2015: And Now for Some Good News

Good riddance to 2014. Good riddance to news of human trafficking, disgraced icons, police shootings, torture, persecution, terrorism, domestic violence, missing airplanes, sinking ships, unsettling cyber-attacks, shocking racism, and disease. And that’s before diving into grizzly events happening at the local level (here’s mine), or the myriad of struggles and hurts that individuals encounter in private.

One of the clearest lessons of 2014 seems to be that the world is a terrible place.

Christians surely know the realities of a fallen world. We are often quick to use bad news to illustrate our message: sin corrupts; the world and her inhabitants desperately need redemption from their King. “Look no further than the evening news. . .” has become a proof-text to establish the problem of sin in many sermons. Some Christians go further to interpret the rash of troubling news as signs of imminent end times. Ebola, Blood Moons, and mounting losses in the culture wars have many Christians convinced that Armageddon-styled tribulations are approaching the church.

Offering hope in the midst of sorrow, beauty amid ashes, is the proper role of the church.Considered from another angle, however, the world was no worse than usual in 2014. In the scope of history, we are much better off than our ancestors. We’re living much longer, war is on the downswing, extreme poverty is plummeting, and crime is decreasing. Even the ozone layer is making a comeback! This has generally been the story of the modern world. Things get better. While there are disagreements over which factors are most responsible (democracy vs. Christianity, for example), the conceit of modern man has been that our continued advancements in technology, medicine, economics, and political freedom will keep the march toward progress a steady one.

Relatively speaking, things are not so bad. We’ve come a long way from the pervasive wickedness of centuries past, when mankind was more often unchecked, acting on “every intention of the thoughts of his heart” to do “only evil continually.” As turbulent as things seem today, past centuries had much more staggeringly turbulent moments. Many people, including our president, have blamed media—specifically social media—for sensationalizing information by skewing news toward the horrifying. We really ought to be optimistic, so this line of thinking goes. The positive spin on a “bad year” like 2014 is that our awareness is growing of problems that are actually shrinking, and responsive solutions are forthcoming that may even speed the progress we’ve made so far.

On the other hand, postmodern theorists and artists have been rejecting the “Myth of Progress” for decades, asserting that the world is not ordered toward advancement, that there is no collective happy ending awaiting us. Even if indicators for the “human condition” improve over time, postmodernism doesn’t buy that we’ll discover more meaning or satisfaction in the extra years tacked onto our lives. I’m sympathetic to this view. I was wrecked by much of the biggest news stories of the year, but my year was also wrecked by a hundred other disappointments, betrayals, and failings of my own, despite my income growing, my family’s health abiding, and a host of other improved conditions that frame my existence. I know I’m not alone.

And is a merely better world really worth celebrating? Only a billion people live in extreme poverty! Only 15 million children are caught up in armed conflict! These statistics are difficult to spin into good news. Even if you believe that the march toward progress is going strong, and we’re headed for a time when wars mostly cease and people almost never starve, that’s no consolation for the oceans of human suffering that took place in 2014, not to mention that which came before or is still headed our way.

The general cultural mood, then, is fitting: the world is a mess, and things are far from fixed. Perhaps the heightened sense of dismay at the problems of our time can not only lead to practical fixes in the abstract (better education, increased access to healthcare, more transparency in government, reduced emissions), but also lead our neighbors to give second thought to the gospel, even finding it by experiencing a tangible embodiment of it in His church. For offering hope in the midst of sorrow, beauty amid ashes, is the proper role of the church.

In a year of bad news and keenly felt desire for something better—our contemporary iteration of creation’s groaning in anticipation of its redemption, people need desperately to hear the Good News. That Christ came to save the world and the sinners in it, and that He’s coming again to ultimately deliver them. While we can (and should) put our hand to the plow in righting the world’s wrongs, there is no hope for complete restoration outside of the supernatural intervention of God—as our world testifies to again and again.

The promise of Parousia—of Christ (finally) ushering humanity into a perfectly just, peaceful reign over a perfectly renewed creation—is always before us. Maybe in receiving eyes to see our fallen condition, we’re also receiving eyes to see the only true redeemer of the world’s injustices, diseases, violence, famine, and hatred. Looking back on 2014 and ahead to a (hopefully better) 2015, I echo the plea of the Apostle John, whose vision of a rescued earth composes the book of Revelation. Come, Lord Jesus.