Chapter 1: Introducing Hope
At some time in our lives, all of us have desperately needed hope.
This book, however, introduces hope from an entirely different perspective. First, we are not asking that you believe what we are telling you. We will simply give you the information and then let you decide what you want to do with it.
We will be talking about Jesus more than any other person. You will find that the Bible describes him as a very different individual than the Christmas-card baby Jesus sleeping in a cattle feeding trough.
The second way in which this book will be strikingly different is in its contrast to many books which try to "market" Jesus by telling readers that he will give them peace, or that their life will be better because of him. These statements are all true, but we want to carefully explain the high cost of commitment to Jesus without coercing you into making a decision to follow him. In fact, we could not be clearer about anything than our desire to avoid any attempt to manipulate you.
This book's organization
In order to fully explain the hope we can have in God's full restoration of creation, we need to give you a fair amount of information from the Bible itself. However, we will not be quoting obscure Bible verses in order to bolster unique denominational interpretations. Rather, we will use Bible verses that have been clearly understood within the Christian tradition during its two-thousand-year-old history. We will make every attempt to give only those explanations that could be supported throughout the history of the three oldest Christian traditions.[1]
[1]There was essentially a single Christian tradition from the time of Jesus' death (crucifixion) and return to life (resurrection) in 33 AD until the division between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions. Because there were many issues debated over a long period of time, no single date can be given for the breakdown in relations between these two groups. However, the events of 1054 AD may be used as a representative date (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East-West_Schism). The third important division in Christianity came in 1516 when the Protestant Reformation came out of the Roman Catholic tradition, though of course, that division quickly proliferated into many separate groups. (For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ninety-Five_Theses and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant Reformation.)
We will avoid explanations that are dependent on Christian rituals such as baptism. As much as possible, we will rely on the traditional Christian meanings of words such as faith, salvation, redemption, crucifixion, resurrection, and kingdom of God.
This book was written for those with limited knowledge of the Bible. Consequently, we will adequately explain each new subject. The more technical topics—and there will be many—will be developed in footnotes. You would be able to read the entire book with adequate understanding without looking at the footnotes. On the other hand, if you read the footnotes, you will gain further information that will give you better insight into the topics of discussion.
Why this book was written
There are two reasons why this book was written. First, more and more people in our postmodern[2] world have lost their sense of hope. Therefore, we want to remind our readers of a hope which has survived for almost 2,000 years within the Christian traditions. Secondly, there has been so much change that even the way hope was explained as recently as a few decades ago has been altered. The hope of twenty years ago no longer expresses convincing hope today.
[2]It is not particularly important that you understand the terms modern or postmodern as applied to today's world. Contemporary writers merely use these terms to represent a shift in the way society perceives itself. However, these same writers agree that our society has gone through a fundamental ideological change in the past few decades. Most agree that sometime in the mid-1950s our thinking as a society began to change. Prior to that time, we were modern in our thinking. We have now become postmodernn—a development that has primarily taken place since 1980. For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism. Our primary reason for introducing this notion is that the way we think conditions us to understand our perceived dependence on society. We are simply suggesting that during the 1960s, many could think of their plight as individuals in the world as being distinct from the trauma society as a whole was facing. That is, in the past, an attempt was made to isolate an individual's problems in such a way that by confronting only the personal problems, the brokenness of society did not need to be corrected in order for the individual to make a satisfactory readjustment in life. There is an increasing awareness in today's world, however, that no individual is able to live apart from dependence on society. Thus, we believe today that an individual's brokenness can be healed only by also addressing the brokenness within society.
First, we have lost our sense of hope. In the 1950s we thought we were about to experience an explosion of knowledge that would soon solve even the unified theory of physics—"the explanation of everything." We thought diseases such as polio and smallpox were close to being eradicated. In just over two decades, test pilots had not only traveled at the speed of sound, but astronauts had walked on the moon. Heart and kidney transplants became routine, huge stores of information became available to anyone with an internet connection, and there seemed to be unimaginable opportunities for brilliant young entrepreneurs to develop wealth.
But we lost our hope. Suicide rates climbed among our youth. Unthinkable numbers of students began dropping out of school. HIV and AIDS became worldwide epidemics. And the worst blow of all came with the scourge of drug cartels, meth labs, and a staggering growth in prison populations and children raised with drugs and alcohol.
The utopian world we were anticipating in the 1950s was a fantasy that never materialized. True enough, we developed amazing technology. But at the same time, a brokenness that is now beyond belief spread throughout our society. It is not just the hopelessness of the chemically-dependent homeless who bed down for the night on our city streets. It is the even more wrenching reality of a high school senior who is earning good grades and living in a decent home, yet who is searching the internet for homemade bomb recipes because he has so little hope in the life he knows. Or the stay-at-home-mom with a successful marriage and abundant income from her husband's high-tech job, who is having an affair. Or the young politician, perceived as a rising star, who has begun living a life of sexual duplicity because he has lost his sense of hope in the system he is serving. Or the soccer-mom who is stealing money from the fund-raising account to feed a gambling habit.
But we are not alarmed by just the soccer-moms-turned-criminals or the politicians or wives who are on a path to self destruction. What we find so alarming in our society today is the fact that all of society is broken. Society is powerless to implement a satisfactory solution. There is no longer a corporate sense of hope.
Secondly, the explanation for hope itself has changed. Every generation has had its moments of hopelessness, and this was equally true in the 1960s. A popular explanation to individuals searching for meaning in life during that time attempted to isolate the individual from society, and suggested that only internal changes were required. It was implied that God worked the change on the individual's behalf without requiring any change within society itself.
Thus, according to this point of view, no matter how disrupted an individual's life may have become because of the ills of society, if that person would make a religious commitment to Jesus, Jesus would improve the quality of that seeker's life. There were great attempts made to deal with injustices in society, but it was often implied that the individual could be redeemed as an isolated person, finding the benefits of a relationship with God quite independently of whether or not society became involved in the redemptive process.
However, the recent shift to postmodern thought has brought us back to a more balanced perspective. Among both the secular and religious communities today, significantly more importance is again being given to the influence of society on the individual. Both communities would agree that to successfully redeem an individual from a broken society that offers no hope, the society must be redeemed just as completely as the individual.
In Chapter 2: Creation's Design Specification we will see why a two-thousand-year-old statement of a 13.73 billion[3]-year-old design specification gives us the greatest hope for the ultimate redemption of our society as well as the possibility of the greatest hope in our personal lives.
[3] Because this book deals with God's purpose in creation, it must make some reference to time. It is not our intent to debate creation dates. At the same time, we want to represent both scientific and biblical references without bias. The simplest way to do this is to use the standard for whichever system we are alluding to as the standard of reference for it. Let's use two simple illustrations. When dating the origin of the universe, the speed of light is its unit of reference. Hubble's constant, which expresses the expansion rate of the universe, is 71 km/s/Mpc (kilometers-per-second-per-million-light-years). Allowing for the most recent estimates of its variables, we have a universe which is 13.73 (± 0.12) billion years old. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe.) It would be naive to try to base the age of the universe on anything other than the speed of light, inasmuch as light is the unit used for its measurement. In contrast, the Bible records a genealogy in Genesis 5 that is presumably based on the 365.2425-day (365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds) solar year. One point of this narrative places a timeline of recorded human activity at approximately 6,000 years ago. We will simply allow either of these two dating systems to state their own purpose without any attempt at reconciling light years with solar years in order to establish a single astronomical/biblical date. We will thus state that the universe is some 13.73 billion years old, while at the same time acknowledging the literal accuracy of the biblical record as being a true statement of the biblical author's understanding of the time structure of his day.
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