In chapter two of his recent The Spirit of Hope (2024) Byung-Chul Han asserts the following:
“Christian hope does not lead to idle passivity. Rather, it pushes people to action by stimulating them to imagine new ways of acting, and by arousing ‘inventiveness . . . in breaking with the old and coming to terms with the new’. [Jürgen Moltmann] This hope does not ‘flee the world’; it ‘strains after the future’. [Jürgen Moltmann] Its essence is not a quietist withdrawal but the ‘cor inquietum’, the restless heart. Hope neither leaves out nor leaves aside the world. Rather, it confronts the world in its full negativity and files its objections. Thus, it nourishes the spirit of revolution. ‘Always the Christian hope has had a revolutionary effect in this sense on the intellectual history of the society affected by it.’ [Jürgen Moltmann] The determination to act is inherent in the spirit of hope. Whoever hopes is inspired by the new, by the novum ultimum. Hope dares to take the leap towards a new life.” (italics in original)
Compare this powerful and positive vision with the usual maundering about “the end times” which so many Christians dutifully bleat, a view which is parallel to what is commonly and properly called “Crosstianity”: a vision wherein the Crucifixion is focused on to the exclusion of the Resurrection. In our “end times” wailing, we see catastrophe ahead, but the coming Kingdom afterwards merely as a forlorn deus ex machina, and that, even, only as a minor footnote to the apocalypse. The Kingdom of God, as so many Christians imagine it, has no continuity with our world. No, in this bloodless, faithless view, there shall be no resurrection of humanity, only an extermination and subsequent replacement!