The content of Christian hope

What is it that Christianity hopes for? The answer can be succinctly put as follows: that we and our world will be as fully transformed as Jesus was. It will be a world in which all that divides people and destroys their environment will have been removed, having been replaced by a love that no longer finds any obstacle to its growth and expression. The Scriptures express this hope by talking of a ‘new heaven’ and a ‘new earth’ (cf Isaiah 65:17, 66:22, 2 Peter 3:13).

Christian hope therefore extends way beyond the salvation of ‘souls’, i.e., the idea that our fulfilment is reached when we all enjoy the vision of God in heaven, seeing God face to face (known also as the ‘beatific vision’). Certainly Christianity believes that we will have an immediate experience of God's presence to us in a way that we cannot even imagine here on earth. But joined to this is the immediacy of the presence in love to us of the rest of the God-humankind community, a presence that will affect the way we experience and utilise the rest of the material universe, which, from our point of view, will also have been totally transformed.

This hope that Christians profess, moreover, is not something unrelated to the salvation they already experience. Indeed, it is nothing other than the full-flowering of that salvation, the final and total transformation of their existence by the Spirit of Love that dwells within them. It is but the fulfilment of their sharing in a reality that already exists – the risen life that came into being on the day Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

There is, then, a sense in which the world that Christianity hopes for – namely one in which human life is totally transformed – already exists. It already exists in Christ. But there is also a sense in which that world does not yet exist – namely, in the sense that all the redeemed are not yet totally transformed. This is often called the tension between the ‘already’ (for example John 6:47) and the ‘not yet’ (for example Romans 13:11, Titus 3:7) in the Christian message.