Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and as our sins sorely hinder us from running the race set before us, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, towhom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and forever. Amen

One of these days, I am going to get around to reading all of Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope.[1] In this book, at one point, he makes an essential point for contemporary Christians:

If it is hope that maintains and upholds faith and keeps it moving on, if it is hope that draws the believer into the life of love, then it will also be hope that is the mobilizing and driving force of faith’s thinking, of its knowledge of, and reflections on, human nature, history and society. Faith hopes in order to know what it believes. Hence all its knowledge will be an anticipatory, fragmentary knowledge forming a prelude to the promised future, and as such is committed to hope. [2]

The hope we celebrate at Christmas is exactly this kind of hope. We cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to a skeptical world that God became human. We cannot prove against all odds that faith is superior to skepticism, that love is more powerful than hate, or that the wisdom of the cross is wiser than the wisdom of human beings or AI engines.

The ancient Jews could not prove to one another that God was faithful even in the midst of attacks by larger and more powerful world powers. What the prophets did do was look far into the future to God’s promises. One of those promises we celebrate at Christmas comes from the prophet Isaiah:

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this (Isaiah 9:6-7).

This and other promises followed the ancient Jews throughout their long history of defeat and captivity by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medo-Persians, Greeks, and Romans. They did not always or even typically understand the promise of God’s deliverance. They did not always or even normally experience that deliverance. But they read these words at the synagogue, they shared them with their children, and they lived in the hope they found in the unfulfilled promises of God.

The Moral Passion of Christmas

Christ and the earliest Christians explained the meaning of the incarnation in terms of the Old Testament, especially Isaiah. It was from Isaiah that Jesus and the Apostles taught:

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:26-27, see also Luke 18:31-34; 22:37; 24:44-47; Acts 28: 23-28; I Peter 1:10-11).

The Jews expected a Messiah who would give them victory over their oppressors in their national history—a Messiah who would be a great conqueror, hero, and king. Instead, they received a crucified Messiah who ruled in weakness and powerlessness upon a cross, defeating the enemies of evil, division, and death in a way that no one could have imagined. This was the “foolishness of the Cross” of which Paul spoke to the Corinthians:

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (I Corinthians 1:18-25).

A key need in modern American politics is for both the left and right to realize that a perfect society cannot exist in human history. We are limited, flawed beings who cannot achieve such a goal, even if it were possible—which it is not. The creation of a perfect society is beyond what flawed humans can accomplish. Additionally, we are driven by endless hopes and dreams and are never content with any achievement, no matter how significant. All we can do is respond to the needs and issues of our time and try to improve things within the boundaries of our place in history, steering clear of the chaos and violence that come with every effort to impose a perfect order on others in history.

We can and should long for a “Wonderful Counselor” and “Prince of Peace,” whose shoulders are strong enough to bear the brokenness of the world and the hopes and dreams of a finite and flawed human race. Still, we should not delude ourselves that such a person can appear within the history of any secular, human society. He came once, and it was not to produce a secular paradise. It was to bear the brokenness of his and every human culture. When Christ comes, human history will not “enter a new secular phase.” Human history will be over and something different and grander will begin.

His next appearance will, instead, mark the end of history as we know it. His coming will not mean a perfect socialist or capitalist world, for whatever world exists at that final moment in time will pass away in the face of the “New Heaven and New Earth” of which Isaiah and Revelation speak. The world we inhabit with all its beauty, glory, uncertainty and violence must pass away when the one who can meet our deepest desires, the Desire of Nations, finally arrives.

In the meantime, what we can do is given to us by one of the prophets when he said:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8).

Conclusion

What can be achieved within history is what I would call a humble politics of wisdom and love, of nurturing slow organic change; of eliminating evils gently, even when working with diligence and speed; of patiently working to end poverty and war and all the other scourges of the human race with a wise understanding that we will ultimately fail, because the creation of a perfect world is a task too great for our limited human moral and spiritual abilities. “The poor will always be with us” and “Only the dead will never now war again.” This is the tragedy of history.

I hope by the end of next year we will all recognize that the Romantic hope of a perfect world within history that gave us the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Communist Chinese Revolution and numerous bad policy decisions in the Western Democracies was based upon a harmful delusion concerning the possibilities and potentials of secular politics. What is needed is not a continuation of the Nietzschean, Marxist, or Laisse Faire Capitalist ideal, but something new and different. When we finally end the period of decadent, Hyper-Modernity we are in, there is hope for a more human future.

Jesus and the Apostles urged us not to look to the worldly wise or the worldly powerful for our salvation. Instead, as we celebrate this week, they suggested that we look at a baby born in a manger and at a broken body nailed to a cross. We do not want to think that our true hope lies in a poor, helpless baby in a manger or a dying man, but paradoxically, this is our best and only hope.[3]

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1993).

[2] I found the quote at https://www.logos.com/product/43568/theology-of-hope-on-the-ground-and-the-implications-of-a-christian-eschatology(downloaded December 8, 2025).

[3] This post was a fairly substantial rewrite of a sermon prepared for Advent Presbyterian Church in Cordova, Tennessee several ears ago.