Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart.Hope Versus Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium. big rapids. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999.
20 others
1. "Hope is one of those faculties or activities that mark the territory of the distinctively human in our world...Hope comes close to a person's very heart and center...Hope in this sense is an activity of imaginative faith (52-53)
2. “Fear and hope are not necessarily opposites. Hope is not rooted in the removal of difficulties, but in imagining the future, which envisions opportunities for success in the face of real dangers and threats” (52-54).
3. “All things cannotbecomenew by a natural process or human work program, it must beCompletednew: made new, that is, by the same Creator God who created them at the beginning and graciously keeps them alive from moment to moment” (69).
4. “True hope has the power to transfigure our perception and experience of the present and transform our way of being in the world...Christianity can be defined as living in the light radiating the resurrection; alive, that is, as those who insist on interpreting this world in terms of its (surprising and unexpected) future as made known to us in the resurrection of Jesus by his Father and by the power of the Holy Spirit" (70).
5. On “Holy Saturday”: “If the crucifixion-resurrection of Jesus is the paradigm of the eschatological expectation of Christians, then in a certain sense we must accept ourselves as people of hope facing that day of which Scripture does not say, say nothing. : Holy Saturday This day is bounded on the one hand by all the horrors of history symbolically concluded in the events of Good Friday and on the other hand by the open future of God's raising of the dead at the dawn of Easter Sunday. In the meantime we live and travel in hope, able to face directly and in all its horror the terrible aspects of this history, in whose temporal limits we still live, precisely and only because the horror of history no longer haunts us" (71).
6. “Faith is a way of being in the world that refuses to submit to dominion over the here and now, that recognizes other values and goals... It appears as a rarity mid-story, hence seemingly incapable of another score to be and sing than the rest of mankind... To be a Christian, a person of faith, we might suggest, is precisely to live as a person for whom God's future shapes the present” (82-83).
7. “In summary, eschatological statements are both similar to and different from fantasy because of their conscious and inherent reference to an 'other world'. They are more fantasy than anything else in their manipulation of the building blocks of our experience in this world, precisely because they seek to show us in this world in language that our expectations of the new creation are not to be constrained. ... through our experience of this world” (107).
8. “Resurrection...the restoration to life of every corporeal person. It is more than that, for the life given to the dead exceeds mortal life, but it is no less than that... The hope of the Christian resurrection is radical belief in the God who raises Jesus from the dead committed himself to raise up those who believe in him. Jesus” (124).
9. “Just as, according to Jesus, we can only find ourselves by losing ourselves, so the world, all created reality, will find itself and rediscover for the first time its own true and fully realized identity. Time to lose yourself in God” (128).
10. On heaven and hell: "One is the destiny for which God created mankind, the other is the result of rejecting that destiny and irrevocably choosing evil" (141).
11. “Precisely because it cannot change men in the end, the Last Judgment, with its prospect of a time when it will be too late to repent, is changing men now... The Christ who comes in judgment has His own Judgment borne for us on the cross in love. Living in the light of Judgment Day means remembering that our lives are under God's test, recognizing that we will never cease to need God's mercy in Christ, and trusting in that love that casts out fear." (145).
12. “Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were innocent of evil, not morally perfect. They could and did sin, while mankind will be assured of his goodness in the resurrection, like God, unable to sin” (149).
13. C.S. Lewis: "Joy is heaven's earnest business" (156).
14. “We need not banish from our images of the world the kind of joy that comes from creativity, reflection, or service to others who are doing their best. Rather, we should regard them as the dancing, the music, the laughter, the mutual conversation that the image of the eternal Sabbath feast suggests" (156).
15. “Modern people do not want to rest and enjoy the fruits of their labor, for it is the pursuit of achievement and the vision of further progress that truly brings joy. Modern men do not want, like Augustinian humanity, to find rest in God for their troubled hearts; they always want new worlds for their restless spirits to conquer... Christian eschatology holds that God Himself is the end for which we were created, and once attained it will be infinitely gratifying. If God really is God, it must be better to find him than to search forever for him. Surprise to find ourselves in God” (157-158).
16. “Most of the annual festivals in Israel's calendar were occasions for celebration and feasting in the temple. Our own vocabulary reminds us of the time when holidays were also holidays” (156).
17. “Your [Jesus] is concerned about the impact that the coming kingdom will have on the present. This is usually nothing spectacular, but just as in Jesus' parables the ordinary often becomes unexpectedly extraordinary, Jesus' expectations for human life lived in the light of the Kingdom expect the ordinary to become extraordinary. The presence of the Kingdom is mostly occasional, on a small scale, everyday, but it makes a considerable difference in daily life" (163).
18. "Ironically, the more we have (those who have little are often the most generous in sharing) the more passionately we seem to submit to this impulse, and the more we believe we need it and are willing to use it for ourselves to seize ... rather because we are afraid that this is all and yet insufficient to satisfy our own unlimited appetites, let alone for all” (204-205).
19. “The lust for life is what the love of life becomes when limited by the fear of death. But once that fear is removed, we are freed from the security blanket that our earthly possessions have become, and we can then give what we have for the greater good (even our own lives) without fear, while doing so to lose. . For to have these things without this hope is to be pursued by an appetite that can never be satisfied" (206).
20. “We will be one placeemthe world that is not suitablevonthe world, the people who live this life to the fullest, but with a view of a horizon beyond, and who therefore demonstrate to society how this life can be lived with hope, even when hope seems hopeless. Of course we're not going to save the world with that. Only God can do that. But we will remain faithful to our first call to witness and call the world to believe again in the only God in whom there is true hope for their future” (210).