Jesus - The Hope of the World
This blog is an adapted essay I wrote a couple of years ago examining the nature of Christian hope in a postmodern world.
Christmas, the moment Christians celebrate the incarnation, brings our hope into sharp focus. It reminds us that Christian hope is not abstract optimism nor a vague belief in human progress, but the conviction that God has entered the world to redeem it. The birth of Christ confronts us with the claim that hope comes not from within humanity but from beyond it.
As worldviews have shifted throughout recent ages, the object of peoples’ hope has changed. I think this shift has coincided with a declining level of hope and an increasing level of anxiety in western society, particularly among young people.
The Bible reveals that real hope for humanity and for the world is not generated by looking inward, by having faith in ourselves, a view that is so prevalent today. The Christmas story points us to where real hope is found: looking outward to God and his redemptive plan for all of creation. Theologian N. T. Wright suggests, “Hope is what you get when you suddenly realise that a different world view is possible.” Over the last five hundred years, the dominant worldview in western culture has changed dramatically, producing new philosophies and ways of understanding reality. As these worldviews have shifted, so too have the beliefs people hold about truth, meaning, and purpose. This movement from one worldview to another has altered the object of hope and, in turn, significantly reduced the level of hopefulness within society. These changing perspectives have shaped the imaginations of individuals and communities, influencing what they believe is possible for humanity as it pursues happiness and fulfilment.
In premodernity, monotheistic societies looked outward to a sovereign God as the source of hope. The age of Christendom, Dave Kettle states, “was nourished by a lively disposition of hope in God and his kingdom.” Even the scientific developments of the seventeenth century, which offered natural explanations for the world, posed no threat to this hope. However, in the eighteenth-century confidence in God began to fade as western culture took its first steps toward secularism. Modernity encouraged people to stop looking outward to God and instead to place their hope in humanity itself. Charles Taylor calls this transition the “Great Disembedding,” a cultural shift in which belief in God ceased to be the assumed default and unbelief became increasingly normal. As T. Dickau observes, people began to see themselves as “autonomous beings floating in contractured space.” Human progress and personal fulfilment were now expected to arise through education, reason, and the steady advance of science and technology.
By late modernity God had been pushed even further to the margins. Taylor notes that this period was marked by an “eclipse of the idea that God was planning a transformation of human beings,” a transformation that would take them beyond their present limitations. The hope of a utopian future, once rooted in the Christian imagination, was replaced by “exclusive humanism.” Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas heavily influenced this outlook, rejected any transcendent meaning or overarching story. Instead, he envisioned the emergence of the “overman,” individuals whose own willpower and strength would reshape society. For Nietzsche there was no hope in divine intervention or in any paradise beyond this world; hope was to be found solely in human potential.
History, however, reveals that modernity’s strategy for progress failed. On the eve of World War I, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey famously said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” In reality, the lights did not only go out in Europe, they went out across the globe. By the mid-twentieth century the world had witnessed the devastation of two world wars, the horrors of Auschwitz, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It had watched dictators like Stalin and Pol Pot murder millions, and seen widespread cruelty inflicted on the vulnerable. By the late 1940s the myth of inevitable human progress was unravelling. As Miroslav Volf noted, “It was as if progress had turned on itself and had devoured its own children.”
During its ascent, modernity was characterised by optimism and confidence in the future. Yet in the postmodern age that optimism has all but disappeared. Institutions and ideas that once inspired hope are now met with scepticism. When the missionary Leslie Newbigin returned to Britain in 1974 after decades in India, he observed that the greatest challenge he faced was “the disappearance of hope.” Modernity believed that science, education, and technology would empower humanity to build a better world, but by the late twentieth century that vision had collapsed, and has not returned.
As hope in modernity faded, postmodernity turned its attention away from the future and towards the present moment. Modernity still believed in metanarratives, but postmodern thought rejects the idea of a single, overarching story. We are no longer travellers on a journey toward a better destination; there is no “eschatological conclusion.” Jean-Francois Lyotard described the postmodern condition as an “incredulity towards metanarratives.” Influential secular voices like Richard Dawkins reinforce this picture, proclaiming that life has no inherent purpose or objective morality. For Dawkins, humans—mere “collections of molecules”—should view the world with “pitiful indifference.” In Lyotard’s scientific anti-metanarrative, history ends not with renewal but with the extinction of life itself when the sun burns out. In such a worldview, hope simply has no place.
This postmodern outlook lies at the root of the hopelessness we see today. With no meaningful vision of the future and no stable sense of purpose, many people find themselves trapped, as Richard Bauckham puts it, “within the tyranny of an absolute present.” This confinement has fostered a culture of self-absorption. Having ceased to look outward to God or to a hopeful future, society has allowed individualism and narcissism to take centre stage. Hope has been replaced by hedonism. In a world with no enduring meaning, sensory pleasure becomes one of the few goals left. Instead of imagining or building a better future, our culture encourages escape through entertainment, sport, and anything that numbs the persistent ache of hopelessness.
This inward turn has also led to the rise of Gnosticism and New Age spirituality. Postmodern culture rejects absolute truth, yet insists that individuals can find “their own truth” by looking within. Roger Lundin argues that this marks a “secularisation of the spirit,” where the authority of the individual mind and inner experience overrides any claim of divine truth. Having removed God, we now attempt to occupy the space he once filled.
The “smorgasbord” of New Age beliefs teaches that truth is relative and that Christian doctrines are merely “conceptions of states of mind.” These spiritualities urge people to transcend suffering by discovering the “higher self.” As Volf notes, salvation is increasingly believed to lie within, where “harmony with the whole cosmos” is supposedly found. Yet this logic breaks down quickly: objective truth cannot be manufactured in our own minds. Inner impressions do not create outward realities. What we call “our truth” is often nothing more than an illusion, and illusions cannot sustain real hope. As Richard Rohr writes, “Meaning is not created; it is discovered.”
Real hope, for individuals and for the world, comes only when we look outward to God. Only a worldview that includes God, and the Christian metanarrative with its assured “eschatological conclusion,” can offer stable and lasting hope. Without faith in God and trust in his redemptive plan for creation, hope collapses. Scripture teaches that the root of humanity’s hopelessness and suffering is sin. Paul reminds the church in Rome that all people inherit sin (Rom 5:12), and tells the Ephesians that we are “dead in our sins” (Eph 2:1). History shows that no advancement in science, technology, or education has ever addressed the problem of sin. We cannot become Nietzsche’s superhumans. Yet hope is possible when we turn away from ourselves and look to the God who loves us and sent his Son to rescue us (John 3:16). Through Christ’s death the power of sin has been broken. Salvation is not found “within the higher self”; it is given to us in Christ (Eph 1:7).
The Christian metanarrative also gives us hope for personal transformation. We are indeed called to grow and become like God, but this transformation does not rest solely on our efforts. Paul writes that our progress comes “from the Spirit of God” (2 Cor 3:18). This growth does not occur through the isolated, individualistic lifestyle encouraged by postmodernity; it happens in relationship with Christ and with others (John 15:4; Eph 4:15–16).
A biblical worldview also gives us hope for the world itself. Christian hope is not simply that things might improve slightly, as an evolutionist might suggest. Rather, it is that God will renew the world completely. N. T. Wright writes, “The central Christian affirmation is that what the Creator God has done in Jesus Christ, and supremely in his resurrection, is what he intends to do for the whole world.” Our hope for creation does not rest on human capability but on the “creative acts of the transcendent God,” grounded in the promises of Revelation 21:1–4. Christian hope is not located in human benevolence or in any “evolutionary transition.” It is located outwardly, in the faithfulness of God, who promises through Christ to “make everything new” (Rev 21:5).
The object of western society's hope has changed across the periods of Christendom, modernity, and postmodernity, and this change has shaped the level of hope people hold. In postmodernity, we now inhabit a culture drained of energy, enthusiasm, and empathy because of its profound hopelessness, I think we are beginning to see the fruit of secularism and the rejection of God. Yet this growing awareness of our inability to save ourselves seems to have created a space where genuine hope is being heard again.
This is precisely what Christmas proclaims: that God has entered our world to bring the hope we cannot generate on our own. Into a landscape being stripped of illusions, the incarnation declares that hope is not an idea, a feeling, or a human achievement, but a person, Jesus Christ. As Oliphant suggests, “the stark and empty landscape of secularism is a perfect backdrop that allows the reality of the Christian hope to shine in bold relief.”
Christmas invites us to see that hope shining again.
Leon
Ps, hope to see you at one of our events: https://www.kerith.church/christmas-at-windsor