Christian hope in a world of pessimism

The title I have chosen is a line from a poem, The Second Coming, by the Irish poet W.B.Yeats. It was published in 1919, against the background of troubles in Ireland, the Russian Revolution

and the devastation of the First World War.

The poem uses a metaphor of falconry to illuminate the uncertain future of the state of the world. The falcon has become separated from the falconer and is rising higher and higher,

spiralling around in ever widening gyrations. Things fall apart because the relationship between falcon and falconer has been broken. The forces which bring order have collapsed and so there

is a terrifying sense of disintegration and chaos:”The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Then the poet imagines the second coming: a creature emerges, part lion, part man. It is the collective soul of mankind, “Spiritus Mundi”, appearing from a wasteland of sand and desert,

slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Unlike the first advent of the Christian faith, this being is a harbinger, not of peace and goodwill, but of darkness and terror.

I have heard or read Yeats’s poem quoted many times in the last year as a comment on the current state of the world. It seems to me that at present pessimism exists in three different,

though overlapping, forms.

First there are the immediate concerns. Brexit has revealed deep divisions in our society, while the political crisis we now face has only exacerbated these divisions and led to a greater

lack of civility in Westminster than I have known as a member of the House of Lords over the past three decades.

Meanwhile in France the “gilets jaunes” grassroots political protest grew spontaneously, rapidly and violently, without leaders and has been about far more than a change in the tax on fuel.

In Germany, a far-Right party (the Alternative for Germany) has won seats in the Bundestag for the first time since the Second World War, reflecting what the New Yorker calls “the fragility

of the whole society”. Throughout the European Union there is a breakdown in trust between the centre and the periphery. There are deep fault lines between those who wish to see future

integration based on liberal, democratic, internationalist principles and those who wish to see no further powers transferred to Brussels or even to exit the EU altogether. In the United

States, President Trump has proved more divisive than any other president in my lifetime. His trade war with China is undermining the multilateral international economic order which has

developed since 1945.

It might be argued that we have survived crises before: Suez in 1956, the student protests of 1968, the miners’ strike of 1984-5. But the present crisis is happening against a background of

disturbing long-term trends which are different from the past. First, the decline of traditional institutions such as the family, the church, communities, trade unions. Second, the loss of

authority in governments, the judicial system, media, police, large corporations. Third, unacceptable inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth. Fourth, the polarisation in

society between social liberals and social conservatives over issues such as the family, gender and justice. Fifth, the rise of nativism, populism, nationalism and isolationism throughout

Europe and in the US. Sixth, the decline of traditional political parties in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden, among others. Seventh, the fragmentation of society into enclaves based

on race, religion and wealth, coupled with the rise of identity politics. Democracy, capitalism, globalisation are working for some, but many feel disenfranchised.

In the US this has been well documented by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 (2013) and by Robert Putnam in Our Kids: The American Dream in

Crisis (2015). In the UK the nature of the deep divisions in our society which we saw in the 2016 referendum are set out very clearly in The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart (2017).

Most disturbing of all, however, is a third cause of pessimism: the feeling that liberalism as a world view is in crisis — some would even call it a meta-crisis. Back in October The

Economist celebrated its 175th birthday. It was set up in 1843 to campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws and economic liberalism. These were laws which taxed imports of grain into Britain

in order to protect the incomes of wealthy gentry, at a time when 20 per cent of the income of factory workers was spent on bread. As part of its anniversary edition The Economist issued a

manifesto which began: “Liberalism made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it…..Europe and America are in the throes of a popular rebellion against liberal

elites…..elsewhere a 25 year shift towards freedom and open markets has gone into reverse.”

Our natural instinct is to break down the proximate causes of pessimism into separate boxes and analyse each separately. The political crisis is seen as a result of political factors:

migration, established political parties having lost touch with the anxieties of their electorates, the indifference of the political class and the meritocratic elite to the rest of society.

As The Times put it recently: “They lack the word ‘sacrifice’ in their vocabulary, they do not belong to the community but want to be respected, admired, even loved.”

In economic life globalisation has benefited a minority, while the majority have experienced austerity and social immobility. In social life dysfunctional families, absentee fathers, drugs,

gangs, knife-crime, domestic violence, mental illness all contribute to anxiety, loneliness, exclusion and poverty. However, within each of these boxes there is a common thread: namely, the

question of the culture, values and ideology necessary for liberal societies to flourish.

Democratic institutions assume certain shared values and shared understandings: a common purpose, obligations, trust. In economic life a market economy assumes honesty, a sense of fairness

and fair play, ideals greater than the interests of just myself. Our societies function because of the enormous reserves of goodwill which exist within families, within communities, in

religious congregations, in voluntary and charitable activities. Without these values and common understandings, politics, economic life and society become dysfunctional.

Only 14 per cent of the British people questioned in Edelman’s annual trust barometer believed the country worked for them. This view was held by rich, poor, old, young, metropolitan, rural.

Divisions are about more than Brexit. A majority from across the spectrum believe that the institution of government is broken. It fails to listen to “people like me”.

In the Yeats poem the centre could not hold because the falcon and the falconer had become separated. Has the creation became separated from the Creator? Have we collectively and

individually become separated from God? Is our future the second coming of a terrifying monster?

So where do the shared values and understanding come from? Do they have their roots in tradition or history or ethical reason? Do they have any relationship to our religious heritage? Is the

current wave of pessimism in the West linked to the fact that we are rejecting the “givenness” of our condition?Have we embraced a vision of unrestricted freedom? What is the source of our

anthropology?

The crisis of liberalism can be traced to the two great liberalisms of the past fifty years: the social liberalism of the 1960s – sexual freedom, the rejection of traditional values,

experimentation – and the economic liberalism of the 1970s and 80s, popularly associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — free markets, freedom of choice, extending the market

economy into areas previously dominated by the state, and reducing regulatory burdens on business. Underlying both these liberalisms is a philosophy associated with thinkers such as Hobbes,

Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Ayn Rand and John Rawls. This philosophy claims that people are born free. According to Locke all persons are born in “perfect freedom” and “perfect equality”.

For Rousseau “man is born free but everywhere in chains”. For Mill each person should be free to pursue their own interests, subject only to not harming others.

Traditionally liberalism meant the rule of law, the freedom of the person, equality before the law, private property rights, freedom of speech. However in the last 50 years liberalism has

morphed into libertarianism. Each individual is free to abandon traditional institutions and practices and to decide for oneself the meaning of what is truth, what is goodness and what is

beauty. Restoring the past is impossible and in any case there was never some ideal world. But is there no hope anywhere?

I chose the title for this talk – “Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold” — to recognise the pessimism of our time. Yet despite the pessimism of our time, the Christian story is the

basis of hope for the whole world and for each person. It is the hope of every Christian and it is my hope.

The evidence for the Resurrection was well expressed in a low key way by Charles J. Caput, the Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia in his book Strangers in a Strange Land (2017). Christian

hope, he says, “springs from a simple historical fact. On a quiet Sunday morning two thousand years ago God (Yahweh, the God of Abraham) raised Jesus of Nazareth (a historic person and a

Jew) from the dead. This small moment, unseen by the human eye, turned the world upside down and changed history forever. It confirmed Jesus’ victory over death and evil”.

The Apostle Paul argued that the Resurrection was the key to his faith: “If Christ was not raised, then all our preaching is useless and your trust in God is useless.” (1 Cor: 15v14)

The Resurrection is a non-repeatable event and because of that some people automatically rule it out. The classic study of the evidence for it remains a book Who Moved the Stone? by Frank

Morrison (Faber & Faber, 1920). It has been repeatedly reprinted and translated into several languages. In it the author examines in great detail the evidence for the death and burial of

Jesus, the empty tomb, the post-resurrection appearances, as well as three theories which have been advanced to explain the event. Morrison was sceptical about the evidence and set out to

write a book to show that in all probability the Resurrection was a myth.

T.S.Eliot was on the editorial board of Faber at the time, read the manuscript and recommended publication. G.K Chesterton said that he initially thought the book was a detective story, but

in his review described how the case for the Resurrection was “treated in such a logical and even legal manner”. Anyone who has read it will certainly agree with that. It’s hard work.

Christian hope is something real, not just wishful thinking. It is not simply a feeling. It is not optimism. Optimism is seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don’t want to see.

Hope can look at the future with eyes wide open to everything which might frustrate hope — failure, rejection, fear, exclusion, even death itself.

The experience of Christians throughout the ages —the Church Fathers, the saints of Middle Ages, Luther, Calvin, John Wesley, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mother Teresa — is that hope becomes real

through a personal encounter with the risen Jesus. The Christian faith is not simply recognition of an historical fact or membership of a particular church or intellectual assent to a creed.

It is a personal experience.

Earlier this year my wife and I were invited to a conference in Rome, one of the highlights of which was a visit to the Pope’s personal residence in the Vatican and to meet Archbishop George

Gänswein, who is Prefect of the Papal Household for Pope Francis and personal secretary to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Incidentally, his nickname is “Bel Giorgio”, Gorgeous George, for his

film star looks. Each morning he works for Pope Francis, then has lunch with Pope Benedict for whom he works in the afternoon. After the tour of the residence we sat down in one of the

state rooms with the Archbishop, who talked about his work. I think we were the only non-Catholics in the group.

The discussion lasted the best part of one and a half hours and twice in the discussion Archbishop Gänswein said: “Pope Francis stresses the point that you cannot be a Catholic Christian

without a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” In the context of a Protestant church such as my own, St Michael’s, such a way of expressing the Christian faith might be normal. But for

the Pope to use that form of words was, as the Archbishop hinted, somewhat unusual.

Yet for Pope Francis this is the heart of the Christian message. It is something he clearly expressed in his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “I never tire of repeating those

words of Benedict XVI which take us to the very heart of his Gospel. Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or lofty idea but the encounter with an event, a person which

gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

Jesus promised that those who committed to following him would experience a new kind of life, eternal life. Simply extending the longevity of this life could become tedious. This new life is

the promise of life after death, but also the promise of a new life here and now: a new intensity in the experience of living, a new vitality, a fullness in life, a new view of

relationships, a new meaning of love and a new hope for the future. It gives us in the present something of the reality we are waiting for. In this way, faith draws the future into the

present so the fact that the future exists changes the present. As a consequence our present life is not just the departure lounge for eternity.

Frequently in the New Testament, faith and hope are used almost interchangeably. The apostle Paul in his letter to Christians in Ephesus reminds them that in their previous life they were

“without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2 v 18). There were many gods being worshipped in Ephesian temples but they did not worship the true creator God. He says that as a result

their thinking was “futile” (Eph 3:17) and their understanding was “darkened” (Eph 4:18).

The Christian faith is a distinctive world view. It is presented to us in the Bible as a meta-narrative: creation, the fall, redemption, restoration, a new heavens and a new earth.

It can never be proved using the methodology of science, but it is not contrary to reason. It is based supremely on the historical record of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We are

part of a moral universe of right and wrong, good and evil. The brokenness and suffering of our world is our rejection of God and of our decision to pursue an independent path, which

theologians term “the Fall”.

The pinnacle of creation is the human person possessed of a god-like quality and infinite dignity. This world view has profound implications for politics, economics and society. Within the

Christian Church it is set out most clearly in Roman Catholic social teaching and in the Reformed tradition, following Calvin, it can be found in the writing of Abraham Kuyper, who was Prime

Minister of the Netherlands (1901-4).

Finally hope is the basis for action. Some years ago I met one of the great Protestant theologians of the 20th century, Jürgen Moltmann. We had a lively discussion on the ethics of

capitalism, following which he sent me a copy of his autobiography. In it he wrote: “In God we trust, In us God trusts.”

Moltmann had a tortured early life. He was 17 in 1943 and describes vividly the experience of living in Hamburg and witnessing it being bombed; 40,000 people died. The following year he was

recruited into the German army and subsequently captured by the British, spending three years in a prisoner of war camp in Scotland. They were for him a dark night of the soul, but it was in

Britain through that experience that he became a Christian and subsequently wrote three books on the theology and ethics of Christian hope.

St. Paul says that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. Behold everything has become new” (2 Cor5:17). It is because the Christian has a new view of the created order, of the

physical world, of each human person created in the image of God, of our political and economic life together, that Christian hope is the spur to fight economic injustice, political

oppression, religious persecution.

C.S.Lewis suggests that if you read history you will find that those who did most for this world were those who thought most of the next. The Apostles of the early church set out to

evangelise the Roman Empire. In the early 19th century, Anglican Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce led the campaign to abolish slavery. Lord Shaftesbury reformed working practices in

factories, Harold Wilson said that the British Labour movement owed more to Methodism than it did to Marx.

Today Christians are active in Parliament tackling modern slavery, low paid work, the preservation of rain forests and many other injustices. I have had the privilege of being involved in

the establishment of a Christian University in Romania and with four micro-finance organisations to help the poor, especially women, in Africa. It has been Christians who because of their

faith, have initiated these ventures.

One of my Christian friends in the Commons is Frank Field, who has been active throughout his 38 years in Parliament, fighting the cause of the poor, supporting initiatives to help parents

in the early years, campaigning with practical policies to support the rain forests and many initiatives in his own constituency of Birkenhead. He told me: “The Holy Spirit cannot operate

unless we work.” He included prayer as work.

I need hardly say that Christians are not the only people who have fought injustice, taken up the cause of the poor, set up schools, hospitals, night shelters. People of other faiths, no

faiths and even those hostile to faith have also shown true compassion and set up similar initiatives. The point I wish to make is that Christian hope is an inspiration to action. Pessimism

must not become fatalism.

Christian hope is something real, based on history, in no way contrary to reason, adding a vitality and fullness to life here and now and providing an inspiration despite the pessimism to

pursue peace and serve others in the name of Jesus. It deserves to be explored.

This essay is based on a talk given at St Michael’s Church, Chester Square, in January 2019.

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