As described in the last post, the announcement of Jesus' resurrection brought a new world into view. A fatalistic ontology of death was replaced with an ontology of life. Reality was revealed to be an open rather than a closed system. As I've described it before, the resurrection is a "crack in the cosmos," a crack that reveals reality and possibility "beyond" our prior bounded and finite expectations. As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien the resurrection comes to us as eucatastrophe.
The practical import of this ontological news is a metaphysics of hope.
So, when we perform the subtraction entertained in this series, the gospel minus God's love along with your values, morality and politics, one of the critical things left over is hope.
The gospel isn't just news that God loves you. And the gospel is more than political action. The gospel, as ontological news, is a rejection of nihilism. Your life matters. Heroic actions of goodness matter. And they matter most especially when all is dark, despairing, and desperate.
In fact, one of the problems I've been writing about a lot over the last few years is that it is hard to sustain our values without some ontological support. One of the problems post-Christian people face is inheriting the emotion of hope from our Christian past while rejecting the ontological news of the gospel. We're trying to be hopeful nihilists, basing hope upon an ontology of death. That's not sustainable.
You can't sustain the emotion hope when, at a deeper level, you have no hope.
