Christian Hope and Christian Life: Raids on the Inarticulate (review)

Rowan Greer's Christian Hope and Christian Life is itself a sign of hope for all who wish to see theology rediscover and reclaim its rootedness in lived Christian spirituality. It begins, theologically, as a study of soteriology prompted, the author tells us, by a certain skepticism regarding Jürgen Moltmann's judgment that the church had banished future hope as a key element of its faith as early as the fourth century. Against this, Greer maintains that there have been, in fact, two lively theological traditions, one expressed more in terms of time ("now" and "then"), the other in terms of space ("here" and "there").

Greer builds his case in five steps, the first being an examination of eschatological hope in the New Testament, with particular reference to Jesus, Paul, and John. He then devotes a careful appraisal to the development of the theme of hope in the work of four later figures: Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, and Jeremy Taylor.

The treatment of the New Testament is judicious. Greer emphasizes the way in which Jesus' preaching of the kingdom lays demands on his hearers regarding their lives here and now. While Paul thinks more in terms of time and John in terms of spatial dimensions, hope, for both, is the foundation of community. And they do not sever the "there and then" drastically from the "here and now."

Gregory appears both as a fascinating figure in his own right and as a representative of the kind of thinking that characterized Christian soteriology before Augustine and apart from Augustine's work. He makes no sharp contrast between grace and the human will, which are seen as working together in the redeemed. Humanity's salvation is a matter of deliverance as much from death as from sin. And Gregory, while a demanding spiritual guide, is optimistic about what we can accomplish with God's help in our pilgrimage toward heaven. In his notion of "epectasy"—a continued "stretching out" into God—Gregory "treats the spiritual life as an ideal fully realized in the age to come but an ideal in which Christians can in some degree participate in this life" (97).

Augustine, by contrast, appears as a pessimist, deeply concerned about human sinfulness and increasingly doubtful, in the context of his anti-Pelagian writings, about the possibility of any human cooperation with grace. Augustine indeed reshapes these issues for later Western Christianity, as becomes evident in the Reformation, when both Luther and Calvin are bearers of the Augustinian heritage. For Augustine, human life here and now is at best "a bridge between our fallen condition and the redemption that awaits the saints" (155). The "there and then" does not interpenetrate or coexist with the "here and now" to the degree that it does in the thought of his predecessors.

Donne appears as a pessimistic maintainer of Augustine's heritage. For him, as for Augustine, the hope is emphatically future; there is little in our human life here and now that could be thought of as a significant foretaste of heaven. Hope is our only possession, its fulfillment yet to be given. It is worked out here largely in terms of repentance and the gracious gifts of sanctification.

Taylor, by contrast, stands more in the line of Gregory, imagining heaven as a "there" that can become intimately involved with and even, to a degree, accessible within our "here." Greer has read broadly in Taylor and presents him in a richer and more nuanced way than has been usual. He notes his attachment to patristic theology and both acknowledges and qualifies the charge of rigorism often leveled at him. At the center of his thought he finds a concern to vindicate the love of God and to provide a more confident...