Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium

I'll leave the complex in depth reviews to others. What I love about this book is that I can understand it. It's graceful and lucid and reading it is a pleasure. The words are infused with a kind of joy. As a novelist, I have to make characters, plots, put people in action. It's hard for me to approach theology or philosophy because of the density of abstractions in the writing. I just can't get most of it. But these two highly gifted theologians have written something of great meaning that is accessible to some one like me. As to the premise of the book, it's a convincing testament to the unfathomable and ever increasing power of the Christian Event. It moves us forward. I connect it with Teilhard de Chardin.

Another work disfigured by the inability to tell the difference between conventional liberal politics and the Christian worldview. I am sick to death of Brits like Bauckham and N.T. Wright going on about the "ambiguous American empire." It reminds me of the old quip about the Holy Roman Empire being neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire. America is neither an empire nor ambiguous, and the current "international order" or "community of nations" they are talking about isn't the nation created by the Founders. Englishmen like John Winthrop founded America on the purely Deutoronomist basis of creating in a new land a Christian republic. That Bauckham views this as just another discredited Enlightenment project shows that he doesn't understand the country and maybe he should leave out discussions of it in the books he writes.

Detailed but tedious

wonderful book nothing like it elsewhere as far as i can see