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.
_____
** 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).
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