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This is the best book you'll never read.

"Never read it," you say, "why’s that?"

Because you think you don’t need to. You don't think that Christian hope has anything to say about culture, ways to critique it, points of contact with it. You may even be unsure about what 'Christian hope' is in the first place. See, you think that understanding Christian hope is something that's way too much work; it's a whole other realm of Christian understanding you just don’t have time for with a whole new vocabulary to learn (with words like eschatology and teleology). Your care factor? Zero.

But although you’ll never read it, What are we waiting for? is a great book. Thanks to this book, in particular some great esays from top-notch biblical scholars like Goldingay, Marshall, and Bauckham, I actually understand that the whole Bible is about eschatology. I've been pushed really hard to think about my ideas of heaven and hell, and the history lover in me really enjoyed reading about the church fathers’ views about the future hope, as well as those in more recent history.

The book is in four parts, all on the topic of hope (which is what eschatology is all about anyway!):

• Hopeful Word (what the Bible says)
• Hopeful Church (what Christians do, and have hoped for – heaven & hell, mission, and so on)
• Hopeful Culture (what the world hopes for, how our Christian hope intersects or diverges from the world)
• Hopeful World (creation and the future)

What are we waiting for? had two highlights for me:

1. In God's Good Time (Russell Rook, pp. 138-148)

What is the go with time? As the band They Might Be Giants sang, "time, is marching on, and time, is still marching on". How are we as Christians to think of time? And more particularly, what does music have to do with time? This is the question Rook thinks about in this chapter. As he does so, he admits that we don’t really know how to think about music, we aren't equipped to know how to critique music. We either throw it out altogether or embrace it, throwing caution to the wind.

Eschatology, and thinking about Christian hope, gives us the tools we need to think about it. And we need to think about music because we all have strong views on it. It is powerful stuff, able to evoke emotions, it's able to manipulate people, to lull people into a sense of awe and happiness – how do we feel about that power music has over people?

I once had the pleasure (?) of hearing the song How Great is Our God played – for around about an hour. At this point, what could have been a great song, became something more than a song, it became a trance. And trance, just like the club on a Saturday night, is about untying us from time, "escaping both the pain of the past and the threat of the future [...], to experience a perpetual presence, a never ending-now" (p. 143).

But, if what God creates is meaningful, if all of God’s good creation is heading towards a goal – unity with Christ – and if time itself is meaningful for God, then we need to rethink how we do music. Are we heading towards a grand finale in time, or an escape outside of time?

2. Eschatology and the Environment (Ruth Valerio, pp. 200-210)

If the world is going to be destroyed, what is the point? No, seriously, what is the point? Is there any place for a theology of ecology? How does the way we think about our hope shape the way we think about the world? And vice-versa, how does the way we think about the future of the world shape our hope?

Once open to the charge of not caring about what happens to the world and even to a willingness to use it up due to our theological (mis-)understanding, the re-emphasis of Christians is now almost as the new eco-warriors.

What we have to deal with is the tension between the profound continuity between this world and the renewed world, but also the radical discontinuity between the two. Part of this means that being responsible Christians is to continue that work set out for the original 'gardeners' in the first couple of chapters of the Bible. For our work on this earth is not in vain as even the earth itself will be redeemed. What this means as far as our union with Christ is something that is played out more fully in other chapters, but is part of the bigger picture that shows this needs to be thought through more fully as responsible citizens and caretakers of this creation.

So anyway, I know you're not going to read it, but you could do worse things. Fascinating, engaging, provoking, practical and edifying. Thanks again Paternoster for a well planned collection of really great essays in this entry-level, well-needed book.

So, what are you waiting for?

By Douglas Fyfe

What are we waiting for?: Christian Hope and Contemporary Culture
Edited by Stephen Holmes and Russell Rook
Paternoster, 2008