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This paper reads Wu Yaozong's 1943 theological work, No One Has Seen God (没有人看见过上帝), as a case study in the dangers of collapsing divine transcendence into historical immanence. Wu's two-dimensional ontology, indebted to a Spinozist philosophical imagination, ultimately dissolves the vertical reality of God into the horizontal movement of revolutionary history. The paper traces three interlocking developments: 1) the subordination of transcendence to material process, 2) the silencing of classical eschatological hopes such as resurrection and the return of Christ, and 3) the conferral of final, eschatological meaning upon revolutionary praxis. Wu's move is not Bultmann's existential reinterpretation but something more consequential; namely, the structural erasure of a God who can speak against history. The bitter irony is that when Mao's Cultural Revolution turned against Wu himself, his theology had already surrendered the only ground from which resistance, grief, and hope beyond history might have been spoken.
This paper argues that in the face of intersecting global crises—climate collapse, political instability, and societal uncertainty, Christian theology must not only relinquish hope in an omnipotent, interventionist God but more importantly surrender its traditional eschatological framework in order to avoid despair. While some theologians advocate abandoning hope in the omnipotence of God, this paper contends that the problem is not only hope in God’s omnipotence but one based in eschatological hope. Rather than give up hope entirely, this paper thus proposes a shift toward Indigenous relational and spatial understandings of Creator, as articulated by Vine Deloria Jr., George Tinker, and Randy Woodley. These frameworks prioritize place, relationality, and non‑anthropocentric creation over temporal promises. Relinquishing eschatological hope enables a theologically honest, palliative faith that accepts human finitude and finality without abandoning the reality or presence of Creator.
This paper explores the eschatological significance of Black identity by construing Blackness as fugitive performance. It aims to establish the Black body as a site and symbol of Christian hope without abstracting or distancing it from the experiences of subjection that shape its historical reality. Accordingly, it considers the ambivalence and multidimensionality of Blackness as a choreography of freedom within captivity, a lived performance in which the shape of Black life is seen to simultaneously reflect, resist, and transcend the constraints and definitions imposed upon it by antiblack violence. Through a theo-choreographic interpretation of Harriet Jacobs’ garret experience, it proposes that Black bodies are constituted in, as, and through fugitive performance and identifies this performance as the instantiation of Black hope. Such hope anticipates the redemption, transformation, and glorification of Blackness and gestures toward a notion of eschatological identity that suffuses and transcends the limitations of oppressed existence.
In this paper I argue that progressivist and realist Augustinians mischaracterize Augustine’s theology of hope in ways that diminish its significance for contemporary Christianity. Progressivist Augustinians attribute Christian hope’s realization to God’s empowerment of creation’s historical advance, compromising its credibility amidst profound environmental and technological pessimism. Realist Augustinians avoid this vulnerability by ascribing Christian hope’s realization to God’s supra-historical consummation of creation, yet they construe this hope primarily as consolation for inevitable moral failure and so strip the Christian life of its teleology. Augustine, however, presents hope as structured by two anticipations: God’s unilateral consummation of creation and humanity’s participation in that consummation. Moreover, since such participation is constituted by love, this second anticipation orders hope to love. Augustine’s account thereby restores a teleological relationship among the theological virtues that sustains hope amid historical pessimism with the realists while summoning people to do what good they can with the progressivists.