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English

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Hope is essential to human life. Without hope, humanity plunges into despair, and life can lose all purpose and meaning. Hope energizes people and communities, and also produces forbearance and patience.
In this clear and accessible survey, which incorporates Asian perspectives, Roland Chia shows how Christian hope presses beyond the limits of both secular and religious world-views and confronts the reality of pain, suffering and death in the light of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is hope for God, and in God.

Informations

Publié par	Langham Creative Projects
Date de parution	14 août 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781907713507
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0025€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Christian Vision
Roland Chia
Series Editor: David Smith
Consulting Editor: Joe Kapolyo
Global Christian Library Series

© Roland Chia, 2006
Published 2012 by Langham Global Library
an imprint of Langham Creative Projects
Langham Partnership
PO Box 296, Carlisle, Cumbria, CA3 9WZ, UK
www.langham.org
ISBNs:
978-1-907713-06-4 print
978-1-907713-49-1 Mobi
978-1-907713-50-7 ePub
Roland Chia has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. First published in Great Britain in 1979. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline Ltd. All rights reserved. ‘NIV’ is a trade mark of International Bible Society. UK trade mark number 1448790.
First published 2006 by InterVarsity Press, ISBN: 978-1-844741-21-2
This edition 2012 by Langham Global Library
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Chia, Roland, 1960-
Hope for the world : the Christian vision.
1. Hope--Religious aspects--Christianity.
I. Title
234.2’5-dc23
ISBN-13: 9781907713064
Cover & typesetting: projectluz.com

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Contents

Cover

Acknowledgments

1 Hope in Asia

Introduction

Terrorism and peace

Social challenges

Religious and secular hope

The fabric of hope

2 The Hope of Israel

The God who holds the future

The kingdom of God

The Messiah

The Day of the Lord

The afterlife

3 The Foundations of Christian Hope

Jesus and the kingdom

The time of the kingdom

Paul and the future

Already and not yet

4 The Last Enemy

Theology of death

The intermediate state

Resurrection

5 The Coming of the Lord

The nature of the second coming of Christ

The last judgment

Conclusion

6 The Parting of Ways

The final state of the righteous

The final state of the wicked

7 A New World Coming

Signs of the end

The Millennium

Dispensationalism

The new creation

8 Living in Hope

The ground of hope

Worship and hope

Evil, suffering and hope

Hope and discipleship

About Langham Partnership

Endnotes
Acknowledgments
This book would never have been written without the help of a number of people. First, I would like to thank the Revd Dr John Stott for his invitation to contribute this volume to The Global Christian Library. The vision of this series is to provide an opportunity for Christian theologians and thinkers in the non-Western world to participate in the ongoing conversation on the central themes of the Christian faith in a biblically responsible and contextually sensitive way. I trust that by the grace of God this series will make an important contribution to his global church.
Special thanks must also go to David Smith for his encouragement and editorial advice. I recall the many conversations I had with David, both via e-mail and face to face when he visited Singapore, about the issues I discuss in this book. I am certain that David’s persistence and careful advice have made this a better book than what was originally conceived. Above all, I am deeply grateful for his friendship.
I would like to thank the principal and Board of Governors of Trinity Theological College for allowing me to go on sabbatical leave from July to December 2004. The more spacious days of the sabbatical have allowed me to complete a significant portion of the book. I am also indebted to my colleagues for their encouragement and for making Trinity such a stimulating environment in which to teach, think and write.
I must also thank Philip Duce and his colleagues at IVP for their professionalism, thoroughness and encouragement.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Serene, whose patience, encouragement and love have enabled me to persevere in this project. In many ways Serene is the embodiment of the life of hope this book attempts to describe. In her quiet unassuming way Serene has been a source of encouragement and inspiration to me all these years. I dedicate this book to her.
Roland Chia
Trinity Theological College
Pentecost 2005
1
Hope in Asia

Introduction
This book is about the nature of Christian hope. Hope is essential to human life. Some have compared it with oxygen for the lungs: without oxygen, death occurs through suffocation; without hope, humanity plunges into despair and is overwhelmed by purposelessness and meaninglessness. Hope energizes human life and serves as the essential fuel that empowers humankind’s intellectual and spiritual endeavours. Hope is no less essential for communities than it is for individuals. Politically, hope may be said to be the source of civic consciousness and behaviour because it makes the future of our society, city or country inviting. Without hope, each person will simply recoil to his or her private life and seal himself or herself off hermetically from society and the common life. On the other side of the spectrum, hopelessness may ‘motivate’ a kind of fanaticism that ruthlessly, if despairingly, tries to remove every obstacle that stands in the way of the future. Only with hope will there be forbearance, on which all good human life depends and on the basis of which civility is possible. Hope teaches patience and creates that temperament which enables us to listen and speak to those with whom we disagree. For in hope we know that in the end everything will work out and that we need not fear taking our time. [1] Hopelessness is a kind of death because it opens the door to fear, and fear weakens and immobilizes.
More than half a century ago, the great philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote these words regarding the nature of hope: ‘The truth is . . . there can be no hope except when the temptation to despair exists. Hope is the act by which this temptation is actively and victoriously overcome.’ [2] These words imply that hope is never abstract but always emerges from a specific historical and cultural context. The context from which I write, South-East Asia, now contains more than 500 million people with diverse cultures and languages, despite their shared history. South-East Asia is also made up of numerous nations, some of which, like Thailand, have histories that stretch across more than a thousand years, while others, like Singapore, are only a few decades old. South-East Asia also represents a diversity of religions, from animism to more philosophically sophisticated religions, including, of course, Christianity. The region is also a rich cultural and intellectual ethos, as traditional cultures and ideas blend and clash with modern Western ones.
In his sobering account of the consequences of modernity, Anthony Giddens argues that modernity brings to the collective psyche a disconcerting sense of ambivalence and anxiety because it introduces such radical discontinuities and fragmentations to society. The sheer pace of change it brings about and the scope of these changes, as different areas of the globe are drawn together in a complex network of connections that brings with it the clashing waves of social and cultural transformation across the globe, are unprecedented in human history. Vast institutional changes result as older institutions are transformed into something different, and new social orders, such as the nation state, emerge. [3] Paradoxically, the clashing of civilizational and cultural waves in the tempestuous sea of modernity bring about a new kind of integration, one that has political, economic and cultural dimensions, and therefore also implications.
Thus, in the modern situation, where ‘countless bits of the world conflict with other bits’, to use the graphic language of Patricia Crone, [4] a new integration is fostered, not by traditional values and outlook, but by the new ‘isms’ – rationalism, pluralism, secularism, individualism and relativism. It is an integration based on the present and not on the past, for it is the tendency of the modern mindset to be preoccupied with the immediacy of the present, thus only worsening its own rootlessness and instability.

Being fragmented, the industrial world is unstable. More precisely, it is kept fragmented because it wishes to be unstable, the expansion of cognitive, technological and economic boundaries being its aim . . . Far from being anchored in a tradition, the modern individual is likely to drift: he has to decide for himself where he is going. [5]
This dilemma, which characterizes Western societies so well, is not alien to