Resisting Doomerism and Cultivating Hope

Derek Rishmawy and Alastair Roberts take up the problem of Christian doomerism in an age of AI development, geopolitical instability, and algorithmic anxiety — diagnosing why our moment feels uniquely threatening, then building a theology and practice of realistic hope from the Sermon on the Mount, the Psalms, eschatology, and the concrete habits (prayer, scripture, crocheting) that keep despair at bay.

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Chapters

• 00:00 – The Problem of Living in Interesting Times
• 05:05 – I Call All Times Interesting
• 11:52 – Agency
• 17:34 – Hope at Rock Bottom
• 28:03 – The Benefits of Apocalypse
• 32:39 – Eschatology
• 36:13 – Practically Constructing Hope
• 42:03 – Investing in Future Generations
• 49:06 – Back to Basics

 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Lexim Press, who publishes books that love the Word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexin Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our February book of the month is 30 Key Moments in the History of Christianity, inspiring true stories from the early church around the world. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting BakerBookhouse.com backslash pages backslash Mere Fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes to get 30% off our book of the month from Lexim Press. Hello and welcome to another episode of Mere Fidelity, a podcast by Mere Orthodoxy, where we think about the Word of God and the world we live in. My name is Derek Rushmalli, and I'll be your host for today. With that said, I'm joined by a singular cast and crew member, Alistair Roberts. Good to have you on the show today. Good to be back. And today what we thought we'd take we'd take up is kind of an odd subject, but uh really thinking about um how to not give in to doerism uh as it's called uh hopelessness or or or or or sh just fears, uh massive fears uh about when we live in in sort of a we keep calling them interesting times. And you know, the joke is I'd I'd like to live in uninteresting times, but if you are online, as a lot of people are, podcasters and so on and so forth, it just seems like so many things keep coming down the pipeline that that are in a sense menacing or threatening at at uh besides like the small-scale everyday catastrophes that can happen in one's life. Um, as we're recording, you know, who knows what's gonna happen in a week. We might already be there, but uh the U.S. has moved uh an entire fleet of ships and bombers and all sorts of things uh towards the Middle East. Uh every week seems to uh uh give us new uh insights into the um overwhelmingly fast-paced world of AI development, right? I I don't know how many I just anthropic just dropped an announcement about the uses to which various AI bots are being uh put towards, everything from trying to create, you know, um chemicals to, you know, betting to all those sorts of things to the point where you you read stuff on like AI safety, right? And even even the non-far apocalyptic scenarios, uh, if even if you put those out, there's still weird stuff that seems to be coming down the pipeline, inevitably, right? You've got Chinese robots uh dancing around or not so much dancing, running around with guns. And you don't know how many of those videos are real, but they they they come across your feed and you see it. And it just seems like we live in times that feel feel perhaps more unstable than they did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Um and that could be an optical illusion. That could be a a sense of dizziness internally that you know maybe you just weren't aware of the world 20 years ago. It's totally the case. But talking to Al talking to you, Alistair, I I do think for a lot of people who spend uh so much of their time online, we are bombarded with news from around the world about several just potentially catastrophic realities that threaten to kill hope, right? I mean, over just a couple of years ago, I would read stories about young Gen Z folks who were feel so pessimistic about um potential global global warming stuff, although apparently nobody's talking about that anymore, um, that that they were not seeing the point of having children, right? So there's just the kind of deep pessimism about the future, the the inevitability of some sort of catastrophe. And the question is, how do we make sense of all of these things in light of scripture, in light of eschatology, in light of what we know to be true in Jesus Christ? And like what does hope, what does realistic hope look like, and how do you kind of handle living in interesting times? So that's the subject today. That's what we want to talk about a little bit because Alistair and I, I think neither of us are well, not neither of us is Andrew. We we talked, we we we both said we should have had Andrew on the show because he's kind of like our theological tigger. And uh I'm not gonna say I'm Eeyore, but um I I might I might say oh dear from time to time. There might be a piglet uh on uh on the upset. Uh but with all that all that set up, Alistair, I w you know, I don't know if you want to just make things worse before we make them better or start to think about how you think about these things. Uh, but just get us going here on on the problem of living in in interesting times.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Yes. I you mentioned a couple of things there that I wanted to maybe underline a bit. Um First of all, the degree to which we are very online, and so we're exposed to these things. And we have a sense of just swimming in this world of anxiety, anger, polarization, uncertainty, constantly reading about these risks, and then the deep sense of being not able to trust things anymore. You mentioned you don't know are these images genuine? Are they just AI generated? And at a certain point, this sort of uncertainty is just a very unhealthy place to think from and act from. So before we start to think about the characteristic of the world as such, I think it's important to just consider the lens through which we're viewing it, which is primarily um our screens, social media, and being very online. Um that I think tends to increase the sense of doom, uh, the whole phenomenon of doom scrolling, where part of it is the algorithm wants you to remain on the site. It finds that there are things that get attention and it will feed you these negative stories. When you're actually on the ground, it's seldom quite as hopeless. There are the bad things within the world, things are terrible in many different ways, there are all sorts of risks and dangers, but they are not quite so overwhelming when you actually see them, the situation up close. And so I think there's that aspect to it that we need to pay attention to. Beyond that, I think there are ways in which we say we live in interesting times, and the baseline for us is let's say the 90s. This is a period of time after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism. It's a period of time that was really the baseline for us in our um when we're starting to come to an awareness of the wider world, and things were fairly peaceful until um 9-11. And then even after that, things were fairly stable for most of our immediate contacts. And so for that reason, I think we're judging things against a very um unusual baseline. For most of human history, people have been living in fairly interesting circumstances. You might think about the way that our century so far seems bad. We've had COVID, we're having all these issues of uncertainty, started off with 9-11, and yet was incredibly peaceful by relative standards. And when we go back in history, we think about, let's say, the 14th century, um over half the population being wiped out in many parts of Europe during during the Black Death, three popes simultaneously claiming the right to be the leader of the church, all these sorts of uncertainties and catastrophes and things hitting. Our times are not that interesting by comparison, but we do have a sense of more radical existential risk, perhaps, um, than people had in the past, because we have things like AI, which some would suggest will completely change the conditions of human existence. We have nuclear bombs, we have um the threat of um global climate change that will make our world uninhabitable in its um current forms. All these sorts of threats, whether they're real or not, they occupy a lot of mental real estate, and they are the fears that have in many respects created um a lot of the modern attitude towards the future. If you look back in the past, in far more interesting times, in some senses, in terms of more immediate conflict, um, people had a very hopeful view of the future. The future was seen primarily in terms of technological progress and abundance. And now our views of the future tend to be anti-human in various ways. They tend to be dystopian, they tend to be a lot less hospitable to human life and society. So I think it's a complicated situation to assess the exact character of our times because so much of it is refracted through factors that shape our perception of things. And don't necessarily give us an objective view of the situation as it stands. But there is incredible uncertainty about our future. And I think that is what where a lot of the Doomerism comes from.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Yeah, it it's funny to think about it. You know, you can you talk about the 14th century. I was I was just thinking about the 20th century and the the turn of the century there, you had, you know, who knows how many different, you know, small-level wars popping off, and then you've got obviously World War I, and then you've got the the the Spanish influenza that, you know, dwarfed anything that COVID did, and so on and so forth. It's really wild that that that all that happened. But you go back to the 14th century, and for for most of human history, the devastations that were happening around the world you mostly didn't know about. You knew about what was happening in your village, you got some extended news about what's maybe happening in your country, uh, you know, you've got raids happening uh seasonally, that sort of thing. But you were worried about the daily things that oftentimes we're not worried about uh as much, at least in the in the in the modern West, of like, oh gosh, is there gonna be a crop failure this year? And you know, if we had a crop failure, it's like, okay, prices go up at Albertson's or Vaughn's or whatever grocery store, but we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna ship something from somebody somewhere. Nobody's gonna starve. Um so the the kinds of things that press in on us psychologically are not like it's not daily bread as much, at least for the kind of person who's typically listened to a podcast. I globally, again, there are people who who do think about that. Um but it's yeah, the the speed and the wide-ranging the kinds of tragedies that I can know about in countries thousands of miles away from me that I have no, absolutely no control over, and existentially really don't actually hit me besides a generalized human concern for people. Add that to the things that could actually genuinely concern me, and then it it becomes too much. The thing that I also know sort of thinking about is um the context of how we think about our agency in the world, simultaneously we have high expectations of what our agency should be able to do in the world. I think in the modern period, you you you you you have this idea of you know the the the self who's supposed to individual, who's supposed to express their lives, who's supposed to go out in the world, change it, so on and so forth and so so on. But when you get on the news and you realize there are just levels, there are levels of activity and and and choices being made that and and movements happening that I have absolutely no input, right? Nobody cares. Nobody at Anthropic, nobody at at Google, nobody, nobody at DeepSeek or whatever it is cares if I personally don't think that they should develop AI at the rate that they're developing it or certain safeguards or whatever it is. And you don't even get the, you don't even get the sense that they're they're not even that concerned what what like US governments or particular, you know, actual big political players think about it. So the the the sense of decreased agency when you look at global level realities that frustrates perhaps a psychologically intensified sense of of what our agency should have been, um, in kind of how we grew up, uh, can add just layers of frustration and hopelessness, right? Because hope, yeah, hope is hope is related to what you think is coming, but hope is also related to uh what you think you can do, right? The the idea of inevitability that something's coming your way that you have no way of stopping, that you have no way of of acting against or preventing. Um, here here we're just intensifying the problem, but I I also do think that's that's one aspect of it. There there's only so much you can do. Um, and I think there's an affront to recognizing that you are like one of the many peasants of history, right? That that that you know, you might have been born in the 21st century in in in some advanced country and so on and so forth, all that kind of thing. But odds are if you'd been born any other century, like you you just would have you were subject to the same vagaries of history that any everybody else who's suffered some catastrophe in human life uh would have expected to have been subject to. Right? It's the it's it's part of those worst is the expectation that things ought to have been different, or that those kinds of things that would we weren't subject to history anymore, I think is is one thing that increases the potential for Dumerism, maybe not among the Gen Z kids, but you know, millennials and older or Gen X or whatever. So that's that's one element that I've I've thought about before.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

I do think there is a difference to be observed between those past ages and our own, simply in the fact that a lot of forces that were once very far away, and you could more or less insulate your life from them for the most part, those forces can increasingly determine life for us. Yeah. And so something goes wrong in America and then it affects the whole world. Yeah. This is not something that was the case in the past. Even some of these natural forces, like a great disease, couldn't was spread very slowly. And whereas today it can go around the world in a a matter of days. And so I think that is the difference. There's a sense of the forces that shape our lives are no longer within our immediate environment.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you have interconnected economies, travel, all those sorts of things. It was interesting. Uh I was reading a biography of the Emperor Justinian, as one does, um, you know, and reading about it, an event talked about an event that I had never learned about. But apparently during Justinian's reign, there was this almost global worldwide cold snap where um just m uh the the sky suddenly goes darker and crops fail and the temperature drops. And I mean, I I think there were several theories as to what happened. It might have been, you know, a volcano erupts and you get ash across the face of the sky for a couple of years or something like that. But it was this massive, massive event that across continents, right? Not just not just Europe, it's Asia, it's potentially in uh Africa and and and and you know, evidence of it uh on on our side of the Atlantic. But those courts those sorts of things happened historically. This is the reason we're going to all this, and and part of my part of my reason for doing all this, and maybe it's why it's helpful to do it with you, Alistair, is that one of the things that I have always resisted is uh cheap hope. Um I don't know, one thing if you're if you're arguing with like a fairly anxious person or uh a person struggling with those sorts of things, and you haven't really thought it through, and you try to argue like, no, I know you're trying to encourage me and give me hope, but you're not encouraging me or giving me hope because my my sense is that your hope is coming from not having really thought about the problem very hard. Uh and so you're just unaware, right? Now, there is a blessing to being unaware in many ways, right? You actually, I don't think we were designed in a sense to know all these things. But once you do, the question is, how do you how do you hope? How do you like what what resources are there to think about these things? And this is kind of what I want to turn to is thinking from within a Christian framework, uh from within biblical standpoint and hope, what are what are different um scriptures, or I just think in terms of doctrines, uh, that ought to give us hope, uh realistic hope, because you know, one of the beautiful things about the Bible is the Bible, the Bible is a catastrophic book, right? The Bible is is cover-to-cover filled with wars and diseases and plagues and and dislocations and exiles and and you know, large-scale catastrophes and small-scale catastrophes, and it's a hopeful book, nevertheless, right? It's the kind it when you read the Bible, you get the sense of like, okay, David, he gets it. Or, you know, um, oh gosh, who's Psalm Psalm 88? Who's the uh uh what's the name? Who's who's the guy who writes Psalm 88? You should know this.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

David again?

SPEAKER_01 18:32

No, no, it's the guy who's really bummed out. Um it's not ASAF. It's pull it up, Alistair. We're gonna do this.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

I'm doing that now.

SPEAKER_02 18:43

You're doing that now. Guy who's like in darkness is the sons of Korah, but they're in there.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Heeman, the Ezraite. Heeman gets it, right? Heeman is not sugarcoating these things. You you have this sense of, you know, when you read Ezekiel or you read Jeremiah, and Jeremiah talks about hope, you're like, okay, well, Jeremiah is clinically depressed and has like several things going on. All the but when he talks about hope, it's because he's he's it's not because he has, you know, uh hit an optimistic vein. He has hit bedrock, right? So that's my question is when you start to like when you start to think about these things, Alistair, I have certain go-to doctrines and certain realities that root me and orient me. Uh what what is I want to start, what is one for you that starts to root you and orient you to deep reality? Not not not contemporary reality, but deep reality underneath that reality.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Go as a first port of call to Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount um about anxiety and worry that so often we fret over things that we can't control, and we don't trust in God's provision and goodwill towards us. Do not be anxious about your life what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of much more value than they? And which of you being by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed, like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, etc. It seems to me that that's one of the most basic postures to this question, which doesn't have some deep doctrine, it's just an assurance in the good will of our Heavenly Father towards us, that He cares for us. And again you mentioned the experience of the psalmist praying and singing psalms is a good response to these sorts of things. They ground you in the fundamental truth of God's character, his grace towards us. Who we are. I mean, I find you mentioned Psalm 88, Psalm 90, for instance, the Psalm of God, just a sense of someone who's lived through the entire period of the wilderness wanderings. He's been someone who worked out in the wilderness for forty years keeping sheep. He's lived a life, he's seen suffering, he's seen tough times, and he's had all these struggles with this people. And now he's able to speak out of all of that experience and pray for. For God to establish the work of their hands, but just a sense of the frailty and fragility of human life, its short duration, and just putting man in his proper station, um, but also recognizing how great God is before the mountains were brought forth, from everlasting to everlasting your God. That I find is very helpful at getting perspective. And perspective is so much of what we need in these situations.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

And you know, you I don't want to correct and and tinker, because that is a great answer. But when you said no no fancy deep doctrine underneath that, the reality is Jesus' assurance in the Sermon on the Mount has assumed underneath it, it's very straightforward, but you're getting the tip of the iceberg there in terms of it actually has the entire doctrine of God underneath it, as it were. Like it is your heavenly father who makes his his his uh reign sh uh fall down on the just and the unjust and his and his and his son shine on them. But it's assuming the perfection of God, it's assuming the sovereignty of God, it's assuming, you know, he knows the hair on your head or what used to be on ours and that has fallen, and he knows everyone that fell off and when and why and how. And and all the little sparrows, and you are, aren't you of more worth than many sparrows? Now, the the weird thing is obviously underneath that is like, yeah, there's a lot of dead sparrows out there, though. That like there there is is is this recognition that it has the doctrine of God underneath, but it has to have a thick doctrine of God that is capable of offering both assurance for today, but also a deep sense of assurance on the other side of tragedy. So it's it's got like a level of the tragicomic, of, of there's goodness on the other side, even of really bad dark stuff happening. And for that, you do need you do need um that basic sense of a reminder that um God is our best thing in the sense of God is the thing that can't be taken away. If God is your treasure, nothing that can happen can remove that highest treasure. And so even if like even if you face an event, a catastrophe, catastrophic event of the highest order, right, or even at the smallest level, I I I honestly, you know, several people I have known in the last few months have either um received cancer. I mean, you have you have diagnoses of cancer and things like that. I I have we have one friend everybody knows about, Dan Trier, who passed, and a couple of other friends that I know who are are are heading in that direction. Um they're facing many apocalypses, they're they're facing many, you know, uh the ending of their worlds. But if they have a world beyond this world, then that world is God. They they're not losing it. And that is actually that that truth is supposed to anchor us. That truth is supposed to ground you, of like the one thing that your life most needs and and and upon which it is actually built, is can you you can only actually get more of it if the worst thing happens, as it were. Um that sounds very pious because I hope it is. Like I hope it's good good piety. Uh good piety. So that one's that one's one that um, especially for those of us to go tailor for a minute, I do think our turn towards an imminent Christianity, an imminent frame of this worldly Christianity, like there's bad otherworldly Christianity, um, and there's good this worldly Christianity, but there's also the bad form of like heaven is there. And if we keep forgetting that like the best thing about heaven in the new creation is God, um, you start to just look around too much at this world as if this world isn't going on in its current way where I live, then I don't know that there is a good world. It's like, no, no, no, no. This is the form that's passing away. Like, it even like on the best scenario, this is got this is all going to change. Like when she, you know, so that that's that breaking out of the eminent frame, breaking out of the eminence of this world, looking ahead to heaven, looking ahead to God, that is also, I think, an anti-Doomer strategy.

SPEAKER_03 26:54

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SPEAKER_00 28:38

There is, I mean, that's part of the meaning of the apocalypse, is a an event of revelation, a disclosure of something that is true about the world that's so easily forgotten. And in those moments there is a call, I think, to us to humble ourselves. Apocalypses are humbling. They're times of testing, they reveal what we're made of, what our treasure is, where have we invested it. They reveal those things that last and remain, um, those things that are shaken and collapse, and many of the things that look like they're going to be certain are the things that collapse. And so I think in all of these cases, the apocalypse is in its revelation of the fragility and the temp just the temporal character of our reality. It can be a blessing if it's responded too well. And the response to it, I think, should not be a sense of just doom, but it should be a a changing of our priorities in many cases, where we have prioritized those things that are more immediate and we see that they are fragile and about to fail, we start to prioritize those things that will endure, um, investing in the kingdom of God and in the pursuit of of God's righteousness. And so often I think the danger that we have is not that we might feel the crisis or the tragedy. Those crises and tragedies are real, and we don't need to have a sort of Pollyanna faith. We don't need to have a sense that nothing terrible, truly terrible or horrific can happen. Truly terrible and horrific things can and do happen. But we do need that firm existential grasp of something deeper than that. And often what we find in times like this is we haven't cultivated that. Um and so we come up short when we're faced with a crisis or tragedy. We don't know what stronger reality, what deeper reality we can hold on to. And my experience has been that it's very easy for people who have had a certain understanding of faith that everything is going to um the church is going to win, it's going to be successful, um, Christians who are faithful are going to be blessed, they're going to win their cultural conflicts, whatever it is. That sort of person can be very disappointed as things play out, because it's not always that easy. Um and often we can see a radical crisis. Our nations might fail. The church the cause of the church in our nation may completely fail, it seems. Um we can think of countries where the seed of the martyrs has been the um that from which the church has grown, and others where the seed of the martyrs shed their blood and the church has largely been wiped out, and it hasn't really grown. And so I don't think that our eschatology, and here I speak as someone who is uh post-millennialist, I don't think our eschatology commits us to the idea that there couldn't be a meteor uh meteor strike in a few years' time and wipe out much of the population. I don't think that my eschatology commits me to that sort of thing. Um the world is constantly being broken down and reformed, and I do think that as we look through scripture and as we look through history, that is borne out. We don't need to be doomerish, though, because that crisis can happen and the church and the cause of Christ will survive it.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

Yeah, it's that that whole scenario is an interesting thing that I've thought about. I've I've kind of tried to gauge, all right, if I believe that Jesus Christ is going to return and renew the cosmos, um, does that rule, does that create an upper bound to how bad I think something like how bad how bad can a truly bad thing uh happen? Uh what what level uh you know would would would be would be ruled out by the by the eventual return of Christ to restore all things and to save all things? Given that I'm not like uh I'm not a dis dispensationalist or uh uh or a rapture guy or that sort of thing. Um and so for me that that has ruled out certain things. So like it has ruled out, you know, a full-blown like I I don't think we're we're gonna get full-blown Skynet Terminator just because whatever. Uh I I don't see that happening. But it doesn't rule out like really bad AI scenarios where like, you know, this this country or some you know empires have fallen, right? And that sort of thing. We we we we we live in we live in a world where Rome used to be the global order and now it's not. Britain used to be the global order and now it's not, and and and other other things like that. Um but even yeah, even even on post even on a post-millennial framework, which I'm not, I'm I'm millennial, like when you start dealing with uh, you know, extra 100,000 years in your pocket before Jesus comes back, that's that's orders of magnitude of of you know birth and death of civilizations uh happen on that time scale. Um but having instead the bigger, broader picture, when you start to think about what your hope is in, you start hoping in the eventual kingdom of God, you start hoping in the victory of the church overall. Um yeah, when you have that promise of like, nevertheless, it will not fail. Like the the church face down, the church was wiped out a lot in communism in Russia, whatever, and yet now it's still there. It's not it's not great, it's not healthy, but it but but the global church is still large. It's still growing, it's still um having that expanded perspective uh helps, even if your eschatology doesn't um necessarily rule out mass-level huge bad events. I'm not gonna say extinction, extinction events, because I think it I think it rules out certain kinds. Um but but yeah, so but that's the kind of hope that we're we're we're trying to think about is is hope that is beyond just small-scale horizons of like, no, because God loves you, X bad thing would ever happen to you. It's like, well, God has loved a lot of things, a lot of people, and and those things have happened to them. And we have to have a framework of hope that that encompasses that. It's it's it's it's it's it's not God loves you and therefore you'll never face a cross. It's God loves you, therefore you'll always get a resurrection eventually, even if it's like at the resurrection, is the one that you're is the one that you actually get. Um it's it's faithfulness through the fire, not faithfulness uh that never faces a fire, right? It's it's yeah, it's death and resurrection, it's it's new creation after the tearing apart of the old. It's it's new Israel after the destruction of the old. So that is the kind of hope that you have to construct and you have to and I think you have to construct it. Right? This takes active work uh to to um in the power of the spirit, and this is maybe more of a practical point um as we kind of turn a corner here, is uh hope has to be worked at. Uh you you you actually have to, in your mind and heart, sort of build an architecture of hope from Christian truth, where you're you're you're building up the foundations in God. You're building up the the the the the baseline realities in your salvation in Christ and and you're and you're filling them in with you know your assurance and your adoption and and and and a and a and a and a maybe a view to Christian history and all the all the things that God has accomplished despite the horrors within it and so forth. But it it's not something that just happens. There is a peace that passes understanding, and God supernaturally does give us that. And yet we are also called to work with, as it were, the supernatural grace that God has given us by like building on it, by girding up the loins of your, of your, of your, of your mind, as First Peter says, uh one, like I don't know, 12, 13 or so. Uh and by recalling to mind the things that give you hope. And that active work, part of what we're trying to do here in this conversation is is is start to point you in the directions that you have to go to to build that active hope, to build the active defenses against um giving into the forces of decay and the forces of, I don't know, just hopelessness that are, I think, endemic. Right? They're endemic. I think this is actually something that is perhaps going to be one of the main marks of the people of God uh for some coming years is is is being the people who don't go full doomer, um, even while they're not I don't know. When I see the when I see the sort of like full-blown techno-optimism, I also cringe because I just don't believe that's that's coming. But but but going full doomer is I think not a not a Christian frame of mind. And so the ability to do that without we're without naive optimism is I think going to be a distinctive mark of of like a healthy Christian maturity.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

One thing I think we should discuss here is how to go beyond just a Christian theology of hope and holding on to hope in terms of um more sense that we have a hope, we have something to look forward to, um, and we should not ultimately despair, to think about practices of hope. Because a lot of the struggle that we have today, I think, uh arises from practices that um encourage despair. It's not just about people not having the theological or ideological framework to conceive of hope and grasp onto it. It's people doom scrolling and things like that. And as a result, having this constant feeding of themselves in despair and uh hopelessness. And unless we actually tackle those practices and put practices of hope in their place, I think it's going to be very difficult to stand against these impulses. And so maybe turning to that, um, and maybe bearing in mind we're near the beginning of Lent here, um, what are some of the practices that you have found helpful in avoiding practices of despair and hopelessness or just practices that instill hope in you?

SPEAKER_01 40:09

Alistair, you stole my question for you. I uh part of the reason we want to do the show was to help ourselves here in that regard, because this is something I find myself uh battling against. Um I don't know. I haven't found a really good solution beyond obviously I'm a pastor, and so my some of my bread and butter responses are, well, praying, reading your Bible, um, uh, you know, drinking water, whatever whatever the kind of kind of basic, basic spiritual nutrition of like if you're not spiritually dehydrated from lack of you know Bible consumption, it'll generally just be better. But that's true. I actually do think the active practice of meditation on scripture, uh perhaps memorization uh of key passages. I I often do tell my students, I get handed out as homework, of take the back end of Matthew chapter six, and you're just gonna memorize it. You're gonna read it every day, morning and evening, and meditate on the passage on the lilies of the field. Uh you need to just actually do that so that it's filling some of the open spaces of your mind. A lot of it, I think, will involve uh there's gonna be practices of negation. Most people should delete certain apps off of their phone if you find yourself prone towards this sort of thing, um, at least for times, uh knowing that certain news sources, certain kinds of things, if you find yourself prone to that, not going to those as much, uh, especially if it's going to be giving you news about stuff that you really can't do anything about. Um, that's a big one. Uh one other thing that might be we might think of like short-term kind of small daily things, but there also might be think about long-term practices of hope. Hope hopelessness leads you to think short-term, um, short-term. And so you don't start thinking about long-term things that you're trying to build towards. Um acts of hope involve like perhaps taking up a practice that will take you a long time to get good at, uh, or or la like a long-term project of I want to memorize a whole book of the Bible in this way, or I want to learn an instrument. Or I don't know, just building towards finding some way to strategically build towards the future. And like I want to give myself to some project that can't be realized for five years. So I'm gonna start doing something that's gonna assume we're we're still here in five, I'm still here in five years and do and able to do this, or or ten years, or whatever it is. Building towards institutions.

SPEAKER_00 42:55

This is something that came up in the last episode we recorded, but again, the next generation, investing in a time when we will not be, um I think is really important. So much of our hopelessness, I think, goes hand in hand with our failure to raise and to bring a new generation into existence and to raise them. Um and to look beyond the horizon of the immediate now of our lifetimes.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

So, you know, oppose Doomerism, have a baby, is that what we're saying? Just have a society that has have a society that is okay with babies.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

That has children very much as a focal point of its labor.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Yeah. Yeah, no, I I actu I actually do think that's r that's really good. And actually, I mean, being around children is hopeful. Um just in itself when you see their encounter with the world. If you don't have children of your own Uh borrow your friend's children. They will often want to give them to you for certain hours of the day so they can go away for a little bit. And Alistair, you've talked about, you know, in the past when you were single, the child minding being uh just a really encouraging thing. But but but having like thinking strategically within your church about like, hey, let's build up building programs, like pouring yourself into institutions beyond institutions that you want to build beyond the next couple of years. Um that I think is that is a is a hopeful way of thinking that requires you to not be focused on things that can go wrong. It requires you to some degree, like what can we focus on about how to make this go right? That that that God, God-willing, God-preserving, uh we're still here in five years, these are the things that's going to make a that's going to make five years from now work. It also, uh, you know, on the technology question, it it means you're probably gonna have to focus in to some degree on deeply human tasks. Um I don't know how to put this, but um trying to think about the things that will this is not an AI exclusive kind of episode here, but trying to think about the things, the habits, the practices, the kinds of things that will keep you feeling and acting and being very human, uh while not being dependent on developing a skill that tech is going to make irrelevant in a couple of years. There's there's certain kinds of tasks like that that I think, you know, certain kinds of ways of reading, certain kinds of ways of inhabiting the world's skills. Alistair is knitting right now. Um again, he's crocheting. Crocheting, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:53

Knitting.

SPEAKER_01 45:54

Knitting. Oh, what are you making?

SPEAKER_00 45:56

I am making uh a large sweater for one of the women in my parents' care home.

SPEAKER_01 46:04

There we go. Uh that kind of thing is actually just like a deeply human act that is uh hopeful, that is, I don't know, currently not AI replaceable. Um because it's the kind of thing that even if an even if an AI can automate and make sweaters and scarves, whatever, it can't actually pour in your time and devotion and your love and effort that is received in a scarf. Like like a like the person receiving it can't receive that through a screen print thing. Um I think that's one element of a practice of hope here. And if you I mean, there there's a lot of different areas that we can go here.

SPEAKER_00 46:47

Um I do think there's when we talk about practices of hope, there's almost something quite natural in the relationship between practice and hope. You act because you think you can have some impact, and you become paralyzed when you lose hope. And so one of the things that we really need to do is to commit ourselves to practices that, even in the very course of being involved, will instill a sense of agency within the world and a sense of being able to make some sort of difference. One of the challenges that I think we have when we're faced with so many media spectacles is that we feel a sense of increased powerlessness and paralysis. We're faced with all these situations over which we have no control. We feel some sort of duty to say something into the void, but we can't make any impact upon them. And yet, within our immediate circumstances, there are lots of ways we can make a difference in our lives, in the lives of people around us. We can be faithful in our more immediate callings. And sometimes it's helpful just to compartmentalize. I can't control the sea, the chaos of the world around me that is beyond my control, that is often thrown into a sort of storm. But I can exercise some sort of control over my life, how I relate to God. I can exercise some sort of control in terms of making my home a sane and loving place. I can exercise some sort of control in having good relationships with my family and the people around me. I can exercise some sort of control in serving my church, in serving my local community. Beyond that, I probably have very little control. And the more that I focus on that area, I have little control, the more I will feel despair. And you may be seeing very real things, very real forms of uncertainty. But focus on where you can make a difference. Throw yourself into activities that try to make a difference. And the hope often comes with that.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

We we already talked about some of the limiting your limiting your intake, limiting your your your news time, limiting all those sorts of things. Um I do think some people getting out, touching grass, getting the sunlight, taking care of yourself, exercising, all those sorts of things. Um believing uh these things actually just help for your your capacity to engage in the world with agency. Right. Um moving your body uh when you haven't been uh that just connects you in a way to yourself and your ability to act, even in small, limited ranges. Uh if you are able to be more helpful to those around you. Some of us can't do that, right? We have we have certain kinds of disabilities. But even there, um figuring out the even if you have certain kind of bodily challenges. And I I I had chronic pain issues for years, and so I I deeply sympathize there. Um those small habits that increase your sense of your capacity to act in the world uh and assume that you're gonna be there the next day, and assume that you're gonna be there uh not even the next day, but the next five, ten, fifteen years of kids those those are acts of hope, right? Uh for some people, um, beginning to take care of yourself is part of how you start to act like you have hope, uh, that God has things for you to do in the world and that he's doing them in your life. Um So that that that's one one thing I'd I'd think about there as well.

SPEAKER_00 50:44

I would also say prayer is so important because we have agency in prayer. We can bring our concerns and anxieties and our fears to the Lord, and we have access to a far higher throne than any of the halls of power um that we have in our lands. There is a sort of agency there that is not just a sort of shrinking back from the issues of the world. It can be a way of leaning into the issues of the world, intercede for things, make a point of it. Um some of the things that worry you within your local community or something that worries you within your family, something that worries you within the wider world that would usually cause you to shrink back in a sort of paralysis, transpose that into prayer and bring that concern to God and just practice that diligently. And it will just change your posture towards it. And I think as a result, you'll discover agency that you have relative to that thing that will change the complexion that that issue has for you. The crisis, the tragedy, the anxiety may still be there. It all the uncertainties, but it will have a different complexion for you than it will if you're doom scrolling primarily as the practice that shapes and gives it a sort of form for you.

SPEAKER_01 52:17

I this also goes back to, I mean, I would say, again, going back to bread and butter, things like reading your Bible in prayer, I don't feel bad about. But that whole element of the imminent frame to our general assumptions about the world and what the good life is and what it means for for life to be meaningful and okay, so many of our practices, so much of our mind, like so much of our scrolling, so many of those things keep us rooted firmly in this worldly realities of the sort that screen out the possibility of divine agency and divine providential control and divine providential care. And prayer is one of those things that that, again, pierces the veil. This is what we talk about apocalypse, we talked about that earlier, but revelation. Revelation is this appearing, this pulling back of the veil on reality, revealing the action of God, the hand of God in history. And the prayers of the saints are in there, right? Uh God has God has called us to act as if our prayers have power in the sense that they are they call on divine power. And so the the prayer actually moves you out of a restricted imminent frame mindset by just the act of saying, God, please act, is not only intrinsically efficacious, because it is, in the sense that like you are actually asking, it also acts on you insofar as it re-it shakes you. It shakes you up in it and it and it shakes you to your senses. Um there is I was talking to a friend about some of these things. Oftentimes there are there are thoughts that stop thought. There are realities that you can think about, or like a bit of news can come that can make you feel, as it were, kind of dizzy existentially, and you start to doubt things, not because you've been rationally considered, hey, somehow this now means the cosmological argument for the existence of God doesn't work anymore, or or the historical argument for the resurrection just fails, or any kind of like ra it's not. It's not. It's it's a thought, it's a reality that made you dizzy. It made you flinch existentially and made God feel less real. But it's not, it's it's not actually it it hasn't actually defeated the truth of the reality of God and his life. And it one of the things that prayer does is it it sta it stabilizes you, it steadies you, it stops the dizziness because it's it's it's almost like when you uh you you put your hand, you know, you get dizzy for a month and you put your hand on something solid, or you know, if there's a vibration occurring in the tuning fork, you you put your hand on the tuning fork and the vibration stops, the dizziness uh settles. Prayer does that. Um and that I think is part of what cultivates our ability to hope for the future in light of um so many of the real the realities that may threaten our our ability to think about a good future in their light. Um Alistair, we could keep going here for a while, but I do think we we probably have to probably have to wrap things on this episode. Uh Alistair, this has been helpful for me. Thanks for the conversation. I hope it's been helpful for you. Uh walked through the world.

SPEAKER_00 55:41

Say to our listeners that now is the season of Lent. It's I'm an Anglican, I'll say this. Um Derek, being a Presbyterian, probably won't want to talk about the benefits of Lent, but now is the time to take up practices of hope. Give up some of the practices of despair that you have had in your life and take up some practices of hope as you prepare for the great event that will ground those hopes, the event of the of the resurrection. And so I am trying to do this for myself this season, and I very much recommend that you do the same.

SPEAKER_01 56:23

And on that note, um, thanks for listening. Appreciate that. If you have found any of this helpful, feel free to share the episode, rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, any any any kind of listening streaming service that we're on. Uh, but for now, this has been Mere Fidelity.