What he meant is that he doesn’t see a clear role for his denomination in the larger community: It can nurture its own faith but doesn’t add to the larger conversation. “I stand in Europe in a secular context,” he said. “Essentially, the church doesn’t play a big role here. We are even more irrelevant than before.”
One of its leaders, named Plenty Coups, “accepted the situation and looked for new ways to be,” said van den Heuvel. It became a question of hopeful waiting despite conditions that offered no hope. Hope was holding space open for the arrival of something unknown, like keeping a radio tuned to a channel full of static. “He characterized his time as years in which nothing happened. Years out of time,” van den Heuvel said.
We live in incomplete times, grasping our way toward something we can’t be sure of. But we hope for it anyway, even if we don’t know what it is. Hope is a way of keeping ourselves open to something else. Call it democracy, call it God, “it’s not easy to feel that incompletion,” said Newheiser, but we can act as if we feel the presence, even if what we hope for is hidden by the clouds.
For Radner, that’s an indictment of the sort of hopes offered by the Christian churches; they don’t offer an independent vision of what to hope for. “The churches don’t have a lot to say about next month, next year. ‘Hang on.’ ‘God is good.’ ‘The Holy Spirit or whatever can energize us to get over this.’ But to get over it to what?” he told me. For him, this talk of waiting for an undetermined future to make itself appear seems an insufficient consolation.
“We don't really tell people what to be hopeful about. We help them come to their own discovery of where hope is,” he told me a few days later before he started his rounds. “Jesus and other great leaders have spoken of living in this time of not knowing. That’s a big element of why people like to go into hospice chaplaincy,” he said. “We suffer all the time, and we trust that all will be well. We trust that we are never alone, and that God is with us.”
'Christian scholar' is a contradiction in terms.
Not trying to be an ass here, but Christians caused a metric ton of historic suffering. So, maybe, had they backed off and minded their own business there wouldn’t have been these “hopeless times” that they created? 🤷♀️🤷♀️🤷♀️
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