Forgotten is the Minor Key: The Hope that We Have (Part 4)
Some stories are tragic. Ian McEwan doesn’t know how to write anything else. He paints with words the most beautiful Oxfordshire landscapes on which to spread misery and bloodshed and destroy the hopes of ordinary people. And I love a good tragedy. The opportunity to feel melancholy rather than just pretending everything is ok. But if every story is tragic we’re destroyed. In the end, shouldn’t heroes triumph and evil be destroyed? Someone needs to wipe away our tears and write a happy ending.
It’s sometimes hard to believe stories with happy endings, because we can get so used to disappointment. We almost dare not believe that our team might win, or that we’ll get the job or marry the girl.
Tragic stories feel real, but that doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy a good comedy. We like happy stories. Professor Brian Cox’s fame before his academic success was in his keyboard playing for D:Ream as they sang the song of progress behind Tony Blair’s 1997 election triumph: ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.
LSE Professor John Gray accuses Dawkins, Cox & co of stealing their hope from outside of their own worldview:
[The new atheists] renew one of Christianity’s most dubious promises – that salvation is open to all. The humanist belief in progress is only a secular version of this Christian faith.
Hopeful humanism is just godless Christianity and it goes further still. Richard Dawkins was interviewed in The Daily Telegraph in November 2011 saying: “Someone as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist.”
Everyone wants Jesus on their team, and everyone wants hope on their team. But you can’t just believe things because you want to; there have to be good grounds to do so. Gray says the secularists have no good grounds for believing in hope, but does anyone else?
The Christian says:
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Corinthians 15:17-19 ESV)
It’s the Speeding Neutrino Moment.
Once in a while something happens to change the rules of the game. We might call it a speeding neutrino moment. In September 2011 CERN reported that some neutrinos had managed to get to Italy quicker than expected. In time we might find it was a glitch in measurement but for now this anomaly has to be tested. It can’t just be dismissed out of hand.
Dead people stay dead. We know that today. They knew that 2000 years ago. It’s what made the claim that Jesus was alive after he’d died extraordinary. The resurrection of Jesus is a Speeding Neutrino Moment. It makes you stop and check the evidence, and if it’s found to be true it might just change everything.
John Gray summarises Christianity in his book Black Mass:
Jesus taught that the old world was about to come to an end and a new kingdom established with unlimited abundance in the fruits of the earth. Those who dwell in the new kingdom – including the righteous dead, who will be raised back to life – would be rid of physical and mental ills. Living in a new world that is without corruption, they will be immortal. Jesus was sent to announce this new kingdom and rule over it… Jesus not only defended the weak and powerless as other Jewish prophets had done, but he also opened his arms to outcasts of the world. The belief that a new kingdom was at hand was the heart of his message and was accepted as such by his disciples. The new kingdom did not arrive, and Jesus was arrested and executed by the Romans. The history of Christianity is a series of attempts to cope with this founding experience of eschatological disappointment.
Hope stands or falls on the resurrection. If Jesus didn’t rise then the whole Christian story is disappointing. If he did…
This article is the forth and final part in the series on hope.
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