By Edward W. H. Vick
A Commentary on the Sabbath School Lesson for December 21–27, 2002, "Ultimate Things," on 1 Thess. 4:13–18
The way in which we believe in God will determine the way we look at history. The question of hope is the question of God. To ask, "What is the Christian hope?" and "Is there a Christian view of history?" is to ask concerning the question of God. Whether it is possible and essential to talk about a Christian doctrine of the end will ultimately boil down to the question of how we may speak about God.
There have, of course, been many philosophies of history, from the erudite to the matter-of-fact. Since the Christian claims that his God is the God of the whole earth, and is also the Creator-God, he has a stake in the discussion of the meaning of history. No philosophy of history that would call into question his fundamental convictions of faith and compete with his understanding of the nature of God could be acceptable for him. This means that a philosophy of history that left him without hope would have to be rejected. The nature of the hope that was proffered to him from history and from the future would have to be consonant with his understanding of the God revealed for him in the person of Jesus Christ, and in his resurrection. It is for this reason that certain understandings of history do not satisfy him.
History is sometimes portrayed as illusion. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded in a sleep." History is the insubstantial pageant, the realm of shadows that must pass as the fading of a dream before the substantial reality (whatever that is) is made known or possible. This platonic viewpoint has had great power. History is a shadow—reality, no more. This is an essentially pessimistic view since it despairs of the concreteness and permanence of man’s actions in the world. What seems so real is only a ripple on the ocean of appearance. Reality is met only as history is escaped, as its particularities become the avenues to the permanent, the ultimate. In itself, history has no permanence, no ultimacy.
A simpler pessimistic view denies any rationality about history. It is not concerned to deny its reality, but simply its meaningfulness. History is chaotic and irrational. Search as one will, he will not be able to find meaning in the midst of history. He will live through the little piece of time into which he has been thrown, but apart from catching a fleeting glimpse of harmony and unity in this here or that there of history he will find neither rhyme nor reason as he attempts to look at it in the broad. What hope then that out of the future there should come that which has not been evident from the past? What has not been found is not to be found. There is no clue to the meaning of history from within history.
A less extreme view of history finds meaning in history by imposing a pattern upon it that has been drawn from one’s understanding of life and world. One can read into history a meaning from that which has appeared to be meaningful apart from history. One can take a "root metaphor" and find in it the key to the meaning that history can be made to bear. History exemplifies growth and decay like that of an organism. It displays a dialectic process of conflict and counterconflict. In both cases, new realities emerge, so there can be hope, only provided that these new realities represent progress, and provided that the future will not stand in essential contradiction to the progress of the past.
The Christian has certain clear-cut convictions concerning the reality of history. He sees in history the sphere of the unrepeatable. What happens in historical reality is unique. No event is like any other in every respect. But this uniqueness does not mean that we have to despair of ever finding meaning within history. Indeed, the Gospel of Christian Hope says that it is within the uniqueness of certain decisive events that the clue to the whole of historical reality is to be found.
The Christian hope is based upon the view that God is to be found revealed within the course of history. Some particular events manifest his will and show us himself. The key has been given and so the believer is enabled to hope. On the basis of what has thus been accomplished by God within history, he who has faith in God may anticipate the future and so talk of the end, the eschaton. The God who will be revealed at the eschaton will be none other then the God who has been manifest in the events that have been understood as the clue to the whole. So he is called "the God of hope" (Rom. 15:13), and his manifestation "Christ in you the hope of glory" (Col. l:27).
The Christian has often been tempted to regard history as illusion, especially in times of hardship and persecution. But he could neither deny the reality of his suffering nor the historical basis of his Christian foundation, namely, the cross of Jesus and the faith of the apostolic church. If he explained these away, he would have no faith. That history is unreal can never be the whole truth. When the Christian believer has said that he sought a city above and has no continuing city below, he did not mean that human history was an illusion, nor that what was done in it was of no permanent effect. Rather, the Christian claim is that what is done in history is real, permanent, and effective. He claims that certain events of a particular kind are of crucial significance and that the hope of man is not to be found in an observation of the course of history, either in the past or in its continuing course. It is to be found by reference to these particular events.
Thus, hope may stand in opposition to that which we now experience. Hope is always directed toward that which is not yet visible, is always to some extent a standing in contradiction to that which we now experience. "Hope that is seen is not hope" (Rom. 8:24). The believer repeats in his experience the experience of Jesus, who "set his face toward Jerusalem," that is, toward a future that awaited him, not seeing through to the success of his mission. The crucifixion was a life cast away in hope.
Jesus did not perceive the outcome, beyond death, of the course of events that he was initiating. His faith in the promises of God led him to hope in spite of the impending grave. He cried out in anguish of spirit, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" That God to whom he cried was the God in whom he hoped. That God was the God of promise, to whom he could entrust the success of his mission, as he did with the commitment "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." It was in this faith that he embraced the final enemy, death. It was in hope that his life was cast away.
Death has come to stand for the unfathomable and the finally mysterious in human life. Death was for Paul the enemy of man and of fulfillment. But God was the God of promise whose promise was being fulfilled in death and resurrection. He had disturbed the course of human history and had made hope possible for what apart from his action would not otherwise have been.
The church became the place of the unexpected activity of the God of promise. It was the happening of the unexpected that assured the believer that his attitude to history was not irrational, and that history was not chaotic. It was the emergence of meaning from certain unpredictable events that showed him the way to meaning in history, and that lay at the basis of his hope. His God was an active God. Past and present history was the sphere of the activity of this God.
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