Jul 5

Written by: gfackre
7/5/2008 5:00 PM

According to the famous Cruden’s Concordance, there are two usages of the word “salvation” in Scripture: “(1) Preservation from trouble and danger, (2) Deliverance from sin and its consequences”(Page 560). As we follow the biblical storyline from creation through fall to covenant, Christ and church, it is clear that the heart of the world’s problem is its alienation from God, and thus “sin and its consequences.” Christian hope/Hope has to do, first and foremost, therefore, with a reconciliation that overcomes the alienation from God and its consequences in the world’s internal alienations in human nature, nature and supernature.

We have already spoken of the “sure and certain” Hope that has arrived in and as Jesus Christ. Here sin was vanquished in his birth, life, death resurrection and ascension and rule. Vanquished, “in principle” but not yet fully ‘in fact.” Hence the Story goes on.

Part of that Story since the Fall is the “trouble and danger” inextricable from a world of sin. Another way to describe it is with the word suffering. The world suffers in all its dimensions. Nature, human nature and powers and principalities of supernature are fallen, hence, disease, natural disasters, unjust dealings and destinies, war, hate and hurts of all kinds, especially the enigmatic suffering of the “innocent,” and thus the “problem of evil” or “theodicy” (How come a good and almighty God with so much evil in the world?—the subject of a previous blog on this Confessing Christ site).

When we hear the word “hope” today, it is almost always related to the problem of suffering, as was noted earlier and exemplified in Desmund Tutu’s book Title and subject, Hope and Suffering. Thus the other Cruden’s meaning of “salvation” is to the fore. Our word to those who anguish over suffering is the same as those who honestly confront sin: Hope has already arrived in Jesus Christ; Evil has been confronted and over come. Yet what has happened in the Already awaits its completion in a Not Yet, the eschatological Hope. This is the burden of this book, yet to unfold.

Because Christ—the Hope of the World (the Evanston Assembly’s title) assures us of both the Already and Not Yet, we have a right to hope for some evidence of this claim—“signs of the Kingdom” right now, modest as they are in a world still not reaching its End. Not only are they discernible through the eyes of sight as well as of faith, but Christians are called to set them up, pulled by the vision of Things to Come, as Moltmann has helped us to see: an imperative that grows out of an indicative. Put another way, a graced faith busy in love expresses itself in works of hope. So the three sisters.

Hope as “preservation from trouble and danger’ in all its dimensions—the problematic of our time—still must press toward its second biblical meaning, the central issue of the Christian Story. To that we turn in the next blog.

Copyright ©2008 Gabriel Fackre

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