“The Garden of Impending Bloom”: Hope in the Face of Apocalyptic Doom

In my April 9 blog post, I wrote about embracing comfort and hope from George F. Händel’s Messiah, first performed publicly 280 years ago on April 13, 1742. This post is about the hope of theologian Catherine Keller as seen in her book Facing Apocalypse—and also about a much greater hope. 

Keller’s Book

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University, and Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances (Orbis Books, 2021) is the first of her several books I have read—and it was a delightful, and somewhat difficult, read. 

Catherine Keller (b. 1953)

While the content of Keller’s book is deeply theological/philosophical, the written style is more that of a contemporary novel than that of most academic works. 

Although the book is primarily a general exposition of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, Keller repeatedly alludes to the political and economic situation of the world in the last few years.

She concludes her book with “PostScroll” (pp. 195~205)—and ends that conclusion with the words she had recently seen on a hand-painted sign: “The Garden of Impending Bloom.”

Keller’s Hope

Keller’s earlier work, Apocalypse Now and Then (1996), was written with the fear of nuclear holocaust in the background. But she said, by the time that book was finished, “the nuclear threat had dissipated” (p. ix).

(But now in 2022 with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some have again begun to fear that same threat again—and the terrible prospect of MAD, mutual assured destruction.)

Keller correctly points out that the 2021 “nightmares” were, “for instance, a climate-forced collapse of civilization within not many years, escalating mass migration and starvation, white supremacism, degrees of fascism, elite escapes, population decimation, and possibly worse” (p. xiv).

She realizes that many who understand the plight of the present have sunk “into a savvy nihilism.” Such people “see hope as delusional, and surrender to the spiral of our species’ self-destruction” (p. 2).

It is against that background that she attractively articulates the auspicious content of the biblical Book of Revelation. And by her erudite exposition we glimpse her underlying hope. This is especially seen on pages 132~6 where she referred to Händel’s Messiah (as mentioned in my previous blog post).

A Greater Hope

While Keller does briefly mention “the prophetic dream of a collective resurrection” (p. 135), she sees seven possible scenarios ahead, ranging from “exhumanity” (“the extinction of our species”) to “the age of enlivenment,” the optimum human response to the present ecological crisis.

In harmony with her worldly hope, Keller closes her book with the dream of a garden of impending bloom. It is an appealing dream, but since it depends on humans doing the right things, I don’t share her optimism. Impending doom seems more realistic.

So, I have been drawn back to the writings of German scientist/theologian Karl Heim (1874~1958). The last section of his book The World: Its Creation and Consummation is “The Future of the World in the Light of the Gospel of the Resurrection,” and indeed, he presents a much greater hope than Keller.

Keller mentioned the “savvy nihilism” of the present, but savvy or not, Heim wrote about nihilism in the 1950s. He contended that we humans are faced with two possibilities: “The first is the radical hopelessness of nihilism, . . . The second possibility is the universal faith of Easter” (p. 149).

The stupendous meaning of Easter is not the resuscitation of the physical body of a crucified Jewish man. Rather, it is a divine act with cosmic dimensions. It is the beginning of what will eventually become “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1).

I certainly don’t know how, or when, that will take place, but it is the living hope to which I cling.

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** The second edition of Heim’s book Weltschöpfung und Weltende (1953) was published in 1958 and the English translation of the latter was published in 1962 with an additional subtitle The End of the Present Age and the Future of the World in the Light of the Resurrection. It was probably the next year (59 years ago!) when I first read, and was invigorated by, that book as a graduate student. (I wrote a bit about Heim in my April 15, 2021, blog post).