“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).

An Apology for Apologetics

Communication is hard—for many reasons, one being that the same word sometimes has quite different meanings. Apology is one such word, and I invite you to think with me a bit about the meaning, and value, of apology and apologetics.

My Lifelong Interest in Apologetics

An apology often means an expression of regret or remorse for something a person has said or done. But there is another, technical meaning of that same word. Apology can also be legitimately used to mean the verbal or written defense of one’s basic beliefs.

There is a long history of apology being used in the latter sense with regards to the Christian faith, beginning with these New Testament words: “Always be ready to make your defense [ἀπολογίαν, apologian] to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).

One of the important Christian books of the second century CE is First Apology of Justin Martyr (c.156), and his Second Apology was written shortly after the first one.

As a third-year college student, I became deeply interested in Christian apologetics, the religious discipline of defending Christian beliefs through rational discourse.

Philosophers/theologians such as Pascal and Kierkegaard were the Christian “apologists” I was most interested in at first and through graduate school, although I also read and wrote papers by lesser-known thinkers such as German theologian Karl Heim and Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi.**

A Good Book on Apologetics

This article was prompted by my recent reading of Randal Rauser’s 2020 book, Conversations with My Inner Atheist: A Christian Apologist Explores Questions that Keep People Up at Night.

Rather than writing more about that book in this article, I invite you to see here for a brief review of that intriguing work by Rauser (b. 1973), a Canadian Baptist seminary professor. 

A Different Type of Apologetics

Even though I maintained my initial interest in apologetics, long ago I began to shift my emphasis from apologetics by rational argument to what I sometimes refer to as “apology by life.”^##

That shift was prompted by my growing awareness that the main reason so many Japanese students in my classes at Seinan Gakuin University rejected Christianity was not because of intellectual issues but because of ethical problems.

The bulk of the students in my Christian Studies classes did not have as much problem, I gradually began to see, with Christian doctrines as with Christian actions.

Rejection of Christianity was based far more on what they had learned in high school world history classes about the Crusades, for example, or what they had seen on television about racism in the United States, which they generally thought was a “Christian nation.”

With that awareness, I began to read and think less about traditional apologetics and more and more about Christian social ethics. Thus, I began thinking more about apology by life rather than apology by rational discourse.

Rauser hardly deals with this matter in his book, although the 20^th chapter begins with Mia saying, “It’s often been said that the biggest objection to Christianity is the life of Christians.” That is probably true.

Although I was unable to find the source, I have often heard these or similar words that Nietzsche reportedly said to Christians: “Show me that you are redeemed, and I will believe in your Redeemer.”

For a long time now, Christians have needed to say less about their beliefs and to act much more deliberately and lovingly for peace and justice, that is, for the basic well-being of all people.

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** My last essay published by The Seinan Theological Review in Japan was in March 2004, and it was largely on the thought of Karl Heim. It is available for viewing/reading here.

^## In footnote 16 of the above article, I wrote, “I have long wanted to write an essay on ‘Apology by Life.’ Apologetics has long been one of my strongest interests, but long ago I realized that the best apologetics may well be done by loving action rather than by words.”

Disclosure: The review I wrote of Rauser’s book and my mentioning of Rauser and his book in this blog article is partly because of receiving the book for review from Mike Morrell and his Speakeasy book review network.