Doom and the History of God: What Brings Me Hope

After Earth Day in 1970 my main focus on doom was ecological destruction. In the 1980’s it was nuclear proliferation. In the 2000’s I shifted back to environmental demise because of climate change. Now, the nukes are creeping back into my consciousness, not least because of Russia’s Putin holding the Free World hostage during his rapacious rampage over democracy and freedom, not to exclude here and perhaps say primarily, persons, in Ukraine. Recently an astrophysicist named David Holz and James Evans, a computer scientist and sociologist, taught a course at the University of Chicago entitled “Are We Doomed?” (see “Are We Doomed,” an article in The New Yorker, June 10, 2024, by Rivka Galchen). Holz is also Chair of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the outfit that sets the “Doomsday Clock” each year (by the way, it’s right now set at 90 seconds to midnight. The farthest it has been? Right after the Cold War it was at 17 minutes. Back in 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was set for the first time, and it was 7 minutes. The 90 second placement now is the closest to midnight it has ever been).

So now, I’ve got nuclear annihilation and ecological devastation on my mind, in equal fashion. I know!

I’m reading through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new An Unfinished Love Story – A Personal History of the ‘60’s. She recently gave an interview (AARP Bulletin, June 2024) in which she was asked “What gives you hope?” Her answer: “History gives me hope. When I think of the eras I’ve studied – The Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, the early days of World War II and the ‘60’s – they were all times of great turmoil, but we got through all those times and emerged with greater strength as a nation closer to our ideals.” For about 45 years now, ever since I caught this from Jim Wallis (as I recall), I’ve marched to the beat of this credo: “A Christian knows enough about humanity not to be optimistic and a Christian knows enough about God never to lose hope.” So, you might say, I appreciate but don’t share Kearns-Goodwin’s unvarnished hope in human history.

But why hope in God and not humanity? What is it about God that makes me hopeful? One way of putting it is to say it’s not what I see of God but what I hear from God. Let me try to unpack that a little.

There is a thing in the discipline of biblical theology called “heilsgeschichte.” This is a German word for “salvation history.” It’s the notion that in the biblical narrative there is this overarching theme of a story of a sequence (linear, not circular) of events in which and through which God saves and is saving and will ultimately save humanity through the likes of Israel and Jesus (while “heilsgeschichte” was named primarily for the activity of God in the Hebrew Scriptures, I’ve extrapolated here through the Christian Bible). The point of heilsgeschichte is this: history is not human events, it is a divinely filled and directed world of activity. Once can find peppered throughout the Scriptures references to how the people of God can be hopeful now because they can see how God has been faithful and saved them in the past (see Psalm 78 for a poetic expanse of this salvation history, see Hebrews 11 for a dramatic rundown of persons throughout the generations living in faith in the God of all history). It’s not unlike Kearns Goodwin’s  claim that “history makes me hopeful.” It’s a looking at past events and circumstances, this time infused specifically with divine involvement, to find light in a current darkness.

I find heilsgeschichte fascinating as a way of understanding a people’s (Israel) dynamis for hope, but I don’t subscribe to it. I think its simply one culture’s way of describing their own sense of purpose and destiny and is too easily, and constantly is, corrupted into a divine mandate to kill and destroy other cultures and peoples who don’t meet their standards or fit their desired outcomes.

But wait, I’m not a heilsgeschichte subscriber but I’m still hopeful because of and in God (and not in human “progress,” be that technological or philosophical)? What’s up with that?

The answer, ironically enough, does have to do with history.

Jesus was born somewhere between 6 and 4 BCE (likely in Nazareth, by the way, not Bethlehem). He lived and died. And, as they say (literally!), was raised from the dead (importantly, the event itself was not literal, it’s what Jesus’ contemporaries said that was and is literal). I don’t see salvation history in the now because of Jesus (as in “look at all the good things God is doing in our lives!” – jobs, healings, whatever), but I see salvation history then that describes and impacts my now. The then: distributive justice (love on the social plane) at all costs (death) that wins the day (resurrection!). The now: the victory (God wins, love wins) then propels justice now.

What is it about God that makes me hopeful? Jesus Christ.

History does not bring me hope (But I do love to read and pay attention to history and it certainly is critical in helping us not make the same mistakes and is inspiring to make the same right moves and all of Kearns Goodwin, by the way, are a must read). Not even “salvation history,” heilsgeschichte, brings me hope. But there is something, someone, that happened in history that brings me hope and the Christian faith makes a bold and audacious and interruptive and never to be scientifically or otherwise proven claim about this someone: “This man is God.”

I am hopeful because of God.