Recovering Faithful Participation in a Therapeutic Age – Series Page
Phase 4 – Where the Therapeutic Story Breaks Down
Christian Hope We Can Defend
Peter’s Social Exiles
I wonder, if we might read too much of our world into Peter’s world and therefore, misunderstand his call to give an account for the Christian hope within us.
We often hear those words as an invitation to prepare the right argument (you’re probably familiar with the word “Apologetics”) – a logical defense of the Christian faith when someone challenges what we believe. There’s certainly a place for words. Peter expected his readers to be able to talk about the hope they carried.
Peter wrote to people whose lives were already becoming an answer for their faith and hope. Social exiles living within an honour-and-shame culture, experiencing pressures we can hardly appreciate from the distance of our own time and place. Their circumstances failed to follow a comfortable script. Yet Peter doesn’t tell them to wait passively for God to change their circumstances. He teaches them how to live faithfully within them.
Two Horizons of Hope
First, there was hope for the life they lived in their here and now. It’s the possibility of practically living out the life of Christ in the ordinary relationships and circumstances of their present world.
Second, there’s a future hope grounded in an event they believed had already happened – the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Their hope, based upon a past event, wasn’t wishful thinking. It’s a confidence that the life Jesus came to give, will one day reveal itself fully.
These two horizons belong together.
Not only were they waiting for the coming kingdom; and since you’re reading this, you’re also waiting. They were also learning to live according to a kingdom way of life right now. In 1 Peter 3 we see:
- Their gentleness mattered.
- Their willingness to suffer without retaliation mattered.
- Their treatment of one another mattered.
- Their refusal to return evil for evil mattered.
- Their hope became visible in the way they lived.
Rehearsing the Coming Kingdom
Perhaps this is what Peter’s voice still has to say to Canadian Christians today. Our circumstances certainly aren’t theirs, and we should be careful not to imagine otherwise.
However, we too live in a culture where the assumptions around us increasingly shape what we believe a good life should look like. We also lean to interpreting God’s faithfulness as a promise that He’ll make our circumstances conform to our unwritten script of expectation. That’s wishful thinking.
Peter offers another possibility. What if hope isn’t primarily expressed by knowing how God will resolve our circumstances, but by learning how to live faithfully within them?
What Hope Looks Like on the Ground
- A people who refuse to allow interpretative fear to determine the shape of their lives.
- A people who can disagree without devaluing or diminishing others.
- A people who can grieve what’s being lost without surrendering hope.
- A people who can endure uncertainty without demanding certainty from God.
- A people who can care for neighbours who don’t share their faith.
- A people who can participate in the life of Christ without knowing how every circumstance will turn out.
This isn’t a performative Christianity designed to impress an increasingly skeptical culture. I call it a rehearsal.
Wholeness Over Predictive Forecasts
You’re familiar with the old saying that, “Practice makes perfect.” By “perfect,” I don’t mean flawless. I mean whole, complete.
When I think of the life Jesus came to give as a rehearsal, I mean we learn to live according to the life we believe is coming, and practice it here and now. The coming kingdom; “the new heaven and new earth” isn’t just a destination toward which we wait. It’s a marriage between God’s space and our space. The life Jesus came to give has already begun among us. We experience its first fruits now, while still looking toward the day when God’s purposes will be fully realized.
What Was Peter Thinking?
I can’t say for sure, but this might be the kind of defense Peter had in mind. Not simply a faith we can explain with words, but a hope we can live into.
What makes Christian hope more than wishful thinking is that it doesn’t require predictive certainty. We don’t have to know how our circumstances will work out for hope to remain hope. Actually, when we treat our expectations as predictions of God’s faithfulness, hope becomes something else – a forecast. Christian hope rests deeper: in the faithfulness of God.
Therefore, Christian hope isn’t simply an argument we can make to convince critics – it’s a way of life that makes the question worth asking:
“Why do you still have hope?”
No Script Required
We began our exploration with the question, “What happens when God doesn’t follow our script?” We’ve ended our discovery with the question, “Do we really need one?”
Scripture hardly tells us everything we can know of God and the life Jesus came to give but it gives me:
- Enough to know about God to trust Him.
- Enough to know about Jesus to participate in His life.
- Enough to know about the coming kingdom to start living in line with that reality now.
Through seven reflections we explored how therapeutic thought has shaped the way many of us imagine the Christian faith.
We began by asking what happens when the Gospel becomes therapeutic. We end by asking what happens when Christ becomes our centre of gravity again.
This is where our diagnosis ends and our discovery begins…until next time:
Present faithfulness.
Future Hope.
No script required.