What is the purpose of life? Whereto the carriage of history takes the human across the wilderness of time? Is their a meaningful ultimatum worth searching for? Such inquiries were raised by the famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy almost two centuries ago in a confessional text on an existential struggle he passed through searching for the meaning and purpose of life.
Half a century before Tolstoy, the German philosopher, Schopenhauer, insisted that the process of life and existence is static and changeless, and it should, therefore, be encountered except with pessimism. Schopenhauer structures his philosophy of life on a denial of any belief in an ultimate or supreme purpose for existence. Tolstoy, to the contrary, lands with his searching boat on the shore of the conviction that there is actually a supreme purpose and meaning for life, the sum of which is represented in the notion of ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. ‘Faith’, says Tolstoy, is the state of perceiving of the essence of human life, which protects, even prevents, the human from self-destruction and gives her purpose for living. Faith is the power of life.
Schopenhauer’s and Tolstoy’s views about life and existence feature in the life and thought of the humans in today’s world. There are people who build their view of reality upon what they glean from observing life’s negative and tragic events. This observation turns them into pessimistic persons, living in a state of negativity, hardly expecting that the tragic life would one day qualitatively change: everything is static and changeless; there is no better than what now is. On the other end of the spectrum, there are others who structure their attitude toward life upon a specific religious conviction based on a belief in the existence of an infinite, wholly other Being, who endeavours, in His supreme power, to drive life towards an ultimate Good. Such a belief, Tolstoy says, is the generator of the living aptitude of millions of people around the world. The subject of the human eagerness for living and survival is not absent from Schopenhauer’s point of view. It is, actually, as valuable and basic in his thought as it is in Tolstoy’s. The difference between their views, though, is that for Schopenhauer the realistic person thinks that we perceive life in its ultimate shape and value when we dispense with the optimistic expectation, humans may hold, about a futural supreme Good. The power of life lies, for Schopenhauer, in the prevalence of a realistic view of the world as is; no more, no less; free from any imaginations about a better world that may be waiting for us upon the horizon of the future. This is probably what Schopenhauer means when he says in his book, The World as Will and Idea, that the world is our idea. Tolstoy’s human being seeks to understand the meaning and essence of life and existence through the act of belief, the state of faith. Whereas, Schopenhauer’s human being struggles to live life free from optimism. Both characters are realistic incarnation of the human being in her relationship with history and time process. They both stand on the same ground with regard to this point.
When we, nevertheless, study both philosophical approaches in the light of the Christian understanding of existence in time and life, we find that the proposal of Tolstoy is closer than Schopenhauer’s to the Christian theological thought about the relationship between being and existence. Theology organically links the act of understanding life and its telos with the Christian interpretation of the state of belief, or of faith. Faith in Christian theology is a living journey as such; a process of subsisting in an openness towards the other; life in a state of expansion beyond the single, individual self’s narrow boundaries.
What takes Christian theology beyond the boundaries of Tolstoy’s understanding of faith, nevertheless, is that the former does not merely build upon faith, but also explicitly and affirmatively rejects pessimism. Christianity does not concede the pacifist, negative trend of realism that fosters indifference to any grey dimension in human existence. One can likely say that Christianity stands on a middle-ground between Schopenhauer’s extreme pessimism and Tolstoy’s extreme reliance on the metaphysical dimension of being. It confronts pessimism without sacrificing its appreciation of the valuable role of realism in reading the present state of living, on one side; and it takes the notion of faith, the act of belief, beyond the state of supernatural submission, construing faith a power of revolution and change that stem from a realistic and objective perception of reality, on another.
Between the descriptive, realistic pessimism and the intrinsic state of belief that seeks an ultimate, supernatural telos from-without human existence, Christianity proposes the theology of hope. It argues that ‘hopeless realism’ is just a moment of psychological release of intrinsically accruing loads of despair, frustration and helplessness. Yet, it also states that ‘hopeless faith’ is just a religious confidence in supernatural, private ideas that are hardly rooted in human history. Without hope, as Juergen Moltmann says, faith vanishes; because it deteriorates and eventually dies.
Today, the contemporary Christian believer, in specific, and religious person, in general, seem to be swinging violently between pessimistic realism and intrinsic, privative belief that lacks tangible hope in a historical, or history-based, future. The majority of Christians would most probably agree about the problematic implications of pessimism. However, they may not all realize, or even consider as challenging, the fact that the individualistic, privative form of faith that is indifferent to the historical and communal realities of human life seriously lacks the truth of hope. There are many Christians who think that faith builds upon hope just because one of the components of the Christian religiosity is the believers’ waiting for the second coming of the Messiah and their anticipation of the last day at the eschaton, the end of times. One of the traditional teachings of the Christian church(s) states that the believer should hope for God’s interference in history at the end of ages to exterminate the present heaven and earth and establish the ‘New Jerusalem’ that descends from heaven. While proclaiming this biblical promise, the church must always associate this proclamation with an explanation that the theological connotations of this biblical discourse lay beyond its literal structure and poetic and symbolic style. At face value, the biblical, tragic, symbolic language about the eschaton is enigmatic and vague for the human of today: it is puzzling rather than enlightening, it causes fear rather than confidence and despair rather than hope. Such symbolism drives the majority of Christians to marginalize the idea of ‘the Day of the Lord’ and to ignore the Christian teaching on the second coming; to an indifference, that is, to the hope about a coming better future created by God. For, why would the human hope for cosmic destruction and anticipate nihilistic condemnation? Would not such symbolic image of the eachaton bring us back, in a way or another, to a circle of existence and world-view that implicitly carries features of Schopenhauer’s negativity?
If life proceeds toward its inevitable, religiously certified annihilation, and since history is drawing near to its final abortion, why, and in what, should we hope? What good such a tragic, catastrophic eschatological image of the ‘End of Days’ offers to our historical life, since history still exists and we still dwell in it? If Christian hope lies totally and exclusively in the belief that God would eradicate Evil and brokenness only at the end of times, is not the church, then, calling the world to suffice with infertile waiting, vigilant withdrawal and passive indifference? Moreover, is not such totally futural approach an indirect allegation that the idea of hope has no real presence in present life and that one should confine herself totally to the belief in the last day and to rely obediently on a God who neither relates to history or approaches it positively?
What does ‘the idea of hope has no real presence in present life’ means? Linking hope strictly to what will happen at the end of history alone means a denial of any possibility of change in the present, real history. It means replacing this real history with an elimination of the present and a total denial of historicity per se, because the God of history does not include the present in his salvific view of time. ‘The end’ here only connotes annihilation and death, not change and new beginning. This, however, is not what Christian thought suggests. When the community of God asks its Lord’s salvation from weakness and evil and seeks His freedom and righteousness, it does not expect this to happen by means of life’s annihilation, but through the change of its nature, of its being. Being creatures implies our inability to experience and perceive anything that lay beyond the boundaries of the structure of life itself. We cannot speak about ‘lifeless-ness’ because we hold no rational conception about such a notion, and we cannot cognize any meaning for such a notion that does not stand within the boundaries of reason alone. The same applies to our conception of time. We cannot perceive time except as temporal creatures. And, since we are temporal creatures, we cannot cognize the idea of ‘timeless-ness’ apart from time as such. Be that as it may, when we hope for the second coming of God in Jesus Christ in history, we hope that God would change the nature of history, and not to annihilate it. Rather than annihilation and destruction, the incarnation is God’s entrance to history and His dialogue with it: God redeemed history and transformed it. Christian hope is based on the notion of change (transformation), not annihilation, on freedom from alienation from real life (redemption), not on condemnation of life. Our God is the God of the living, is a living God, the source of eternally infinite life. There is no faith without hope, as there is no pessimism without annihilation.
The Christian theological understanding of hope, therefore, should be structured on the notion of ‘change’. This notion as such is historical in nature. To say that a certain state would change means that there would come a time when this state would no more exist as it is now. It will, that is, become a past and will be followed by a new present. For us, who live this state and hope for its change, this anticipated present is a future that has not happened yet. The awareness of the possibility of the existence of such a futural state in reality does not originate apart from the idea of hope. The truth of hope, in turn, requires a principal awareness of the existence of the possibility of change, which the human can experience and live within the framework of time. This is why Christianity refuses Fukoyama’s claim that history has reached its end, because such a claim ignores the two dimensions of hope and change. Apart from the human’s awareness of what we call ‘change’, the human cannot realize the reality of hope. And, without hope the reality of change has no realistic manifestation or tangible incarnation. If we deny the truth of change, the present would turn into an endless, eternal time that transcends historicity and even eliminates it, for without change history as such does not exist, and this makes the present, eventually, a non-human state of being. Believing, for instance, that the state of suffering is a universal, atemporal state demise the human’s awareness of the state of suffering per se, because it places this state beyond the boundaries of human thought, and, eventually, beyond the realm of the notion of hope.
The notion of hope, therefore, is organically related to the notion of change. And, the notion of change is linked to history and temporality. Thus, hope is linked to history and temporality too. Hope is hoping while standing in history, and not outside or over-against it. It is a belief in the change of the present state in the coming future. And, as long as there is change this indicates that humans can experience hope and realize it in time and within history. Our hope about the end of the suffering state and our experience of deliverance or salvation mean that the truth of suffering is not cosmic, absolute or eternal, but temporal, circumstantial and present; and there will be a futural time that will become a ‘present’, wherein this state would be replaced with a reality beyond suffering.
The idea of change is related to time, at least within the framework of the human awareness and cognition of this idea. The idea of changelessness, on the other hand, is related to non-temporality. Thus, the human awareness of hope is a historical and temporal awareness. Our hope about the future departs from what happens in history, and then it moves forward towards the change that will also happen in, and to, history, and not after it ends. We believe and hope that the evil present will change here in our lived time, and not only after death. This is what the paschal resurrection of Christ proclaims to us. It is the hope that occurred in history, changing the state of crucifixion, turning it into an event from the past.
We cannot as humans think of a change we hope for after death and the elimination of the world. We are this world that we hope for its elimination. Without time, we are not able to perceive change in history, since we build knowledge upon an encounter with known things within a temporal framework. The human cannot have hope in the divine future except within the process of historical change. The Christian hope does not, therefore, focus only on the end of days, when earth and heaven would no more exist. The majority of Christians acknowledge this last theological idea without totally or fully perceive its content, because this idea designates a divine action beyond the limited realm of human, historical awareness. Nevertheless, the Christian hope which we can experience and perceive as humans is the one that can envision the change that might happen in the midst of the broken present, paving the way before us to live a new historical situation. Our hope, accordingly, starts primarily from the divine incarnate God in Jesus Christ and ends ultimately in the depth of the divine Creator in His eternal trinity.
Jesus Christ is the historical God, who entered into the mechanism of the notion of change and created within us, in the midst of time, an awareness shaped by hope. We cannot truly understand the creedal statement ‘and we hope for the resurrection of the dead’ apart from an objective, historical condition of death we can interact with humanly. In addition, we cannot truly understand the statement ‘we hope for the resurrection’ apart from an objective, historical state of resurrection we can interact with and express by human thought. This is what establishes our presently experienced hope on the power of the state of the resurrection that God revealed in Christ and Christ personally lived as a new radical and unexpected change in the heart of life.
The community of God, who lives in a state of hope, does not seek an image of change that descends down from beyond time and the historicity of life. As well as it does not limit itself to the state of groaning and pleading for the fast coming of the end of days. If the community of God limited itself to this latter state, it would undermine the presence of God in history and marginalize the incarnation and the resurrection alike. In our living of the state of hope, we search for a change that lies within the boundaries of the meanings of the resurrection. The resurrection is the Christians’ mirror for viewing time and witnessing history. It is what makes us realize that the suffering of the present is just a temporal and not a cosmic state. It convinces us about trusting in the value of hope, for it reveals to us that hope is our path towards a realistic and not a yotopic change: a new state that will turn evil into past and salvation into a present proceeding towards the future.
This dynamic nature is inherent to the substance of history, as itself a creature in the image of God, as it is constitutive of a state of time that is immersed with the eternity of God. In his book on the concept of time, father Henry Bullad tackles the relationship between time and eternity. Following the scholars of the eschatological methodology, Fr. Bullad argues that the misunderstanding of time concurs with another inaccurate interpretation of the notion of eternity. Eternity, he continues, is neither a stage that succeeds and replaces a previous stage called ‘time’, nor a stage that starts after God ends the stage of time, as we may imagine. Eternity is not just a state of metaphysical changelessness and staticity. It is, rather, a reflection of God’s presence in His dynamic, live and creative being in the midst of the temporal nature history. The presence of eternity in the midst of time, which happened in Jesus Christ, fr. Bullad says, turns time up-side-down and totally redefines history. Instead of a hope directed towards an eternity, the world of which we would meet after the termination of history, we have a hope oriented towards a history baptised with the presence of eternity (God in His full dynamicity); a history into which enters the eternity of God and heals its presence, leading it to the door-steps of a future drawn by God’s ever presence with us. History is neither mere waiting nor an inevitable, fatal destiny. It is the state and context of change and renewal, which God certainly creates inside the substance of His creation. The time of the living being, of the human creature, is a creative time that moves and drives things forward. Christian hope is based upon the belief that the eternal realm of God is effectively present in history; it dialogues with it and changes its finitude. God, thus, is influentially present with the human of history, dialoguing with him and sharing with her the experience of change and progress.
The Christian churches’ general puzzlement about, and undermining of, the doctrine of the second coming (eschatology) stems, as Juergen Moltmann says, from a contemporary, popular belief that this doctrine is irrelevant to the lived time and to history in its substantial relation to human nature. Eschatology is in fact a theological discourse on the Christian hope of change and on considering this hope as an experiential factor we encounter in life, and not only after its end: in the midst of this life that is under the mercy of death. Eschatology means “the doctrine of Christian hope that includes the subject of hope and the state of hoping it creates.” Our awareness of what is called ‘the state of hope’ is connected to the mechanism of reasoning that is limited to the means of human cognition. We cannot understand ‘state of hope’ if it remains mere abstract idea, without objective and experiential implications. Our understanding of hope is linked to a historical subject, whether this subject is what we hope for its change or what we hope to be. Eschatology links between our historically-shaped cognition and the notion of hope. It plays the role of the theological identifier and introducer of the concept of ‘change’ on the basis of living this latter and experiencing its truth as we sew it in the resurrection of the crucified, dead and risen Jesus Christ. Eschatology does not drive us outside a hopeless time. It is, rather, a significant theological Christian view that takes us right into the heart of the inferno of time and discloses before our eyes that the present is not a static entity. It reminds us that change is substantially inherent to history. This penetration into the depth of life is hope at its peak. By his resurrection from the dead, Jesus took us into the heart of the state of temporal death and revealed to us that one of the substantial characteristics of life is the change that sometimes takes place by means of death. Christ’s resurrection is the cry of hope that creates within us the action of change. It raises us from the states of despair, defeated-ness and retreat from the world and involves us in God’s salvific and liberating action.
There is hardly an attention to eschatology, and there is rarely any active and balanced teaching on the theology of hope in the Middle Eastern Christian context. There is no real change, therefore, in the Eastern Christians’ understanding of the meaning of ‘historical presence and role’ in relation to the progress of human life, whether in the Middle East or in the world. Hope has turned into a hostage of an atmosphere of tragic passivism flourishes only in the context of radical, fundamentalist Christian communities. These communities do not offer a reliable or complete theology on hope and the Second Coming. It merely calls enthusiastically for alienation from the historical reality, appealing to God in heaven and passionately begging for the day of the final judgment. Who sits still waiting for this end, imprisons himself in stagnation, nostalgia and imaginary thought, and undermines action, perseverance and fight for the cause of building the human and society. Ripping the church of its theology of hope marginalizes the spirit of change that characterizes the truth of the resurrection. And, ripping off the religious faith its power of change is an expelling of the human being from the space of God’s creation; the creation, that is, that is mixed with the yeast of time. The hope that is structured on the notion of ‘change’ is the missing link between the realist understanding of the world in its historical progress and the teleological belief in an ultimate, absolute good that will happen metaphysically. Eschatology is the missing link between anthropology and the doctrines of christology and the incarnation, even with the doctrine of God. If this link continued missing, the Middle Eastern churches’ faith in Jesus Christ will remain lost between Schopenhauer and Tolstoy.
