A Case for Christian Optimism

Once the preserve of the middle-aged and elderly, ‘declinism’ has reached the mainstream in the Western world. The nagging feeling that life is on a downward trend, that things are not what they once were, that our future is less bright than our past, now plagues public discourse and popular media. The complex causes for this range across political, social, ecological, economic and religious arenas, and are symptomatic of an increasingly polarised culture where people on opposite sides of almost everything fear the consequences of their enemies’ ideas or the end of the world. In late 2019 UK journalists were anticipating the return of a ‘Roaring Twenties’ era, instead we are in a hand-wringing decade, a seemingly decaying season of small returns and narrow horizon. Many people, even those awash with luxury and affluence, are almost always on the edge of lament and existential fear.

In such a ‘declinist’ culture how should we communicate and live as Christians. Is this a period in history where we should dust down our ‘The End is Nigh’ sandwich boards from the church storeroom (assuming they haven’t been stolen by climate change activists), and speak doom and darkness in harmony with our peers? Or is there another way in which we can witness to the world as it discovers that its centre of meaning and hope cannot hold? In this post I want to make a case for Christian optimism, a plea that we speak the bright horizon that the message of Christ brings while our world sings a darkening lament for the end of empire. There are features to our faith which make it uniquely suitable and hopeful as an antidote to the declinist instincts of those around us.

The darkest story ever told

There are few things worse, or more dangerous, than to have to listen to a clown when one is at the brink of calamity. Incessantly cheerful people who could find the bright side of having Black Death are of no real help and offer no genuine hope to a world in decline. It can be tempting to think that this is the category into which the concept of Christian optimism should be placed. Putting faith into the equation of fatalists can sound like folly, a flight of fancy that is at best a distraction or a placebo, a hymn tune whistled in the dark, a by-the-fingernails refusal to see things as they really are. This might be a caricature of Christianity, but it is one that Christian media can easily perpetuate. The prosperity gospel, the saccharine Jeremiah 29:11 merchandise of the Christian trinket industry, can all suggest that Christianity is as trivial and merely topical as the entertainment world that helps people forget the morbidity of the world, and their mortality that beckons them ever nearer. This form of Christian optimism should be rejected outright.

True Christian optimism is resurrected realism. This is a true story that takes us to the gates of hell and back. The Bible contains some of the most profoundly dark and visceral views of human nature of any literature in any language in any age. Scripture’s view of humanity, of the world around us, of the chasm that godlessness opens in time and in eternity is humanly frightening and wholly dreadful. In one sense the Bible’s story line is not merely of decline but of a cankerous depravity that eats the heart out of our joys and ambitions, of an ineradicable moral ballast that plummets any sense of human pride and enterprise into the dust. The Bible insists on showing us that we do not merely live in a world of darkness but that a world of darkness lives within us, permanent, impervious to self-improvement or political leverage. The realism of the Bible is enough to bring us to despair, and in many ways it is designed to.

Even the storyline of the Bible is incessantly realistic. Human beings depart from God in favour of a Fall from him that devastates their progeny, covenants and kingdoms come and go, kings rise in glory and are buried with their fathers, a people laden with promise prostitute their hope to heathen gods, they abandon the spring of living waters and die parched at the brink of broken cisterns, the intervention of God and the inveterate sin of humans run painfully parallel across the story.

A more hopeful story than we could ever imagine

The Bible tells us that we have nothing to be proud of but, unthinkably, that we have everything to hope for. The optimism of Christianity enters this world’s darkness in the person of Jesus Christ, the God-man. In his life, he didn’t flinch from the hardest realities of the communities he walked among – he wept for the world as it was, worn by the war that sin was waging. Jesus went out to the margins where hope was most thin, among people whose lives were passing in desperation and isolation, and he worked there powerfully, tirelessly, hopefully. Jesus selected the most openly sinful in his society and insisted that the hope he was bringing was designed to deliver them from that sin and make them God’s children. He walked among the broken mechanisms of human government, the detritus that Adam’s death had left behind, and spoke redemption, deliverance, new things.

Ultimately Jesus himself entered death and detonated a hope within it that human history could never have imagined, and that human resistance cannot contain. The cross is the lowest moment imaginable, the Son of God incarnate crucified in shame and blasphemy, under reproach from men and wrath from God. His was a sinking into sorrow and seeming defeat that our best words and thoughts cannot fathom. But Jesus wrestled light out of darkness, life out of death, victory out of defeat, and rose from the dead as the literal embodiment of history’s trajectory – making gracious atonement, guaranteeing a new people, a new world, a new city, a new society, where sin is vanquished and sorrow is gone. Christian optimism is resurrected realism.

A more compelling story than the world can tell

This redemptive story – this true history of our past, present and future – surpasses anything that our world is presently telling itself. It refuses the easy anaesthesia of substances or materialism, it refuses to sigh and retire to bed in the hope that tomorrow might be better, it does not call us to impotently rage against the dying light of the cosmos, it rejects defeatist fatalism. Instead Christianity brings us to the depths of who we are, the darkness of that the world is, so that it might lift our eyes to the glory of Jesus, so that it might flood our cell with the majesty of a resurrected Redeemer.

This is the message that we can bring to our world – that Jesus Christ is making all things new, that he can make us new, that through faith in his finished work there is now possible a personal regeneration by his Spirit that is a mere foretaste of the physical and cosmic regeneration of the universe that awaits Jesus’ return. We have a message which is not merely therapeutic but so theologically and philosophically sophisticated and sanguine that it should make the ears of a despairing world prick up and listen – things are worse than we imagine, but Christ has come to effect a redemption of which we could never have dreamed. Let’s carry our Christian optimism – this resurrected realism – to a world which is weeping for want of hope, and despairing for lack of redemption.