Politics, Progress and Christian Hope

At the risk of gross oversimplification, we suggest that there are two quite different ways of looking at the future of the world. Both of these ways are sometimes confused with the Christian hope, and indeed both make use of some elements of the Christian hope in telling their grand stories. But neither comes anywhere near the picture we have in the New Testament and, in flashes, in the Old....

The first position is the myth of progress. Many people, particularly politicians and secular commentators in the press and elsewhere, still live by this myth, appeal to it, and encourage us to believe it. Indeed (if I may digress for a moment), the demise of serious political discourse today consists not least in this, that the politicians are still trying to whip up enthusiasm for their versions of this myth--it the only discourse, they know, poor things--while the rest of us have moved on. They are, to that extent, like people trying to row a boat toward the shore while the strong tide pulls them further and further out to sea. Because they face the wrong way, they can't see that their efforts are in vain, and they call out to other boats to join them in their splendid, shore-bound voyage. That is why the relentlessly modernist and progressivist projects that the politicians feel obliged to offer us ("vote for us and things will get better!") have to be dressed up with the relentlessly postmodernist techniques of spin and hype: in the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings. Persuasion will not work because we're never going to believe it. What we appear to need, and therefore what people give us, is entertainment. As a journalist said recently, our politicians demand to be treated like rock stars while our rock stars are pretending to be politicians. Sorting out this mess--which the Christian hope, despite current opinion, is well suited to do--should mean, among other things, a renewal of genuine political discourse, which God knows we badly need.

--N.T.Wright
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven,
the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church