbringing and religious tradition. It must be one of the most tragic misunderstandings in Christian theology to reduce this God-given virtue of love to an inner-Christian doctrine. When, for instance, Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Anders Nygren and Eberhard Jüngel, however differently, speak of Christian love, they are reducing the power of love merely to a Christian horizon instead of appreciating the capacity of all genuine love to enlarge any human horizon. In Chapter 3, we have discussed the inappropriateness of reducing God’s gift of love to Christian love.24 However, once we have freed love from the status of an orthodox doctrine to a transformative praxis in which the mystery of the human being and the mystery of God can be seriously explored, love will be empowered afresh to demonstrate its true potential to change all relationships for the better. Thus, love becomes significant for all occasions of human encounter and relationship. It also precedes interreligious dialogue by inviting people of different religious traditions to relate to each other in a mutually respectful search for the best point of entry into an ever-deeper exploration of the mystery of the human and the divine.25 A deepened praxis of love may well be the result of an actual encounter between people from different religions and between their mutually constructive and critical understanding of the

Cf. Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 80. Cf. ibid., 29–30. 24 Cf. also Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 100–3. 25 Cf. Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Toward an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love’, in Interreligious Hermeneutics, eds. Catherine Cornille and Christopher Conway, Interreligious Dialogue Series, vol. 2 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010), 44–60. 22 23

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others’ traditions as well as of their own traditions. Here, a hermeneutics of love is required.26 Hence, I do not wish to limit interreligious hermeneutics only to the dialogue between well-defined traditions, but to take this reflection further into the direction of a more radical exploration of human possibilities of meeting self and other. Therefore, it is unnecessary to negotiate any kind of multireligious doctrine of love prior to the actual encounter and ensuing praxis of love. Rather, accepting the challenge of love will steer ecumenical and interreligious meetings and deliberations to a different and, I believe, more promising level. The reflection on the actual and possible praxis of love may also help to support the critical and self-critical exploration of love. Love is the God-given horizon through which people, cultures and religious traditions can be encountered, understood, explored, assessed and transformed. Criteria of truth within and between traditions must, of course, be developed, however not without reference to human communication and love, but on the basis of both.27 A critical and self-critical hermeneutics of love might be able to liberate approaches to religion and to religious selfhood and otherness from constructing religious identities at the expense of religious others, at times assumed to be totally other, and for an in-depth encounter and relational exploration of a shared conversation of love. In loving conversations, differences do not pose a threat, but open up new possibilities. Differences, even conflicts, are the very occasions with which love deals and in which love can flourish. Love does not necessarily need or aspire to harmony; rather it aims at mutual understanding and recognition of otherness. Love cannot wait until the eschaton when all differences are said to be overcome – if indeed they would need to be overcome at all. Rather, love is the eschatological force par excellence, and this insight encourages us to face genuine difference, conflict, and death without fear.28 Jüngel has retrieved the Old Testament insight into the important difference between death as the natural end of our life, on the one hand, and untimely death as a curse, on the other.29 Moreover, as we have seen above, he has reminded us of the biblical view of the possible relationship between death and sin. ‘Sin drives us into relationlessness. It renders us relationless. Death now is the result of this drive toward relationlessness. From the anthropological point of view then, death to this extent is not merely and not primarily an event at life’s end; rather it is constantly present as an active possibility in this drive toward relationlessness.’30 Therefore,

In Chapter 9 below, I shall return to the importance of a hermeneutics of love for inter-hope dialogue. 27 Jeanrond, ‘Toward an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love’, 59–60. 28 Cf. ibid., 60. 29 Jüngel, Death, 76 (Tod, 97). 30 Ibid., 78 (translation amended) (Tod, 99). 26

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with regard to Old Testament approaches to death, Jüngel distinguishes between two concepts of death: natural death that could be the fulfilment of a successful life in God’s presence, and hopeless death marked by the absence of relationships and the absence of God.31 In contrast to Old Testament approaches to death, Jüngel sees in the history of Jesus Christ a new struggle with death, namely God’s own struggle with death. According to the New Testament, ‘what death is all about is something which is decided by the death of Jesus Christ. In turn, what was decided in the death of Jesus Christ is disclosed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.’32 Jüngel offers an in-depth meditation on the presence of God in Jesus of Nazareth’s life, death and resurrection. ‘In surrendering himself as a man to men Jesus demonstrated the nearness of God. Jesus’s conduct no less than his proclamation was a parable of God’s nearness.’33 Victory over death was won ‘when God identified himself with the dead Jesus’.34 Here, out of the midst of the earthly relationlessness of death, God establishes a new relationship between God and human beings.35 Jüngel sees this new divine beginning intimately related to God’s very being as love. ‘When all relationships have been broken, only love can create new ones.’36 Thus, the resurrection of Jesus is the result of God’s creative and transformative love. In the death of Jesus Christ, God has revealed the extent of his love for each and every human being.37 The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ represent for Jüngel a radically new point of departure: ‘a beginning out of nothing not only as it was in the beginning (Gen. 1:1), but a new beginning out of the destructive nothingness of death, a new beginning in the midst of that total relationlessness, which must count as the result of a self-destructing life. Christian faith proclaims this new beginning as resurrection from the dead.’38 However, I wish to ask, is it right to speak in this context of a new relationship between God and his creation? Should not the resurrection of Jesus Christ rather be understood as a wonderful act of God who is love and who has been revealing his loving attention to humanity through Israel’s history and beyond all along? Jüngel is certainly right in arguing that love alone can open new relationships, where all relationships have been ended or broken down. God, who is love, loves endlessly so that the resurrection of Jesus Christ flows consistently out of this love. Moreover, the incarnation of God in Christ is a powerful and mysterious manifestation of God’s love as

Cf. ibid., 79 (Tod, 101). Ibid., 81 (Tod, 104). 33 Ibid., 100 (translation amended) (Tod, 127). 34 Ibid., 109 (Tod, 138). 35 Cf. ibid., 109 (Tod, 139). 36 Ibid., 110 (Tod, 139). 37 Cf. ‘Der Tod als Geheimnis des Lebens’, 352. 38 Ibid., 347. 31 32

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is God’s continuing presence in the Spirit. However, Jüngel tries to construct a christological novelty in the revelation of God’s love which conflicts with the testimony to God’s love and both its known and its (as yet) unknown expressions throughout the history of creation and the particular history and faith of Israel. As I have shown in A Theology of Love, Jüngel’s theology of love remains subordinated to his christological doctrine and does not account for the broader pluralist spectrum of biblical reflections on love.39 Rather, it centres on the Johannine community’s identification of God and love without discussing this particular community’s obsession with Christ’s sacrificial self-giving as the ultimate qualification of authentic love. Jüngel has not participated in the ongoing discussion on selfhood, subjectivity, justice, and mutuality. Who is this human self that is to grow into self-giving or selfsurrender? How do self-relationality and self-giving relate? What amounts to a just love? And, is it really the ideal of human love to correspond to divine love in terms of a full self-giving (kenosis)?40 These questions lead us back to christology and particularly to Jüngel’s approach to the death of Jesus Christ. Jüngel is, of course, correct in highlighting that in the Christ-event God’s love is made manifest in a powerful way. But God’s love is not new, rather, his incarnate expression adds significantly to the human insight and faith in the God who is love. This connection between the manifold expressions of God’s love is strangely absent in Jüngel’s theology. Here, the Jewish roots of any Christian concept of love are cut off. Moreover, approaches to love in other (religious) traditions are not part of Jüngel’s theological horizon.41 Nor does the created universe, its ecological challenges and its future perspectives enter into Jüngel’s thinking on the extent of love in any significant way.42 Nevertheless, we ought to be grateful for Jüngel’s reminder of how closely love and death are related but pursue this trajectory with a somewhat different appreciation of both otherness and radical otherness even within a Christian praxis of love. Thus, although God’s gift of love is not Christian, Christian

Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 131. Cf. ibid. See in this context also the critical comments by John B. Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1986]), 90–2. 41 Cf. ibid., 132. 42 Cf. the perceptive comment by George Newlands, ‘The Love of God and the Future of Theology: A Personal Engagement with Jüngel’s Work’, in The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel in His Sixtieth Year, ed. John Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 190–205, here 204: 39 40

Jüngel’s profound emphasis on the freedom of the Christian, based on Luther’s understanding of justification by faith, needs to be widened and applied directly to the whole created order as a reminder of the unconditional love of God which undergirds and invites to fulfilment all that is. This is not enthusiasm but eschatological realism. The Reformation stress on justification needs to be directed outwards towards the service of others.

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discipleship of Jesus will always be committed to the gift and challenges of love. That commitment, however, obliges Christian disciples to take the challenge of otherness and of God’s radical otherness very seriously indeed. Rather than blindly following Jesus or copying his particular way of love within the circumstances of his time, place and language, his disciples need to discern always afresh what the course of love, critically and self-critically, might entail in their particular situation. Hence, christology, at best, is a reflection on God’s love, but God’s love is never exhausted by christology.43 I shall have to return to this complex of questions in Chapter 9.

Love and death in an age of interreligious encounter The Johannine community saw clearly the interconnection between love for the brothers (and sisters) of this particular community, on the one hand, and love for God, on the other hand. However, their overall inward-looking mentality defined the horizon of their love in narrow terms with regard to their own embattled group (1 Jn 4:20f.). In contrast to such a mentality, I wish to argue that all men, women and children are brothers and sisters and hence ought to be considered being co-subjects in the praxis of love and hope. The horizon of our love has been enlarged at the same time as the world has become a global village for us. All human beings are our neighbours.44 Moreover, we cannot face up to God’s radical otherness if we are not prepared to face up to the concrete otherness of women, men and children. Remaining faithful to the biblical love command leads Christian disciples unavoidably into the much wider network of human communities in and beyond any narrowly defined Christian horizon or identity construction. Today the works of love comprise attention to, respect for, and struggle with the otherness of all our neighbours irrespective of traditional doctrinal exclusions. Even in this respect, Jesus of Nazareth left us with some clear markers and a lively encouragement to embark on the eschatological course of love, as, for example, in the Lukan story of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10:25-37). Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, then, does not offer an invitation to a new love of God; rather it witnesses to God’s faithful love where human destruction saw only death and the breakdown of

For Jüngel, christology provides the exclusive perspective on God’s love. See Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, and Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983), 329. 44 This is far from arguing for an uncritical appreciation of globalization. For a critical discussion, see, among others, Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 43

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relationships. God’s love created new life in this son of God according to God’s measure: beyond our experiences of space, time and language and hence beyond our full comprehension. Jesus Christ was resurrected into God’s eternity – into the divine network of eternal relations, that is, relations that can no longer break down. Empowered by this faith in God’s eternal love relations, Christians can embark on a praxis of love that reaches out to all the arenas of death in our universe: war, oppression, exploitation, abuse, slavery, gender discrimination, illness, neglect, suffering of all kinds, hunger, and so on.

The depth of death and the intensity of love Time is the measure of human life; eternity is the measure of divine love.45 Through participating in the divinely inspired praxis of love, we human beings are invited to participate in God’s eternal relations – on God’s terms – already here and now. Jüngel has stressed the importance of such realism about human death when he writes that the importance of the fact of the uniqueness of the life of each human being should not be misunderstood. We should not imagine that because of this our life is of infinite importance or that for the same reason our life can never end. The fact that it is a moment of God’s history with all human beings makes it of unique importance to the infinite God. But that our life is regarded as uniquely important by the infinite God gives us no reason to conclude that our life is of infinite importance or indeed that human life can never end.46 Our human life is limited. Even the experience of being related to God, the radical other, does not open a way out of our limitations with regard to space, time and language. We cannot overcome these conditions as long as we live. Moreover, removing the limitations of human life would imply the dissolution of human personhood.47 However, we can transcend these conditions in the sense of seeing our groundedness in the love of God – but precisely as finite human beings and not as God. This means that our death is final. ‘It is as finite that man’s finite life is made eternal. Not by endless extension – there is no immortality of the soul – but through participation in the very life of God. Our life is hidden in his life.’48

Cf. the discussion of time and eternity above in Chapter 3. Jüngel, Death, 118–19 (translation amended) (Tod, 149). 47 Cf. ibid., 119 (Tod, 150–1). 48 Ibid., 120 (Tod, 152). 45 46

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Jüngel, therefore, recommends accepting human death as what it is: our natural boundary, which no human being can remove.49 Moreover, he calls for protest against any attempt to claim the right to set temporal limits to human life.50 Death has to be respected for what it does: it terminates all human relationships, all human power, all human strategies. Yet, precisely because of its nature of limiting everything we are and do, it opens the perspective of God’s radical love. However, I would like to propose that we go beyond Jüngel’s perspective on the death and love of the individual Christian and retrieve the horizon of larger bodies of love. Of course, it is true that nobody can love in my place. There is no vicarious love. But much grace and help is needed so that I can remain faithful in committed and mutual love to my partner, my family, my friends, my communities, and to the body of Christ and in this body to God and God’s universal project of creation and reconciliation. My love is always already part of this universal love story initiated and inspired by God. As part of the transformative eschatological force, every love is dialectically related to this larger development. It requires much prayer and contemplation to stay on course. The divine love that makes our love possible has also set in process the development of structures and institutions of love for supporting this love.51 Our love benefits from these structures and institutions and, at the same time, it contributes to their ongoing transformation. Every occasion of love, then, has both a personal and a communal dimension.52 Our postmodern (or late-modern) Western culture has concentrated on the love of the individual person and often neglected the communal dimension of love. This imbalance must be corrected, and more adequate Christian approaches to a culture of love ought to be developed with a view of struggling more intimately with the wider religious and secular challenges of otherness. Finally, if we are serious about our desire to love God, the radical other, ever more intimately, this desire will direct us to all the women, men and children whom God intimately loves as well as to God’s overall creative and reconciling project. Freed to respect death for what it is, we can dedicate ourselves fully to the challenge of mutual and transformative love and thus, as long as we are alive, enter ever more deeply into the mystery of God’s eternal project.

Cf. ibid., 136 (Tod, 171). Ibid., 133: ‘No human being, no institution, no legal administration has the right to mark out the temporal boundaries of the finite life of human beings. The Christian has the duty to oppose actively every effort to gain control of death’ (translation amended) (Tod, 168). 51 For a detailed discussion of institutions of love see Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 173–204. 52 The communal dimension of love remains underdeveloped in Jüngel’s theology. See Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith: A Theological Study with an Ecumenical Purpose, trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer (Edinburgh/New York: T&T Clark, 2001), 174. 49 50

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Death, love and hope Once more, we have seen how love provides the best starting point for approaching central dimensions of human life, including death. However, we also have become aware of the difficulties with approaching death in our Western cultural context. Repression and denial characterize many approaches to human mortality, natural decay and death in our universe – so much so that it has become necessary for a theology of death to defend the actual mortality of all human persons. Only based on a realistic theology of death can an appropriate consideration of the praxis of hope unfold. Who among human beings can be a meaningful resource of hope when all live in the shadow of death? Who can transcend human mortality in such a way that hope even beyond the event of death could be meaningful? Epistemologically, it is clear that human beings cannot have any ‘knowledge’ of the event of death as distinct from the experience of dying. Plenty of near death experiences have been recorded. However, they are still experiences of the end of life and not of death itself. If death is adequately described as the collapse of all of our human relationships, then we human beings do not possess any power to grasp its mysterious nature other than through symbolic expressions burrowed from experiences in life. As long as we are alive, and that means being limited by space, time and language, we cannot escape from this predicament. We simply cannot understand what lies outside of life, what ‘follows’ upon our death. Death limits our knowledge. Of course, we can try to reflect on death on the strength of our own life experiences and those of others who lived before us. Human beings have always engaged in such reflections and speculations. Yet it is important to remember that any such thinking occurs within the limits of life and therefore it can never adequately grasp the mysterious phenomenon of death itself. Even when we kindly accompany a dying person or witness the accidental or violent death of others, we stay behind at the moment of their death and can only relate to this moment through the analogical imagination of the living. All references to the human soul are conditioned by this predicament of the living notwithstanding if we, following Eberhard Jüngel, deny the ‘survival’ of the soul in death, or, following Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, assert the human soul as the immortal link between human creatures and God. We cannot ‘know’ what happens after death, but we can imagine how God might relate to us based on what others and we have experienced in this life. At the end of this chapter, we shall revisit the issue of the human soul. Christian tradition has built much of its hope on the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is wide agreement that Jesus Christ is the primary source of hope. The New Testament authors

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and communities interpreted the good news of Jesus Christ’s ministry, death and resurrection through the categories and imagination provided by their own Jewish Scriptures and imagination. Our approach to death, however, differs radically from theirs, and this has led to many confusions and misunderstandings. Prior to the modern age, few people believed that their death marked the end of their personal career.53 Rather, death was interpreted as the crucial instance in every person’s journey when body and soul were separated. Death as the total end to a human journey was a perception shared neither by the builders of Stonehenge in England, Newgrange in Ireland, Ales Stenar in Sweden, nor by the Greeks, nor indeed by our Christian ancestors. In ancient cultures, the dead were believed to inhabit some place where they could rest from life and join with other dead – be these places good or bad or, as in many passages of the Hebrew Scriptures, as yet unspecified. It is striking that the Hebrew Scriptures, by and large, do not promote any concrete hopes for the dead other than to say that their biological life has ended, that the event of death has separated the dead from the living. While the living can still praise God, the dead cannot: The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings. The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any that go down into silence. But we will bless the Lord from this time on and forevermore. Praise the Lord. (Ps. 115:16-18) Over against the shadow existence in much Hebrew thinking and to some extent in tune with emerging expectations of resurrection in Israel from the time of the book of Daniel onwards, early Christians proclaimed the resurrection of the dead. Paul saw the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as the beginning of a new order. He defended this turn of events against doubters in the Christian community at Corinth: Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ – whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to

Here I have further developed some thoughts published previously in Call and Response, 45–7. 53

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be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. (1 Cor. 15:12-22) Paul’s theology of Jesus Christ’s resurrection proved to be highly influential throughout Christian tradition. Moreover, the link between sin and death, which Paul defends in this passage, promoted the view among Christians that death was ultimately something unnatural. It was a consequence of Adam’s sin and not the normal limit of divinely created human life. Hence, Paul could speak of death in terms of ‘the last enemy’ to be destroyed by God. In other words, death was the result of human sinfulness, and it required God’s salvific act in Christ’s death and resurrection to establish a new order of grace in which death has lost its ‘sting’ (1 Cor. 15:55). For Paul, hope originates in God’s victory over death as a result of sin in God’s action in Christ. God has fulfilled the hope expressed in Isaiah (25:7) and Hosea (13:14), that death will be destroyed once and for all. This theology of resurrection is not the only one developed in the New Testament. The different resurrection accounts in the gospels agree that a number of disciples experienced the surprising presence of the resurrected Jesus. However, their experience was not of a Jesus whose death had been undone; rather the accounts clearly emphasize the wounds that led to his death. Hence, the resurrected Jesus was identified as the crucified Lord who appears now outside of the limitations that characterize normal human life, that is outside of time and space – he comes and goes at will and no longer shares the temporal and spatial predicament of his disciples. In such a theology of resurrection, death is affirmed not as an evil or as a result of Adam’s sin. Here, hope grounds not in the undoing of death or in divine victory over death, but in God’s faithfulness to his relationship beyond the death and end of all human relational power and agency. God remains faithful to the crucified and murdered Jesus, but also to the mourning friends and disciples of Jesus. The experience of Jesus’s resurrection, narrated in different ways in the gospels, supports the advent of radical hope among his disciples. When all human institutions and pillars of faith have lost their power, God’s faithfulness was revealed as an unexpected gift. However, this gift of ‘seeing’ the resurrected crucified Jesus was experienced within the limits of human time and space. This ultimate experience of the resurrected Jesus liberated the various expectations and hopes of his disciples into the one hope which only God can give: God’s radical presence and faithful love to his ongoing project of creation and reconciliation. Although here we cannot explore the different New Testament theologies of resurrection in any detail, it is important to appreciate the change in emphasis on the link between death and human sin. It matters greatly whether death is seen as the natural end to life, or as the deplorable consequence of Adam’s sin in the resulting predicament of original sin. Do we hope for

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salvation from the link between sin and death and for the subsequent return to the biblical vision of an original paradise, or do we hope for reconciliation with God in discipleship to Jesus Christ and the subsequent surprise of eternal relationships with God, Jesus Christ and the community of the saints in God’s great project of creation and reconciliation? The intimate connection between different eschatological visions and human concepts of sin, death, salvation and reconciliation will concern us also in the next chapter when we shall explore prominent eschatological symbols. However, before entering into this discussion, we must return to the issue of the human soul. Do we have a soul? Are we composed of a body and a soul? Does it still make sense to use soul-language in our scientific age?

The mystery of the human soul The concept of an immortal human soul that together with the human body forms the human being has been accepted or rejected for at times very different and conflicting reasons. Ironically, in psychology, the very discipline committed to researching the soul (psyche and logos) as well as its properties, prospects, deformation, suffering, alienation, treatment, cures and liberation, the concept of soul has often fallen victim to advancing empirical methods. Empirically, the existence of the soul could not be proven. Instead, references to ‘soul’ increasingly shifted to notions of the self, the ego, the subject, human identity, the person and self-consciousness. Thus, psychology, the academic examination of the soul, has been working without a clearly defined understanding of the soul. Theologians often followed suit, propelled partly by an increasing unease at talking of the soul in terms of a substance. Some theologians feared that human beings might claim to be already in possession of eternal life and salvation simply by virtue of their soul-consciousness. Others feared to be confusing pastoral care (Seelsorge in German, care for the soul) with therapy. Some, like Eberhard Jüngel (see above) shared the suspicion that any talk of an immortal soul might lack in respect for the actual phenomenality of death. Others wanted to avoid any overlap with Eastern doctrines of reincarnation of the soul. Hence, the suspicion of talking about a human soul knows many causes and motives.54 However, in recent years, theologians, psychologists, and historians of ideas have articulated a new interest in approaching afresh, and even

Cf. Knut Wenzel, ‘Die Seele – in Raum und Zeit: Zu einem in der theologischen Anthropologie nicht leichtfertig aufzugebenden Problembegriff’, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 34, no.2 (2017): 285–307, 285: ‘wie kann es eine theologische Sorge um die Seele geben, wenn diese selbst begrifflich keine theologische Wirklichkeit hat?’ 54

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critically rehabilitating, the concept of the human soul, beyond traditional religious and confessional suspicions, fears and phobias.55 Understanding the human being as created by God for mutual love, friendship and partnership requires a corresponding ontology of the human person as a whole beyond mere corporeality or materiality. Thus, a theological reflection on the soul might need to be part of a more adequate theological understanding of the human being, that is, theological anthropology, and ought not to be postponed to eschatological reflections on what happens after death. As we have seen in Chapter 4, Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI argued in favour of the concept of an immortal human soul. For him, the divinely created soul guarantees human immortality and relationality – in this order. Hence, the soul is relational as a result of its divine endowment. What makes us human in the first place, then, is immortality, and not relationality. I wish to challenge this view by stressing the fourfold relationality of the human being and the eternal endowment of human life through God’s gift of love, hope and faith. The soul participates in God’s eternity as a result of God’s offer of this fourfold relationship. The soul is the relational centre of human life. Here, we cannot enter into a comprehensive discussion of the development of either the concept of soul or theological anthropology.56 Rather, I wish to recall that our eschatological starting point in this book has been the fourfold network of loving relations in which every human being is involved at once: my relationship to fellow human beings, to God, to nature, and to my own emerging self. Thus, from the start of our deliberations, we have understood the human being as a relational being. Therefore, any approach to the human soul takes place within such a relational context. When we talk of the soul of a person, we acknowledge right from the beginning that we aim at more than mere individuality. Since the soul points to the relational centre of our human being, the human person can never be properly understood merely by interpreting her own particular individuality. The relational dimensions of the human soul require a concept of the soul that transcends any purely individualist approach.57 The death of a human person affects

Cf., for example, Christof Gestrich, Die Seele des Menschen und die Hoffnung der Christen: Evangelische Eschatologie vor der Erneuerung (Frankfurt am Main: edition chrismon (Hansi­ sches Druck- und Verlagshaus), 2009); Wilhelm Christe, ‘“Unsterblichkeit der Seele”: Versuch einer evangelisch-theologischen Rehabilitierung’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 54, no.3 (2012): 262–84; and Gerhard Sauter, ‘Seele: geprägte Le­ bendigkeit’, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 34, no.2 (2017): 308–36. 56 For a brief account of the development of the concept of the soul since antiquity, see Uwe Wolfradt, ‘Seele zwischen Psychologie, Philosophie und Esoterik’, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 34, no.2 (2017): 195–213. See also Ole Martin Høystad, Sjelens betydning: En kulturhistorie (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2016). 57 See also Wenzel, ‘Die Seele – in Raum und Zeit’, 288, who also stresses the relational nature of the soul: ‘Das Wirken der Seele ist eher nicht so zu fassen, dass sie zwischen dem, was ohne sie schon als es selbst da ist, vermittelt, sondern eher so, dass sie Verhältnisse stiftet, in denen Wirklichkeiten relational aufscheinen.’ 55

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all relationships. Therefore, we must keep this in mind when, in the next chapter, we reflect on powerful images of the post-mortal vocation of the human soul. A fuller recognition of the mystery of the human person must not ignore the spiritual dimension. However, neither can we hope to understand the mystery of the human person by ignoring her body. This body does not constitute a mere instance of psychic embeddedness (ensoulment); instead, the body and its relational dimensions form a single nature. The Catechism of the Catholic Church formulates this as follows: The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man [sic], are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature. (§ 365)58 In the light of the perspective that God creates human beings and relates to them in intimate partnership, does it make sense to say that this God-given connection totally ends in human death? Let us not forget that both God and the human person are mysteries to us. We cannot fully comprehend either, but we can know some important dimensions of both as far as they have manifested themselves in our lives and experiences as well as in the lives of people who lived before us. The Christian tradition suggests that we know God and ourselves in the light of the three theological virtues, which are infused into us by God, that is, by love, hope and faith. All three, though in different modes, enlighten us to glimpse the ever-greater potential of our relational network involving God, our fellow humans (dead, living and yet to be born), the evolving universe, and our own emerging selves. This dynamics allows us also glimpses of eternity, that is, of God’s project: God’s reign (or the Kingdom of God). Hence, we are aware that in relation to God’s ultimate purpose for us in his great project of creation and reconciliation, both in our life and in our death we remain unfinished, uncompleted, yet open.59 Our ultimate goal, namely to become truly ourselves with others in this dynamic network of relationships, cannot be reached this side of death.60 However, it can be clearly envisaged as a human goal. Our relationality, our soul, keeps the

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 83. Cf. Gestrich, Die Seele des Menschen, 16. 60 I note with interest references to a relational understanding of the soul in recent ‘New Animism’ discussions. Cf. Klaus Hock, ‘Animismen: Seele als Relationsbegriff’, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 34, no.2 (2017): 264–84, esp. 283: ‘Theoretische Ansätze um den sogenannten ‘Neuen Animismus’ versuchen … ‘Seele’ nicht mehr substanziell, sondern im Sinne einer relationalem Funktion zu konzeptualisieren, die radikal immanent gestellt wird und Transzendenz nur noch als Relationalität zu denken zulässt.’ However, I fail to see why a relational understanding of transcendence would need to lead to merely immanent perspectives. 58 59

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intention alive in us to move towards becoming the ‘selves in relation’ to which we have been created.61 The French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) distinguished two aspects of the human search for identity: idem-identity and ipse-identity.62 The first refers to the continuity of the self, the second to the wish to become a genuine self, a wish to be pursued always in relationship to others and to otherness. Applied to our theological reflection on the nature of the soul, we might say that the dynamics of our lives is promoted by the relationality of the soul, a relationality which, however, can never be separated from our embodied personhood. Philosophers and theologians in the Christian tradition have always been tormented by the difficulty of distinguishing between body and soul without running the risk of separating both and, as a result, of ending up in some hopeless dualism. One way out of such danger could be to formulate that the human being does not have a body, does not have a soul, but is body, is soul.63 Body and soul together are the human being, however difficult it may be to relate to this insight.64 Neither talking of body nor of soul alone ever grasps or exhausts the full mystery of the human person. Human persons cannot be understood completely by decoding their genome or mapping their brain. Moreover, what a human person is in terms of her soul resides not only in her individual person but also in other persons and is even developed by these others or in conjunction with these others. The human person, as suggested earlier, is always already being constituted by her relations and by her relational development according to her fourfold relational nature. Hence, any effort to reduce the person merely to her inner relations must fail. ‘Human “identity” can never be reconstructed simply from within herself.’65 Here is not the place to explore and discuss the contributions by Greek philosophers to the development of an understanding of the human soul.

Gestrich, Die Seele des Menschen, 30, articulates this intention as follows: ‘Die Seele ist es, die dem Menschenleben die Intention ‘einstiftet’, zur Übereinstimmung mit sich selbst zu gelangen.’ 62 Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 2f. 63 Cf. Gestrich, Die Seele des Menschen, 121. See also Sauter, ‘Seele: geprägte Lebendigkeit’, 321: 61

Der lebendige Mensch ist Seele, er hat nicht eine Seele wie einen Körperteil, der anatomisch auffindbar wäre oder als eine Synapse von Nerven oder eine Funktion von Hirnstämmen dokumentiert werden könnte, auch wenn Äußerungen der Seele wie Freude, Trauer, Begehren, Gedenken und Hoffen bis zu einem bestimmten Grade als Impulse und Ströme im Gehirn aufgezeichnet werden können. Als Seele wird der Mensch in bestimmter Perspektive wahrnehmbar: in seiner Lebendigkeit, wie sie geprägt ist und sich ausprägt. See, here, Ola Sigurdson’s enlightening discussion of the return of the body to the forefront of current philosophical debate in his book Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in Christian Theology, 295–359. 65 Gestrich, Die Seele des Menschen, 123. 64

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However, it may be useful to refer briefly to Plato and Aristotle, the two most distinguished representatives of this tradition, since both have greatly influenced Christian thinking about the soul. Plato assumed that the human soul enjoyed a prenatal existence in heaven and, therefore, longed back to this state during earthly existence. Death could therefore be understood as liberation from this alienating and inauthentic existence in life and as return to the heavenly Heimat (patria in Latin) of the soul. Moreover, the ability of the virtuous human being to re-cognize or re-member (anamnesis) the truth is the soul’s talent, which grounds in her participation in the heavenly and eternal realm of the gods.66 The problem with Plato’s understanding of the soul is that the soul can be conceived of as being ultimately independent of the body. Only liberated from the body can the soul re-enter the realm of the eternal. Plato’s approach to the heavenly origin, earthly travail and divine destination of the soul has been highly influential (not only) in early Christian thinking. Aristotle approached the soul in a rather different manner – at least in the texts which have been preserved. In De Anima, Aristotle does not consider the soul in terms of an independent substance. Rather, he understands the soul as the form of the body. For Aristotle, form and content are one unity. And yet, thanks to the soul, something exists as something. Hence, life cannot be thought outside of the context of souls and their life-giving energy. However, unlike Plato, Aristotle denies that the soul can separate from the body and then continue to exist. The soul organizes the transition from the merely possible to the actual existence but has no life or individualizations of her own.67 Aristotle influenced Thomas Aquinas’s discourse on the human soul. Thomas speaks of the soul (anima) as unique form of the body (unica forma corporis).68 In Christian anthropology, both the Greek heritage and the biblical references to the human soul were taken together in order to understand the nature and vocation of the human being and her innate orientation to God. The words for soul and the words for spirit in Hebrew and Greek respectively were sometimes fused, sometimes distinguished.69 In any case, they underline the insight into the indestructible relationship between human beings and God. Hence, the danger of losing sight of this quality of the divine–human relationship when one denies the existence of a human soul.

See Ole Martin Høystad, Sjelens betydning, 32–9; and Paulus Engelhardt, ‘Seele. II. Philosophisch-anthropologisch’, in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed., vol. 9 (Freiburg: Her­ der, 2009), 370–2. 67 Cf. Gestrich, Die Seele des Menschen, 126–30, and Høystad, Sjelens betydning, 40–7. 68 Cf. Gisbert Greshake, ‘Seele. V. Theologie- u. dogmengeschichtlich’, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed., vol. 9 (Freiburg i. B.: Her-der, 2009), 375–8. 69 For a discussion of the relation between soul and spirit, see Gestrich, Die Seele des Menschen, 145–50. 66

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In other words, however strange the Greek concepts of the soul and their different Christian appropriations and redefinitions may sound to modern ears,70 they refer to the ability of human persons to love and thus to relate to otherness inside and outside of the self. This dynamic centre of human life needs to be acknowledged and explored ever more deeply. A Christian eschatology that ignores this dimension of human life and personhood runs the risk of missing the primary vocation and ultimate orientation of human life. Three theological positions on the soul may be distinguished and invite further discussion: (1) the (often Protestant) denial of an immortal soul and the related preferred attention to the resurrection of the body; (2) the (often Roman Catholic) insistence on the immortality of the spiritual soul and its lonely journey following death and prior to the final resurrection;71 and (3) the attempt to speak of a ‘resurrection in death’ – a position which eclipses any need for the soul in terms of a separate entity, separate from the body (Leib).72 This last position is opposed to a dualistic understanding of body and soul, yet not to an understanding of the soul in terms of ‘being related to everything else’.73 Moreover, with regard to any outright denial of the soul it is important to appreciate that ‘if such a continuity and identity – however it may be thought of or articulated in terms of post-mortality, post-materiality or post-temporality – is excluded in principle, then this particular human being is also no longer able to be judged or perfected’.74 Hence, Christian eschatology calls for a concept of soul, also in the name of ultimate justice.75 I shall return to the hope for justice in the Chapter 7. A relational understanding of the human soul acknowledges that the death of a human person does not imply the end of her relationality. Rather, as history continues, also her relationality continues to be affected as well as to affect the course of history.76 Therefore, it remains a task of Christian

Elmar Klinger, ‘Seele’, in Herders Theologisches Taschenlexikon, ed. Karl Rahner, vol. 6 (Freiburg i. B.: Herder, 1973), 393–7, here 397, underlines that while the classical Greek tradition tended to think from nature to the subject, modernity tends to think from the subject to nature. 71 Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 366: 70

The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God – it is not ‘produced’ by the parents – and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection. Gisbert Greshake, Leben – stärker als der Tod: Von der christlichen Hoffnung (Freiburg: Herder, 2008), 128–39. 73 Ibid., 134. 74 Wenzel, ‘Die Seele – in Raum und Zeit’, 294. 75 Cf. ibid., 295. 76 Cf. ibid., 298.

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theology to resume reflection on the soul’s ‘life’ after death. Maybe we would need to reflect afresh more generally on how to relate to the dead? I hope to have shown that we need the concept of the soul in order to account for the unbreakable connection between God and human beings and also to protect the mysterious nature of the human person and her foundational orientation to others and otherness in love. However, the soul should not be conceived of in terms of some dualism between body and soul. Rather, the one human person needs to be approached in terms of her complex and dynamic relational nature, network and destination, which no academic discipline ever should claim to have fully explored, and which we have reasons to assume does not come to an end with our individual death. Hence, it is not the soul that gives us reasons to hope, but God’s gift of eternal relationship. The soul as the centre of human relationality participates in this divinely given eternal relationality. It is thus not the immortality of the soul which is an important source for hope, but God’s gift of eternal relationship. This relationship always already reaches out not only to God, but also to fellow humans, to God’s evolving creation, and to my own mysterious self. All four interdependent relationships are challenged by the task of developing their ipse-identity and not by defending mere idem-continuity. In other words, the care of the soul is more central to Christian discipleship than the wish of maintaining and defending some orthodoxy of doctrines and catechisms. The care of the soul happens in the work of love.

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7 Judgement, heaven and hell The power of symbols

Hoping for heaven? Why are images of heaven so often boring? Why are few Christians attracted by images that after all wish to portray a fulfilled life with God and the saints? Hallelujah-singing baroque angels, static images of silent gardens, peaceful alpine mountaintops, and stable cloud formations nowadays enthuse few people to contemplate the afterlife. Joining inner-trinitarian movements and communities somehow does not offer a more wonderful perspective for many Christians either. The Christian Bible does not provide much help here. The gospels portray Jesus addressing his contemporaries using the language and religious imagery of the time. However, rather than alluding to the afterlife, Jesus proclaimed the arrival of God’s reign in this world. Consequences of his proclamation for a life after death only appear very sporadically in the gospels.1 For Jesus, the end time has already begun, and it finds concrete shape in his ministry and in the response of his disciples and the people he meets on his way. Nowhere in the gospels do we encounter static images of an afterlife. Rather, the gospels point to a conflict in this life in terms of how best to respond to God’s invitation to join in the dynamics of his arriving reign. Signs of God’s reign (or the Kingdom of God) include experiences of healing from illness and demonic possession, experiences of inclusion of otherwise excluded women, men and children, experiences of

See Stefan Schreiber, ‘Sprach Jesus vom Jenseits?’, in Stefan Schreiber and Stefan Siemons, eds., Das Jenseits: Perspektiven christlicher Theologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell­ schaft, 2003), 96–118, here 97. 1

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being comforted when bereaved, and experiences of new respect for and support of the poor, of the widows, of the hungry.2 All that has gone wrong in human lives promises to be made right here and now for those who accept the invitation to join in the transformative dynamics of God’s reign. This reign has already begun, but its unfolding stretches into the future. The future as such is not at the centre of Jesus’s concern and ministry. At the centre of his ministry is the transformation of the present. Nevertheless, the gospels provide at least some implicit indications about the future. One classic example can be found in Mk 12:18-27, when Jesus discusses with the Sadducees the logical implications of the expected resurrection from the dead. What happens to a successively remarried widow with regard to her different husbands – whose wife will she be after the resurrection? The Sadducees have denied the resurrection of the dead and merely wanted to test Jesus with their question. He, however, confirms the resurrection from the dead, yet refuses to be drawn into anthropological analogies with life in the present. Moreover, Jesus refers to God as the God of the living and thus points to God’s privilege to resurrect the dead to a life in His presence. Any hope for resurrection is thus clearly linked to the nature of the relationship which God offers to all human beings. ‘The hope for resurrection is a consequence of theo-logy.’3 According to the gospels, Jesus did not normally issue invitations to heaven – the exception is in Lk. 23:39-43, when Jesus assures the criminal, who is being crucified beside him, of their common entry into paradise. Overall, Jesus proclaimed God’s transformative presence in this world. God’s eternity as present is of interest to Jesus, although he obviously shares in the general belief in the resurrection of the dead, which belonged to his and his contemporaries’ understanding of God.4 Hence, he believed in the resurrection because of his faith in God’s presence, rather than making faith in God dependent on his belief in the resurrection. Similarly, references to divine judgement in the gospels (e.g. Lk. 11:31f. and Mt. 18:23-35) presuppose a general expectation of the resurrection of the dead and a belief in some form of continuing identity of the human person after death. Yet most of all, they demonstrate the urgency of the here and now as the time and place of decision for or against God’s reign.5 The gospels do not tell us anything specific about heaven; rather they elaborate on the implications and urgency of God’s reign on earth. However, they leave no doubt about God’s faithfulness – here and beyond. God’s

See, for example, the list of bodily healing experiences emerging from Jesus’s ministry, in Helmut Jaschke, Heilende Berührungen: Körpertherapeutische Aspekte des Wirkens Jesu (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2005). 3 Schreiber, ‘Sprach Jesus vom Jenseits?’ 104. 4 Cf. ibid., 113. 5 Cf. ibid., 114f. 2

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reign, like God’s covenant with Israel, is not limited by the normal human limitations of time, space and language. Rather, God’s reign implies an invitation to an eternal relationship of mutual love starting here and now. It is this gracious divine–human relationship that provides the framework for human hope. Discipleship of Jesus is thus not the context for speculations about heaven and about who will be the greatest in heaven (cf. Mt. 18:1-5; Mk 9:33b-37; Lk. 9:46-48). Instead, following Jesus demands full attention to this present and God-given life and its concrete requirements and challenges. Human projections from this life onto God and onto God’s provision of any future resurrected life are meant to fail. Hence, there should be no surprise that all human images of heaven ultimately must be boring!6 However, the epistemological impossibility to grasp the nature of ‘heaven’ does not rule out the possibility, even the desirability, to talk about ‘heaven’ from a perspective that is grounded on earth. We must speak about our hope, even argue about our hope, but we must not confuse the grounds for our hope with any detailed projections of ‘heaven’. For the experience of God’s presence on earth, God’s revelation in Israel’s history, in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and in other religious, cultural, historical and natural contexts provokes human imagination to talk analogically about what it might be like to be with God eternally – beyond the end of our present lives. The pivotal experience of God’s transforming presence witnessed to in the Hebrew Scriptures is God’s act of liberating his people from oppression, captivity and slavery in Egypt and of providing the land and space for the existence and development of Israel. God’s faithful love finds expression in successive covenants with his people. God’s forgiveness and mercy makes him turn again and again to his beloved people in spite of the repeated failures of the people to recognize and adequately respond to his divine offer of love. God’s love project involves untiring acts of creation and reconciliation. Love is at the centre of God’s relationship with Israel and humankind. Jesus proclaims this same love and provides gripping images of what may happen if love is realized, but also if not. One of the most attractive images for this offer of mutual love remains the shared meal – shared with the customs officer, with the disciples, with the hungry crowd, at the wedding feast, with his diverse friends, acquaintances and enemies. Moreover, in some New Testament texts the shared meal with his followers is presented as Jesus’s primary testimony. ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ (Lk. 22:19; 1 Cor. 11:25). The memory of Jesus’s loving service and presence in the Eucharist is then powerfully confirmed once more in the

Cf., for instance, the song ‘Heaven’ by Talking Heads which includes the following refrain: ‘Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.’ 6

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Eucharistic appearance at Emmaus where the distraught disciples suddenly recognize the resurrected Christ (Lk. 24:13-35). The shared Eucharist, thus, becomes a central focus of Christian memory, recognition and hope. Jesus seems to be dining and wining a lot and making great use of the image of the shared meal as a powerful symbol for God’s reign and for its at times surprising provisions. Hence, it seems fitting for movies such as Babette’s Feast (1987) to employ and explore this eschatological imagery of the heavenly banquet in the language of our time and culture. However, sharing a meal with each other also makes demands on us: are we prepared to sit down even with people we do not like? Are we prepared to forgive those who have offended us when we sit down with them? How could we prepare appropriately for such a heavenly banquet in order to become fit to attend to others and not only to our own needs, hopes and desires? The shared meal or banquet as an image of heaven provokes our religious imagination because it involves a high level of drama in terms of careful preparation, loving attention, communal dynamics, challenge to traditional hierarchies, and personal and structural transformation. Joining this sort of meal, then, might not leave us unchanged. Likewise, refusing the invitation to the banquet challenges the one who has invited us to participate in the dynamics of the meal and prompts him to regret our refusal and denial of his invitation, love and care. Joining, or refusing to join, the heavenly banquet, thus, has consequences for the divine–human relationship. Jesus’s proclamation in the gospels confronts human beings with this choice: accepting God’s offer of eternal relationship or not accepting it. Jesus’s ministry provokes human decisions. ‘Heaven’ and ‘hell’ are symbolic expressions for the options when facing the decision either to be with God eternally or not to be with God eternally. Throughout the centuries, Christian expressions of and images for these eternal options have shifted and developed. Naturally, they have emerged from within particular cultural and religious horizons and sensitivities, and they mirror the respective analogical imagination. How could it be otherwise? Hence, when reviewing eschatological expressions and images from previous generations, we ought to be aware of their, and of our own, imaginative potential and respective limitations.

Images of an afterlife It matters where exactly one starts to think about the afterlife. Is Jesus’s proclamation of God’s love and reign the starting point? Does Paul’s reflection on the paschal mystery and his concentration on the significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus as atonement for our sins provide the focus? How do Christian thinkers relate to the Jewish emphasis on the resurrection of the body and the radically different Greek emphasis on the

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immortality of the soul?7 In the Christian tradition, there are many ways to heaven. In the recent past, heaven has not been a highly controversial aspect of theological debate. This may have to do with the great interest in heaven among nineteenth-century thinkers. ‘That period was characterized by fascination with heaven, and not surprisingly, earlier anthropocentric accounts of the afterlife were developed in even more imaginative detail.’8 At the same time, Enlightenment thinking about death and its finality and the related critique of human projections onto ‘heaven’ have, possibly as a backlash against sentimental visions of heaven, contributed to a diminishing interest in heaven in Western societies. Moreover, Christian thinkers were normally keen to distance themselves from dualist approaches propagated by Gnostic movements, that is, approaches to the afterlife that considered precious human souls to be imprisoned by evil matter in this world and therefore called for liberation or salvation of human spiritual existence from its material alienation and embodiment in this world.9 In what sense can Jesus be approached as saviour? As saviour from sin and damnation? Saviour for a renewed love relationship with God for persons and communities? Saviour of persons or of souls that are separated from their bodies at the point of death? Saviour of the universe? Talking about the saving work of Jesus demands careful clarification of the motives and clear distinctions of the proposed ways, as I have already discussed in Chapter 3. Early Christian images of heaven not surprisingly incorporated, and in the process at times transformed, a great variety of influences – from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, Classical Persian, Greek and Roman mythologies and so on.10 The last book of the Christian Bible, the Revelation to John, offers a good example of this process: The colourful imagery of that book – the great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, whose tail drew a third part of the stars of heaven; the great whore sitting upon seven hills – has been a chief reason for its fascination and an inexhaustible source of bogus prophesy. But at its core is a picture of a God-centred universe, in which heaven turns out to

Cf. Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 39; John Casey, After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 117; Michael Kreuzer, ‘“Auferstanden am dritten Tag”: Christologie als Modell der Eschatologie’, in Schreiber and Siemons, eds., Das Jenseits, op. cit., 119–42. 8 Jerry L. Walls, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8. 9 Cf. Norbert Brox, Erleuchtung und Wiedergeburt: Aktualität der Gnosis (Munich: Kösel, 1989). 10 See, for example, Casey, After Lives, 245–60. 7

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be a huge liturgical celebration of the glory of God. The New Jerusalem pictured is not the restoration of the kingdom of Israel on earth; rather, the New Jerusalem that descends from heaven is essentially a temple in which God is praised for ever.11 The combination of apocalyptic imagery and eschatological theological thought in this biblical text characterizes much of early (and later) Christian imagination with regard to heaven. The insatiable human longing to imagine heaven in conjunction with a sober theological minimalism of what we can and should not know on this side of death about God’s ultimate fulfilment of creation including our personal lives continues to produce such combinations. In Ancient Israel as well as in neighbouring cultures, heaven as the place of the Gods or of God was considered inaccessible to living human beings. Only God could reveal aspects of heaven to humans. Hence, heaven became the symbol of God’s absolute transcendence, but also the possible offer of ultimate human participation in and perfection by God. For Christians, the belief in this fulfilment is inspired by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, the God of love has opened heaven for all of creation, liberated from structural evil, personal sin and alienation and reconciled with God in and through God’s Spirit of love. In Christian thinking, heaven means the ultimate fulfilment and perfection of divine–human relationality: our relationship with God, with God’s creation, with our fellow human beings, and with our own emerging selves. In this sense, heaven can be said to amount to the final stage of our dynamic human ‘identity’ project. In God’s heaven, we truly become ourselves in eternal relation.12 However, serious problems arise when apocalypticism runs wild and remains unchecked by theological critique, yet also if and when theological critique forbids and thus avoids all imagery of heaven. The careful balance between both, apocalyptic imagery and constructive theological critique, presents a challenging task for every generation of Christians.13 This applies, of course, also to the central images for heaven in Christian thinking and piety, including heaven as eternal rest/eternal life; heaven as beatific vision; and heaven as the beyond or the ‘afterlife’ of human existence and suffering. It would be naïve, if not outright dangerous, to underestimate the ambiguous power of images and symbols of heaven or eternal life with

Ibid., 267. Cf. Medard Kehl, ‘Himmel. III. Systematisch-theologisch’, in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed., vol. 5 (Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder, 2009), 117–19. 13 Cf. here also David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 268. 11 12

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God in Christian life and praxis. Revelation 21, for example, has exerted great influence on the religious imagination of Christians throughout the centuries. On the one hand, it presents the comforting thought that God has promised ‘to make all things new’ (Rev. 21:5). However, on the other hand, the subsequent vision of the New Jerusalem paints the picture of a perfect city (Rev. 21:15-27) which, when read as a description of the church, can quickly turn into an oppressive image: ‘nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life’ (Rev. 21:27). Images of perfection can be helpful when pointing to God’s gift, yet they can also become oppressive when they are used to defend human power structures on earth. The same is true about the long list of symbolic expressions of heaven and the afterlife in Christian history. No such symbol or image is ever free of earthly interests, and the starting point for any form of expression of ‘what comes after’ is of course what is the case now. Any entry point to thinking about heaven is and remains the world and its respective social, religious, political, intellectual and cosmic configuration. Hence, it makes good sense to speak about the ‘history of heaven’.14 ‘Heaven itself cannot be described, but the human concept of heaven can be.’15 A lasting tension in all images of heaven emerges from the relationship between time and eternity. In what sense can we speak of heaven as existing after the end of the universe that marks the end of time as we know it? Is heaven, then, outside of space and time? Is heaven an aspect of God’s eternity? Yet, if so, how can we speak about it in the first place?16 Moreover, is heaven a place for persons with bodies or merely for independent souls? Is heaven a place for individuals, for a particular community or for an emerging network of communities? Do we go up to heaven or does heaven come down to us? The concept of heaven, thus, is always already linked both to our understanding of the eschatological subject and to our appreciation of the different agents and institutions of hope. Asking neighbours to tell us about their heaven, then, promises to enlighten us about their understanding of ultimate human fulfilment and whether or not as embodied persons we may have a part in it. Christian – like any other – ideas of heaven are constructed on and conditioned by a number of conscious and unconscious expectations of what a fulfilled life with God, Christ and the saints might entail. Moreover, Christian approaches to heaven and the afterlife have always been fluid – depending on the shifting ground from which they are emerging.

Cf. Burton Russell, A History of Heaven, op. cit. Ibid., 3. 16 Cf. ibid., 11. 14 15

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Heaven in the Early Church Christian belief in heaven has always been affected by ideas of compensation and restitution. Not surprisingly, Christian theologians working under conditions of persecution in the Roman Empire, such as Irenaeus of Lyons (second century), understood heaven as a place where Christians were compensated for their sufferings on earth, especially the suffering inflicted upon them by their Roman persecutors. Irenaeus expected heavenly compensation also for acts of charity in this life.17 However, attention to the plight of the individual in heaven must not be overstated in the Early Church. Rather, for Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 240) and other early Christian thinkers, the cosmic transformation to be expected and hoped for was much more important than the post-mortem fate of the individual: The notion of the afterlife was dwarfed, in Tertullian’s thought, by the idea of the transformation of the entire universe associated with the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. It was thought that this mighty transformation was about to happen. Tertullian imagined it to be so majestic, so radical, and so total as to make the interval between death and Resurrection of the dead seem short and empty of significance.18 It is important to remember that such early Christians did not die for the immortality of their souls – a pagan expectation at the time – but they died hoping for the resurrection.19 However, as Peter Brown has emphasized, the pagan focus on the soul as ‘an utterly spiritual substance, entitled to the immediate enjoyment of the vision of God’ spread also in Christian circles of the third century.20 Now, heaven became the true patria (Heimat) of the soul, and entry to heaven after death became the new norm. Differences existed in terms of how speedily a particular soul was moved towards heaven. Individuation of the soul and the pace of ascent to heaven merged with an understanding that some souls required particular forms of purification on their way to heaven. Here we find some of the roots of the later doctrine of purgatory.21 ‘The ease with which each soul reached heaven depended on this individuality – on a complex alloy of virtues and vices, sins and merits, that had accrued in the course of a lifetime.’22

Casey, After Lives, op. cit., 269–72. Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 9. 19 Cf. ibid., 10f. 20 Ibid., 13. 21 See also the discussion on hope in the Early Church in Chapter 2. 22 Brown, The Ransom of the Soul, 16. 17 18

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Increasingly, later Latin Christian thinkers paid greater attention to the relationship between the living and the deceased and their respective religious needs and requirements. Now, we are no longer dealing with the extraordinary lives of some Christian martyrs; rather everyday spirituality and care of the dead became common concerns in the church. Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), for instance, reflected in some detail on Christian practices, such as intercessory prayer and the celebration of the Eucharist ‘that might tip the balance between heaven and hell for the souls of the departed’.23 The belief that the living Christians could do something for the deceased opened a large reservoir of activities for everybody, and even more so for the wealthier members of the church. Wealth, however, was seen not only in terms of a possibility of the rich to take care of their soul’s coming ascent into heaven, but also in terms of a duty to share means with the poor and the church lest one’s soul would encounter problems in the afterlife.24 Increasingly, money adopted a central function at the interface of the living and the dead. There are, of course, many motives for supporting monastic institutions and their important pastoral work. However, many monastic foundations continue to benefit from the human urge to create heavenly treasures through earthly investment within the eternal economy. Pope Gregory the Great should also be remembered for his intellectual portrayal of heaven. The joys of heaven extended to a transformed knowledge. Burton Russell sums up Gregory’s position in this regard: As intellectual creatures, we shall have our intellects satisfied, and we shall know, not in a temporal sequence, but in the eternal moment. In eternity we shall know what, in time, we call the past, present, and future. We shall understand the cosmos in a manner and to a degree we have not imagined, and we shall see everything that is possible for our natures to understand. Faith and hope are no longer needed, and only love endures.25 This new knowledge in heaven even extended to knowledge about the suffering of those eternally condemned to the lack of love. In early Christianity, we can observe a number of significant shifts with regard to approaches to heaven: on one level, Christians had to relate to both the later Jewish emphasis on the resurrection of the bodily human person and the Greek focus on the immortality of the soul. On a second level, early Christians had to consider modes and speeds of ascent into heaven. On a third level, they had to decide on the quality and potential of the interrelatedness

Ibid., 20. Cf. ibid., 58f. 25 Burton Russell, A History of Heaven, op. cit., 96f. 23 24

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between the dead and the living, and what this interrelatedness might entail for the tasks and duties of the living towards the dead. Hence, agreeing that true life is the fulfilment with God in heaven implied quite a number of complex decisions and challenges for the Christian leader as well as for the ordinary believer. The framework for such deliberation, contemplation and ethical decision making was the celebration of the Eucharist. ‘The liturgy connects us with the whole ecclesia, with the congregation of all who love Christ, past, present, and future.’26 Who was in heaven? Early Christians agreed that self-evidently the martyrs must be in heaven. Moreover, it was assumed that baptized Christians, whose lives and works bore the mark of grace, were there. Also, and this is interesting even for twenty-first-century discussions on eschatology, Jews faithful to the Old Covenant before the institution of the New Covenant were expected to be in heaven. However, Jews failing to accept Jesus as Messiah were deemed excluded. A number of early Christian thinkers, such as Justin (second century), included even virtuous pagans who lived before Christ among those present in heaven. Some went as far as including even those who lived after the resurrection of Christ as long as they had not had any practical opportunity to learn about Christ.27 Heaven, thus, was initially not understood as a homogenous Christian place, but more generally as home or paradise for the just. It slowly became the primary platform for compensation for those who had suffered for their faith on earth, that is, the martyrs, and the natural home for the virtuous followers of Christ and seekers of God. The image of a purely Christian heaven was a much later projection. Although initially early Christians considered Christ to be the heavenly ordained mediator between the living and the dead, increasingly the cult of the saints broadened this realm of mediation.28 Proximity to the tomb of a saint became a desire of many and a possibility for privileged and wealthy Christians, inspired by the hope that physical closeness of tomb and relic shrine ‘conjured up the possibility of a similar closeness in the other world’.29 Augustine of Hippo remained very critical of such developments. He considered prayer, almsgiving and offering at the Eucharist as sufficient practices on behalf of the dead and he maintained the ritual praxis of remembering the dead in prayer and at the altar.30 Not only could he not stop the development towards ever more intricate practices and rituals at

Ibid., 56. Cf. ibid., 66f. 28 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 3: ‘The graves of the saints – whether these were the solemn rock tombs of the Jewish patriarchs in the Holy Land or, in Christian circles, tombs, fragments of bodies or, even, physical objects that had made contact with these bodies – were privileged places, where the contrasted poles of Heaven and Earth met.’ 29 Brown, The Ransom of the Soul, 79. 30 Cf. ibid., 80f. 26 27

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the interface of world and beyond, he himself helped to propel some aspects of this development. His propagation of almsgiving touched the connection between wealth, heaven and poverty when he encouraged the hearers of his sermons to think and act in straightforward commercial terms: the goal was to increase one’s treasure in heaven.31 Moreover, prayer for forgiveness of sins should be accompanied by almsgiving. ‘Almsgiving provided the “wings” that brought the Dimitte nobis of the Lord’s Prayer up to heaven. Without such wings no prayer could fly.’32 Prayer and almsgiving, thus, were promising ways to manifest one’s hope for reaching the ultimate home with God in heaven. Augustine, like other early Christian thinkers, distinguished different degrees of sinfulness and respective requirements for ultimate purgation. However, he did not subscribe to the emerging cult of the saints and its mediating pretension. While Augustine refused to enter into any detailed speculation on how exactly God’s forgiveness and the expiation of human sins occurred, coming generations of Christians developed much more concrete ideas and images of the fate of the soul in the other world. Rather than concentrating on the joy of heaven, a new generation of church leaders, such as Gregory of Tours (d. 594), focussed more on the Last Judgement and on the threats of hell. Moreover, the presence of the saints was ever more tangible now – as guarantors of episcopal authority and as miracle workers that supported the ruling order in church and society at the same time.33 The poor occupied a central place in this order and the church protected the poor. Hence, ‘any attack on the lands of the church was an attack on the poor. And an attack on the poor was an attack on Christ himself. For it was from the estates of the church that the poor were supposed to be fed.’34 The nexus between life, afterlife, authority in this life and patronage from the afterlife, and the relationship between money and the path of the soul grew ever more intimate. The cosmic world view of antiquity was increasingly replaced by a moral universe now characterized by sins and merits.35 Journeys to heaven and associated visions and images mirrored this shift.

Medieval images of heaven Medieval churches and their sculptural representations of the Last Judgement confronted Christians with the stark choices required for any preparation of

For Augustine’s view of heaven and how to prepare for it during this life, see also Chapter 3. Brown, The Ransom of the Soul, 100. 33 Cf. ibid., 164–79. 34 Ibid., 172. 35 Cf. ibid., 204–11. 31 32

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the ultimate journey. The choice of moving towards heaven entailed clear awareness of what can go wrong. Matthew 25:31-46 provided the biblical inspiration to the works of art that described the implications of a life for or against the biblical love command in view of the end of the world and the coming judgement of the nations. Looking at many a Romanesque tympanum, medieval pilgrims perceived in gruesome detail what to expect when deviating from the path to heaven. In the meantime, the moral landscape from which to embark on the journey towards heaven had widened. As a result of the ascetic movement and the increasing significance of monastic spirituality in the church, sins associated with sexual purity joined the sins associated with problematic wealth management on the list of obstacles to reaching heaven. Although the epistemological question of how human beings can know anything about heaven has been a general concern in Christian thinking, the intellectual revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth century attended to the understanding of heaven with new and forceful enthusiasm. Attention to heaven was never free from the intellectual and political struggles for influence and power in the church. Who could be seen to be a reliable authority on heaven: the seer, the ascetic, the mystic, the scholastic, the monastic, the bishop, the pope?36 What should Christians strive for? Union with God in heaven. But how could that goal be reached within the framework of the church? The envisaged eschatological subject needed to become a fulfilled person in total harmony with God and the saints. Moreover, imagery of heaven was affected by the new urbanization of life in parts of Europe: should heaven be likened primarily to a perfect garden or to a perfect city? Whatever the choice of images and symbols, our medieval forebears in Western Europe displayed greater awareness of the connection between this life and the next than most Western contemporaries today. Medieval debates on heaven had a direct impact on daily life and its organization. Authorities on heaven exerted influence and power also on this side of death. In other words, ‘heaven’ mattered greatly. This is important to keep in mind when reviewing medieval images of heaven. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) presented a theological system in which heaven was an integrated part. Combining traditional theological (mostly Augustinian), mystical and new philosophical thinking (mostly Aristotelian), Thomas’s starting point was and remained God. All creatures proceed from God and seek to return to God. Heaven, therefore, represents the goal of our ultimate return to God. Hence, it ought to be of ultimate concern for any human being. The human return to God, however, has become more challenging than the natural return of other creatures because of original sin. Instead of focussing on what ought to be our ultimate concern, namely being

Cf. also Burton Russell, A History of Heaven, op. cit., 114.

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fulfilled in and by God, we humans have confused the legitimate theological concern with false concerns, such as wealth, power, lust and so on. They are concerns of this world and not of heaven, that is, our true destination. Hence, we humans are troubled travellers on earth. However, not all is lost because we have some insight into what is good, some unthematic longing for the good, and a desire for God. With the help of God’s grace and the related infusion of the three theological virtues of love, hope and faith, we can direct our will towards God and embark on the journey to the promised fulfilment in heaven.37 Heaven opens the beatific vision of God. Thomas was well aware of the dangers of a distorted scriptural hermeneutics.38 Hence, he warned against anthropomorphic reductions of heaven. When we pray ‘Our Father in heaven’, Thomas argues, we are not saying that God is bound to a place called heaven. Rather, this phrase is to indicate God’s pre-eminence as a divine being above nature.39 What we know about God and heaven we owe to God’s gracious illumination of our minds. This light of glory shines brighter depending on the degree of our love. Eternal love will no longer be conditioned by time, space and language. However, even the strongest creaturely love can never transcend the realm of God. God remains God also in heaven, and the human being remains human also in heaven, albeit in a perfected human state.40 Three aspects of Thomas’s eschatology are of particular interest to our review of heaven: His theology of death, his understanding of the process of attaining heaven, and his approach to the interim state. For Thomas, as for Augustine, death was unnatural – an evil that resulted from the Fall of Adam. Death rips apart the human unity of body and soul. A soul thus deprived of the body ceases to be a human person. However, being created in God’s image, human beings, though clearly mortal, must never be understood as perishable. What God has created in his image shall exist. On this theological premise, it becomes imperative to reflect more closely on how the thus disunited soul, the form of the body, can be reunited with the body in the ultimate resurrection of persons.41 ‘The separated soul longs for its body, without which it is not complete, and its happiness will grow when its body is restored.’42 But how and when is this unification to be expected to occur?

For a concise discussion of Thomas Aquinas’s approach to heaven, cf. ibid., 131–8. Cf. Werner G. Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (London: SCM Press, 1994), 28–30. 39 Cf. Burton Russell, A History of Heaven, 134. 40 See here also Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1995), 307: ‘God remains God, and the world remains creation. Through their mutual indwellings, they remain unmingled and undivided, for God lives in creation in a God-like way, and the world lives in God in a world-like way.’ 41 Cf. Burton Russell, A History of Heaven, 137. 42 Ibid., 138. 37 38

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Thomas, like a number of fellow thinkers, felt the need to distinguish between different stages on the return of the soul to personal bliss in heaven. At the moment of death, soul and body separate. Then, the souls of the blest are in an interim: they see and enjoy God, but they still await the general resurrection and the Last Judgement, as a result of which they will be made even more perfect. Only Jesus and Mary are believed to be already corporeally in a state of ultimate perfection in heaven. Hence, there is a lesser heaven and a perfect heaven. But how do the souls in the lesser heaven await the ‘end time’? This question must be distinguished from the issue of purgatory, which affects those souls that require further purification. In any case, references to what happens to our souls after death on their way to heaven remains a mystery. Any detailed eschatological geography is deeply problematic. Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) poetic imagination of paradise was to have a great impact on most subsequent Western approaches to celestial imagination. The Paradiso is the final part of what later was called the Divine Comedy.43 Dante concluded the Paradiso shortly before his death.44 He was fully conscious of the human limitation to imagine anything beyond space, time and language. Yet he was equally convinced that language itself has transcendent qualities even on this side of death. In narrating the pilgrim’s encounter with the blessed spirits awaiting the return of their bodies, Dante needed to ‘embody’ these souls.45 Love is at the centre of paradise, and in heaven ‘the degree of love determines whether a person stands nearer to or farther from the burning center’.46 Dante’s heavenly geography portrays three levels: the earthly paradise on the summit of purgatory, the heavenly spheres beginning with the moon, and the ‘empyrean’ level where the Trinity itself dwells. On the second level, Dante identifies the great mystic and monastic leader Bernard of Clairvaux as the highest soul, thus emphasizing both the significance of contemplation as key to a fulfilled Christian life and love as the ultimate goal of human life.47 God is love. Contemplating this love in words, dance, music and other representations makes us aware of the God-given desire to be united with God. The systematic theologian alone is not able to express this desire as powerfully as is possible for the mystic and the poet. However, both Thomas and Dante portrayed heaven in a way that removed it somewhat from the earthly realm of human experiences. ‘The

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. C. H. Sisson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 349–499. 44 Cf. Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, Dante: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 14. 45 Cf. Burton Russell, A History of Heaven, 157. 46 Ibid., 162. 47 Ibid., 182: ‘Bernard is Dante’s final guide on the path to God because he represents highest contemplation.’ 43

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life of contemplation is the life of peace, in part because it is the end of motion and of all restlessness. This is symbolized by the empyrean, which is the true realm of the blessed souls and of God’s heaven, and which, beyond the other circling heavens, is itself perfectly still.’48 The restriction of such an image of heaven means that there is no room for earthly pleasures or for an appreciation of human society, community, conversation, celebration and recreation outside of the intensification of the beatific vision. ‘This is the heaven anticipated in the whole Catholic tradition of monasticism, celibacy, mortification of the flesh, and asceticism in general. Underlying those disciplines was always the belief that in quieting the demands of the flesh and the world, the mind and soul would become more open to the movements of the spirit.’49 Finally, Dante’s heaven left no space for the natural world, including animals, plants, the propagation of life in conjugal love, and the concerns of civil life.50 In 1336, some sixty years after the death of Thomas and fifteen years after the death of Dante, Pope Benedict XII defined once and for all that the souls of the just enjoy the beatific vision of God in heaven already prior to the last judgement (ante iudicium generale).51 Hence, the pope confirmed references to times and periods in eternity, thus applying human reason to spheres not accessible to human reason.

On the way to modern images of heaven In the eyes of early modern Christians, the theocentric heaven and its contemplative focus on the beatific vision was rather austere and stood in too great a tension with the actual experience of life. Images of the terrestrial paradise mingled increasingly with the older heaven, certainly reflecting a more optimistic view of life than was possible previously at the time of the great plague and its daily threat to life and its pleasures.52 Hence, the imagined pleasures in heaven included not only spiritual delights but also earthly pleasures, however in a different, heavenly intensity.53 The expectation of earthly features amidst the heavenly bliss even extended to images of a heavenly statehood, ‘a sort of republic of the saved – or, at any rate, a state where distinguished persons enjoy the company of their peers,

Casey, After Lives, op. cit., 291. Ibid. 50 Cf. ibid. 51 Heinrich Denzinger, Kompendium der Glaubensbekenntnisse und kirchlichen Lehrent­ scheidungen, ed. and trans. Peter Hünermann, 41st ed. (Freiburg/Basel/Vienna: Herder, 2007), 406–7. 52 See Klaus Bergdolt, Die Pest: Geschichte des Schwarzen Todes (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006). 53 Cf. Casey, After Lives, op. cit., 293–302. 48 49

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and where that is an important part of bliss’.54 In early modern society, this bliss was restricted to male participants, and hence heaven became ever more patriarchal in outlook and attraction. The reformers attempted to reinstate a contemplative heaven with God firmly at the centre. Both Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–64) expected a restoration of the earth to its state prior to Adam’s Fall. However, this restored world will be an object of contemplation, and not a place where people actually live. John Calvin warned against asking superfluous questions, and he bemoaned the obsession of some Christians, such as Thomas Aquinas, to investigate heaven: As far as I am concerned, I not only refrain personally from superfluous investigation of useless matters, but I think that I ought to guard against contributing to the levity of others by answering them. Men hungry for empty learning inquire how great the difference will be between prophets and apostles, and again, between apostles and martyrs; by how many degrees virgins will differ from married women. In short, they leave no corner of heaven exempt from their search. Then it occurs to them to ask what purpose is to be served by the restoration of the world, since the children of God will not be in need of any of this great and incomparable plenty but will be like the angels [Mt. 22:30], whose abstinence from food is the symbol of eternal blessedness. But I reply that the very sight of it there will be such pleasantness, such sweetness in the knowledge of it alone, without the use of it, that this happiness will far surpass all the amenities that we now enjoy.55 Calvin rejected the doctrine of purgatory. For him, there remained only heaven and hell as the soul’s destinations after death. He distinguished between two forms of judgement: one at death and the other at the Last Judgement. ‘The souls of the faithful enter into bliss, but not fully. They remain in a state of expectation till the final judgement, when all is revealed. Thus, for Calvin, the expectation that marks the life of a Christian continued in death.’56 In spite of clear resemblance between the heaven of the reformers and the heaven envisaged by Thomas Aquinas, there are also important differences. While Thomas distinguished between degrees of attainment in heaven according to the intensity of love, Luther and Calvin did not accept such

Ibid., 301. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2, ed., John T. McNeill, trans., Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christin Classics, vol. XXII (Louisville/London/Leiden: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 1006f. (my italics). See also Casey, After Lives, 304. 56 Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2009), 336. 54 55

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distinctions. In his Commentary on 1 Corinthians 15, Luther argued that we will all be equal in heaven, even though ‘a particular [individual] crown is laid up for [each] in accordance with his labors’.57 Yet, not all differences are gone: in heaven there will still be different degrees of glory.58 The glory of the apostles, the martyrs, the church leaders and such are recognized in heaven. Luther struggled to maintain a God-centred vision of heaven while at the same time acknowledging an embodied understanding of human persons in heaven. The glorified body will be the same as the earthly body, but its use will not be the same.59 Thus, he could affirm the biblical image of a divinely reconstituted body without gliding into primitive anthropomorphism. Luther’s struggle reflects the modern dilemma of approaching heaven as God’s own realm, yet affirming God’s perfection of his creation through the redemption of humankind. How our images of heaven relate to God’s created world has remained the central eschatological question to this day. John Casey sums it up in this way: Dante’s imagining of a heaven in which God is all in all went with a clear metaphysic and philosophy of mind, which made pure contemplation the highest human good. No later writer fully retained that austere metaphysic. In various ways they all … let in some pleasures that can be thought of as being valued for their own sake and which are not all subordinate to the beatific vision.60 Increasingly, such heavenly pleasures reflect the new self-confidence of the (male) subject on earth and his particular aspirations. Isaac Watts (1674– 1748) paints a picture of heaven where the different crafts developed on earth can play a constructive role. Heaven, thus, takes on the shape of a society with clearly fixed roles, hierarchies and (academic) achievements. ‘Indeed, heaven soon begins to resemble a college or a research institute.’61 Moreover, according to some writers, the risen dead would enjoy some form of bodily identity with their previous selves and hence ‘live’ in clearly defined societies and nations with respective (male) hierarchies and power structures. There was no social mobility or equality to be reckoned with or hoped for in a heaven of this shape. Nor was there a clear understanding of divine presence and judgement associated with the end of time. The emerging modern heaven was marked by activity, the high medieval heaven by contemplation. Both kinds of heaven reflect respective principles

Casey, After Lives, 305. Cf. ibid., 307. 59 Cf. ibid., 308f. 60 Ibid., 319. 61 Ibid., 326. 57 58

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and values of human life on earth.62 That is not surprising. What remains puzzling, however, is the fact that this present universe itself is not seen as a central aspect of God’s ongoing commitment to his creative and reconciling project. In other words, is heaven only a realm for human beings far removed from God’s evolving creation, and does divine creation remain safely divided from the fate of resurrected persons? Does not such an approach to heaven betray a new form of Gnosticism with its lasting suspicion of the cosmos as prison of the souls? What should Christians hope for? A resurrection of life in total discontinuity with this life? A continuation of some shape of this life? A radical but not total transformation of human life in and of this world? A contextless and hence creation-less contemplation of God? Or the prolongation of a happy Oxbridge common room into eternity? Which are the discontinuities and continuities to be hoped for? Might heaven mean creation without evil? This brings us to the need, however briefly, to address the question of evil and its ultimate ‘place’ in hell. My aim in this book is to explore reasons to hope, and hell, in whatever form of imagination, can never be or become an object of hope. Yet, in view of its traditional role as counterpart of heaven, I wish to reflect briefly on the expectations associated with hell in Christian tradition and thinking.

Judgement, heaven and hell Hell has always been the other of heaven. Whereas, heaven signifies the encounter with God on God’s own terms, hell marks a life outside of the presence of God. The doctrines of heaven and hell ‘involve a commitment to the idea of an afterlife and to an eschatological significance of our present lives beyond the grave’.63 However, there are vast tensions and baffling ambiguities related to the image of hell. In the Christian tradition, heaven has frequently been regarded as reward for a decently lived life, while hell has been understood in terms of punishment for the opposite kind of behaviour. However, if heaven is taken to be the free and gracious gift of God, who is love and who relates in love to his creation, without regard to merit on our side, what then is

Ibid., 355. With regard to Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) approach to heaven, Casey comments: ‘Swedenborg brings out implications of the Renaissance and Protestant conviction that a life of activity is superior to one of contemplation. Perhaps this is the only sort of heaven that a Protestant ought logically to countenance – one in which the active virtues are paramount and which represents a purified version of a cheerful active society as it ought ideally to be in this life.’ 63 Jonathan L. Kvanvig, ‘Hell’, in Jerry L. Walls, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 413–26, here 413. 62

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hell? If hell is the result of divine justice, has heaven been above and beyond God’s justice? Is God’s love unrelated to ultimate justice? Are not, in Paul Tillich’s phrase, love, power and justice related to each other?64 Moreover, is not ultimately the hope for God’s coming judgement in love and truth the genuinely liberating feature of Christian eschatology in so far as it entails hope for justice for the victims, but ultimately also hope for justice for the perpetrators. Hence, hope for justice promises liberation from all forms of oppression in this life and world, and it holds out an opportunity to the perpetrators to confront their ill deeds and sins and thus to open themselves towards reconciliation with their victims as well as with their own distorted selves. The account of God’s final judgement in Mt. 25:31-46 points to a judgement in and about love. It is interesting to note that this gospel passage is not based on ethical theory or theological epistemology. Those who did not love had obviously not known what they were doing when not attending to the needs of fellow humans. It is not their belief or their theology, which is judged here, but their actual praxis of love is being scrutinized. Even people with the wrong doctrine of God or with a false orthodoxy, yet committed to the praxis of love will ultimately find themselves near God, whereas people with the right doctrine and with proper loyalty to orthodox positions, although lacking in love, may find themselves in radical or even total distance from God. In view of this gospel challenge, I find it impossible to side with those theologians who advocate universal salvation or general reconciliation. Instead, I share the view that God’s judgement will be a judgement of love.65 Such a judgement is based not on divine terror or vindication, but on God’s faithful love, which respects human freedom. How could it be otherwise if God is love? Yet, God’s abundant love, precisely by being love, must respect a potential human no to this love and to the praxis of love. The freedom to say yes or no to God’s offer of love, to God’s offer of creation and reconciliation, is a condition of the genuineness of human love on earth. The Matthean passage does refer to eternal punishment, though not to the originator of this punishment. Nor is hell anything which the people referred to in this biblical text have consciously chosen or affirmed. Far from it, they lived under the illusion to do God’s will in their lives. This text unveils the failure of their response to God’s call to love. I read this text as a rejection of any model of hell that is based on a response to some catalogue of sins – lenient, mortal or other. Rather, what is at stake here is the judgement of love: the personal commitment to the

Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). 65 See James M. Matarazzo Jr., The Judgment of Love: An Investigation of Salvific Judgment in Christian Eschatology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2018). 64

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divinely ordained praxis of love opens the gates of heaven, whereas failure to be committed to this praxis of love unavoidably leads away from God. Moreover, this text emphasizes the finality of our human lives. Our love matters in terms of our relationship to God, to our fellow human beings, to God’s creation and to our own emerging selves. Hence, Christian eschatology needs God’s judgement of love that implies God’s mercy and commitment to his creatures as well as his respect for their freedom to choose or not to choose love.66 Our love of God is only possible on the basis of such freedom, respect and recognition. However, the judgement of love invites men and women to participate in the divine disclosure of their loving commitments and relationships: ‘at the transformative judgment, those that are judged are also judges, chiefly of themselves’.67 On this side of death, we cannot explore or exhaust the depth of divine love and its transformative nature. It is of course possible that God’s abundant love succeeds in transforming us human beings in this judgement of love. From the perspective of human love and justice, God’s ultimate transformative act remains open. God’s endless love, however, gives birth to hope here and now. Speculation on the detailed nature of hell and its torture, pain, and isolation is not the task of a theology of love. Nor is hell ever a reason to hope. Hell is no place either. ‘If heaven and hell are conceived of as mere extensions of an earthly life, where people can pack up and move at will, such a conception has more affinity to religious perspectives that espouse endless cycles of rebirth than to religions with a substantive eschatology.’68 Heaven and hell are not symmetrical symbolic expressions. Heaven symbolizes a fulfilled life with God, whereas hell stands for life in denial of God, God’s gift of love and hope. However, more importantly than heaven and hell is the hope for God’s ultimate judgement of love. It alone promises liberation for eternal life in God’s presence. ‘For the sake of human dignity, for the sake of the destroyed dignity of the victims, and for the sake of the justice that does not allow the perpetrators to get away “cheaply”, without losing their dignity, a judgement is required not only from the perspective of God, but also from the perspective of human beings.’69 In other words, if there were no

See here also Johanna Rahner, Einführung in die christliche Eschatologie, Grundlagen Theologie, 2nd ed., Freiburg: Herder, 2016, 227: ‘Die biblische Überlieferung spricht vom Durchsetzen der Gerechtigkeit Gottes als Folge seiner Barmherzigkeit. Das bedeutet, dass das Gericht in der aktiven Begegnung mit Gott begründet ist: Das Selbstgericht hat den Charakter einer Begegnung von Mensch und Gott, es ist personales und damit dialogisches Geschehen, es ist ein Miteinander von Gott und Mensch.’ 67 Ibid., 259. 68 Kvanvig, ‘Hell’, op. cit., 418. 69 Ottmar Fuchs, Das Jüngste Gericht: Hoffnung auf Gerechtigkeit, 2nd ed. (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2009), 31. 66

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divine judgement, ‘then living on after death would have been bought by mocking the victims and the eventual confirmation of the perpetrators’.70 God’s judgement of love extends an invitation already now to hope for the ultimate revelation of the truth of all our relationships. God’s judgement, thus, ‘is not a punishment, but a grace’.71 Heaven and hell, then, are merely secondary features of the divine judgement – this primary symbol of truth, transformation, liberation and reconciliation with God and with God’s great project.72 Anticipating this judgement in our present life will allow our life to gain eschatological depth.73 Finally, in this chapter, I wish to attend to the concept of purgatory and the ambiguous and at times dramatic role it has played in Christian thinking and piety.

Purgatory and heaven The Latin term purgatorium means place of purification. In Christian doctrine, purgatory plays a constructive role because it entails that those who enter it are certain of heaven, for the only exit from it leads directly there, and purgatory is by definition temporary. A sojourn in purgatory purifies those who undergo it from whatever separates them from the love of God, and they leave it when that has been achieved. Purgatory’s inhabitants, then, are in an intermediate state between death and heaven. They are in heaven’s antechamber: like the bride in her dressing room preparing for the marriage bed, they are preparing for eternal, loving intimacy with God.74 In one way, it seems appropriate to treat of purgatory in a discussion on heaven because the idea of purgatory is logically dependent on heaven. However, there are also logical challenges: how can we meaningfully distinguish ‘times’ or ‘periods’ outside of the conditions of time, space and language? It sounds meaningless to speak of before and after in eternity

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 121. 72 Ottmar Fuchs, Das Jüngste Gericht: Hoffnung über den Tod hinaus (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2018), 154: ‘Die Gerichtsverkündigung ist kein moralischer Hammer, mit dem man anderen auf die Köpfe haut, sondern ein Einsehen, das sich der Erschütterungsempfindlichkeit aller Gläubigen verdankt und aus der konsequenten Vergewisserung des Glaubens an Gottes Gerechtigkeit und Barmherzigkeit herauswächst.’ 73 Cf. ibid., 156. 74 Paul J. Griffiths, ‘Purgatory’, in Jerry L. Walls, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 427–45, here 427. 70 71

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or of limited aspects of eternity. Seen as a symbol of divine–human relationship, however, purgatory may have some meaning to convey. First of all, this symbol reflects the painful human experience of inadequacy in view of God’s generous invitation to women, men and children to be eternally united with God and the saints and with God’s creation. Secondly, it expresses the possibility of transformation even beyond death. Thirdly, it opens up possibilities for the living to assist the dead in their post-mortal process of purification. It is this last dimension that has caused a lot of drama in Christian history, notably in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, not least with regard to the power of the institutional church to classify, orchestrate and manipulate this process. The doctrine of purgatory arose from the conviction that it was never too late to engage in works of penance for the sake of eternal purification. Thus, it was an extension beyond death of the discipline of penance. By the thirteenth century, it was largely accepted. In 1254, Pope Innocence IV speaks of the post-mortal fate of the deceased and decrees that the place of postmortal purification of minor sins be called ‘purgatorium’ and that it signifies the fire in which non-mortal sins are purified.75 In 1274, the Second Council of Lyons clarified that these purifying punishments could be moderated by the prayers of the (living) faithful, that means by ‘the sacrifice of the mass, prayers, almsgiving, and other works of piety which are normally undertaken by believers for other believers according to the ordinances of the church’.76 The Council of Trent reaffirmed this doctrine in 1563, but, at the same time and in response to the critique of the doctrine by the Reformers, it warned against excessive speculation and wilder imaginative elaborations about this process of purification in popular piety.77 The doctrine of purgatory is most developed in Roman Catholic theology. However, we also find a theology of purgatory in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. In Roman Catholic thought purgatory is understood as a ‘place’ where a temporally limited punishment for remaining sins occurs, whereas Eastern Orthodox theology approaches purgatory in terms of a process of growth and maturation for persons who have not completed the process of sanctification.78 The Reformation critique of purgatory questioned the possibility of relating to the dead and emphasized the lack of biblical foundation for this

Cf. Denzinger, Kompendium der Glaubensbekenntnisse und kirchlichen Lehrentscheidungen, op. cit., 374–5. 76 Ibid., 381. 77 Ibid., 578. 78 Cf. Walls, Heaven, op. cit., 52. See also Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27: ‘Although the differences between Roman and Eastern theology on the matter of purgatory are genuine ones, they are arguably minor compared to their agreement on the reality of postmortem cleansing in the intermediate state and the important role of prayers for the dead in this matter.’ 75

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doctrine. Moreover, it vehemently rejected the related practice of indulgences. An indulgence is granted by the church in response to some meritorious act done by an individual. The meritorious act might be prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, or the gift of money, land or property to the church; the indulgence might be offered to the one performing the meritorious act, or to someone designated by him or her; and among the most common forms of an indulgence was remission of time in purgatory.79 The sale of indulgences by the church in conjunction with the financing of some major Roman building projects and the related demonstration of power exposed the perverse application of the doctrine of purgatory in church and society and provided a focus for the critical protest of the reformers.80 But there is more at stake here: the critique of the reformers concerned the very nature of salvation as result of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, the individual’s responsibility for her own salvation, and the impossibility to interfere in this process between individual and God from the outside, here from the living on behalf of the dead who are undergoing a period of purification.81 A symbol gives rise to thought,82 and the symbol of purgatory provokes further thinking. In a divine–human network of mutual love, this symbol may point to the human need to be fully transformed by love, a level of transformation not conceivable under the human condition of limited time, space and language and not realistic in view of the impact of personal and structural evil. Hence, as a symbol of God’s judgement of love, purgatory may make some sense. Moreover, this symbol points to the interconnection between all human beings in God’s creative and reconciling project. In this project, ‘salvation’ must not be reduced to merely individual acts of eschatological significance. Rather, creation and reconciliation involve all of humanity – past, present and future. Hence, as we have seen in Chapter 6, the human person in body and soul belongs to a larger ‘body’ in life, but also in death. Finally, this symbol expresses the need to consider the relationship between the living and the dead, including the love and care of the dead.83 However, such observation about the eschatological potential of purgatory must not be read as defence of the shocking instrumentalizations of this symbol in the history of the church and in popular piety. Speaking about

Griffiths, ‘Purgatory’, op. cit., 434. For more details on the sale of indulgences and ‘the reckless and scandalous manner in which this was commonly done as a means of fund-raising for the Church’, see Walls, Purgatory, op. cit., 26–30, here 27. 81 Cf. ibid., 434f. 82 Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 348. 83 See also Johanna Rahner, Einführung in die christliche Eschatologie, op. cit., 267. 79 80

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times and places in eternity will always remain problematic. Ultimately, all our expressions about what we cannot express, what goes beyond our spatial, temporal and linguistic limitations, are at best limited expressions. They try to convey a sense of expectation of the unlimited power of God’s creative and transformative love. And it is out of this love that human hope beyond death arises. Heaven as the image of fulfilled life with God provides reasons to hope: to be blessed by God’s offer of eternal and intimate relationship and by God’s healing of all of our relationships in need of the ultimate judgement of love and the resulting transformation of the relational centre of our being. In such a view, a necessarily critical interpretation of the symbol of purgatory might point to God’s love and mercy.

Love and heaven In this book, I am approaching hope from within the horizon of God’s gift of love. ‘Heaven’ provides the occasion of fulfilled love in God’s presence. As we have seen throughout this chapter, images of heaven have been developing and changing, usually not unrelated to the dominant religious, social, political and intellectual experiences and hopes of the respective period. Hence, once again, it does matter whether one approaches heaven from the perspective of faith or from the perspective of love. The transformative nature of love points towards a final judgement of love by God. Salvation could then indicate a fully enabled participation in this love dynamics. In this context, ‘purgatory’ could be interpreted as the symbol of divine healing, forgiveness and reconciliation, and the ‘final judgement’ could point to the ultimate transformation of our fourfold networks of love. And ‘hell’ could be imagined as the final destruction of evil. The promise of a love-based approach to heaven lies in its openness to the communal, intersubjective and creation-oriented process of transformation, which God initiated and confirmed in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here the gift of Jesus Christ demonstrates God’s ultimate commitment to creation and reconciliation. Moreover, hope for God’s judgement becomes central, also for our present life. The traditional faith-based approach to heaven and the related understanding of fulfilment of a Christian life risks making God and God’s love subservient to the human logic of lack and fulfilment, reward and punishment, however much elaborated in christological and/or trinitarian terms.84 Inner-trinitarian models of love calling for human participation presuppose a series of beliefs on how the immanent Trinity works and how

See, for instance, Hans-Peter Großhans, ‘Himmel.V. Dogmatisch, 1. Christliche Tradition, b) evangelisch’, in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3, 4th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 1744–5. Here, heaven is approached exclusively through the category of faith. 84

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we human beings might be able to join this dynamics. I find such theological thinking problematic.85 Here, beliefs about the inner nature of God offer a propositional construct to which the believer is invited to assent. However, as we have seen, cognitive assent is by no means identical with the praxis of love. This was the clue to Jesus’s account of the judgement in Mt. 25:31-46. Nor does a soteriology based on human depravity and divine self-sacrifice necessarily lead to love. A soteriology that begins with a belief in radical human fallenness as the background to a belief in the logic of Christ’s self-sacrificial offer to God, which God now can take as occasion to reopen the passage to heaven for Christians, does not yet present a persuasive call to love God, the neighbour, the universe and one’s own emerging self. Believing in salvation must not be confused with a praxis of love open to the divine judgement of love and the resulting healing, reconciliation and transformation. Whatever our approach to heaven, let us remember, in the poetic words of Kurt Marti, ‘the heaven, that is, is not the heaven that comes’.86 Our concepts of heaven only ever express our human hopes. God’s heavenly presence will transcend them all. Genuine hope can be found only in God and God’s judgement of love.

For a discussion of the problematic nature of references to the immanent Trinity, see Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘The Question of God Today’, in James M. Byrne, ed., The Christian Understanding of God Today (Dublin: Columba Press, 1993), 9–23. 86 Kurt Marti, ‘Der Himmel, der ist …’, in Evangelisches Gesangbuch, no. 153 (Hymnal of the German Protestant Church): ‘Der Himmel, der ist, ist nicht der Himmel, der kommt, wenn einst Himmel und Erde vergehen. Der Himmel, der kommt, das ist der kommende Herr, wenn die Herren der Erde gegangen …’. 85

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8 The Christian praxis of hope and Europe’s future

Hope and politics Even if not always explicitly stated, the horizon of genuine hope will include the hope of others and otherness. The divine gift of hope encourages not only expressions and trajectories of personal hope and visions of a personal future with God, with the saints and with God’s entire creation. Rather, like love, hope relates also to our collective future as subjects within God’s ongoing project of creation and reconciliation. In this sense, hope is also political. For the following discussion of the political dimension of hope, I have chosen to reflect on the present state of the European project and to assess the hopes and the hope which promise to inspire its future shape.

The crisis of the European project The crisis of Europe is omnipresent – whether with regard to the functioning of the institutions in the European Community or with regard to the conflicting expectations in the different regions, nations and countries in Europe. One would not need to have lived in the United Kingdom during and after the campaign on membership to the European Union and the British Brexit referendum decision on 23 June 2016 in order to be aware of this crisis. Rather, increased immigration into Europe, and particularly during 2015 into Sweden and Germany, the crises in Greece and Italy, the crisis of the Euro, the constitutional crisis in Spain and in Belgium, all these and further manifestations of crises have led to a sharpening of the focus on everybody’s take on Europe and its future. The British referendum, however, has helped to concentrate the minds of all people engaged with the future of

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the European Union to rethink the European project, as a whole, as well as the level of their respective contributions to it.1 Yet, before reflecting on Europe in more detail, it may be worthwhile to widen the perspective beyond the continent of Europe and beyond the question of Britain’s departure from the European Union, to the ongoing process of globalization and to the breathtaking revolution in technology and its impact on all of humanity. Nobody can deny that we live in an ever more interconnected world and that the processes of urbanization and globalization are irreversible. Even if we may long for a different world, watch countless episodes of Downton Abbey, The Crown and likeminded series in order to nurture nostalgia for a world long gone, choose to hide behind old or new nationalistic, religious and sectarian walls, urbanization and globalization are here to stay. Hence, we must tackle this development as critically and constructively as we can. To be sure, the process of increasing proximity and global interconnectivity has revealed wonderful opportunities as well as serious fault lines in the different parts of our one world; it has exposed old and new inward-looking tendencies in nations, cultures and religions; and it has caused deep unrest as well as great excitement. Notwithstanding our approach to it, globalization is continuing with ever-increasing speed: Overall, the truth is that Europe has been making crabwise improvements which are a long way short of achieving the degree of efficiency and flexibility it needs in the face of the global challenge – while the rest of the world has not been standing still.2 Globalization in conjunction with the massive technological revolution now underway, has made not only the middle classes of this world insecure. Jobs are disappearing as human labour has become either unnecessary or more expensive than robot labour. The mechanics of consumption switches from direct human contact in the marketplace to a more and more digitalized pattern of trade and, as a result, it contributes to a further mediatization and atomization of human life and connectivity. While the first waves of industrialization and the related urbanization did not significantly reduce the level of human encounter and exchange as such, the ongoing digital

For a one-sided discussion of the impact of recent mass immigration to Europe on Europe’s future trajectory from the perspective of nostalgia for a more homogeneous European development, see Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1: ‘I mean that the civilisation we know as Europe is in the process of committing suicide and that neither Britain nor any other European country can avoid this fate because we all appear to suffer from the same symptoms and maladies.’ The maladies are ‘the mass movement of peoples into Europe’ (2) and ‘that Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions and legitimacy’ (3). What was once referred to as ‘our culture’ has now been lost (29). 2 Stephen Green, The European Identity: Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny (London: Haus Publishing, 2015), 19. 1

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revolution widens the field of potential encounter and exchange to include the entire planet and beyond. At the same time, it significantly diminishes concrete experiences of personal encounter and of unmediated human relationships. The consequences of this development are only beginning to dawn on us. Since the High Middle Ages, Western intellectuals have been advocating human emancipation, autonomy and full subjectivity. However, the human subject that has emerged in the West thanks to humanism, Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment finds herself rather more isolated and lonely in today’s world and is often longing for more fulfilling forms of genuinely human interaction, relationships and community.3 Such developments are of course not limited to Europe, but they concern all human beings alive and not yet born. The various forms of reaction to this rapidly changing world are in themselves not particular to European processes either. A complex struggle for political power and domination in our fluid world can be observed in Russia, China, the United States, India, the Middle East, Brazil and elsewhere. The instrumentalization of religion in this struggle is not unique to Europe either, as developments in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Iran, Japan, the United States and the Middle East only illustrate too well. Challenged by globalization and digitalization, political elites seem intent to control mass data and the flow of information. Moreover, they are prepared to mastermind the emotional households of their people in order to hold on to power. While controlling the flow of information proves ever more difficult and cumbersome (e.g. Panama Papers, WikiLeaks etc.), managing and manipulating the religious and emotional households of people seems a more promising endeavour because it appeals to a sense of belonging, however fictional, which has become ever more precious while traditional forms of connectivity are rapidly disappearing. Confronted with fragmentation, atomization and resulting powerlessness, threatened with unemployment and challenged to cope with emerging cultural, religious and social forms of otherness, many people now turn to groups that promise affinity, stability, belonging, meaningfulness, Heimat, work and simplicity.4 I agree with Francis Fukuyama that democracy as such cannot provide identity.5

For a discussion of ‘relation’ as characteristic for our time’s search for meaning, see Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Liebe, Hoffnung und Glaube als Kategorien relationaler Theologie’, in Markus Mühling, ed., Rationalität im Gespräch – Rationality in Conversation: Philosophische und theologische Perspektiven – Philosophical and Theological Perspectives. Christoph Schwöbel zum 60. Geburtstag (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), 161–73. 4 Klaus Segbers, ‘Die Rückkehr der Stammesmentalität’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 May 2019, 6: ‘Infolgedessen kehrt der Tribalismus jetzt als Identitätspolitik zurück, als reaktionäre Rückwendung zur vormodernen Welt.’ 5 Francis Fukuyama, ‘Demokratie stiftet keine Identität’, DIE ZEIT, 2016:13, 49–50. See also Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile Books, 2018). 3

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The tribal forms which we can observe to be on the rise today are, at least in part, reactions to the challenges of the new global and digital complexity (die neue Unübersichtlichkeit).6 When confronting this tribalism it would not be helpful to deny that our lives are indeed significantly affected by ongoing complexification processes. In any case, the recipes of a pre-industrialized past will not suffice in our radically different environment. How then should we organize our societies and our global order today? What role can religion in general and Christian religion in particular play in this newly configured world? What expectations of the future are appropriate in this radically different environment? What could a Christian praxis of hope and its wisdom contribute today to the debate on human future in and beyond Europe? Obviously, in this chapter I cannot deal with all of these questions. With appropriate modesty, therefore, I propose, first, to reflect on some neotribalist and populist approaches to the crisis in Europe. Second, I shall explore the promise of hope in this context. And third, I shall offer a few markers on how an enlightened Christian praxis of hope may help in promoting a more promising approach to Europe’s future in this universe. Hence, rather than reflecting on the political dimensions of hope in general, I propose here to review the political potential and dynamics of hope in the particular context of Europe.

The danger of neo-tribalism and populism in Europe Today, everywhere in Europe we can observe new expressions of tribalist and populist thinking and acting. The ongoing refugee crisis has functioned as a catalyst for such thinking and acting.7 However, tribalism has always been a more or less visible feature in European societies, whereas populism is a more recent phenomenon.8 Tribalism has to do with a basic instinct of defining a

For the origin of this German concept, see Jürgen Habermas, Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit: Kleine Politische Schriften V (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985). 7 For a discussion of the religious and related aspects of this crisis, see Ulrich Schmiedel and Graeme Smith, eds., Religion in the European Refugee Crisis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Walter Lesch, ed., Christentum und Populismus: Klare Fronten? (Freiburg: Herder, 2017). 8 Jan-Werner Müller, What is Populism? (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 19f., defines populism as follows: 6

Populism … is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified – but, I shall argue, ultimately fictional – people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior. … In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist: populists claim that they,

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‘we’ against an ‘other’ who is potentially threatening, while populism claims that only my group and I can genuinely define proper belonging to a nation, region, religion, social group and so on. The primitive division between us and them is exactly this – primitive. It promises to offer belonging and protection against any danger within a real or imagined group deemed to be able to guard the self against concrete or imagined others.9 Tribalism has always been a feature of human society and of religious traditions, although an evil one, because it limits human development, encounter, renewal, imagination and transformation. Primitive tribal reactions to otherness appear today in the shape of social, cultural, religious, economic and political attitudes, movements and extremist parties all over Europe. And populist ideologies can be observed in many European countries and beyond.10 Populism is the shadow of representative democracy.11 France for the French, Sweden for the Swedes, Finland for the true Finns, Britain for the self-appointed guardians of British values, especially in England, whose noisy value defenders have been longing for ‘liberation’ from Europe. Mother Russia is back again, and in Poland a massive fight for so-called traditional Polish values is ongoing.12 Humorous banter about cultural and regional differences may indeed be exhilarating and liberating, however, what is going on in Europe today is deeply disconcerting and calls for resistance.13 The nationalistic and populist noises in England, for example, are frightening: What does it mean to be liberated from Europe? To be liberated from European immigration? To be liberated from otherness? To be liberated from Brussels – the new fictional Rome, as it were, in many

and only they, represent the people. Other political competitors are just part of the immoral, corrupt elite, or so populists say, while not having power themselves; when in government, they will not recognize anything like a legitimate opposition.The populist core claim also implies that whoever does not really support populist parties might not be part of the proper people to begin with. Jan-Werner Müller, ‘False Flags: The Myth of the Nationalist Resurgence’, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019, 35–41, here 41: ‘The point is not that fights over culture and identity are illusory or illegitimate just because populists always happen to promote them. Rather, the point is that establishment institutions are too quickly turning to culture and identity to explain politics. In this way, they are playing into populists’ hands – doing their jobs for them, in effect.’ 10 Cf. Müller’s host of examples in What is Populism? See also Klaus Segbers, ‘Die Rückkehr der Stammesmentalität’, op. cit.: ‘Die Nachfrage nach populistischen Rezepten beruht nicht primär auf unzulänglichen Medien- und Bildungsangeboten, sondern auf dem Bedarf nach einem tri­ balen Heimatgefühl.’ 11 Müller, What is Populism? 20. See also Andreas Lob-Hüdepohl, ‘Wider den Populismus: Zur Verantwortung menschenrechtsbasierter Sozialer Arbeit’, in Walter Lesch, ed., Christentum und Populismus, op. cit., 112–23, here 112: ‘Populismen schüren aber vor allem Feindbilder gegen ‘die da unten’ oder ‘die da draußen’ – also überhaupt gegen alle, die nicht zum ‘wahren’ Volk dazugehören sollen, dazugehören dürfen oder aufgrund irgendwelcher ‘Andersartigkeit’ vermeintlich nicht dazugehören können.’ 12 Cf. Gabriel Byström, Med Guds hjälp: Om religion och politik i Ryssland, Ungern och Polen (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2017). 13 See Müller, What is Populism? 22–3. 9

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English minds? Is Brussels now the new Antichrist replacing the pope and the Vatican?14 And even in the aftermath of the Brexit decision, the nasty tribalism which has come to the fore during the months of campaigning for or against Europe is continuing, forcefully fuelled by some loud voices in the British press. In Europe, it seems, we are confronted once more with a massive problem of relating to otherness. As already indicated, even religious tribalism raises its ugly head. Sectarian forms of Roman Catholicism have come out of the woodwork ever since Pope Francis refused to provide the level of dogmatic recognition and doctrinal security which certain Catholic groups claim to require. As long as the pontiffs of the past stilled such longings, Catholics were admonished by some self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy to be more obedient to the (infallible) popes. However, as soon as it has become obvious that Pope Francis displays less of an interest in Neoplatonist upholstery, but more of an interest in the factual situation of women, men and children and their experiences and needs (especially the poor, the migrants, the exploited and marginalized, as well as those whose life and faith projects have not been perfectly successful), some cardinals, bishops and lay people have started to revolt in favour of more dogmatic security, clearer restatements of orthodoxy, cleaner doctrinal boundaries to, and subsequent exclusion of, others. Such groups seem to find it difficult to cope with the freedom of the Christian believer in a church that clearly affirms human freedom as a necessary precondition for love – the love of God, of neighbour, of God’s creation and of one’s own emerging self. When discussing the complex phenomenon of populism from a Christian perspective, it might be useful to recall that historically the Christian churches have not always been advocates of cosmopolitical openness and of welcoming others into their midst.15 Moreover, one can observe a number of structural similarities between the habitus of ecclesial self-affirmation and political confessions on the far right: Christian churches have accepted democratic structures of cooperation and mutual recognition within a shared legal space only relatively late. Anti-modern confrontations with the ‘world’ are still well-known attitudes in some Christian quarters. Moralizing

Stephen Green, Brexit and the British: Who Are We Now? (London: Haus Publishing, 2017), 20: 14

But for forty years, British political leaders have treated Brussels as a convenient whipping boy for all sorts of actual or perceived ills inflicted on their citizenry. And for more than sixty years, the British political class (of both the left and the right) has shown a shortsightedness and indeed dishonesty about Britain’s strategic options in Europe and in the wider world, ever since the years when the founders of the European project sought to create a new and peaceful postwar order. Our forebears were still at that time fixated by empire and its aftermath. Cf. Walter Lesch, ‘Religion und Populismus: Blinde Flecken der Wahrnehmung’, in Lesch, ed., Christentum und Populismus, op. cit., 12–25, here 18. 15

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and excluding discourses can be observed in a number of Christian contexts even today. Preaching doom and gloom are not the sole characteristics of populist expressions. ‘As cultural and social phenomena, religions are as ambivalent as populist programmes of global explanation and politics.’16 For a number of years, originally in connection with the failed European constitution project, voices were raised in favour of identifying the ‘soul of Europe’ in expressly Christian terms.17 They argued (wrongly) that Europe had always been Christian and therefore any proposed European constitution ought to display explicit references to God in the opening paragraphs of such a document. These voices hoped that such a reference would safeguard a clear emphasis on those religious values that, as it was claimed, had been underlying and inspiring the process of European integration, ever since its beginnings in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, a number of states, including France, Belgium and Northern European states, rejected such a reference. Instead they proposed a very general mentioning of the significance of the cultural, religious and humanist heritage of Europe as a basis for the development of universal values. Hence, neither God nor Jesus Christ was named in the proposed text of the constitution, which, it must be recalled, was never implemented. At the time, I welcomed the exclusion of references to God, Christ or the church in such a constitutional framework, because, then as now, I propose to approach the European project first of all in terms of a community of law and not in terms of a homogeneous community of views of life. For me, Europe does not have a soul; rather, Europe offers a constitutional space to all its citizens and legal protection for the development of their respective religious or non-religious humanist convictions. I wish to argue that the religious fabric and future of Europe must be recognized as radically pluralist. Any reference to a myth of a Christian Europe ought to be exposed as a dangerous tribal pursuit. Unfortunately, versions of such a foundation myth are on the rise – not only in Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Austria. In the perception of many, Europe has been a Christian continent during the greater part of the last two thousand years. In spite of the fragmentation of the Christian church into a Western and an Eastern church, in spite of the age-old and continuous presence of Jews and Muslims in Europe, in spite of the separation of the Western church into Catholic and Protestant denominations, in spite of the secularization process following the

Ibid., 22. See also Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Europa och den religiösa utvecklingen’, in Jeanrond, Kyrkans Framtid: Teologiska Reflexioner III (Lund: Arcus, 2012), 151–70; and Jeanrond, ‘The Future of Christianity in Europe’, in Werner G. Jeanrond and Andrew D. H. Mayes, eds., Recognising the Margins: Developments in Biblical and Theological Studies: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne (Dublin: Columba Press, 2006), 182–200. 16 17

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Enlightenment critique of church and religion, many still prefer to associate Europe with a monolithic Christian heritage. Douglas Murray, for instance, is one among recent commentators who view Islam as new and unfitting to Europe.18 Of course, in its different and ambiguous shapes and forms, Christianity has indeed contributed significantly to the religious, cultural, legal, social, political, scientific and so on development in Europe and to the emergence of pluralist societies in Europe.19 At the same time, there cannot be any doubt that one of the interests behind the drive for a distinctly Christian identity in Europe has been the concern to keep religious and social otherness at bay. The myth of a Christian Europe has been erected and defended against Judaism, against Islam, against socialism and communism, against secularism, in short against any movement deemed to be other and considered as a threat. In that sense, Christianity has been used by some defenders of an integrated Europe in order to provide the European project with a strong internal identity and religious cohesion. At times, this myth has suited church leaders; at times it has been instrumentalized by political rulers in Europe. In whatever form, this foundation myth has always been problematic and dangerous.20 Europe has no soul.21 It is neither an exclusively Christian space, nor is its future the exclusive concern of Christian believers and churches. Europe is a geographical and legal space where people of different religious and secular orientations and backgrounds must learn to live together in closer cooperation and deepening mutual respect. Such a life together can never be free from conflicts, debates and pluralism; instead, it always requires new and courageous attempts at understanding each other. The best way to deal constructively with difference, diversity and otherness is, as I have argued earlier, a culture of love. However, the European heritage in terms of shaping the relationship between religion and politics does not facilitate the development of such a culture of love which would be able to deal with religious and political differences. Since the time of the Roman Empire, Europeans shared a conviction that a state needs religious homogeneity for its flourishing: political and social harmony presupposes religious homogeneity. This conviction was not altered in view of the various religious and confessional splits in

Cf. Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, op. cit., 306f. Cf. Rupert Shortt, ‘At the prow of history: Why Christianity has been more of an encouragement than an obstacle to social and intellectual progress’, TLS [The Times Literary Supplement] No. 5933, 16 December 2016, 3–5. 20 Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 305, argues that Europe would need to come to terms not just with the pains of its past but also with its past glories. He feels that ‘much of the future of Europe will be decided on what our attitude is towards the church buildings and other great cultural buildings of our heritage standing in our midst.’ 21 In Chapter 6, I have attempted to develop a relational understanding of the human soul. 18 19

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European history. Rather it was confirmed once more in the Westphalian Peace of 1648 through the slogan cuius regio eius religio, which implied that the civic spheres in Europe continued to be organized in terms of religious homogeneity: every political unit in Europe defended its exclusive religious character. Thus, Sweden, for example, officially remained a Lutheran state with a state church until the (nearly complete) disestablishment of the Church of Sweden in 2000. England still has an established church, the Church of England. This conviction was even held by those modern forces who assumed that the arrival of the secular realm would eventually do away with religion altogether. So-called enlightened societies and states, such as revolutionary France, communist Albania and the Soviet Union, chose to embrace and to defend homogeneous forms of secular orientation and tolerated no doctrinal dissent. Hence, the challenge of pluralism which European citizens face today is experienced as new and daunting: how to build and develop a genuinely pluralist Europe in which religious and non-religious people alike find a home and enjoy the opportunity to contribute constructively and critically to the development of such a pluralist culture of respect and love and its supporting institutions. To be sure, this transition from a once homogeneous culture of belonging, imagination and social organization now to a genuinely pluralist approach to religion and society will not be easy. Rather, it requires a firm commitment to the legitimacy of otherness and difference as well as to approaching difference in love for the otherness of the other. Moreover, establishing such a culture of love in Europe demands from religious movements the relinquishing of their traditional aspirations to dominance, hegemony and power.22 New models for constructive co-existence between the followers of different religious and secular movements within the one European space need to be developed and discussed. A new trust must be established from below.23 The question, then, will be how faith and theology – the critical and self-critical reflection on faith – can contribute to the development of mutual respect and recognition and of a culture of love in which difference and otherness are not considered threatening but enrichening.24 Known models to keep the public life free from religious influence and symbolic presence, such as the French concept of Laicité, or models to

Cf. Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 305–7. Mere references to the glory of our church buildings and cathedrals will not suffice here. 23 Christof Mandry, ‘Europa als politisches Feindbild – oder: was spricht für die Legitimität der Europäischen Union?’ in Walter Lesch, ed., Christentum und Populismus, op. cit., 72–85, here 84: ‘Wenn europäische Integration auf der Basis gemeinsamer Interessen erfolgen können soll, muss eine Vertrauensbasis zwischen den Europäern mit politischer Tragfähigkeit vorhanden sein oder sich aufrichten lassen.’ 24 Cf. Antje Jackelén, Samlas kring hoppet (Stockholm: Verbum, 2016), 29. 22

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promote a system of mutual cooperation and instrumentalization between state and religion, such as the concordat system between most of the states (Bundesländer) and the Christian Churches in the Federal Republic of Germany, will not do any more. They privilege outdated approaches to social harmony and do not invite the open, critical, self-critical, constructive and creative involvement of religious and non-religious movements in the public realm. Christianity, alongside Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions and non-religious secular movements should actively contribute to the development of such a culture of love, leading to mutual understanding, increased respect and the establishment of just institutions.25 This seems to me to be a more appropriate approach to a way of living together that accepts and relishes otherness and difference than any futile search for a European soul or some stable religious homogeneity.26 Moreover, in such a pluralist space, neither primitive tribal identity politics, nor a populist politics of belonging through selective exclusion, nor shallow forms of civic religion are necessary or helpful.27 How might the Christian praxis of hope, which I have considered in the chapters of this book, be able to contribute to such a development in Europe?

Exploring the potential of hope Traditionally, faith has been considered to be at the centre of Christian religion, whereas love and hope at best have played second fiddle.28 As we have seen earlier, there are a number of reasons for this predominance of faith in Christian thinking and praxis. One of them is the appeal to faith in times of conflict when one wishes to determine and secure the boundaries of the Christian church: who is in and who is (or ought to be) excluded? Love, of course, is hardly ever a useful concept in order to terminate relationships with others. Rather, love lives of otherness and of relating to the otherness

Cf. Paul Ricœur’s reference to the desire for just institutions in his book Réflexion faite: Autobiographie intellectuelle (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995), 80. 26 For a nostalgic plea for religious homogeneity as the sole foundation for the potential integration of religious others, see Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 320: Day by day the continent of Europe is not only changing but is losing any possibility of a soft landing in response to such change. An entire political class have failed to appreciate that many of us who live in Europe love the Europe that was ours. We do not want our politicians, through weakness, selfhatred, malice, tiredness or abandonment to change our home into an utterly different place. 27 Cf. Stephen Green, Brexit and the British, op. cit., 32: ‘Identities do not exist, and cannot flourish, in isolation.’ 28 Cf. Jeanrond, ‘Liebe, Hoffnung und Glaube als Kategorien relationaler Theologie’, op. cit., and the discussion in Chapter 1. 25

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inside and outside of me, including God’s radical otherness. While love, by nature, is inclined to transgress boundaries, faith, especially when understood as fides quae, can more easily be reduced to a list of propositions requiring assent.29 If such assent is not forthcoming, a case of dissent can quickly be constructed and upheld. As I have argued throughout this book, I propose to approach hope from within a horizon of love. In my understanding, hope is relational by nature. It results from the intimate encounter with a loving God whose creative and reconciling presence proves to be transformative in the lives of women, men and children. Moreover, as discussed earlier in Chapter 5, memory and hope belong together.30 Both memories of broken relationships and memories of transformative relationships inform and shape our approaches to the future – not only to our own personal or communal future, but also to the future of humanity in this universe. All our futures are interconnected; hence, nobody can seriously hope only for himself or herself alone. Europe can also be approached in terms of a community of remembering (Erinnerungsgemeinschaft). Rather than leaving the development of a culture of remembering only to nations or regions, Europe could be understood as a transnational and trans-regional space in which memories – good, bad, tragic, subversive and ambiguous – may be cultivated and evaluated in a critical and self-critical way. Moreover, the focus of a shared future would oblige the different agents and bodies of remembering in Europe to include all types of memories, and in particular the memories of suffering. Thus, the memory of the Holocaust could offer an important focal point on the way towards a shared European memory of suffering. This is not to suggest taking anything away from German guilt and responsibility, nor to reduce European memory exclusively to the memory of suffering. Rather, this is to propose a European obligation to maintaining the memory of the Holocaust as an essential aspect of the moral memory of humankind and, hence, of hope. To be sure, the Holocaust will not become central to the European collective memory as an act of remembering from above, imposed by forms of institutional politics of memory. Instead, it must emerge from below, out of a responsive and responsible culture of remembering.31 There are signs that such a culture of remembering is emerging in western parts of Europe, especially where national mythologies are exposed, challenged and overcome as a result of the combining of national memories with memories

For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between love and orthopraxis, see Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Orthodoxy and Ideology’, Concilium 2014:2, 59–68. 30 See also Stephen Green, Brexit and the British, op. cit., 60: ‘Achieving maturity in the future will depend on how well we come to terms with the past.’ 31 Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, 3rd ed., Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018, 258, emphasizes that a memory has only then a vital cultural energy when it is not only ordered from above, but locally supported and maintained from below. 29

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of the respective others.32 In Chapter 5, I have attempted to illustrate such transnational and transcultural European developments and to underline the significance of shared spaces of remembering. To remember the different ‘lieux de mémoire’ in a shared transnational framework remains a central European task.33 However, as Brian Klug reminds us, ‘The darkest cloud over Europe’s future is Europe’s past. This is not necessarily the past that Europe imagines for itself. Europeans are in the habit of thinking that for centuries they have been in the vanguard of the human race, showing the way forward to a backward and wayward world.’34 Hence, the European task of remembering requires a good amount of self-critical work and vision: So, when we broach Europe’s future, we begin not in the present but in the present-past. This is the tense of our enquiry. If we ignore the past and the painful task of reckoning with it then the question ‘How can people live together in difference?’ becomes merely sentimental – and ceases to be political. In the present-past, this question is not only about bridging differences of culture, it is also about overcoming the disparity in status written into the script of colonial history, whether that history is remembered the way Europe imagines it (‘the White Man’s burden’) or the way non-Europeans experienced it.35 We have seen that people entertain all kinds of hopes and that such hopes need to be liberated in the name of the one hope that comes to us as gift and that invites our personal participation and communal engagement. Furthermore, I have shown that radical hope is required when the normal religious, cultural, social and political institutions fail to offer critical markers towards a common future. However, radical hope does not emerge in a vacuum. Rather for Christians, it emerges thanks to their ongoing and transformative relationship of love with God in Christ and the Spirit. Radical hope is always the fruit of radical love. ‘Show me your hope and I know how you relate to God.’ A phrase like this could point to the intimate relationship between our hope and our understanding of God and of God’s presence in this universe. Thus, Christian pronouncements on hope always already reveal the state of love for God and for God’s continuing creation. Christian eschatology, therefore, must point to the liberating potential of hope in relation to all of our different hopes either here and now or with regard to life after death.

Cf. Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, 255–64. See also Brian Klug, ‘A World of Difference’, Antony Lerman, ed., Do I Belong? Reflections from Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 116–30. 33 Cf. Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, 265. 34 Klug, ‘A World of Difference’, 126. 35 Ibid., 127f. 32

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As discussed in the previous chapter, hell can never be an object of hope. This is not to say that there can be no such state characterized by a selfwilled total negation of or absence from God and from love. Hence, it makes no sense to hope for hell. However, it makes good sense to hope for heaven – if heaven is understood in relational terms: to be eternally related to God, to God’s people, to God’s evolving project of creation and reconciliation, and to one’s own emerging self. Yet any hopes for heaven in terms of a desire for personal benefits external to the divinely initiated network of loving relationships and for some sort of eternal homogeneity, ought to be confronted with the full relational power of hope. Christians do not equate eternal love relationships with the suppression of otherness, diversity, particularity and conflict. In my understanding of hope, heaven is the occasion of love and full acceptance of God’s radical otherness and of human otherness in the light of God’s judgement of love. Love, then, is not a process of homogenization, but a process of respect and desire for the other as other. As discussed in Chapter 7, the Kingdom of God and heaven are symbolic expressions of the fullness of God’s creation, love and reconciliation but not of any promise of total annihilation of differences and particularities. These considerations are of significance for any approach to shaping human future and its institutions in Europe (and beyond). Christian approaches to Europe can be informed and inspired by Christian approaches to hope, love and faith.36 It makes a difference from where one starts: if my hopes inspire a monistic and exclusive approach to Europe, this augurs badly for all the others around me. If, however, my hope relates to the loving and merciful God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammad, then I need not fear manifestations of difference, diversity, otherness and conflict in Europe, since conflict, otherness, diversity and difference mark the situations in which true love first comes into its own.

Hope and Europe’s future Christians are people of hope. They nurture expectations and look to the future. They are political beings. They experience a call to build a culture of love in which they can articulate their expectations for the future, in our

It is interesting that Douglas Murray’s account of Europe’s past, presence and future in The Strange Death of Europe is devoid of any consideration of hope or radical hope. Instead, he mourns the death of Europe’s presumed former identity. Alas, it will no longer be the same! Moreover, he does not explore the possibility and attraction of the emergence of a pluralistic identity in terms of task and challenge. Cf. here Paul Ricœur’s discussion of idem-identity and ipse-identity in Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1–4.

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case for the future of Europe in a globalizing and pluralist world. A culture of love offers the necessary relational framework for dealing constructively with otherness – the otherness of my neighbours, the otherness of our created universe, the otherness of my own emerging self, and the radical otherness of God. According to Christian wisdom and experience, love represents the only way forward when approaching this interlinked fourfold manifestation of otherness. Once again, love must not be confused with like. The point is not to like everything and everybody – not even God could seriously issue such a command. Rather to love means to respect the other as other – even if I should not like him or her. Hence, love often implies hard work and intimate engagement, and, contrary to popular opinion, love ought not to be reduced to sentimental feeling of harmony or nostalgic romanticism. Instead, Christian love is by nature eschatological: it is bound up with hope and with hope universal. That means it looks to the future together with all human beings that have lived, live now and shall live in this universe. Christians cannot imagine a future without all the others – dead and alive. Hence, two prominent approaches to the world ought to be rejected: firstly, any aspiration that Christians are called to erect some sort of an anti-world in Europe – individually or collectively, the only authentic sacred society so to speak; and secondly, the division of Europe into a clearly defined secular and a religious sphere. Christians share the European space with all other men, women and children that live here. Christians participate in the shaping of Europe’s future. Thus, they take their place within the orchestra of voices and expectations without trying to subject all other faiths and beliefs to their own approaches or horizons. Christian articulations of love, hope and faith do not limit themselves to interpret the world; rather their goal is to change the world and to transform it, though not against others, but together with others. Christians share this ambition to shape the world not only with the two other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, but also with all people of good will – religious or not. Moreover, Christians remain committed to seek truth and justice in love. Hence, their respect for otherness does not amount to a relativistic attitude of ‘anything goes’, but to a critical and self-critical interpretation of all hopes, plans and visions of the future, approached through the perspective of God’s gracious attention and loving recognition and judgement. Prayer, conversation, music, shared moments of tranquillity are among the many possibilities of shaping hope within a global culture of love. Here, the churches have much to offer and to contribute.37 Exclusivist eschatologies and exclusive versions of apocalypticism do not provide room for otherness, since they believe in a world where otherness is

See also Jackelén, Samlas kring hoppet, op. cit., 14.

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to be managed, fought, controlled and ultimately overcome. Here, religious beliefs control, limit and subdue the gift of hope. It must be said that exclusivist visions of the end are always boring if viewed from a perspective of hope. For hope reckons with God’s surprising acts of judgement and transformation in love. The praxis of hope overcomes any form of thiswordly or otherworldy calculation.38 However, at the other end of the spectrum, an indiscriminate pluralist approach to the future does not take otherness seriously either. Rather, it merely salutes any approach to ultimate reality, including one’s own, as an equally valid response to ultimate mystery. Here eschatological expectation has become so general that it runs the risk of losing any distinctive features of a genuinely evolving mutual relationship of respect and love, including the loving pursuit of justice and truth. Only a critical and self-critical approach keeps the eschatological horizon open for the self-communication of God and takes seriously the tasks emerging from such a horizon. Attending to otherness, even religious otherness, demands respect, curiosity, courage and critical engagement for the disclosure of ever more otherness – including the otherness of one’s own subjectivity that might evolve in the process of encountering others – and care for examining the other’s otherness and one’s own otherness in mutually critical correlation. Attention to otherness respects the priority of the question over against any claim to certainty. Interreligious learning is a case in point.39 The different eschatological outlooks reveal something about the relational potential of particular religious traditions and groups in European society. Christians have developed quite an array of eschatological and apocalyptic visions with indirect and direct consequences for all those others that have been refusing to be harmonized or homogenized with Christian projects in the past. Both Jews and Muslims have been badly affected by exclusivist Christian eschatologies. However, even the opposite can be true: also Jewish and Islamic eschatologies, at times, have had disastrous consequences for the respective others. In all three Abrahamic religions, we can observe the manifestation of individualized eschatologies according to which martyrdom for God’s sake, or for one’s own private understanding of what God may wish to be the case, is understood to guarantee immediate personal salvation and sainthood.40 Moreover, the combination of traditional eschatological concepts with individual apocalyptical imagination has led to explosive mixtures of religious violence with massive personal, social and political

Cf. Ottmar Fuchs, Das Jüngste Gericht: Hoffnung über den Tod hinaus (Regensburg: Fried­ rich Pustet, 2018), 132–4. 39 Cf. Andreas Lob-Hüdepohl, ‘“Brücken statt Barrieren”: Potenziale christlicher Hoffnung gegen den Populismus von rechts’, Concilium 55 (2019:2), 196–205, esp. 204. 40 For a discussion of the complex notion of martyrdom, see ‘Märtyrer’, in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 5, 4th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 861–73. 38

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consequences. It is important to recall that violence and terror in the name of God are never faithful responses to God’s multiple love command: to love God in conjunction with neighbour, world and self. Eschatological faith and apocalyptic action outside the framework of love are destructive and ultimately deadly. Thus, violence in the name of God can never claim to be an act of love. In Europe, we rarely discuss in public the connection between eschatological and apocalyptic concepts and their social, political and ecological consequences for the world and the universe as a whole. Attitudes to the current use of global resources are, of course, intimately connected with an understanding of the universe as God’s creative and reconciling project. Moreover, the inner connection between God understood as the creator who created the universe out of nothing and God who loves this world as the personal other needs to be explored in greater depth.41 Christian eschatologies thus must answer the critical challenge that they often have prioritized their own personal and communal future at the expense of this wider aspect of otherness. Eschatology and ecology ought not to be separated.42 Even the future of the physical universe belongs to the natural horizon of Christian eschatology.43 I shall return to this aspect in the following chapter. Hence, the vocation of the religions with regard to the future of Europe is not to provide strong harmonious and exclusive forms of belonging and related maintenance of group identity. Rather, it is to develop the praxis of forming communities of love and hope, out of which religiously mature and critical people and communities can emerge, who care for and are committed to God’s project of creation and reconciliation. Given this commitment to the recognition of otherness in love, the religions should have no difficulty in respecting the pluralist nature of European forms of democracy while developing concrete local forms of love, justice, charity, hospitality, mercy, resistance and peace, which in turn can enliven and support the democratic process in Europe.44 Moreover, life in Europe must not be reduced to economics, to markets and the mobility of people and goods, and to consumption, however,

Cf. David Fergusson, ‘Loved by the Other: Creatio ex nihilo as an Act of Divine Love’, in Ulrich Schmiedel and James M. Matarazzo, eds., Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Alterity, A Festschrift for Werner G. Jeanrond (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 265–73. 42 See Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudatio si: On Care for Our Common Home (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2015); and Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, [1996] 2005), 277–9. 43 Cf. Fuchs, Das Jüngste Gericht, op. cit., 155: ‘Gott selbst ist es, der die Zerstörung der Schöpfung anklagen und ahnden wird.’ 44 See, for example, Mona Siddiqui, Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in God’s Name (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2015); Marianne Moyaert, Fragile Identities: Towards a Theology of Interreligious Hospitality, trans. Henry Jansen (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011). 41

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justified and important these goals may appear to be.45 Life in Europe must ultimately be life for the entire human person in her various relations and networks as well as life for the whole world and the universe at large. The Christian horizon of hope comprises all of humanity and its environment, that is, the living, the dead and the human beings not yet born: every human person is my neighbour.46 Nation states, forms of interstate cooperation, forms of European integration, the work of the United Nations, all of these and other forms of human organization and institution must be subjected to constructive critique by those religions who genuinely wish to promote human life within a framework of alterity and just love. It is the task of the religions to make sure that the question Who is the human being? and the question Who is a neighbour? will not be subordinated to technical, tribal and sectarian calculations. Overcoming tribalism and populism in the religious, cultural, social, economic and political spheres of our lives must be a priority today. The contribution of the religions to the future of Europe is to enable growth in love and hope for all women, men and children. This growth requires vibrant and dynamic communities. To put it differently, Christian eschatology ought to direct Christian visions of the church and not the other way around.47 To be sure, the priority of religious life in Europe is to nurture creative forms of transformative communities of love, hope and faith. Democratic processes on their own cannot create such communities; rather without such vibrant communities, our democracies will wither away. To put it bluntly: Our democracies require critical and self-critical religious movements that are capable of organizing genuine communities of love, hope and faith and to mount prophetic forms of resistance to all forms of oppression and exclusion. Christians expect no less than the reconciliation of all people in love and peace before God. That is a truly revolutionary hope, a radical hope, which can never be satisfied with any status quo. Communities of hope keep the momentum alive that a better Europe in and for a better world is possible and desirable. This momentum will be good news for all of us – including the refugees who knock at our doors.

Cf. Johann Baptist Metz, Memoria passionis: Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft, 2nd ed. (Freiburg i. B.: Herder, 2006), 198–211. See also Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Financial Crisis and Economist Pretensions: A Critical Theological Approach’, in Iain G MacNeil and Justin O’Brien, eds., The Future of Financial Regulation (Oxford/Portland: Hart Publishing, 2010), 341–9. 46 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 22: ‘The one to whom I have a duty is my neighbour, and when I fulfil my duty I show that I am a neighbour. Christ does not speak about knowing the neighbour but about becoming a neighbour oneself, about showing oneself to be a neighbour just as the Samaritan showed it by his mercy.’ 47 For a corresponding approach to ecclesiology, see Ulrich Schmiedel, Elasticized Ecclesiology: The Concept of Community after Ernst Troeltsch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 2017. 45

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However, we must go even further. The praxis of hope implies a praxis of sharing our lives and our goods with all people on earth. Since the horizon of our hope is universal, we cannot hope for our future while excluding the future of all those others. In a time of rapid social, political and technological change, more than ever, we need just institutions to help us in this process of learning afresh how to share. The Christian praxis of hope – alongside Jewish, Muslim and other approaches to the praxis of hope – will keep the burning desire for truth, justice, reconciliation and peace alive and initiate the development of just institutions in Europe and beyond. The current crisis of Europe may thus present us with both a unique challenge and a unique chance to contemplate our situation in a critical and self-critical spirit and to act with critical conviction, passionate love and transformative hope for the renewal of our continent for the benefit of this world and this universe.

9 Reasons to hope

Love and hope Throughout this book, my point of departure has been the primacy of love over hope and faith. The divine gift of love provides the horizon for exploring the potential of hope in Christian discipleship. Moreover, as I tried to show in A Theology of Love, there is no such thing as a Christian love. Rather, there is love – God’s gift to all women, men and children, past, present and future.1 Over the centuries, there have been countless attempts at developing a Christian praxis of discipleship in response to God’s creative and reconciling gifts of the virtues of love, hope and faith. Thus, we do not possess a single authoritative blueprint for how to love, how to hope, and how to believe. Rather, these virtues are relational, and therefore dynamic, activities within the fourfold network of interdependent love relationships: our love for each other, for God, for God’s creation, and for our own emerging selves. All love relations confront us with otherness – in each other, in God, in God’s creation, but also in our own evolving subjectivity. Every generation must attend afresh to the task of shaping their own Christian praxis in critical and self-critical consideration of their particular circumstances, talents and challenges. In each case, the mystery of otherness draws us ever more deeply into this network of interdependent dynamic relations. In this final chapter, I wish to offer some systematic remarks on hope in the church and world today. I am trying to gather the fragments,2 so to speak, presented in the previous eight chapters, in order to explore the different but

Werner G. Jeanrond, A Theology of Love (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), esp. 101. Here I am making use of David Tracy’s expression. Cf. David Tracy, ‘Form and Fragment: The Recovery of the Hidden and Incomprehensible God’, in Werner G. Jeanrond and Aasulv Lande, eds., The Concept of God in Global Dialogue (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2005), 98–114. 1 2

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related trajectories of love in terms of their potential for present and future acts of hope. Again, hope is not a unique possession of Christians. Rather, through their respective acts of hope Christians have responded and are responding to God’s gift of hope to all humankind – albeit in the particular Christian traditions of following Jesus Christ towards the divine fulfilment of their lives and the life of the whole universe. Love is the eschatological force per se, which again and again gives rise to fresh approaches to hope and faith. In my discussion of the three theological virtues, I plan to explore faith in a future book. Here, however, I am concentrating on hope as the motivation and source for approaching a common human future in relation to God’s ongoing and transforming project of creation and reconciliation. As argued in Chapter 3, God’s offer of eternal relationship suggests that the salvation of individuals may actually not be such a central concern for Christians wishing to participate in God’s comprehensive project. Salvation smacks too much of individualism. As we have seen, the concern for salvation springs from the view that, as a result of original sin, God’s original creation was totally fallen or deprived. God’s offer of relationship, by contrast, brings together all four of our interdependent love trajectories. While I thus reject the narrow focus on individual salvation in Christian hope and eschatology, I do, of course, appreciate the potential of salvation language with regard to exposing and overcoming sinful structures in our world. Abuse of children, exploitation of women, all forms of slavery in the past and the present, spreading fake news, these and other distortions reveal a systemic or structural evil that transcends individual acts and failure. Structural evil cannot be ‘reconciled’; rather it must be overcome. In this respect, it makes good sense to pray for deliverance from evil – and hence for salvation. While persons need to be reconciled, our human condition as a whole requires salvation from evil and its ongoing effects. Moreover, breaking with a particular line of soteriological thinking that privileges the salvation of individuals and focussing instead on active participation in God’s ongoing project of creation and reconciliation implies a somewhat different approach to christology. Rather than concentrating exclusively on the cross and the resurrection as the works of Christ, we may pay more attention to what Jesus Christ’s ministry reveals of God’s ongoing universal project. This is not to deny the significance of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection. But this is to change the perspective from a forensic understanding of the work of Christ to an understanding of Jesus Christ as God’s agent of love who reconfirms and embodies God’s creative and reconciling transformation in this world through his suffering and death at the cross. Unlike Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033–1109) feudal theology of offering satisfaction to God, who was thought to be insulted by our sinful deeds, I am arguing for personal and communal repentance and conversion, and for participation in God’s project of creation and reconciliation.

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Discipleship of Christ, then, points to the need to develop ever more adequate responses to the manifestation of God’s love in the world, now in the light of experiences of following Jesus Christ. Such a christology points to God’s work in the world and summons churches and traditions within the larger Christian movement to become accountable for the degree of their encouragement of, facilitation of, and engagement in a culture of love in the world.

Hope and the love of neighbour When considering who may be my neighbour or to whom I should become a neighbour, it is important to recall the important distinction between to like and to love.3 Nobody, not even God, can command us to like somebody. However, in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim praxis of love the challenge remains to love our neighbours. They, like us, have been created in God’s image and, therefore, they enjoy the same divine right to be accepted and respected in their relationship to God and their other relationships.4 Moreover, once again, nobody can seriously hope for himself or herself alone. A hope borne of love always includes the other – the potential as well as the actual neighbour. Thus, hope is not the fruit of my likes, but the result of my loves. Hopes in the plural, of course, usually emerge from my various likes. However, they lack obligation; they only circle around my own orbit and personal wish list. Hope in the singular, emerging from my acts of love, however, is of a very different register and dignity. This is not to suggest that the hope that springs from love is ever easy. As we shall see in more detail when reviewing hope and the love of God in the next section of this chapter, it can be very demanding to relate to the radical otherness of God. But also relating to the human other can pose hard and at times dramatic challenges. The relational nature of hope confronts us with the inclusion of the other into all of our considerations – the other we know, the other we think we know, the other we do not (yet) know, the other who has lived long ago, and the other who is not even born. All these others play a part in my acts of hope. Not only in terms of possible ethical demands on us, but also in virtue of their co-existential nature as God’s graced creatures.5 Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God includes potentially all of them. God’s creative and reconciling project transcends the limitations of persons and builds on the emergence of loving communities.

Cf. Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, op. cit., 80. See Claudia Welz, Humanity in God’s Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 230–54. 5 Cf. K. E. Løgstrup, Den etiske fordring, 4th ed. (Århus: Klim, 2010). 3 4

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It is not possible for us human beings to establish close relationships with all human beings, past, present and future. Nor can we participate in every existing community that attempts to respond to God’s call. Yet, we all are soul friends, so to speak, through our common origin in God and our orientation at and responses to divine love. Moreover, as we have seen in Chapter 6, our souls open us to a universal and dynamic relationality. Together we form the emerging complex body of God’s beloved creatures within the created natural framework of the created universe(s). This Jewish, Christian and Muslim insight is not moral in the first place, but relational. Of course, all dynamic human relationships involve us in moral decisions. Nevertheless, it seems important to stress that every act of hope ultimately connects to this eternal relationship with the whole of humanity. The Christian commitment to all human beings does not suggest that all also wish to share in such a universal and mutual commitment, nor that everybody necessarily feels attracted to join emerging forms of Christian, Jewish or Muslim communities of love and mercy. Everybody can say ‘no’ to such a bond of love, ‘no’ to a shared hope for the future, ‘no’ to developing in communion with others. However, no human being can live without some form of relationship. Through the bond of a shared language (not necessarily only verbal language), we always already grow in participation in human relationships. Moreover, we share time and space with each other. Phenomenologically, we are always already beings in relation. The Christian praxis of love, then, acknowledges this phenomenon and, at the same time, encourages its continuing cultivation in the light of God’s self-revelation in Israel’s history, in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and in human experience more generally.6 Attending in detail to the praxis of hope, inspired by love, we become aware of the need to help building communities in response to God’s invitation to Israel, to God’s presence in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and to God’s Spirit working among and in us. What might Christian communities of hope look like? Obviously, they would be communities that expect something from the future and that articulate a desire to live in truth, justice and peace with others in this universe, which is our common framework in terms of space, time and language. Looking, desiring, sharing and attending to the work of truth, justice and peace highlight some of the acts of hope that characterize this Christian praxis. Moreover, the common care for our earthly home and its particular ecological needs today must be

See here also Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Menschsein als Sein-in-Beziehung. Zwölf Thesen für eine christliche Anthropologie’, in Schwöbel, Gott in Beziehung: Studien zur Dogmatik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 193–226. I share Schwöbel’s emphasis on the relational constitution of human beings, although I approach this constitution through the full spectrum of the theological virtues rather than through faith alone. 6

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part of our acts of hope. I shall return to this dimension of hope later in this chapter. A community of hope is not only inspired by shared acts on behalf of identifiable external needs at any given time. Rather, the community may wish to reflect this hope also in its internal relations, institutional structures and concrete day-to-day activities. ‘Christians are practitioners of hope, and what they believe and how they act embodies their hope.’7 Solidarity may be too small and ambiguous a concept to describe this praxis of hope. Solidarity could be seen as a paternalistic attitude towards people in need by those privileged to select a specific focus for their attention. Moreover, solidarity may not immediately indicate an openness to our shared human future. In this sense, acts of hope go beyond, but may include, acts of solidarity. Acts of hope in Christian praxis remain open for God’s transformative presence, for the mystery of God and the mystery of our own humanity. Hence, such acts of hope recognize the need to respond to God’s gift of hope and they welcome a future open for God’s loving acts of completion and fulfilment. Hope in Christian tradition always relates to God. Finally, in situations where we can no longer hope, we need others to hope with us, for us and sometimes in our stead. Parents do it all the time for their kids. And believers who pray for others practice hope for those who are unable to do it themselves or who think they can do without it. Such a hope is motivated by love for the good for others – it is not solitary and self-related, but open to the needs of those for whom it hopes.8 And, as discussed earlier, hope ultimately relates to all the others.

Hope and the love of God God as the origin of love and hope is involved in all genuine acts of hope. Thus, whether conscious or not, our praxis of hope is always already related to God’s project – provided our praxis remains self-critical and is not deluded. Moreover, when we hope in God and with God, we are naturally attracted by and directed to God’s creative and reconciling project. When we participate in concrete projects of hope, we may be directed to sense the co-presence of God in such acts.

Ingolf U. Dalferth, ‘From the Grammar of “Hope” to the Practice of Hope’, in Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Bock, eds., Hope: Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2014 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 1–9, here 7. 8 Ibid. 7

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However, as we have seen in Chapter 1, acts of radical hope deny closure by whatever system of hope. They confront us with radical transcendence, with God’s transforming (and at times frightening) presence, with God’s faithfulness and trust at the point when my and our own calculations have come to an end – yet when I or we recall the memory of God’s lasting and loving commitment to his creation, to the arrival of his reign, and to his loving acts of ultimate judgement and fulfilment. Radical hope implies radical acts of re-membering. Thus, when all our power and might has come to an end and when we face annihilation in suffering, illness and death, the memory of God’s involvement in the history of humankind and in this universe comes afresh to our attention: God loves this creation and God loves us. Through God’s love we have been blessed with the gift of hope, and therefore we can always start afresh to hope in the love of God. Even in hope-less situations, God’s hope comes towards us and invites us to join afresh the creative and reconciling movement of the divine–human dynamics. This dynamics, however, is transformative and hence demanding. We cannot at once enter into a bond of hope with God though not wishing to be transformed.9 As we have seen in Chapter 4, some theologians, such as Robert W. Jenson, imagine the goal of radical hope in terms of ultimate human participation in the Trinity and its inner-Trinitarian love dynamics. ‘The triune God is too intimately involved with his creation for its final transformation to be founded in anything less than the event of his own life.’10 I find such language troubling. Not because Jenson acknowledges God’s full involvement in his creation and its ultimate transformation and perfection, but because here the Trinity is treated like an object of theological engineering. Rather than a limit concept signifying God’s presence in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and as Spirit from the beginning of creation, the Trinity resembles here a wheel that sucks all of humankind into its everfaster spin. Jenson considers the redeemed in terms of being ‘themselves a communal agent in the triune life’,11 and thus he subsumes all and everything into God’s triune being. Is such a ‘perfect harmony between the conversation of the redeemed and the conversation that God is’, where ‘meaning and melody are one’ really an expression of love?12 Or does it amount to an act of an, however happy, total annihilation?

See also Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch, new ed. (London: SCM, 2002), 7: ‘Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.’ 10 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: The Works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 338. 11 Ibid., 350. See also ibid., 369. 12 Ibid., 369. 9

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The Trinity, as limit concept pointing to God’s creative and reconciling acts of love, makes good sense. However, the Trinity as sublation of human agency and love seems to me less attractive, because, if not simply contradicting, it challenges the power of radical hope. In Jenson’s view, mystical union has been eclipsed into mystical unity. Knowing too much, as it were, about the inner dynamics of God risks undermining hope and radical hope.

Hope and the love of God’s creation Although here I am concentrating on the vocation of human beings to build communities of hope, I wish to recognize the place of all non-human creatures and of the future of the physical universe within this loving horizon of hope. God’s entire creation is loved and, therefore, by necessity also connected to our human acts of hope. God’s project of creation and reconciliation affects, of course, also animals, plants, planets and so on. Healing and restoration is needed on so many levels of our universe.13 However, we must not confuse the obvious need for healing and restoration in our universe with some sort of dream of or longing for a lost paradise to which we ought to return. As we have seen repeatedly in this book, for some Christian thinkers the clue to hope lies in the past before the Fall of Adam and Eve, before the crime of Cain against his brother Abel, before the onset of human discovery, science, development and the resulting destruction of a supposedly originally clean and innocent environment. However, such a hope thinks pessimistically about God’s invitation to all human beings to become agents of love in God’s continuing project of creation which is shaped at once by evolution, human development and God’s transforming presence. Longing for a past paradise romanticizes God’s original act of creation and infantilizes human agency, subjectivity and participation in this project. If God loves us and invites us to become his friends and collaborators in his grand project, we need not escape into the role of mere spectators hoping for a cosmic drama being staged in front of us though without our direct participation and commitment. The focal point of God’s project lies in future fulfilment and glory. And this future affects us already here and now by soliciting our participation in its dynamic movement. Narrating the past and remembering God’s acts in the past are of course important aspects for understanding and approaching the future of God’s project and of human involvement in it. However, the chief perspective for

Cf. Jerry L. Walls, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 90f. 13

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the Christian praxis of hope remains God’s future and our divine vocation to participate in this gift. Against this background, it makes good sense for theologians to take part in the discussion of the beginning and the end of our universe in dialogue with other sciences and disciplines concerned with the nature and future of the universe. Reclaiming and exploring the relationship between eschatology and the place of non-human creatures and of the physical universe is an important task for a theology that takes God’s creation seriously and that does not merely await salvation from the constraints of this universe, and thus from the constraints of God’s creativity.14 If we consider this universe as divinely created and loved, it must in its entirety affect our hope. ‘Theology must interact with the whole of creation if we want to think and speak of the God of creation.’15 Such interaction, however, is still not very common in theology and in the church. Its relative absence points to forms of residual dualism in Christian thinking and acting. References to God’s new creation in some biblical writings have at times been interpreted in defence of such dualist thinking according to which new creation signifies the total end of the present universe. Revelation 21:1–4 is a case in point: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ This text stresses both discontinuity and continuity, and whoever concentrates only on one of these aspects misses the theological potential of the text. God is in charge, but there is no reference to God undoing his creation. Hence, what can be positively maintained regarding this image of a new heaven and a new earth ‘is that the created non-personal world will be relevant to the form of the eschatological reality in its spheres that are both accessible and inaccessible to us, if the creature is not to be altogether judged meaningless’.16

Cf. here David Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 25. 15 Ibid., 27. 16 Markus Mühling, T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Eschatology, trans. Jennifer AdamsMaßmann and David Andrew Gilland (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2105), 358. For a discussion of the different interpretations of this biblical text, see Judith Kovacs and Christopher Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 221–37. 14

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David Wilkinson finds Paul’s reflections on the new creation in Rom. 8:18-30 helpful and challenging. Paul writes: I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now. (Rom. 8:18-23) And Paul continues his reflections by stressing the connection between our hope and of God’s ultimate purpose in everything. Hence, Paul invites his readers in Rome to trust in the guidance of God’s Spirit. Commenting on this passage, Wilkinson emphasizes the need to maintain the tension between creation and new creation in terms of both continuity and discontinuity: This passage is helpful in eschatological thinking as it constantly challenges views that see creation as meaningless compared to future glory or new creation as meaningless compared to present experience. New creation is not an escape from a fatally flawed creation; it is the completion of God’s original purpose in and for creation. Thus new creation is part of God’s purpose from the beginning but creation is necessary for that purpose to be fulfilled.17 Moreover, Wilkinson stresses that biblical hope in a new creation does not eclipse the physical universe. Rather, the new creation ‘is not simply the present order with a renewed humanity. There is something essentially “new” both for humanity and the physical universe.’18 In the biblical testimony to the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Wilkinson sees important hints

Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe, 83. On the interdependence of creation and humanity in Paul’s anthropocentric thinking in Rom. 8:21, see Michael Wolter, Der Brief an die Römer, vol. 1, Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament VI/1 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlagsgesellschaft, and Ostfildern: Patmos, 2014), 514: 17

Nicht nur das Unheilsgeschick, sondern auch das Heilsgeschick wird der Schöpfung um der Menschen willen zugewiesen. Umgekehrt geht aus V.21c zwar deutlich hervor, dass Paulus sich auch die Verherrlichung der Kinder Gottes nicht ohne Einbettung in die nichtmensch­ liche Schöpfung vorstellen kann. Sie sind vielmehr bleibend auf die erneuerte Schöpfung angewiesen und können ohne sie nicht existieren. Trotzdem hat die erneuerte Schöpfung keinen Eigenwert, sondern ist einzig und allein für die Herrlichkeit der Kinder Gottes da. Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe, 86.

18

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for Christian hope for the new creation of both humanity and the physical universe.19 In Chapter 6, I have discussed the significance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ for a theological approach to the death and destiny of the human person. Here, we need to extend this discussion to include the future of non-human creatures and of the physical universe. What can we learn from the different biblical witnesses to Jesus Christ’s resurrection in this regard? The biblical accounts portray the resurrected crucified Jesus as relating to the order of this universe through communicating, eating, drinking, celebrating, questioning, appearing in recognizable form; yet, they stress his freedom to transcend the boundaries of our three-dimensional existence and imagination. The resurrected Jesus belongs to and acts in more than our normal set of dimensions and perspectives. In more but not in less. Therefore, it may make sense to see the resurrected Jesus as the first of God’s new creation in terms of both discontinuity and continuity. The discontinuity, however, does not deny the continuing validity of this creation which we human beings experience through our three-dimensional approach to reality. Rather, the resurrection of Jesus points to further dimensions revealed by God that confirm the disciples’ ordinary experiences in this universe while at the same time pointing to more and different sets of experiences, extraordinary experiences, to be expected from God’s creative acts of love. The witness to God’s resurrection of Jesus, then, opens the presence of new perspectives and dimensions which we can acknowledge, but over which we human beings have no power. Nevertheless, they allow us a hint, a preunderstanding (Vorgriff) of God’s ultimate plan, judgement, love and reconciling action. In the destiny of the person Jesus whose life and ministry was fully devoted to God’s project of creation and reconciliation, we are shown God’s transforming love, however not merely in this particular person, but also in all of his relationships – including to non-human creatures and the physical universe. Thus, it makes sense to conclude with David Wilkinson, that the resurrection ‘is God’s eschatological act in history but it is also the “first act in the new creation of the world”’.20 God’s resurrection of Jesus both confirms our human categories of time, space, and language and it affords us a glimpse of a new eternal order of transformation in which these categories continue to exist, though within a radically different horizon. However, radical is not the same as total. Whereas radical transformation acknowledges both continuity and

Cf. ibid., 103–14. I have been inspired by Wilkinson’s arguments, but I develop here my own conclusions in terms of considering additional dimensions to our understanding of the created universe in the light of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. 20 Ibid., 106. 19

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discontinuity, total only points to discontinuity.21 Hence, God’s promise of eternal relationships does not threaten time, space and language, but it transforms them in a radical way. While they are limiting in our present embodiment, these categories are no longer limiting in God’s new creation.22 Antje Jackelén has proposed a relational understanding of time, and she has pointed out what this means for the understanding of life and the world. Relational thinking does not tolerate the levelling of differences. It opposes the obliteration of the dissimilarity of proper times and rhythms. And it does not tolerate a flattening of time into the simple infinity of a super-continuity or a total synchronicity in which everything is available nonstop. In a relational understanding of time, time is conceived as ‘time for’, which always stands in relation to an Other. The primary communicative form that corresponds to this understanding is not information, but, rather, communication. This also results in an alertness to how and where time is utilized as a means of power.23 Eternity, thus, need not mean timelessness. Rather eternity refers to God’s order of relationships. Eternity is not at our disposal, but we can acknowledge it in prayer and contemplation. Moreover, we can remain open to God’s acts of self-communication in history and in history’s particular three-dimensional framework. Whenever we open ourselves to the presence of God’s Spirit in our lives, we may be granted a taste of God’s eternal relations. We cannot force this about, but we can be open to receive it. Seeing the entire universe as God’s creation and, therefore, as permanently inspired by its Creator, conditions our perspectives on matter, on the animal world, on plants and on all other aspects of the created order. Every aspect of our universe can become an occasion for God’s revelation. ‘How one sees creation affects the way that new creation is imaged.’24 Moreover, we must not allow creation and new creation to be separated, as they both are part of God’s design.25 I am not in a position to know the future of the animal kingdom in the new creation.26 However, recognizing God’s creative will in each animal

This tension between continuity and discontinuity is also present in political forms of hoping, even in approaches to understanding what is meant by revolution. Cf. Ola Sigurdson, Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 179–80. 22 For Wilkinson’s interesting discussion of the aspect of time, see ibid., 134. 23 Antje Jackelén, Time & Eternity: The Question of Time in Church, Science, and Theology, trans. Barbara Harshaw (Philadelphia/London: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005), 229. 24 Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe, 160. 25 Cf. ibid., 168. 26 For Wilkinson’s approach to animals in the new creation, see ibid., 166–70. 21

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makes it impossible for me to reduce animals to the status of mere objects or machines or to mere waste products of human engineering and of food industries. In so far as animals participate in the relational framework of God’s creation, it would be reasonable to speak also of their souls. The ongoing ecological discourses of thinking and acting might achieve some form of conversion to a deeper appreciation of love for all aspects of the universe in which we human beings live. The task we face at present is to reconcile the relationship between us human beings and the animal world, and, more generally, to restore the non-human part of this universe to its rightful place in the created order of love. The Christin praxis of hope recognizes the relational nature of animals in God’s new creation.27 Once we recognize in the present creation the groundwork for God’s new creation and once we see ourselves as divinely invited collaborators in the ongoing project of creation and reconciliation, then not only our ecological and climate commitments and our inter-generational responsibilities will need to be reconsidered. Rather, our own subjectivity, agency and eternal vocation will require to be anchored afresh in the fourfold dynamics of interdependent love relations.

Hope and the love of the self As we have seen in Chapter 3, not all Christian theologians recognize the legitimacy of love of the self. Augustine of Hippo and Anders Nygren, for example, rejected the idea of self-love. They saw in it a violation of the biblical love command: we are to love God and the neighbour, though not our own emerging selves. Other theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, Paul Tillich, Margaret Farley and a host of contemporary thinkers, in particular theologians committed to human emancipation and subjectivity, affirm the complex need of loving also one’s own self. Once again, to love one’s self is not the same as to like oneself. In my understanding of the biblical love command, all are called to love their selves in the light of God’s love, even when they do not like themselves or aspects of themselves. Ultimately, it is the knowledge of God’s prior love that makes self-love and hope possible in the first place. However, self-love can be a tough challenge and imply hard work, especially in terms of personal development when one’s self appears to be a big and possibly threatening mystery. However, when we find it difficult to relate to our own self, such as in times of major disappointment, puberty, illness, trauma, dying and mourning, a struggle for hope takes place in us.

See, for example, here Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 281–6; and the Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2015), 102–4. 27

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Then, we are moving between hope and despair. Arne Grøn reminds us that to despair ‘is not simply to give up hope but rather to struggle with hope, at least in so far as despairing is the act of despairing. In the terms of struggling, there is an option of hoping or despairing.’28 Hope, then, appears as the human framework in which despair presents itself as a possibility and not the other way around. Hence, ‘we cannot just give up on hope (and then choose (to) despair). We cannot just – not hope. In despairing there is hope to struggle with. If we give up hope our life changes.’29 Moreover, as we have seen in Chapter 1, in circumstances when our human support structures seem to collapse and when we find ourselves isolated, abandoned, excluded and alone, acts of radical hope might be called for. How can we prepare for hope and radical hope in view of the fact that we are struggling to love our own selves? Is it possible to learn how to hope in order to be adequately prepared to engage in acts of hope when life gets tough? In the first chapter of this book, I have argued that all hope is relational. Moreover, I have proposed to approach hope from within a horizon of love. The art of hoping, thus, depends on the art of loving which we have been learning from the very beginning of our lives in the various institutions of love, such as family, friendship, marriage or partnership, education, church and religious bodies, human associations and so on.30 This process of learning never stops as long as we live. Therefore, it would be presumptuous to argue for perfect love and, as a result, for perfect hope. Both to love and to hope remain a struggle. However, in so far as we are loved and able to love, our hope might grow or intensify accordingly. It is the network of our loves in which our hope can develop. Hence, it makes sense to say that every act of hope carries with it the memory of love. Søren Kierkegaard repeatedly pointed to the presence of the eternal in every act of human love. One does not have to be aware of it for it to be there. One can recognize it or one can defraud oneself of it: To defraud oneself of [bedrage for] love [Kjerlighed] is the most terrible, is an eternal loss, for which there is no compensation either in time or in eternity. Ordinarily, when it is a matter of being deceived [bedrages] in love, however different the case may be, the one deceived is still related to love, and the deception is only that the love was not where it was thought to be, but the self-deceived person has locked and is locking himself out of love.31

Arne Grøn, ‘Future of Hope – History of Hope’, in Ingolf U. Dalferth and Marlene A. Block, eds., Hope: Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2014 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 139–52, here 147f. 29 Ibid., 148. 30 For a discussion of institutions of love and of their respective ambiguities, see Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, op. cit., 173–217. 31 Søren Kierkegaard Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5f. 28

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This loss of love, then, implies the loss of hope.32 The philosopher Axel Honneth (b. 1949) considers love, in addition to rights and solidarity, as one of three necessary forms of intersubjective recognition.33 Surprisingly, religion does not enter into his analysis. In any case, our different networks and experiences of love enable us to develop trust in the human and the divine other, in our social and physical environment, and finally in our own emerging selves. The love which we have received renders us capable to engage in acts of love within the emerging fourfold network of love. In this dynamic context of love, the potential, attraction and necessity of hope arises. The context of love enforces our desire to be related to each other, beyond the present and past, also in the future. However, hope’s focus on the future always carries the past with it, as Arne Grøn explains: People in the past did not live the past as past. They too were struggling with hopes. What we have as past is also past hopes. And past hope is not only hope belonging to the past that we have turned our back to; it is also past future – in the sense that it transcends what became the future, our present. To the temporality of hope belongs the past as past future. As our present is not simply the fulfilment of past hopes, they – past hopes – may for us go beyond ourselves, redirecting us toward the future. They can transcend our presence in that they may redirect us beyond the future we project.34 Our personal struggle for hope is confronted with two forms of hope: ‘the hope that is not easily given up and the hope that is not easily found’.35 Grøn thus describes the challenge which we are facing in our personal struggle of hoping: do we wish to adopt the paths of past hopes or do we wish to grow in relationships of hope that include the perspective of eternity? The former implies a life in static or cemented connections, whereas the latter embraces the fragility and vulnerability of life, yet also the dynamic of loving relationships. However, without the knowledge of past love and past hope no acts of love and hope would be possible now. My praxis of hope today, though made possible by the past, can only flourish in the expectation of ever more transformative acts of hope that are emerging from the network of love, however fragile and marked by sin and distortion, into which I have been born and in which I have been loved, educated, accompanied and

Cf. Grøn, ‘Future of Hope – History of Hope’, 148. Cf. Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte, 12th ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2012), 148–74. See also Risto Saarinen, Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 12. 34 Grøn, ‘Future of Hope – History of Hope’, 150. 35 Ibid., 152. 32 33

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sustained ever since. This network is encouraged and enlivened, although never dominated, by God’s eternal spirit of love. This network of love directs our acts of hope also towards those contemporaries who may have given up – or are in danger of giving up – in their struggle with hope. Moreover, it sensitizes us to identify, expose and overcome those structures and systems in our world that may cause men, women and children to give up hope and sink into despair. Liberation theologians often point to the intimate connection between hope and the development of human subjectivity and to the energy that springs from the empowering dialectics between love and hope.36 However, despair is but one of two temptations emerging in the struggle for hope. Optimism is the other. In Chapter 1, I have discussed differences between hope and optimism, in particular the optimistic belief in the stable nature of our human-made systems of progress. Such optimism affords no space to the tragic experience of life. In the words of Nicholas Lash: Hope, unlike optimism, does not ‘leave behind’ the tragic experience which is its enduring context. Both optimism and despair ‘know the answer’, whereas it is characteristic of hope (as one form of expression of the tragic vision) that it is articulated in the interrogative mood. Hope may, indeed, be questionable but, if it is to remain hope, it can only take the form of a question. For the Christian, that question is cast as request: ‘Thy kingdom come.’37 In this chapter, we have further explored the dynamic interconnection between the fourfold network of love and the Christian praxis of hope. We have become aware that the Christian praxis of hope is inspired by the promise of resurrection – not a resurrection as such, but the resurrection of a very particular life that was fully committed to the emerging reign of God. Thus, once more, it would not make sense for Christians to have hope only for themselves. Given the experience of the universality of broken relationships, broken trust, disappointed love, despair, and the struggle for hope in view of deep suspicion (at times, even gross dislike) of one’s own self and its history of failure as well as its entanglement in structural distortion and systemic evil, one cannot have hope only for oneself. ‘Moreover the

See, for example, Sathianthan Clarke, ‘Hope in Situations of Hopelessness: Dalit Liberation Theology’, in Elizabeth J. Harris, ed., Hope: A Form of Delusion: Buddhist and Christian Perspectives (Sankt Ottilien: EOS, 2013), 193–204, here 199: ‘Hope in Dalit liberation theology as a form of praxis has always claimed to be collective and thus relational. This saves hope from being detached from living faith and cut off from life-giving love. The way of curing delusion is to test hope in concrete acts of love and seek its application in lived faith, both of which involve community and imply relationship.’ 37 Nicholas Lash, A Matter of Hope: A Theologian’s Reflections on the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1981), 269f. 36

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Christian also recognizes that one cannot have hope logically if one does not participate in the fashioning or the realizing of the values of the reign of God here and now in this world.’38 Yet, how can we consider the complex relationship of our acts of hope in a context in which not only love but also evil, oppression, exclusion, sin and despair abound. In what way can love and hope encourage our participation in the building of God’s reign and how does God’s emerging reign relate to our eschatological vision for this universe and its transformation?

Salvation from evil At the end of the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to ‘rescue [or deliver] us from evil [or the evil one]’ (Mt. 6:13b). What do we mean when we hope and pray for such deliverance? Today, the discussion of evil does not necessarily seem to be a self-evident aspect of popular and academic wisdom and scientific interest. The Swedish National Encyclopaedia, for example, does not even have an entry for ‘evil’ (neither det onda nor ondskan).39 Do we no longer possess a fitting vocabulary for expressing what is evil? Ironically, this would amount to the ultimate victory of evil, for we would no longer have the means to recognize and express it when it happens. The Greek verb diabolein (to split, to undo union), helps to expose one aspect of evil, namely to define someone by means of excluding another. Racism, nationalism, totalitarianism, populism, sexism, anti-Semitism and related ideologies all operate through acts of exclusion. In the previous chapter, we have already discussed examples of defining oneself or one’s own social group, party or nation at the expense of others. Creating division and celebrating divisiveness in society and religion, instead of building bridges to meet the other and trying to recognize and explore the others’ otherness and one’s own otherness, only cause further evil. Instrumentalizing God and religion for all kinds of divisive projects further increases evil in our universe. Although Christian thinkers, following Augustine, have often considered evil in terms of lacking substance, as privatio boni, as deprived of goodness, as the other of what is good, all human beings experience the impact of evil also in structural and systemic terms. Thus, we need to distinguish between evil as a consequence of human wilful and sinful acts against the good, on the one hand, and structural manifestations of evil, on the other hand. Each can infect the other. In any case, we find ourselves entangled in evil circumstances, systems and structures which in turn lead and tempt us into further sinful acts with more evil consequences. When we see how hard it is

Roger Haight, S.J., An Alternative Vision: An Interpretation of Liberation Theology (New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1985), 255. 39 Cf. Nationalencyklopedin, vol. 14: MÖNS-PAR (Höganäs: Bra Böcker, 1994). 38

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to be free from this trapping, we pray for salvation or rescue from evil and review how Jesus Christ dealt with sin, evil and structures of distortion and oppression.40 The last petition of the Lord’s Prayer may refer either to the evil one or to structural evil or personal evil (our own and that coming from others), but also to ordinary experiences of illness, emergencies and natural disasters. It is interesting that only Matthew’s gospel includes this petition.41 The petition to ‘rescue us from evil’ (Mt. 6:13b) is linked to the preceding one: ‘And do not bring us to the time of trial’ (Mt. 6:13a). The Bible provides gripping accounts of personal and communal struggle against evil, including the story of the temptation of Jesus in Lk. 4:1-13. Precisely at the moment when Jesus prepares himself for his public ministry through fasting and prayer, the devil puts him to three tests that culminate in the suggestion to worship the devil rather than God. In this story, the devil clearly knows who Jesus is and offers him all the glamour of the world. Translated into today’s world of reality, stardom, of social media adoration and of celebrity cult, the devil excels in offering glamour. However, the evil one cannot offer any consolation.42 Notwithstanding the particular symbolic expression for the presence and personification of the power of evil in our world, we face evil in two forms: as negativity resulting from the contingency of our world and our own existence (malum physicum) and as human wilful acceptance and (re-) production of negativity (malum morale).43 However, evil cannot always be neatly categorized. The horror of Auschwitz continues to challenge our conceptual resources. It confronts us with our inability, morally and rationally, to explain why German people organized the annihilation and extermination of Jewish and other women, men and children on an industrial scale.44

The ancient form of litany often includes a section of prayer for salvation from all manifestations of evil. See, for example, the litany in the Swedish Hymnal: Den Svenska Psalmboken (Stockholm: Verbum, 2006), 700:1. 41 Ulrich Lutz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus, vol.1: Mt 1-7, 5th ed., Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament I/1 (Düsseldorf/Zurich/Neukirchen-Vluyn: Patmos Verlag, Benziger Verlag, Neukirchener Verlag, 2002), 454, translates: ‘from evil’. However, W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. 1, The International Critical Commentary (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 614f., translate ‘from the evil one’. 42 Cf. Werner Bergengruen’s novel, Das Feuerzeichen: Roman, Freiburg i. B.: Herder, [1949] 1957, 168: ‘Man weiß ja, daß der Teufel seine Vertragspartner späterhin in ihren Verzweif­lungen allein und ohne Trost läßt, und wahrscheinlich mangelt ihm die Fähigkeit, Verzweiflungen überhaupt wahrzunehmen, geschweige denn in ihrem Wesen zu begreifen. Der Teufel hat wohl Glanz zu vergeben, nicht aber Trost.’ 43 Cf. Karl-Wilhelm Merks, ‘Böse, das Böse. IV. Theologisch-Ethisch’, in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 2009), 608–9. 44 See Susan Neiman’s discussion of evil and the evil of Auschwitz in her book Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp. 250–81. 40

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The Christian praxis of hope focuses on divine deliverance from all forms of evil at the Last Judgement (Mt. 25:41) and when the new creation emerges (Revelation 21). When hoping for the overcoming of all personal and structural forms of evil by God, however, we need to be careful that we do not glide into two further forms of dualism: first, claiming that we cannot do anything since only God can save us from evil and our sins and from their impact on all of our relationships. Insisting on an attitude of mere passivity in view of our sinfulness would only lead to further evil. Second, arguing that since there is so much evil in this world, only the creation of a totally new world could save us from present evil and its impact. Such beliefs deny God’s good creation and our co-responsibility for God’s great project of creation and reconciliation. The existence of evil and of evil structures remains a challenge for all forms of hope in God. At the same time, the experience of evil points us also to the urgency of ever-greater acts of love, forgiveness and reconciliation.45

Inter-hope dialogue The insight into the fact that nobody can only hope for themselves alone invites human agents of hope to consider the larger horizon of hope, that is, the horizon of love. Love points us to the other and the otherness of the other as well as the otherness of our own selves. Ultimately, then, every human person that has lived, lives now and will live is part of this horizon of love. When we approach hope from within this horizon of love we may discover a natural desire to engage in conversations of hope and in the praxis of hope not only with people from our own religious movement but also with people from other religious and non-religious traditions. I wish to argue that inter-hope dialogue, which Anthony Kelly has called for and to which I have referred repeatedly in this book,46 is best promoted and advanced through a hermeneutics of love.47 Rather than beginning by reviewing, agreeing or disagreeing about specific creeds and doctrines pertaining to hope, love as point of departure may free our perspective of the future from the shadows of a closed past. As we have seen in Chapter 5, working with memory is crucial for cultivating the gift of hope. Reconciling memories becomes necessary when facing a common

Cf. Merks, ‘Böse, das Böse. IV. Theologisch-Ethisch’, 609. See also Dieter Funke, ‘Das Böse’, in Peter Eicher, ed., Neues Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe, vol. 1 (Munich: Kösel, 2005), 167–78. 46 Anthony Kelly, Eschatology and Hope (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2006), 15–17. 47 For a more detailed discussion of the potential of an interreligious hermeneutics of love, see Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Toward an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love’, in Catherine Cornille and Christopher Conway, eds., Interreligious Hermeneutics, Interreligious Dialogue Series, vol. 2 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010), 44–60. 45

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future and most certainly when awaiting ‘a promised future of communion in eternal life’.48 However, reconciliation does not mean harmonizing memories or differences. Rather, reconciliation aims at mutual recognition of otherness and at cultivating desire for an eternal union (not unity) with God, each other and God’s project of creation and reconciliation. Moreover, the critical and self-critical work of love provides attitudes, feelings, desires and means for addressing the mysterious otherness of the other and of the self. This is not to argue that the virtue of faith were not important for our consideration of hope. Rather, I wish to emphasize the significance of the right point of departure: love and trust first and then a review of the different faith positions and contents and of their take on our common future. In recent years, theologians from different religious traditions have explored the importance of hospitality for meeting the respective other and God, the radical other.49 George Newlands and Allen Smith regret that hospitality ‘is not always evident in church and society. Yet the hope of hospitality as promise, as the shape of God’s intended future has been and continues to be a powerful instrument for encouraging hospitality in difficult circumstances.’50 They consider reflection upon possible futures as essential for any religious movement and tradition. ‘God is the source and the object of hope, of a positive future for the created order.’51 The content of hope is the ‘transformation of the present world order, of the religious community and of the self, as a physical or spiritual entity or both, as part of this process’.52 Other theologians, such as Catherine Cornille, have proposed empathy as a promising attitude towards the religious other.53 ‘Though rarely thematised, or accessed as a source of reliable information, empathy is both implicitly and explicitly at work in interreligious communication.’54

Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, 17. See, for example, George Newlands and Allen Smith, Hospitable God: The Transformative Dream (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2010); Marianne Moyaert, Fragile Identities: Towards a Theology of Interreligious Hospitality (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011); Mona Siddiqui, Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in God’s Name (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2015); Jakob Wirén, Hope and Otherness: Christian Eschatology and Interreligious Hospitality (Leiden/Boston: Brill and Rodopi, 2018); Daisy L. Machado, Bryan S. Turner and Trygve Wyller, eds., Borderland Religion: Ambiguous practices of difference, hope and beyond. Religion, Resistance, Hospitalities (London/New York: Routledge, 2018). 50 Newlands and Smith, Hospitable God, 199. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Catherine Cornille, The im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Crossroad, 2008). See also Susanne Heine, ‘Related Rivals: How Christians and Muslims Might Relate to One Another’, in Ulrich Schmiedel and James M. Matarazzo, Jr., eds., Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Alterity: A Festschrift for Werner G. Jeanrond (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 239–46, esp. 243f. 54 Catherine Cornille, ‘Empathy and Otherness in Interreligious Dialogue’, in Ulrich Schmiedel and James M. Matarazzo, Jr., eds., Dynamics of Difference, op. cit., 221–9, here 228. 48 49

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Moreover, Cornille underlines that imagination is the most important condition for empathy with otherness.55 In interreligious dialogue, ‘empathy forms an essential – though by no means sufficient – tool for stretching one’s religious imagination and touching the religious life of the other’.56 These approaches are to be welcomed because of their constructive and imaginative openness to meeting others and of exploring together with others the virtues of love, hope and faith. However, a hermeneutics of love goes further: it is interested in the dynamic encounter and its particular eschatological openness to transcendence, conversion and transformation.57 On this basis, then, we can attempt to look to the future which we have in common, to consider ways of approaching this common future with shared wisdom, experience and expectation. Moreover, we can benefit from each other’s desire and hope for God, for God’s love, mercy and forgiveness.58 We can embark on a journey of listening to the other’s hope and experience of radical hope. We can assist each other both in seeking liberation from our many hopes and in concentrating afresh on the one hope which God has made possible for us within his great project of creation and reconciliation.

Agents of hope At the end of this book, I wish to return to its starting point and consider the challenge of becoming a responsive and responsible agent of hope in our universe. At a time when an increasing number of politicians in different countries preach fear, exclusive notions of identity against others and hatred of others in order to be (re-)elected, expressions of hope may encourage acts of resistance. Since the orbit of hope, as we have seen, ultimately includes all others, hope cannot tolerate social, political and religious division and exclusion of human beings. The Christian praxis of hope is inclusive because all creatures, human and non-human, belong to the emerging reign of God,

Ibid., 227. Ibid., 229. 57 Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (London: Continuum, 2000), 98, captures this dynamic when he discusses the social miracle of charity. ‘The social miracle, charity, draws attention to recognition or possibilities of recognition prior to any agreement about what we have in common, in history or race, attitude or ideology. Social joy rejoices in the surprise of recognition, not in the establishing of a spuriously objective ground for fellowship outside the present “miracle” of converse.’ The miracle is that we can have a conversation in the first place, that we can meet and develop a dynamic relationship with each other. See also Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 221. 58 Cf. Siddiqui, Hospitality and Islam, 143; see also Walter Kardinal Kasper, Barmherzigkeit: Grundbegriff des Evangeliums – Schlüssel christlichen Lebens, 4th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 2014), 94. 55 56

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are created by God, and are invited to be reconciled by God in God’s great project of creation and reconciliation. While faith as a set of propositions requiring assent may be misused to create further division among people in the name of some appeal to orthodoxy, love as hope’s framework directs our attention to the other and his or her mysterious otherness as well as to God, the radical other.59 Moreover, love nourishes the desire to explore and enjoy the otherness of the other – of God, of fellow humans, of the other creatures and of the physical universe, and of my own emerging self. The desire to meet and trust others, to find out more about them, to relate to them need not stop when potential conflicts emerge. Rather, conflicts invite only more love, provoke deeper engagement and encourage acts of hope and of radical hope. Even when in the struggle for hope I experience the collapse of my relations, my support structures, my well-tuned attitudes and cherished orientation, a commitment to radical love will turn me towards acts of radical hope. However, such acts of hope need to be developed, learned, appropriated and fine-tuned in the different schools and institutions of love throughout life. Love and hope are always also responsive: I react to prior experiences and recognition in love. In that sense, all my acts of hope rely on previous acts of hope by others. Every act of hope is one part in the long chain of hope. What greater manifestation of love can there be in this life than hoping with and for the other? Acts of responsive and responsible hope recognize the co-vocation of all others as agents of God’s future. This is the good news of the emerging reign of God in this universe. At the same time, it calls for protest and acts of resistance against any effort to deprive fellow human beings and God’s creation from their significance for God’s great project. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has given us a powerful example of what maturing in hope and radical hope can mean in and for this world. His example, however, does not invite us to repeat his life and work today. Rather, his example might encourage us to gain a sense of what is involved to move towards hope and then towards radical hope in our own lives and circumstances.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s radical hope Bonhoeffer’s (1906–45) commitment to resisting Adolf Hitler’s evil regime and Nazi ideology amounts to more than just another example of individual acts of hope and heroic resistance. In fact, during his captivity, his hope matured into a manifestation of radical hope, which in turn has inspired

Cf. also Jackelén, Time & Eternity, op. cit., 218: ‘I would propose to understand eschatology as a hope that is precisely not hope in oneself.’ 59

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new theologies of hope, new theologies of the world, and new political theologies long beyond his violent death in 1945.60 It would be wrong to reduce Bonhoeffer’s human and theological legacy merely to the fact that eventually he was executed by Hitler’s men and that he, therefore, can now be celebrated as a Christian martyr. Instead, we might find vital encouragement on the road to hope and radical hope when we contemplate his intense struggle with hope and resistance and, then, with radical hope in the months prior to his execution.61 As with Jesus, so with Bonhoeffer: their respective violent death makes sense first within the larger challenge of their lives and faithfulness to God’s love – and not in isolation. Reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, published posthumously since 1951, we can detect a gradual development in his praxis of hope and resistance towards an emerging commitment to radical hope.62 During his imprisonment from 1943 to 1945, Bonhoeffer asks himself who may stand firm in a context in which evil presents itself in the disguise of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice, hence, in a context which must be utterly bewildering for Christians who try to follow Christ with the help of the usual biblical categories of discipleship. Masquerading as the good is the abysmal wickedness of evil (38): Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, his principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue; only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action. Such a person is the responsible one, whose life is to be nothing but a response to God’s question and call. Where are these responsible ones? (40) The imprisoned Bonhoeffer knows that it is much easier, ‘to see a situation through on the basis of principle than in concrete responsibility’ (42). Moreover, ‘inactive waiting and dully looking on are not Christian responses’ (49). Instead, he stands firm in hope: ‘As much as I long to be released from here, I nevertheless believe that not one single day is lost. What effect this time will eventually have is impossible to say. But it will have an effect’ (161f.).

For example, Bonhoeffer’s life and theology has inspired the theological developments of Jürgen Moltmann, Johann Baptist Metz and countless practitioners of political, liberation and emancipatory theology throughout the world. Cf. Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘From Resistance to Liberation Theology: German Theologians and the Non/Resistance to the Nationalist Socialist Regime’, in Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, eds., Resistance against the Third Reich: 19331990 (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 295–311. 61 For a more recent biography of Bonhoeffer, see Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Eine Biographie, 2nd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006). 62 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. de Gruchy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010). Page numbers in the text refer to this edition. 60

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Bonhoeffer reflects on the tension between resistance (Widerstand) to fate (Schicksal) and submission (Ergebung) and concludes that ‘the boundaries between resistance and submission can’t be determined as a matter of principle, but both must be there and both must be seized resolutely. Faith demands this flexible and alive way of acting’ (304). Bonhoeffer’s move from hope to radical hope announces itself in passages like these: ‘We can have abundant life even though many wishes are not fulfilled’ (325). And: ‘If my present situation were to be the conclusion of my life, that would have a meaning that I believe I could understand. On the other hand, all this might be a thorough preparation for a new beginning, which would take place in marriage, peacetime, and with new work to do’ (353). Finally, in his now famous poem from New Year’s Eve 1944, we can sense his close relationship to God beyond all old scaffolding of institutionalist piety and religious sentiment and expectation. Instead, Bonhoeffer now submits fully to God’s love and care and thus can give expression to this radical hope: Surrounded faithfully and quietly by good forces, wonderfully protected and consoled, I would like to share these days with you and approach a new year together with you. … And if you present us with the heavy and bitter cup of suffering, filled to its rim, we shall gratefully accept it without hesitation from your good and beloved hand. Yet, should you wish to let us enjoy once more this world and the glory of its sun, we should like to recall the past; and our life will then be totally yours. …63 Bonhoeffer’s life and theology reminds us that hope and radical hope always include all the relationships to which God has invited and empowered us human beings. Therefore, necessarily hope and radical hope are also political: God and the world are the concern of the Christian praxis of hope. Hence, hope will motivate us to resist evil, sin and injustice in all its manifestations and to embrace the work of love, peace and justice even in apparently hope-less situations. However, Bonhoeffer’s gradual growth in

My translation of three of the seven stanzas of Bonhoeffer’s poem “Von guten Mächten”, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, ed. Eberhard Bethge, 11th ed., Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, [1951] 1980, 204f. A more poetic rendering of this poem in English can be found in Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. de Gruchy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8, op. cit., 548–50. 63

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radical hope also reveals the tough demands of such a Christian praxis of hope. It calls for radical discipleship, personal commitment and ongoing critical and self-critical discernment. Bonhoeffer had been prepared to understand both hope and its costly nature throughout his learning experiences in a number of institutions of love – in his family, his many and rich experiences of church life in and beyond Germany, his university contexts and leadership demands, and his friendship with others who, like him, attempted to respond to God’s call to hope and resistance, notwithstanding the cost. Radical hope, then, is not the lonely climax of an isolated person’s pilgrimage, but the climax of a life with and for others in the fourfold network of loving relationships: our relationship to our fellow human beings, God, God’s creation and our own emerging selves.

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Schmiedel, Ulrich, Elasticized Ecclesiology: The Concept of Community after Troeltsch, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Schmiedel, Ulrich and Graeme Smith, eds., Religion in the European Refugee Crisis, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Schreiber, Stefan, ‘Sprach Jesus vom Jenseits?’ in Stefan Schreiber and Stefan Siemons, eds., Das Jenseits: Perspektiven christlicher Theologie, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003, 96–118. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, ‘Prophet of Divine Wisdom-Sophia’, in Patrick Gnanapragasam and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, eds., Negotiating Borders: Theological Explorations in the Global Era: Essays in Honour of Felix Wilfred, Delhi: ISPCK, 2008, 59–76. Schwikart, Georg, Tod und Trauer in den Weltreligionen, Kevelaer: Topos, 2007. Schwöbel, Christoph, Gott in Beziehung: Studien zur Dogmatik, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002, 193–226. Siddiqui, Mona, Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in God’s Name, New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 2015. Siddiqui, Mona, ‘Who Practices Hospitality Entertains God Himself’, in Ulrich Schmiedel and James M. Matarazzo Jr., eds., Dynamic of Difference: Christianity and Alterity: A Festschrift for Werner G. Jeanrond, London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015, 247–54. Sigurdson, Ola, Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Sigurdson, Ola, Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in Christian Theology, trans. Carl Olsen, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2016. Simon, Ulrich, A Theology of Auschwitz, London: SPCK, [1967] 1978. Spencer, Stephen R., ‘Hope’, in Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005, 305–7. Stålsett, Sturla J., Religion i urolige tider: Globalisering, religiøsitet og sårbarhet, Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2017. Svenungsson, Jayne, Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit, trans. Stephen Donovan, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016. Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Teifke, Wilko, Offenbarung und Gericht: Fundamentaltheologie und Eschatologie bei Guardini, Rahner und Ratzinger, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012. Tillich, Paul, Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954. Tillich, Paul, ‘Liebe ist stärker als der Tod’, in Paul Tillich, Impressionen und Reflexionen: Ein Lebensbild in Aufsätzen, Reden und Stellungnahmen. Gesammelte Werke, vol. XIII, Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1972, 249–52. Tillich, Paul, The Courage to Be, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, [1952] 2000. Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, New York: Crossroad, 1981.

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Tracy, David, ‘Form and Fragment: The Recovery of the Hidden and Incomprehensible God’, in Werner G. Jeanrond and Aasulv Lande, eds., The Concept of God in Global Dialogue, Maryknoll: Orbis, 2005, 98–114. Vattimo, Gianni, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Walls, Jerry L., Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Walls, Jerry L., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2008. Walls, Jerry L., Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Webster, John B., Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to his Theology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1986] 1991. Welz, Claudia, Vertrauen und Versuchung, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. Welz, Claudia, Humanity in God’s Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Wenzel, Knut, ‘Die Seele – in Raum und Zeit: Zu einem in der theologischen Anthropologie nicht leichtfertig aufzugebenden Problembegriff’, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 34:2 (2017), 285–307. Wirén, Jakob, Hope and Otherness: Christian Eschatology and Interreligious Hospitality, Leiden/Boston: Brill and Rodopi, 2018. Williams, Rowan, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement, London: Continuum, 2000. Williams, Rowan, ‘Augustinian Love’, in Schmiedel, Ulrich and James M. Matarazzo Jr., eds., Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Alterity, A Festschrift for Werner G. Jeanrond, London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015, 189–97. Williams, Rowan, On Augustine, London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Williams, Trevor, ‘Salvation’, in John Bowden, ed., Christianity: The Complete Guide, London: Continuum, 2005, 1078–80. Wilkinson, David, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe, London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010. Wolfradt, Uwe, ‘Seele zwischen Psychologie, Philosophie und Esoterik’, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 34:2 (2017), 195–213. Wolter, Michael, Der Brief an die Römer, vol. 1, Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament VI/1, Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlagsgesellschaft, and Ostfildern: Patmos, 2014. Young, James E., The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1993. Zachhuber, Johannes, Luther’s Christological Legacy: Christocentrism and the Chalcedonian Tradition, The Père Marquette Lecture in Theology 2017, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2017.

INDEX OF NAMES

Abel  185 Abraham  4, 10, 173 Adam  30, 66, 126, 147, 185 Alighieri, Dante  44, 148–51 Allison, Dale C., Jr.  195 Ambrose of Milan  33–4 Amos  26 Angenendt, Arnold  59 Anselm of Canterbury  180 Aquinas, Thomas  4, 11, 19, 39–44, 50, 55, 58, 60–1, 64, 65, 79, 91, 116, 146–50, 190 Arendt, Hannah  115 Aristotle  42, 131 Assmann, Aleida  100–10, 171–2 Assmann, Jan  107 Auer, Johann  76 Augustine  11, 35–9, 42, 50, 57, 60–1, 63, 66, 108, 145, 147, 190, 194 Aulén, Gustaf  69–70 Barry, Sebastian  104 Barth, Karl  51, 52, 64, 117 Basil of Caesarea  32–3 Bauckham, Richard  44, 82, 88 Bauman, Zygmunt  121 Benedict XII (Pope)  74 Benedict XVI (Pope)/Joseph Ratzinger  3, 7, 9, 23, 75–9, 124, 149 Benedict of Nursia  58 Bergdolt, Klaus  149 Bergengruen, Werner  195 Bernard of Clairvaux  148 Bettenson, Henry  34, 36 Bietenhard, Hans  26 Bloch, Ernst  3, 46, 78 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  70–1, 199–202 Boniface VIII (Pope)  53

Brown, Peter  57, 142–5 Brox, Norbert  29–30, 139 Burton Russell, Jeffrey  139–48 Busch, Eberhard  51 Byrne, James M.  159 Byström, Gabriel  98, 165 Cain  185 Calvin, Jean  44, 59, 150 Carmichael, E. D. H. (Liz)  16 Casey, John  139–42, 149–52 Chadwick, Henry  38 Christe, Wilhelm  128 Clark, Christopher  96 Clarke, Sathianthan  193 Cleese, John  101–2 Cohen, Arthur A.  105, 109 Conway, Christopher  117, 196 Cornille, Catherine  117, 196, 197–8 Daley, Brian  29–38, 53 Dalferth, Ingolf U.  10, 15, 49, 183, 191 Daly, Gabriel  5, 112 Daniel  27, 29 Dante Alighieri, see Alighieri, Dante David  26 Davies, W. D.  195 Denzinger, Heinrich  53, 74, 149, 156 Dodd, C. H.  77 Doyle, Dominic  19, 40–1 Drecoll, Volker Henning  38, 57 Du Toit, Andrie  28 Eagleton, Terry  4, 6, 9, 13, 20 Eire, Carlos  56–60 Engelhardt, Paulus  131

216

INDEX of Names

Epicuros  112 Eve  66, 185 Falconer, Alan D.  108 Farley, Margaret A.  64–5, 190 Fergusson, David  176 Ford, David  44 Francis (Pope)  9, 52, 55, 176, 190 Fredriksen, Paula  7 Friedlander, Albert H.  8 Fuchs, Ottmar  154–5, 175–6 Fukuyama, Francis  163 Funke, Dieter  196 Gerle, Elisabeth  70 Gestrich, Christof  128–31 Gordon, Bruce  150 Green, Stephen  100, 162, 166, 170–1 Gregory of Nyssa  33 Gregory of Tours  145 Gregory the Great (Pope)  143 Greshake, Gisbert  131–2 Griffith, Paul J.  155–7 Großhans, Hans-Peter  158 Grøn, Arne  191–2 Gronemeyer, Marianne  111 Habermas, Jürgen  164 Haight, Roger  194 Hainsworth, Peter  148 Häring, Hermann  57 Harris, Elizabeth  1 Hasenfratz, Hans-Peter  115 Hasenhüttl, Gotthold  44 Hastings, Adrian  53–4 Hebblethwaite, Brian  26–8, 39, 44 Heidegger, Martin  115 Heinrich, Christian  6 Hirsch, Monica  106 Hitler, Adolf  95, 99–100, 200 Hock, Klaus  129 Homolka, Walter  8 Honneth, Axel  192 Hosea  26 Høystad, Ole Martin  128, 131 Hünermann, Peter  53, 74, 149, 156 Innocence IV (Pope)  156 Irenaeus of Lyons  29–30, 67 Isaiah  26, 126

Jackelén, Antje  169, 174, 189, 199 Jaschke, Helmut  136 Jasper, David  21 Jenson, Robert W.  23, 64, 67, 75, 85–94, 184 Jeremiah  26 Job  26 John of the Cross  18–21 Johnson, Elizabeth A.  190 Jüngel, Eberhard  64, 112–23, 127 Kasper, Walter  198 Kavanagh, Patrick  61 Kehl, Medard  140 Kelly, Anthony  3, 5, 7, 23, 71, 75, 89–94, 107, 109, 196–7 Kierkegaard, Søren  15, 61, 117, 177, 191 Klinger, Elmar  132 Klug, Brian  6, 172 Kohl, Helmut  100 Kovacs, Judith  29, 186 Kreuzer, Michael  139 Kristensson Uggla, Bengt  70 Küng, Hans  5 Kuschel, Karl-Josef  7 Kvanvig, Jonathan L.  152, 154 Lacoste, Jean-Yves  44 Lane, Dermot A.  17 Lash, Nicholas  193 Lear, Jonathan  19–20 Lesch, Walter  164–6, 169 Leveson, Brian  97 Lindberg, Carter  65 Lob-Hüdepohl, Andreas  165, 175 Løgstrup, K. E.  181 Lössl, Josef  38 Luther, Martin  11, 13, 44, 45, 47, 59, 62–4, 69–70, 117, 150–1 Luz, Ulrich  195 Machado, Daisy L.  197 McGinn, Bernard  18, 58 McGuckin, John Anthony  31 Mandry, Christof  169 Marti, Kurt  159 Mary  85, 148 Matarazzo, James M., Jr.  15, 153 Materne, Pierre-Yves  105

INDEX of Names

Merks, Karl-Wilhelm  195–6 Merton, Thomas  20–1 Metz, Johann Baptist  22, 103–7, 177, 200 Micah  8, 26 Mitterand, François  100 Mittleman, Alan  6 Mjaaland, Marius Timmann  71 Mohammad  71, 173 Moltmann, Jürgen  44–50, 147, 176, 184, 200 Moses  4, 6, 11, 173 Moyaert, Marianne  176, 197 Muers, Rachel  44 Mühling, Markus  18, 186 Müller, Jan-Werner  98, 164–5 Murray, Douglas  162, 168–73 Neiman, Susan  195 Newlands, George M.  53, 120, 197 Nikulin, Dimitri  106 Nocke, Franz-Josef  67 Nygren, Anders  62–4, 69–70, 117, 190 Origen  30–4, 39, 43 Ottati, Douglas F.  7 Paul (Apostle)  4, 7, 11, 28, 39, 41, 45, 46, 47, 56, 69, 72, 80, 83, 114–15, 125–6, 138, 153 Pelican, Jaroslav  69 Phan, Peter C.  82 Pieper, Josef  42 Plato  131 Power, David N.  71 Prendergast, Terence  8

Rothberg, Michael  106 Rowland, Christopher  29, 186 Saarinen, Risto  192 Sarah  4 Sauter, Gerhard  128, 130 Schelde, Michael  70 Schlingensiepen, Ferdinand  200 Schmiedel, Ulrich  17, 97, 164, 177 Schreiber, Stefan  135–7, 139 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth  14 Schwikart, Georg  112 Schwöbel, Christoph  16, 163, 182 Segbers, Klaus  163, 165 Shortt, Rupert  168 Siddiqui, Mona  6–7, 176, 197–8 Siemons, Stefan  135, 139 Sigurdson, Ola  5, 20, 31, 37–8, 130, 189 Simon, Ulrich  105 Smith, Allen  53, 197 Smith, Graeme  164 Snowden, Edward  97 Spencer, Stephen R.  29 Stålsett, Sturla  13 Svenungsson, Jayne  44 Swedenborg, Emmanuel  152 Talking Heads  137 Taylor, Charles  82 Teifke, Wilko  81–2 Tertullian  142 Thomas Aquinas, see Aquinas, Thomas Tillich, Paul  64–5, 68, 153, 190 Tracy, David  140, 179 Turner, Bryan S.  197 Vattimo, Gianni  87

Rad, Gerhard von  26 Rahner, Johanna  154, 157 Rahner, Karl  21, 64–5 Rasmusson, Arne  44 Ratzinger, Joseph, see Benedict XVI Relotius, Claas  97 Ricœur, Paul  64, 82, 108, 130, 157, 170, 173 Robey, David  148 Römelt, Josef  30 Rosenberg, Göran  106

 217

Walls, Jerry L.  82, 139, 156–7, 185 Watts, Isaac  151 Webster, John B.  120 Welz, Claudia  17, 61, 181 Wenzel, Knut  127–8, 132 Wilkinson, David  9, 48, 82, 186–90 Williams, Rowan  11, 198 Williams, Trevor  69

218

Wingren, Gustaf  70 Wirén, Jakob  197 Wolfradt, Uwe  128 Wolter, Michael  187 Wyller, Trygve  197

INDEX of Names

Yarbro Collins, Adela  29 Young, James E.  105 Zachhuber, Johannes  47 Zwingli, Ulrich  59

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

activism  49 afterlife  2, 31, 35, 49, 56–7, 60, 71, 84, 135–59 agency/agent of hope  198–9 animals  25, 66, 149, 185, 189–90 annihilation  36, 41, 43–4, 77, 106, 173, 184 anthropology  33, 54, 60, 63–4, 74, 80–2, 118, 127–8, 131, 136, 182 Auschwitz  106–6, 195 autonomy  163 body and soul  31, 80, 125, 133, 147, 157 Body of Christ  15, 78, 80, 87–8, 92–4, 123 Brexit  101, 161, 166, 170–1 Buddhism  170 Christian hope, see hope Christian love, see love Christology  45, 47, 62, 69, 71, 76–82, 86–9, 93, 115, 120–1, 139, 158, 180–1 common good  86, 89 community of believers  12, 14, 28, 32, 49, 52, 58, 67, 72, 73–5, 76, 78, 80, 83, 87–8, 89, 93, 141, 182, 197 of hope  15, 48, 88, 90, 93, 110, 183 of law  167 of love  15, 65, 87 of remembering  171 of the saints  2, 52, 55, 71, 80, 127 contemplation  4, 14, 26, 28, 40, 52, 56, 58, 62, 110, 114, 123, 135, 144, 148–52, 178, 189, 200 cosmos/cosmology  28, 33, 39, 66, 81–2, 88, 90–1, 143, 152, 166

Council Council of Trent  156 Second Council of Lyons  156 Second Vatican Council  55, 67, 82, 89, 91, 93 covenant between God and Israel  6, 10–11, 13, 26, 80, 137, 144 creation  5, 7, 15–16, 26–7, 29, 31, 33, 39, 42, 47–8, 50, 53, 55, 61, 63, 66–7, 70, 73, 79–80, 82, 84–5, 87–9, 91, 92, 98, 107, 109–10, 119, 140, 147, 151–4, 156, 158, 161, 166, 172–3, 179, 184, 185–90, 196, 199, 202 creation and reconciliation  13, 16, 47–8, 53–55, 65, 66–70, 72, 108, 123, 137, 153, 157, 158, 161, 173, 176, 180, 185, 196–9 new creation  25, 30–1, 35, 47, 63, 66, 73, 87, 94, 119, 126–7, 129, 186–90, 196 Scandinavian Creation Theology  70 cross/theology of the cross  16, 26, 39, 45, 47, 49, 62–3, 114, 157, 180 cryonics  2 death  1–2, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16–17, 21, 23, 26–7, 31–4, 36, 42, 51, 53, 59–60, 62, 69–72, 73, 75–8, 84, 87, 92, 95, 99, 106, 111–33, 135–42, 146–50, 154–8, 172–3, 180–4, 186–8, 200 demiurge  29 democracy  14, 163, 165–6, 176–7 desire  1, 5–6, 12–13, 17, 23, 31–3, 40–2, 50, 51, 61, 63–4, 73, 75, 90, 116, 123, 137–8, 144,

220

INDEX of Subjects

147–8, 170, 173, 177–8, 182, 192, 196–9 despair  3, 17, 19, 21, 43, 68, 191, 193–4 dignity  10. 49, 117, 154–5, 181 disciple/discipleship  11–12, 15–16, 18, 21, 27–8, 30–1, 35, 39, 47, 52, 70–1, 105, 121, 126–7, 133, 135, 137–8, 179, 181, 188, 200, 202 dualism  9, 16, 54, 66, 79–80, 130, 132, 133, 139, 186, 196 ecology  9, 52, 54, 71, 120, 176, 182, 190 economics/economy  14, 68, 84, 101, 111, 143, 165, 176–7 emancipation  14, 21, 54, 71, 75, 77, 96, 104, 163, 190, 200 emotion  6, 28, 41–2, 70, 98, 105, 112, 116, 163 enemy, see love of enemy eternity/eternal life  2, 4, 7, 13, 15, 29–44, 46, 51–72, 73–5, 78–80, 83, 88, 90, 113, 122–3, 127–33, 136–43, 147–58, 173, 180–2, 188–93, 197 Eucharist  58, 71, 92, 137–8, 143–4 Europe  23, 59, 76, 95, 96, 100–2, 110, 146, 161–78 European Community  161–78 evil  14, 16, 27, 29, 32, 34, 37, 43, 48, 51, 68–9, 98, 99–103, 109–10, 112, 115, 126, 139–40, 147, 152, 157–8, 165, 180, 193–6, 199–201 feminist theology  14, 54, 71 forgiveness  14, 28, 43, 48, 54, 57, 68, 137–8, 145, 158, 196, 198 globalization  2–3, 44–5, 89, 102, 105, 121, 162–4, 167, 174–6 Gnosis/Gnosticism  29, 139, 152 God God’s Reign/Kingdom see Reign of God/Kingdom of God as love  11, 61, 79, 117, 119–20, 123, 148, 153, 183

as radical other  12, 14, 22, 116, 120–3, 126, 171, 174, 197, 199 as Trinity see Trinity Good Samaritan, see Samaritan health  2 heaven  2, 21, 23, 32–4, 36, 56, 60, 74, 79, 85, 91, 135–59, 173 hell  2, 19, 23, 32, 36, 38, 42, 51, 54, 56–8, 60, 72, 79, 81, 83, 85, 88, 91, 125, 131, 135–59, 173, 186 hermeneutics  16, 31, 88, 105, 118, 147, 196–8 hermeneutics of love  118, 196–8 Hinduism  170 hope ambiguity of hope  8–9, 89, 107, 140–1, 152, 155, 183, 197 complexity of hope  6, 15, 22–3, 94, 144, 182, 190, 194 delusion of hope  1–2, 193 and hopes  1–23, 50, 52–3, 84–5, 89–90, 93, 107–9, 25–6, 138, 158–9, 161, 172–4, 181, 192, 198 institutions of hope  99, 103, 110, 141, 178, 183 networks of hope and love  1, 8, 17, 22, 61, 64, 65, 67, 71, 91, 99, 116, 121, 128–9, 133, 141, 157–8, 173, 177, 179, 192–3, 202 and optimism  5–6, 20, 52, 104, 193 as principle  3, 46 radical hope  4, 16–22, 50, 107–9, 126, 172, 173, 177, 184, 191, 199–202 and trust  4–6, 17–21, 56, 66, 83, 91, 95–106, 108, 110, 169, 184, 187, 192–3, 197, 199 illness  1, 2, 32, 51, 122, 135, 184, 190, 195 Imago dei/God’s image  61, 117, 147, 181 institution, see hope, institutions of; love, institutions of

INDEX of Subjects

 221

inter-hope-dialogue  3, 71, 90, 94, 109, 118, 196–8 Islam  6–7, 20, 74, 98, 107–8, 168, 170, 174–5, 181–2

monastery/monastic movement  18, 57–60, 143, 146, 148–9 mystical theology/mysticism  18, 52, 58, 62, 146, 148, 185

Judaism  3–5, 8, 16, 20, 26, 30, 45–8, 56, 58, 63, 74, 83, 89, 106–8, 117, 120, 125, 138, 143–4, 167–8, 170, 174–5, 178, 181–2, 195 judgement Last Judgement  145, 148, 150, 196 of love  15, 153–4, 158 justice  4, 8, 10, 14, 26, 38, 43, 47–8, 55, 64–5, 69, 78, 95, 120, 132, 153–4, 175–8, 82, 200–1 justification  64, 78, 120

optimism, see hope and optimism original sin, see sin

kenosis  78, 120 Kingdom of God, see Reign of God kyriarchy  14 liberation theology  14, 54, 71, 193, 200 loneliness  17–8, 74, 132, 163, 202 love Christian love  62–4, 75, 117, 174, 179 of enemy  8, 37, 74, 109, 116, 137 and hope  4, 8, 11–16, 19, 22, 39–42, 71, 84, 87, 91, 121, 154, 170, 177, 179–81, 183, 190, 193–4, 199 institutions of love  123, 170, 178, 191, 199, 202 and like  51, 109, 116–17, 138, 174, 181, 190, 193 networks of love see hope martyr/martyrdom  25, 57, 78, 100, 143–4, 150–1, 175, 200 matter/material world/physical universe  9, 17, 23, 25, 28, 30–1, 33, 36, 48, 57–8, 66, 74, 79–81, 85, 88, 91, 93, 105, 128–9, 132, 139, 176, 185–90, 192, 197, 199 mercy  8, 36, 38–9, 41, 43, 137, 154, 158, 176–7, 182, 198

Parousia  7, 25, 28, 39, 56 passivity, see hope and passivity patriarchal  14, 98, 150 Paul/Pauline theology  4, 7, 11, 28, 39, 41, 45–6, 49, 56, 68–9, 72, 80, 83, 89, 114–15, 125–6, 138, 187 peace  4, 8, 14, 35, 48, 51, 101–3, 149, 166, 169, 176–8, 182, 201 physical universe, see matter plants  25, 66, 149, 185, 189 politics/political  9, 12, 14, 17, 22–3, 26, 28, 32, 33, 54, 59, 68, 71, 75, 85–6, 97–8, 104–5, 108, 110, 111, 115, 141, 146, 158, 161–78, 198–202 politics of hope  161–78 populism  13, 98, 164–70, 175, 177, 194 poverty  28, 50, 136, 143, 145, 166 psychology  93, 115, 127–8 purgatory  2, 23, 34, 59–60, 74, 79, 84, 91, 142, 148, 150, 155–8 queer theology  12, 54, 71 racism  100, 194 Reformation  12–13, 54, 59–60, 62, 75, 120, 156, 163 Reign of God/Kingdom of God  7, 9, 15–16, 20, 26, 30–2, 35, 36, 47, 48–9, 56, 58, 66–7, 71, 77–8, 87–9, 129, 135–7, 173, 193–4, 198–9 respect  6, 17, 99, 112, 116, 121, 123, 127, 136, 153–4, 168, 169–70, 174–6, 181 resurrection  4, 7, 15–16, 20, 25–50, 56, 62–3, 69–71, 78–81, 87–8,

222

INDEX of Subjects

92, 111–33, 135–59, 180–4, 187–8, 193 Roman Empire  35, 42, 168 sacrifice/sacrificial  64, 70–1, 120, 156–7, 159, 200 salvation  2, 4, 13, 16, 25–50, 51–72, 73–94, 126, 139, 153, 157–9, 175, 180, 186, 194–6 Samaritan/the Good Samaritan  121, 177 sect/sectarianism  13, 28, 30, 48, 162, 166, 177 self/selves  1, 8, 13–15, 17, 19, 31, 34, 43, 46, 48, 55, 56, 61, 64–7, 69, 70, 74–5, 77, 83, 87–9, 91–2, 94, 97–8, 104–5, 107–8, 110, 111–33, 139–40, 151, 152–5, 158–9, 163, 165–7, 171–3, 174–9, 181, 183–4, 189, 190–4, 196–7, 199 self-emptying see kenosis sin  8, 11, 14–16, 28–39, 43, 48, 50, 60, 63, 68–9, 87, 108, 115, 117–18, 125–27, 139–40, 142, 145–6, 153, 156, 180, 192, 194–6, 201 original sin  11, 16, 33–4, 63, 108, 115, 126, 146, 180 solidarity  10, 59, 183, 192 soul  18–19, 23, 27, 30–6, 42, 48, 56, 60–1, 67, 78–81, 88, 91–2, 96, 122, 124–5, 127–33, 139–45, 147–52, 157, 167–8, 170, 182, 190, see also body and soul

subject/subjectivity  11, 14, 16, 31, 44, 48, 63–5, 68, 73–5, 77, 79, 82, 86, 88, 93–4, 105, 109–10, 120–1, 127, 141, 146, 151, 158, 161, 163, 175, 179, 185, 190, 192–3 technology  66–7, 103, 162, 178 theological virtues, see virtue Torah  117 transcendence  14, 18–19, 58, 60, 68, 75, 107, 109–10, 129, 140, 184, 198 transformation  6, 11, 14–5, 26, 28, 30, 52, 55, 64, 66–8, 70–2, 79, 90, 92–4, 99, 101, 108, 110, 123, 136, 138, 142, 152, 155–9, 165, 175, 180, 184, 188–9, 194, 197–8 tribalism  13, 164–66, 177 Trinity/Trinitarian theology  14, 78–80, 85–9, 92–4, 135, 148, 158–9, 184–5 trust, see hope and trust truth  15, 40, 78, 88, 97, 118, 131, 153, 155, 162, 174–5, 178, 182 virtue theological virtues  4, 11–16, 19, 39–44, 45, 55, 91, 129, 147, 179–80, 182, 198 war  12–13, 27, 32, 44, 95–110, 122, 166, 167