“GREAT EXPECTATIONS”.
“Great Expectations” is the title of a novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1860-61. The book relates the coming-of-age story of Pip, a young orphan, against the backdrop of 19th-century England, exploring themes of social class, ambition, love, and personal growth.
Dickens wrote in an era when Great Britain was great indeed: her golden Age, a period when the sun never set in her empire, which stretched from ocean unto ocean.
Eric Hobsbawm, a historian, born in Vienna, in his classics The Age of Empire and The Age of Revolution, stated that the 19th Century began in 1815, with the Battle of Waterloo, and ended in 1914, with the onset of World War I.
He suggested that World War I – 1914-18 – really ended in 1945, when World War II, begun in 1939, concluded with the defeat of Hitler. In the same vein he proposed that the 20th Century began in 1914 and ended in 1989, with the Collapse of the Soviet Empire, creating a 75 years century. In that short time-frame the world saw two global wars, the Spanish Flu and a severe economic depression: four events that swept away millions of lives and entire systems of government: 10 percent of people born in 1900, died violently before 1945. Also, then Communism became a messianic faith, peasants became city dwellers, housewives became workers—and, increasingly leaders – while populations turned literate, even as new technologies threatened to make print obsolete. Truly a remarkable era!
And today? Lunacy looms.
If I were the name the period in which we now live, 1989 to 2025, I would label it as THE AGE OF DECLINE, a world still filled with conflict, a world where nations increasingly quarrel about possession of the world’s diminishing resources, a world tired and suffering from old age, with a senior lunatic leader loose among the Republican USA elite.
This Trump regime, rather than carefully husbanding the planet’s dwindling possessions, acts exactly contrary to reality: it is accelerating the exploitation of the ever faster disappearing of the earth’s treasures. By his irrational interventions, he speeds up global financial collapse, and, makes true what is portrayed in Revelation 18: 11: The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore.
Just imagine: Trump refuses to see that natural resources are becoming more expensive to extract; he ignores that fresh water is often inadequate for the world’s rising population; he adds debt while debt levels are already too high; he increases complexity to the breaking point; for many, an already inadequate standard of living is becoming even more unaffordable; and, while an increasing world population needs more food, his disastrous anti-environmental policies imperil the global food supply.
All these symptoms strongly suggest that the world economy is headed for collapse.
So, why Great Expectations?
In Charles Dickens’ time economic and national prospects were, indeed, glorious and full of promise. Now only demented politicians like Donald Trump tout triumphant times.
Still, there is a remnant, a faithful remnant, a tiny minority with a different view on future events, because of their ‘faith’. James, in his New Testament Bible book, bluntly states the ‘faith without works is dead.’ (James 2: 17).
That begs the question: How then shall we live? What sort of ‘works’ are we required to do?
A quick look back.
In the Middle Ages the struggle against the bad influences of the world resulted in a retreat to monasticism. Luther, who first entered a monastery, later saw the monastic solution as wrong, because it restricted the extent of responsible life to the walls of the monastery or convent.
Searching the Bible, Luther and Calvin saw that Reformation required the unity of God and the reconciliation of the world with God in Jesus Christ. Our world is holy, as Karen Armstrong has shown in her book, Sacred Nature.
All humans are appointed to this concrete responsibility; They must regard the world, first as being created and loved, then as condemned and again reconciled by God. Both church reformers believed that our daily actions must reflect this insight.
In other words: The ’state of the world’ is our responsibility, given to us in and through Jesus Christ, who became a fully ‘human’ person for that purpose, and will return soon in that fully ‘human’ form.
Those are the Great Expectations we look forward to. Because God in Christ assumed humanity, and, because God said ‘yes’ to us women and men, we have the responsibility, the right, but also the obligation to live and to act in the full realization that God’s world is and will become fully ours. (John 3: 16)
The question remains: “How to act ‘responsibly’. What is our ‘response’?
I believe that our ‘response’ has almost become impossible, as Evil – cars, wars, pollution – has become inescapable, leading to Collapse. Then God will return to rectify everything, and restore Paradise, the Garden of Eden, the New Earth where everything fits perfectly.
In the meantime consider Luther’s words, expressed in Latin: Pecca Fortiter, meaning, “Sin bravely’, while constantly anticipating the GREAT EXPECTATIONS.