Hope in the System
Earlier this month we lost one of the most influential and engaging biblical scholars of the past century. Dr. Walter Brueggemann died peacefully at the age of 92 on June 5, 2025. His penetrating work on the Old Testament has been a gift to the church, helping a generation of pastors and church leaders see the contested nature of the text as an expression of Israel’s ongoing struggle to live as a people delivered out of and set apart from the oppressive control of imperial rule. Shaped by the imagination of the biblical prophets, Brueggemann’s writing often carried an edge that afflicted the comfortable while comforting the afflicted. Here is a quote representative of the former, capturing the nature of hope and why it is that hopelessness has become such an enduring problem in the affluent West:
“Because hope has such a revolutionary function, it is more likely that failure to hope—hopelessness—happens among the affluent, the prosperous, the successful, the employable, the competent, for whom the present system works so well. We are the ones who are likely to be seduced into taking the present political, economic, intellectual system too seriously and equating it with reality. Indeed, it is prudent to take it that way, because that is where the jobs and benefits are. The more one benefits from the rewards of the system, the more one is enraptured with the system, until it feels like the only game in town and the whole game. Our ‘well-offness” leads us finally to absolutize, so that we may say that ‘the system is the solution.’ The system wants us to believe that, for such belief silences criticism. It makes us consenting, docile, obedient adults. The system wants to contain all our hopes and fears, wants us to settle for the available system of rewards.”
The Judgment of Hope
When we think of hope we may not often connect it with judgment. But hope, as described in Scripture, is all about judgment. Judgment is the hope for what the oppressed and the marginalized long for — for God’s righteous judgment to fall on those who have rigged the system for their own personal gain. And for those of us who are on the profitable end of things, we are tempted to equate our hope with the rewards set by the system: we hope to be prosperous, successful, employable, competent. Much of this can be summed up with the word affluent. Our hope, within the system, becomes the wish to be affluent.
And so, before we can speak of hope, there may be the need for some of us to enter into despair — the despair that comes from hearing God’s word of judgment. God’s judgment over the things we hope for. Not all hopes are created equal and to hear rightly the hope that Scripture points us to, may very well require a radical recalibration of our hopes. This begins with a willingness to question what we currently long for and aspire to. Are our hopes simply the product of what the available system of rewards has trained us to desire?
All this to say, the hope God intends for us may very well rub against our own personal goals and wishes. In this way, hope moves us out of conformity to the pattern of this age and invites us to the renewing of our minds to discern what is the will of God — the will of God, which is nothing less than God’s hope for a creation healed of the greed that makes it so only a few benefit at the expense of the many.