I have a confession to make: Like many others today, I’m strongly tempted toward doomerism.
Every day online seems to bring the potential of fresh, man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. In the span of several weeks, you can read about the imminent collapse of the global financial system due to a war (which may or may not include nuclear engagement); potential pandemics originating in some far-off country; the possible disclosure of UFOs and extraterrestrials; and my recent nightmare fuel, the breakneck advances in AI and their the potential to rewrite global geopolitics, finance, and personal security, and to deepen the splintering and alienation of human cultures at a heretofore unforeseen rate.
It’s cliché, but we live in interesting (and therefore anxious) times. Yet the times seem not only anxious but apocalyptic—in both senses of the term. We teeter on the edge of events that are cosmically catastrophic, and for that reason, they reveal our basic, fragile condition in the world.
Only a fool fails to recognize that on any given day, he could walk out the door and get hit by a car, walk into a doctor’s office and be given a diagnosis from which he will not recover, or experience some other personal disaster. These can be paralyzing thoughts if you dwell on them, which is why we often set them aside.
That said, something appears qualitatively different when we consider global, cosmos-altering catastrophes. There is the kind of thought that stops all thought, that paralyzes and dizzies you in the same way you might lose your equilibrium when staring down the edge of a cliff.
We live in an age where, increasingly, we’re faced with the choice among not just the blue pill of ignorance or the red pill of hard knowledge but also the black pill of hopelessness and doomerism.
How, then, should we hope as Christians? And I do mean as Christians. Secular humanism’s story of the rise from cosmic slime to a descent into cosmic heat death is quintessentially doomeristic to the core, such that you can only avoid pessimism by not thinking about it too much.
Eastern stories offer endless cycles of cosmic birth and renewal with a potential karmic off-ramp into the dissolution of consciousness for good behavior or detachment. Those stories aren’t as grim, perhaps. But they’re also not the source of a hope for the future so deep and poignant that it can shine backward into the present and transform the darkness.
Here are a few meditations for struggling doomers looking for hope in a chaotic world.
It Really Has Always Been This Bad
We should begin with a bit of bleak comfort, but a crucial step for many: We need to admit how utterly catastrophic human history has been up until this point.
I think folks move past this point too quickly because it’s maudlin and bleak. But when you’re talking to somebody tempted toward doomerism, it’s rarely a good idea to try to argue him out of the rationality of his fears or anxieties of disaster. If you try to tell me why I shouldn’t be concerned about the advances in technology for warfare or general political destabilization on the basis of some worldly hope because “nothing ever happens,” you’re basically telling me you haven’t been paying attention to either the news or the course of history.
This is true even of some “Christian” versions of comfort that aren’t sincere exercises of the virtues of faith or hope. They assume that if God is good, then nothing really bad can happen (to me).
But you can only come to that conclusion by ignoring world history and the Bible itself. Consider what God has not done. God didn’t stop a plague from wiping out a quarter of Europe’s population. God didn’t stop volcanoes from erupting in the sixth century and causing a little ice age that led to the Justinian plague, agricultural disruptions, and famine across the Mediterranean. God didn’t stop the Lisbon earthquake, the French Revolution, the Spanish influenza, countless civil wars, the Holocaust, or Hiroshima. The mere existence of God—even the good, biblical God revealed in Jesus Christ—doesn’t mean that awful, history-altering events won’t darken the horizon in our times.
None of this should surprise anyone familiar with the biblical narrative, which depicts catastrophes beyond imagining: the flood (Gen. 6), the descent of the nation of Israel into civil war (1 Kings 12), idolatrous chaos (2 Kings 17), and eventual national death and exile at the hands of the Babylonians (2 Chron. 36). At the narrative’s center is the story of the darkest day in human history, when the sun itself hid its face at the horror of the bloody condemnation, torture, and death of the righteous Son of God (Matt. 27:45). The Christian story gets to the good news of resurrection hope only on the other side of admitting the grim news of the cross.
The Christian story gets to the good news of resurrection hope only on the other side of admitting the grim news of the cross.
Christian hope is not Panglossian optimism or the ostrich’s comfort of a head buried firmly in the sand. It must include clear-eyed realism. Like those who’ve gone before us, we will face death and trial. But like our forebears, our hope isn’t that these things won’t happen. It’s that our God is powerful enough and good enough to overturn them in the resurrection and new creation he’s already begun in Jesus Christ.
In that case, then, sometimes the best thing you can do is ask yourself, If this terrible event that I fear comes to pass, is it something a resurrection and new creation can set right? If the answer is yes, take heart—our Savior can overcome and has overcome even that dark horizon in his resurrection.
Remember the Rainbow
After taking that hard pill of realistic hope, I’d urge you to remember the rainbow.
Several months ago, I was on a walk with my little boy after a cloudy day. We wanted to stretch our legs after being cooped up inside. As we turned the corner around some apartments, we glimpsed the sky and were arrested by a rainbow of such clarity and brilliance as I’ve never seen in all my 40 years. The colors gleamed as they hung across the horizon, and I struggled to communicate to my son the wonder of what he was seeing. He had no context for the fact that rainbows like that don’t happen all the time in our neck of the woods.
I often think of that rainbow when my mind drifts toward doom.
In biblical history, the rainbow is the sign of God’s cosmic restraint. After the flood that washes over the earth for her violence and bloodshed (Gen. 6), God sends a rainbow and with it makes a sign of his covenant with the earth and all on it. Never again will he cause the seasons to cease or wipe off all flesh from the earth (Gen. 9). When the final catastrophe comes, Peter says, the world will be renewed in fire (2 Pet. 3).
Notice the implicit promise, though. Whatever tragedies befall the earth before that final renewal of all things, God restrains his judgments. The earth will remain. Empires will pass away. Nations will fade. But God’s word of mercy and restraint will stand until the last day. God has set a limit the world will not tip past until the day he remakes it.
Of course, hanging your hope for the future on a story about a rainbow and an old man with some animals on a boat seems like a stretch. But then again, what else is Christian faith but hope in God’s promise about something that happened to a man a long time ago? Christian hope isn’t hope in a generic, metaphysical principle about reality discerned through a process of abstract logic. It’s a concrete hope based on the promises of a God who has spoken and kept his word in Christ.
City of God
Reflecting on these issues with a friend, I was struck by his point about one of the challenges with hope on an apocalyptic scale. The problem is not just about the source of our hope. It’s also about objects in which we hope.
We’re not unique here, but perhaps compared to other historical periods, threats to the material social order are all the more menacing because we’re tempted to believe in nothing other than the material social order. Although the story is perhaps overblown, Charles Taylor names something real about modern Westerners’ tendency to live within an “immanent frame,” where this-worldly goods are more likely to be invested with meaning, value, and soul-anchoring power because we’re tempted to believe that’s all there is. And this isn’t only with respect to consumer goods, but also with the higher blessings of the material order: family, friendships, and the stable and enduring social life of the cities and nations we love.
Christians in the past have been accused of contenting themselves with pie-in-the-sky in the by-and-by, of being so heavenly minded that they’re of no earthly good. The bigger challenge for many Christians today, however, is a this-worldliness that leaves them unprepared for the kind of historical ruptures that threaten their sense of the cosmos. For most Americans, if America fell, would there even be a world?
Empires will pass away. Nations will fade. But God’s word of mercy and restraint will stand until the last day.
After the sack of Rome in the fifth century, citizens of the empire were asking themselves a similar question: If Rome can’t last, what can? To her citizens, Rome was the Eternal City. For the Eternal City to be sacked meant that nothing was stable, nothing was solid.
In this context, the bishop of Hippo and theologian Augustine penned his famous reflection on global history and the goodness of the gospel, The City of God. Among his various arguments, at the center is a call for Christians within the empire to reorient their ultimate hopes, loyalties, dreams, and sense of the world away from fallible human cities, which he called the City of Man (representing the entire world system opposed to God). Instead, Christians should place their ultimate hope in the City of God, the eternal kingdom built on the love of God and the enjoyment of God as its highest good, whose fortunes don’t rise or fall with this or that historical order.
For those of us wrestling with these apocalyptic times, perhaps our anxieties reveal that our hope isn’t set on the City of God but on those things that moth and rust can destroy (Matt. 6:19–21). When the sense of doom sets in, do we take comfort in God’s promise that his church will withstand the gates of hell (16:18)? That his people will not be consumed by fires but purified through them, coming out looking like gold (1 Pet. 1:6–7)? That if death should come on you, all that will do is bring you closer to the heavenly gates (Phil. 1:21–23)?
The call here isn’t to some Stoic detachment from things, people, or places (God forbid!) but rather to a greater attachment to those things that history’s catastrophes cannot take from you: the treasure kept in heaven, the inheritance of salvation, the adoption into the family of God that can never perish, fade, or be destroyed (Matt. 6:20; Rom. 8:15–17; 1 Pet. 1:4).
God Himself
The hope I come back to most whenever I’m tempted by dark thoughts and the paralyzing shock to my system whenever a new headline rips across my screen is simply God himself.
Christians should place their ultimate hope in the City of God, the eternal kingdom built on the love of God and the enjoyment of God as its highest good.
Jesus tells us that God watches over the lilies of the field and makes the sun shine on the just and unjust (Matt. 5:45; 6:28). He knows what we need before we ask and has promised that whatever we lose in this life for the kingdom of God will be restored a hundredfold (6:8; 19:29). He forgives sin and welcomes the penitent (Luke 15:7). He is the One from whom every perfect gift descends and to whom every good gift points (James 1:17). God is the goodness whom Jesus reveals and the joy he pours out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit’s power (Rom. 5:5).
Either he is the good God revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus, who keeps promises and is the glorious good beyond all goods. Or he’s not. If he is, then he’s bigger than Skynet, aliens, and the end of unipolar political orders. Our eternity with him will swallow up whatever pain and chaos may enter our world.
The Gospel Coalition