CHRISTIAN HOPE—HEALING
THE VICTIMS OF ‘NOWISM’

by Grant Thorpe

An old disease has gained a new vigour, and I am calling it ‘nowism’. It is an old disease—at least as old as ‘Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ But it is spreading and becoming more acute. The disease appears as a belief that the present is the only time of which we can be sure.

We must expect as much from the present as possible, including such securities and guarantees as will assure us of some future. ‘Nowism’ leads a person to feel insecure unless they can be vindicated, rewarded, satiated and approved immediately, or at least in the foreseeable future. The disease develops a myopic approach to life meaning that only those things which provide immediate help or enjoyment can be considered important. Sufferers are generally preoccupied with security, pleasure and gratification, and are unable to direct their energies to long term good. Because their future is uncertain they direct their energy into the present, and are confined to the littleness of what is immediate.

Christians succumb to the disease in a similar way to atheists, or Hindus or any other faith. It is a virulent and infectious ailment causing churches and pastors to structure programs and preach sermons which elevate the ‘now’ moment to monolithic proportions. When such Christians talk about the life to come, they conjure up images of funerals and heart-rending bedside farewells; the hushed tones appear to arise from a quiet despair—a morbid depressed spirit. Therefore their conversation is kept simple, practical, immediate, and couched in terms that the world will understand. The church’s God has been shrunk to fit the mind-set of the ‘now’ generation (cf. Heb. 11:13–16).

In both the world and the church, however, the ‘now’ cannot bear all the promise being attached to it. States of anxiety, moodiness and infighting may be evident. Speech which grossly overstates benefits available (whether in preaching or advertising) may develop. But these are just the beginnings of the complaint.

Treatment for the disease is simply to open the windows and let the winds of Christian hope blow through the diseased house. Apart from this, the disease is terminal.

We should ask, What is a Christian’s hope? But first, how have we drifted into ‘nowism’?

THE DRIFT TO ‘NOWISM’

I noted before that living for the present alone is not new, but the spirit of ‘nowism’ has come to us in at least two very vigorous forms. The first is a deliberate criticism of Christian hope.

Karl Marx called religion ‘the opiate of the masses’. Before him, the German poet Goethe described a volume of evangelical sermons as narcotics for the poor people who were suffering the harsh, early days of the capitalistic textile industry in Germany. Marx went on to build his whole aggressive approach to society on a criticism of religion. He said that the way to achieve things in the present is firstly to deny that there is any future other than the one we create for ourselves in the present.

But the desire to despise the future in favour of the present does not simply arise from a necessity to arouse indignation and action. It came, and it comes, from the desire to exclude God, and then to create a world in which men can claim to be their own gods. Many who would claim to be far from the teaching of Marx may still be moved by the same spirit of distrust in God. The denial of a God who can secure the future is very pervasive.

The problem with ‘nowism’ is not the enjoyment of things in the present that we ought to have and enjoy. God made the world with our pleasure in mind. The problem occurs when we blind ourselves and call the present the whole of life.

Another factor in the drift towards ‘nowism’ may be what I call ‘causality’ thinking. Our scientists have observed many of the reliable patterns of this creation, including human behaviour, and have used the results to predict or control parts of our life or environment. The results, of course, have been astounding, and in many cases very beneficial. But we have gone beyond the proper and humble use of reason: we have ignored the fact that the very reliability of the creation is the result of God’s providence and his patience with us; we have ignored the great unpredictability of the creation (the ‘changeable faithfulness’ as one writer called it). We have also ignored the fact that this creation is a place of judgement; if things go well with us, it is because of God’s mercy to us, not just the fruit of our own actions. And for all that we know, there is so much that we don’t know, and so much that is beyond our control. So many things go wrong. We cannot build a future with our own cleverness.

THE CHRISTIAN AND THE UNBELIEVER

The Christian comes to daily living with a radically different expectation from someone with no Christian faith. He is reconciled to God and can live to please God and expect to enjoy life. ‘For the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer’ (1 Peter 3:10–13). When he suffers rather than prospers, the example of Christ teaches him to keep doing right, even though, in the short term, it is not leading to acceptance or success. He commits his case to ‘a faithful Creator’ (1 Peter 3:18, 4:2,19).

The world has completely reversed this: the godless man says that if ‘they’ (a nebulous Clayton’s deity) make things go right, he will be able to do right. If someone ‘out there’ can guarantee a good result, he will consider it worthwhile to do his best (cf. Cain when he lost his hope in God: Gen. 4:1–16). This is the desperate situation of all who do not hope in God for the outcome of their actions. They are caught in a vicious circle of wondering who they will trust to secure a worthy sequence to their good works. Politicians try to step into the gap and put ‘guarantees’ in place, and the foolhardy believe them. Who can secure any future unless he be a god, and an almighty god at that? The true God must sit in the heavens and laugh at our comic-strip approach to life. But some such charade must be maintained because we cannot have stability without trust, and we cannot have trust without hope—but hope can only be maintained by God.

Paul said that the Gentiles of the first century were without hope, and without God in the world (Eph. 2:12). Their so-called gods could promise them nothing, and particularly, nothing which could secure them for the life to come. They were limited to the world and subject to the passions of their flesh (Eph, 2:12 with 2:1–3). There was nothing to lift them above a calculated response to their unsatisfactory environment; no-one with the credibility or power to inspire their actions and to maintain their enthusiasm for goodness in their latter years. In short, they had become hopeless. Locked into a system which could only be briefly sure of the present, all of life had to be crammed into the ‘now’.

The stench of decay and the forebodings of doom hang over all of the present. The palliatives to keep these from being too obvious must be swallowed with ever-increasing dosage and frequency. Having descended into littleness, that is, what can be contained by the present, and daring not to look for any larger context in which to place all of these things, the little things must be elevated to look important, to have a meaning in themselves—which makes them look ridiculous.

We may say it with respect, but it must be said that without Christian hope there is a missing element in trying to find a mature approach to life and society.

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE

Where does a Christian find the confidence to trust God for the vindication of his person and the rewarding of his deeds? How can a Christian die with the world still in shambles and yet have the assurance that his life has been abundantly worthwhile?

Human beings do not descend into despair simply because things go wrong but because they experience them as judgements. It is as though we imagined God passing a vote of no confidence in our actions and rewarding us accordingly. We have no peace of conscience. Our restlessness emerges in anger against God. We rail against his management of the world and take affairs into our own hands. This can never yield the idyllic results we had imagined, and so our anger and our determination to settle things for ourselves increases.

On the cross, Jesus Christ became one with our despair and our anger and our hopelessness. He drank their bitter dregs—he bore our sins in his own body. Our despair about things around us was coloured to a large degree by the despair we felt for ourselves. God could not be for us; we had to look after ourselves. Now all these things look so different. Christ has revealed his Father’s favour towards us and removed our sins. In his resurrection, he has given us a whole new reason for hope. Death has been defeated. In some strange way, evil has been defeated. The outworking of all this is still a mystery—evil and death are still around us; but we are quietly confident that he who could reveal his compassion for us in the manner that he has, and who could rise from the dead, must somehow be able to take care of the future—our future—and the future of the world.

The Spirit of God is given to those who have and believe the word of Christ, and he is the Spirit of the future (not as in Dickens' story ‘A Christmas Carol’). He is the Spirit by whom we live now in the light of the things that are still to come. By him, we know the truth of Christ, his death and resurrection. By him, we love, as though we had already received our promised inheritance.

Christians think of the future in a unique way. They are not less interested than others in changing the present world, and not less effective in doing so. But they have no anger against God; they understand (though they may not enjoy) the many reversals that are part of this life as the necessary working out of God’s changeable providences and judgements. Their hope is kept alive, not by gaining their immediate ends, but by love, God’s love. The fact that they have hope for themselves gives them reason to have hope for all the other people they encounter in life, and they encourage this hope in others by announcing the good news by which they have come to have hope.

How sad it seems to me that on many occasions, we, God’s church, drift back to our anxious preoccupation with how things appear, and what immediate effects they are producing in the world. We drift into an illicit delight in the temporary gains of a measurable success: the Laodicean church mentioned in ‘Revelation’ thought that it was rich, prosperous, and in need of nothing. We exult in our brief moments of spiritual power: the disciples thought too possessively about their power to cast out demons. We mistake the tools of kingdom action for the kingdom itself. All such gloating over the present has underestimated the depth of evil in persons and in the world and the very obvious temporariness of every success ever achieved in our world, including ‘successes’ achieved by the church.

The church must live like King David, who prepared materials for the building of the temple but who never lived to see the assembling of all the materials into a glorious edifice. The church cannot afford to live like Solomon, who was permitted to build the temple but got caught in an idolatry of the very signs of God’s glory and power.

When will God finally demonstrate that his church is the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15)? When will Christ’s death be shown to be the central point of history? When will the righteousness of God’s people be acknowledged? When will justice cover the earth? When will we be set free from our bondage to decay? That these things will occur, we hold by faith. None of them are apparent by sight. The same is true for every doctrine of the church (Acts 3:19–21). Our hope lies in the fact that we already have the history of Israel, the love of Christ, the victory of the resurrection and the outpouring of the Spirit, and we are sufficiently persuaded (that is an understatement—we are abundantly persuaded) concerning the nature of God to trust him for what is not yet delivered. If Christ has promised to return in power to reveal the truth of these things, it is our joy to await that vindication with patience.

Christians, then, are those who have been delivered from the disease of ‘nowism’ and who give themselves without stint to the tasks of the kingdom. They do not need the cheap accolades of worldly people (in the church) to sustain their egos. They can believe that their announcing of the gospel will effect change in persons and in the world without resorting to a religious form of social engineering. And in the world, they can stand for righteousness, rather than expediency, awaiting the reward of God, and so be living witnesses that it is God and not man who brings our world to its goal.

Only those who are well tutored in the grace of God will confidently entrust their vindication to God. Only those who rest in the power of Christ’s resurrection will believe in the victory of God over all evil. Only they will be able to shake loose the pressure of the ‘now’ and live for the future which God is, even now, bringing into being.

Therefore, we must fix our hope fully on the grace to be given to us when Jesus Christ is revealed. In each new day—and with each new awareness of our sin—we must be revived in the knowledge of our Father’s restorative purpose, be encouraged by the resurrection and intercession of him who bore our sins. We must put away from us the spirit of this age and be filled with the Holy Spirit; in this way the Father’s love will keep hope sparkling and new.

Those who walk in this way will be living now by the powers of the age to come and the things that are trifling will be seen for what they are.

© 1985 Grant Thorpe