Crisis? What Crisis?

It would not do, if one were writing an apostolic letter today, to speak so imprecisely about ‘this present crisis’, as Paul does in 1 Cor 7: 26, and expect to be understood. The twenty-first century began with an act of violence that its perpetrators wished to invest with apocalyptic symbolism that was hard to misread. The decade since has been one of ‘wars and rumours of wars’. So-called ‘rogue states’ have started nuclear weapons programmes. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008, deemed worthy of and recognised everywhere by its own three-letter acronym (GFC), continues to unravel the world’s prosperity. Perhaps most ominous of all, human-induced climate change haunts contemporary politics and economics. There is no shortage of crises; and each doomsday scenario has its prophets who are willing to recount humanity’s collective sins and to point to the way in which our punishment is coming, and speedily. The question the contemporary world has to grapple with is not so much deciding whether or not there is a crisis but which crisis to confront as a matter of first priority.

While the language and tropes of religious apocalyptic have been commandeered
by contemporary prophetic movements, there is simultaneously a hostility to the use of apocalyptic and eschatological rhetoric in its original setting. In fact, the eschatological impulse from within religion is itself held in part responsible for a number of the impending crises. The secularist apocalyptic nightmare involves those inspired by religious visions of the future wreaking disaster on the present. Forty years ago, Jürgen Moltmann wrote that
Always the protest against the Christian hope and against the transcendent consciousness resulting from it has stubbornly insisted on the rights of the present, on the good that surely lies always to hand, and on the eternal truth in every moment.
It is now not merely that Christian hope ‘cheats man of the happiness of the present’ ; it is that Christian hope is accused, along with other religious accounts of hope, of making his present tenuous and fearful. An account of the good (and so, the good life) that places the human life in the context of the eschatological, and most especially in the realm of the apocalyptic, is unlikely to be recognised generally as such. This is the seriousness of the difficulty confronting the Christian ethicist today.