00:00:10.200 - 00:00:33.240

good morning there in Austin and anywhere else in the creation. So I have some questions left over from yesterday's second lecture that I'll give super brief responses to. I'll read you the questions. There are three of them and give a bit of a response to each one.

00:00:34.520 - 00:01:06.040

So the first is asking me where I have found inspiration of responsible action, large or small. The answer is, well, church, always, since I discovered it at age 16, 15, really. Drew Theological School has been a real center of activism and was very open to my taking the social activism in greener direction, and I have a good colleague there who really specializes in this, World Currents.

00:01:07.080 - 00:01:44.840

And Green Faith with Bill McKibben has been an inspiration and has some connection to Drew, New Jersey Green Faith. And I have to say, the Center for Process Studies and the kind of theology that flowed from Whitehead through the leadership of John Cobb. and his very strong sense, not just of systematic theological thought, but of consistent and multi-layered activist implications and commitments. And of course, an occasional walk by the river.

00:01:45.960 - 00:02:05.240

The second question is, how do we pursue ethical activism if those in power refuse to be in dialogue? More specifically, how do we pursue change without becoming them? Another great question. Well, most activism faces that kind of refusal.

00:02:06.240 - 00:02:23.960

And so, of course, we're going to be tempted to try to get inside the system at least a little bit more. We're already, most of it, somewhat inside of it. If we're involved in academic and church institutions, we try to get into the system a bit more so we can make more of a difference.

00:02:24.360 - 00:02:46.440

And of course, that can yield the danger of becoming the system. So, hey, how to prevent that? Well, staying in this kind of conversation will prevent that. this kind of conversation in a way that rolls along through the weeks, through the months, through the years.

00:02:46.920 - 00:03:15.000

The third question, an important one, even if we allow ourselves to be lured, it's corporations in the US government that need to change. They use power and control. How do we win with love, right? yes, those of us who join this kind of discussion shouldn't get preoccupied with like making ourselves perfect, changing ourselves endlessly.

00:03:15.880 - 00:03:45.080

And maybe the lure, if we tune into it, is not individualistic, not about just how we should become, but calling us into communication and into coalition of immense width, ultimately cosmic. But I don't know. No one knows if we will win. Love has been known to end in crucifixion, hasn't it?

00:03:46.440 - 00:04:17.560

But the resurrection hope persists no matter what, and not just impractically. There's deep hunger across a wide swath of the global population, even the population of the United States. for a just and sustainable world starting now. So starting now, then I'll move right on to my lecture.

00:04:17.640 - 00:04:23.160

Yes. Just checking in with Mona. No, I'll move right on in. Great.

00:04:24.600 - 00:04:39.160

So this third one is hope. Embracing plenitude. And let me start with a quote. We as Christians are neither optimists nor pessimists.

00:04:39.480 - 00:05:00.120

We are hopeful. Now who said that? Well, here at Austin Presbyterian, I couldn't resist quoting a bit of Karl Barth, no doubt the most influential Reformed theologian of the past century. Not that I assume all of you or even any of you are Barthians, but

00:05:01.960 - 00:05:30.120

I still feel I can't think about hope without that clear distinction he makes of hope from optimism. In these days, if I can't think about hope, then I can't think with hope. And then really, what's the point of thinking? So given that it is so common to identify hope with optimism,

00:05:31.240 - 00:06:24.520

I imagine even among many of us, you here, I find myself often repeating that distinction, especially in the United States, the land of insistent optimism. Optimism not just in the sense of an adventurous spirit of new beginnings or of a productive confidence, but of a marketplace of commodified promises a whole capitalist economy of optimism, prosperity, gospel, endless growth and all. Our globally national economy is now with renewed anti-scientific and anti-ecological optimism, threatening the shared future of our planet, our so unevenly shared planet.

00:06:26.080 - 00:07:12.760

And since I've been harping on yesterday about the condition of the earth and our creaturely responsibility, it seems theologically crucial to challenge that optimism with its certitude and to challenge it precisely in the name of hope, reminding ourselves, first of all, that the biblical hope which is the source of the very notion of hope in our civilization as a collective perspective, was born from a history of overwhelming struggle and ever-deferred triumph. And hope comes into its own, theologically, in the prophets.

00:07:13.960 - 00:07:40.760

Such hope has nothing to do with the complacent certainty of optimism. So I will insist that there is an element of uncertainty that distinguishes an honest hope from, well, an addictive dope. Couldn't help that. My point will not be to weaken hope, but to strengthen it by keeping it credible.

00:07:41.720 - 00:08:15.160

And I mean that not just in terms of our skeptical realism about politics and ecology these days. These days in which hope for world healing for any new earth of true earth renewal can seem Pollyannish, short for naive optimism. So real believability isn't about unquestionable knowledge, is it? It needs the test of doubt, of skepticism.

00:08:19.160 - 00:09:13.960

And that can seem a little too modern, but I do mean belief in terms of the biblical sense of faith, of trust in a God who is trustworthy, who does come through somehow. But perhaps in the sense I have been setting forth process theologically, not as the great fixer who intervenes at the last minute or who controls outcomes, but as the great companion who calls, who offers possibilities, not fixes. The fellow sufferer who understands, Whitehead, and offers the divine lure of a possibility that requires creaturely collaboration.

00:09:17.640 - 00:09:34.360

Oh, that co-creativity. A possibility not just for long-term outcomes. So let me suggest a simple definition of hope. Hope is the embrace of possibility.

00:09:35.280 - 00:09:55.000

The embrace of possibility. a desired possibility. But hope is not just a desire for something better. To embrace a possibility is already to begin to realize it, to recognize it, and to actualize it.

00:09:56.120 - 00:10:35.000

But let us remember all along that possibility may or may not get actualized, Theologically speaking, the divine lure may get actualized a bit, or not a bit, or quite a bit, or even in some unique fullness of incarnation. Hope for the possible lacks the certitude of optimism. It's another kind of strength altogether, a kind of confidence in the original sense of confides,

00:10:35.720 - 00:11:08.600

with faith. So an honest hope, even in its luminosity, casts shadows, shadows of uncertainty, of anxiety, even of doubt, as in its biblical form, hope, with Elijah, Job, Peter, has moments of tormented uncertainty. And as you may also have experienced, the shadows are sometimes Disturbing, intrusive.

00:11:09.400 - 00:11:34.840

Or they may just frame what comes to be with alternative possibilities. It's could have been, it's might yet becomes. The point is that uncertainties and all, to embrace a possibility, to hope, already begins to shape the future. For as cited yesterday, Bell Hooks says,

00:11:35.400 - 00:12:04.600

To be hopeful is to be responsible for the future. Without hope, does our sense of responsibility, our ability to respond, get crippled? Well, surely responsibility for the future requires a present embrace of the possible. Not because we know the outcome, but because with our choices, our responses, and our non-responses,

00:12:05.240 - 00:12:26.280

We help to bring the outcome about, some outcome. All that we do, that we become, partly forms the future. Even our feelings of helplessness, of hopelessness, become part of our futures. Whichever possible future becomes actual.

00:12:28.840 - 00:13:01.080

And right now, I think many of us are tempted to those feelings. of helpless and hopeless. Planetarily speaking, the present political situation threatens to push the ecological situation over the edge. Edge in the sense of the Greek word eschatos, as in eschatology, not originally meaning end things so much as edge things.

00:13:02.360 - 00:13:27.960

Time on edge. And these are edgy times indeed. The very life of us interdependent creatures in this planetary bit of the creation is now caught in a deterioration that may prove irreversible. Scientists almost unanimously insist that this decade must be the big turnabout on greenhouse gas emissions.

00:13:29.000 - 00:14:02.920

And instead, halfway through, We are on course for unthinkable levels of reduction, not of carbon emissions, but of environmental regulations. As I began to write this paper, the New York Times was running an article headlined, Trump Wants to Halt Almost All Coal Plant Shutdowns. it could get messy.

00:14:04.680 - 00:14:36.520

The mess doesn't refer to the environmental effects of coal mining, rather to the fact that, quote, even as administration officials vowed this week to head off scheduled retirements of coal plants, some aging plants are now breaking and costs could run to the billions. So that it might be profitable enough to keep them running. Well, that's an awfully shadowy bit of hope.

00:14:37.480 - 00:15:20.680

And it hardly offsets the danger that is becoming real day by day with the reversing of the modest Clinton and Biden levels of regulation and of commitment to wean us off the production of coal, which is only one example less key than oil, as you well know in Texas. At the same moment, We got the invasion of Venezuela in pursuit of its oil reserves, just coincidentally the largest in the world. Through all of this, the Global North, responsible for most of the warming, the sea rise, the droughts, remains the least affected.

00:15:21.840 - 00:15:49.480

And so yes, it is a time when those of us concerned with the planetary mess of carbon emissions, might find ourselves running low on hope. But then we get tempted to the hopelessness that runs in a vicious circle with the causes of the hopelessness. Because we don't think we can make things better, we don't try.

00:15:50.040 - 00:16:06.040

Why bother? And therefore, things get worse. But perhaps hopelessness doesn't need to work that way. I am thinking of a little book called Embracing Hopelessness.

00:16:07.080 - 00:16:25.480

Its author is the social ethicist, Miguel de la Torre. It's a different kind of embrace than my embracing possibility, for sure. But I find I can't just disagree with him when he argues the following. Let me read him.

00:16:27.000 - 00:17:06.760

In the midst of overlapping unjust structures and the intersections of racism, classism, ethnic discrimination, sexism, heterosexism, and all the other ideologically based isms imaginable, a sense of hopelessness grips the soul as realization of the depths of oppression makes solutions appear simplistic. And theologically, he quotes Ecclesiastes in response. I gazed upon the tears of the oppressed, and they have no one to comfort them. Power resides with their oppressors.

00:17:08.120 - 00:17:27.880

Better not to have been born, the author of Ecclesiastes concludes. And de la Torre translate this as S.H. star T happens. Well, it sure does.

00:17:29.480 - 00:18:09.080

He even calls for a solidarity of hopelessness. And yes, if we take the systemic suffering of the oppressed seriously, we have to honor their frequent sense of hopelessness. But I do wonder if that solidarity with the hopeless necessarily requires an answering hopelessness. Bunch of de la Torre's book is a critique of Jurgen Multmann's Theology of Hope, certainly the major doctrinal exposition, perhaps in Christian history, of hope as such.

00:18:09.800 - 00:18:38.360

It shaped my theological development, starting with a visit from him to my seminary half a century ago to the year. De la Torres finds the theology of hope too Western, confident, embedded in the colonizing northern sense of progress. And this is a worthy concern, isn't it? And yet, it is above all Moltmann's version of hope that has

00:18:39.800 - 00:19:03.160

led European Protestantism toward attention to systemic suffering. Liberation theology, without his mediation, wasn't doing it. Genuine hope, he wrote, is not blind optimism. It is hope with, which sees the suffering and yet believes in the future.

00:19:05.080 - 00:19:30.520

Those open eyes, we might say, are opening the portal of possibility. But again, must hope mean belief in the future? Believing, as he says, in the future. Belief in English is maybe a more awkward term than the German glaube, which is actually better translated faith.

00:19:32.240 - 00:20:00.280

And belief in English suggests a kind of knowledge, even a certainty, which is different from faith in English and its character of trust. So translation won't completely settle this. Moltmann does perhaps bring hope a bit too close to certainty. The strength of his eschatology can render faith in the promise a little too much like the security of a guarantee.

00:20:01.400 - 00:20:34.280

And in this he remains, if I may say so here, a strong Calvinist. So he writes that Calvin's concept of faith is always determined by the certainty of hope. And he then cites this passage of Calvin's, since it is certain that God does not deceive us in our hopes, hope must not be full of doubt. It is certain that God cannot do otherwise than correspond to our hopes.

00:20:36.520 - 00:21:01.960

Faith believes that eternal life is given to us, but hope expects that this day, excuse me, hope expects that this will one day be revealed. So then, hope, he says, keeps faith upright and alive. And I cannot disagree. Hope must not be full of doubt.

00:21:03.400 - 00:21:35.960

But that is not the same as saying that hope must be free of all doubt. And yes, I keep faith in eternal life, and I do imagine its eventual, fuller revelation. But that does not mean any certainty about how things will work out in human history, individual or collective. Calvin is not talking about historical happy endings, really, anyway there.

00:21:36.440 - 00:22:09.000

But this is also not a simple leap to the otherworldly. The key concept that Calvin emphasizes and that Multmann carries forward is that of Perseverancia Sanctorum, Perseverance of the faith, perseverance in faith of the faithful, no matter what, which means in face of the cross. And I would embrace this constant

00:22:10.360 - 00:23:00.200

Though perhaps without all the doctrinal baggage of election and predestination, with which Moltmann is far more patient than on this front, I'm glad I am a Wesleyan. But I can't underplay Moltmann's theology of hope, which never ceased to open itself to criticism and transformation into a rigorously pluralistic and ecumenical commitment to what he subtitled his 2019 Spirit of Hope, Theology for a World in Peril. I'm especially grateful for the degree of ecological attention he strengthened on and on through the decades of his writing.

00:23:01.120 - 00:23:24.440

But already in the 1967 Theology of Hope, There is a simple proposition I find myself returning to. Sorry. That proposition is, the life of time is hope.

00:23:26.200 - 00:24:06.520

That enlivening of time through hope is a thread running through all Multman's work. Or maybe we should call the thread a cord, since cord is actually the first meaning of the Hebrew word tikvah, the word for hope. And maybe it is that lively connection woven of many strands that makes hope key to our commitments, hope rather than certitude or prediction, and key to our ability to honor those commitments, to act on them with responsibility.

00:24:08.040 - 00:24:57.080

Without hope, time is just pulled into a straight line, isn't it? A line made straight, oh, so straight, by deterministic causes and predictable outcomes, or into a circle of repetition denuded of openness to the future, and so of surprise and novelty. Perseverencia in hope is not about mere causal chains or predictability, though of course there's plenty of both. But no, hope, formal one, and in a significant way for Calvin, breaks open the chains and circles of time, not by an omnipotent intervention from above,

00:24:57.480 - 00:25:26.080

but through the liveliness of an irreducible freedom. Moltmann, more than Calvin. The spontaneous creativity, the co-creativity of all of the creatures of the creation. And what I want to emphasize is that co-creativity weaves creatures together into the cord of hope, tikvah, together with each other and with

00:25:26.920 - 00:25:54.520

our creator. And in that creative connectivity of the cosmos, the eschatos, the edge, is there at every moment in the edginess of time itself. No simple end there. But of course, that very edge, that eschatos, reveals at the same time the deep link of any biblical eschatology,

00:25:55.160 - 00:26:21.160

to the apocalypse. Yep, that last book. The vision of the Book of Revelation has been endlessly replayed in Western history, a history threatening often to come to an end. But for all its edginess still unfolding, and still I do not find myself free of that apocalypse.

00:26:21.720 - 00:26:49.960

So Yeah, I don't quit wondering whether we are in the last phase of the hospitality of the planet to human habitation. So whenever I use the word apocalypse, I have to repeat, apocalypsis does not mean the end of history or the end of the world. It means disclosure, not closure.

00:26:51.240 - 00:27:19.960

John of Patmos predicts horrendous levels of human and non-human destruction depicted in hallucinatory visions. No, I don't mean the prophet was on hallucinogens, not on dope, but on hope. The shadowy kind of visions. And those levels of destruction have often been experienced ever since.

00:27:21.720 - 00:27:41.960

for particular contexts. And of course, the reading of the apocalypse as the literal end of a predictable timeline has all long served as a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. This we see in the way a significant proportion of the present U.S. population.

00:27:42.600 - 00:28:32.200

The white Christian right segment places their hope for eternal life in an end-of-the-world scenario, rendering ecological destruction and global warming signs, good signs, that the Lord is coming soon. And tragically, that segment of Christianity has been all too effectively mobilized for the eco-politics driving our planet towards something very like the doom they foresee. I'm not suggesting that such self-fulfilling prophecy can be blamed on John of Patmos. No, you know, no more than the imperialism of the Christian West can be blamed on the Gospels.

00:28:33.480 - 00:29:19.480

But its vicious cycle of faith and doom is all the more reason that we must occasionally offer alternative visions of apocalypsis, of the shadowed hope that discloses great destruction preceding great transformation. And at that edge, we may still discern the liveliness of the life of time that is hope, not about mere beginning and ends, framing a timeline. We might instead think of the alpha and omega as both, as each present in every moment of every creature.

00:29:20.360 - 00:29:59.480

In process theology, God lures in the initial aim, the alpha of each moment, and then receives what has become. in the omega of that same moment, taking each creaturely becoming into God's own infinitely becoming consequent moment. So the creation, whether we call it universe or multiverse, is unfathomably vibrant. Each quantum of energy making up anything is a unit of vibration.

00:30:00.120 - 00:30:26.760

vibrating in the vast dance of the creation. Each pulse, each quantum of which we know has an element of unpredictability, indeed of indeterminacy. So a kind of liveliness pulses in everything, not just in the biological evolutions we call life. It seems all to be alive, woven of endless cords of vibrating relation.

00:30:29.040 - 00:31:26.600

And if our theology proceeds in that vibe of hope, that perseverancia sanctum, if it proceeds in that hope vibe, perhaps the connective creativity of the cosmos will not cease to revitalize our efforts, efforts to actualize the improbable. to enact in our lives, in our churches, in our local and planetary communities that hope that is the embrace of possibility. But it was never and never will be easy. Think of Revelation 1.9, speaking about those who share with you in Jesus the persecution

00:31:27.160 - 00:31:59.640

and the kingdom and the patient endurance. And surely that patient endurance, if it is not to go numb or passive, to give up on the kingdom, does need the vibrancy of hope, and it needs it regularly in the vibrations of the day-to-day. As James Baldwin put it, in the midst of the civil rights struggle, Hope is invented every day.

00:32:04.200 - 00:32:25.320

Hope has to be reinvented, recreated constantly. That seems key to the perseverance. It isn't an emotion regulated by the unchanging predictability of a preordained future. Hope has to be improvised, restarted like our lives.

00:32:26.360 - 00:32:55.960

Hope as embrace of possibility means hope that faces live reality. And as James Baldwin also said, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed that is not faced. And if we face, we can share, and vice versa. If we share, we can face.

00:32:56.520 - 00:33:18.680

and help each other to face. Which is why I keep finding it odd that though 90% of U.S. Christian religious leaders believe in human-caused climate change, 90% of us, a half have never discussed it with their congregations.

00:33:20.440 - 00:33:43.240

Perhaps the topic just seems too disheartening. And indeed, we are day by day overloaded with demoralizing examples. In order to face them and help our communities to do so, surely we need the enlivening energy of possibilities already being significantly actualized.

00:33:43.960 - 00:34:16.600

Then, if hope is the embrace of possibility, it can be embracing a dance partner, one of which might be, wait for it, the state of Texas. So let me quote from an important information source. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Texas is the largest energy-producing and energy-consuming state in the nation.

00:34:16.920 - 00:34:33.320

Texas produces more electricity than any other state. Thus, Texas has a disproportionate impact on the ability of the U.S. and the global community to mitigate climate change. Startling, since

00:34:34.600 - 00:35:08.920

though it wasn't always red, Texas is the nation's largest and most powerful Republican state, and it flows smoothly with big oil. Well, there's something not everyone realizes. So according to the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, despite being home to one of the largest petrochemical industries in the world, Texas has a large and growing renewable energy market.

00:35:09.480 - 00:35:52.120

The state is third in solar jobs, just behind California and Florida. And employment in the solar industry has increased by nearly 30% between 2018 and 2023. And recent reporting by the United States Energy Information Administration found that in Texas, utility scale solar, which is solar energy sold directly to the state electrical grid, generated 50% more energy within the first nine months of 2025 than in the same period in 24, and nearly four times more than in 21.

00:35:52.920 - 00:36:26.520

I was also amazed by data just released from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT for short, which is the power grid operator for most of the state. In its 2025 demand and energy report shows that wind, solar, and nuclear power combined to provide 46% of the electricity in Texas last year. That percentage of zero emissions electricity will likely expand further this year, even in the face of attacks from Washington.

00:36:27.320 - 00:37:00.440

because demand continues to rise and renewables continue to provide the fastest and cheapest power on the grid. Solar in particular has grown at a breakneck pace, only behind second place wind and 1st place natural gas. Coal has dropped to #4. So this data suggests that hope for a transition to green energy, and therefore to a sustainable planet, is not an eco-theological delusion.

00:37:00.440 - 00:37:31.720

Of course, it does not assure us of a sustainable future. Even if the economic motives keep enough Texas Republicans from surrendering to Washington's war on renewable energy, still we have no guarantee. But we do have real possibilities, possibilities we can embrace responsibly, because they aren't just pie in the polluted sky. And without such examples, our ecosocial warnings become apocalyptic platitudes.

00:37:33.000 - 00:38:10.280

We don't need virtuous platitude. We do need what we might call planitude, an attitude of planetary belonging. a revelatory responsiveness that forms a vibrant plenum of responsibility. Plenitude not accidentally suggests plenitude, not the kind of plenty ripped off from the majority of humans and other creatures, rather the kind based on all having what they need and so sharing a fullness beyond need.

00:38:11.160 - 00:38:40.760

Such plenitude can accommodate a plenitude of life for all. And it comes theologically supercharged. Indeed, it can even be called an earth theology, not about the earth separate from the rest of the universe. But in the ground and waters of this plenitude, we are earth theologically grounded in a plenitude that in faith includes and exceeds all planets.

00:38:41.720 - 00:39:19.880

So as the proto-scientific mystic Nicholas of Cuza put it, half a millennium ago, because all is in all and each is in each, therefore God is in all and all is in God. Well, I mentioned yesterday that visionary cardinal beat Copernicus by half a century. to realizing the Earth is not the fixed center of the universe. Cuza recognized that our creaturely interconnectivity expresses a God-world interconnection at every level of existence.

00:39:21.640 - 00:40:05.880

But modernity went the opposite way, cutting everything off from everything else into separate beings, none more separate than God, who therefore became more and more of a platitude. But might a postmodern plenitude instead find itself in the fullness of a boundless cosmos, intimately indwelled by the divine infinite, calling all of our finitudes to mutual responsibility and creativity? And so, beginning to end here, if there really is what we call God within each vibrating quantum, within each moment of your complex becoming, doubts and all.

00:40:07.560 - 00:40:52.840

This isn't about God in charge, in control, in command, but God within the creative process, calling for creative collaboration, calling, and perhaps still hoping, can God not also hope, that our species will come through in time? within the life of time, or especially at the edge of planetary apocalypse. Our species' co-creativity with all the remaining creatures can yet break through into a vibrant attitude of planitude. It might be that this hope has its chance of fulfillment only if we recognize it as hope and not as certainty.

00:40:54.120 - 00:41:21.400

It's promise, not a prediction or a guarantee. As Antoine de Santix-Supervey put it in 1948, not a hopeful year for earthlings. As to the future, the task is not to predict it, but to make it possible. And if hope is the embrace of possibility, it is making possible.

00:41:21.960 - 00:41:50.680

And that embrace may reveal a love that does not quit. In the ancient hope of the new heaven and earth, vibrates not impossibility so much as improbable possibility. The pulsation of the divine spirit does not suggest a supernatural production coming down from one high. And yet,

00:41:51.040 - 00:42:26.920

A hypernatural possibility does persist. The chance of a new attitude of platitude spreading across our little corner of this divine creation. So this hope that faces the worst in order to discern the best, the best that is really possible, this hope will continue to confront apocalypse. And that unveiling of the causes of the systemic evil can reveal in any moment also a common good.

00:42:27.880 - 00:43:19.400

Because in facing the evil, we strengthen that goodness, and we find vibrancy, impulses of planetary alliance, in intersectionalities that exclude none of our specific priorities, but create new solidarities. colorful, intersecting solidarities of the spirit in bonds of multi-denominational, multi-religious, and multi-secular collaboration that bring not dilution, not homogeneity, but the connectivity of difference in the sunshine and in the shadows. Amen? And thank you there in Austin so much.

00:43:19.640 - 00:43:21.640

Wish ever with you in your sunshine.