The (original) Audacity of Hope
What explains the virality and vitality of the Abrahamic vision?
Roughly four thousand years ago, one person had a radical idea:
The future can be better than the past.
That visionary could have been any human being who looked at a broken world and thought: There’s gotta be a better way.
He or she could have been named Jedediah or Theodore or Bernice or Kevin or Chantelle or Ralph — it doesn’t really matter. Someone at some point in the past suddenly woke up to this revolutionary new idea of progress, of Hope writ large, and then built his life and his children’s lives around it.
Except here at Out of Babel, the guy’s name is Abraham, and the Story that began with his quest eventually split into three major subplots — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which today have more than four billion participants. That number isn’t news to me or probably to you. But to see it mapped (above) and to realize this transformative Story spread from a single person — well, that still takes my breath away.
Trust the material
In case you’re wondering: Yes, anyone today could have that same Abrahamic insight, and gather a group of like-minded souls to form a new community that embraces life-affirming values, the audacity of hope, and a dream of redemption. But why start from scratch? Why begin again when our ancestors have spent thousands of years working on the same project? Instead of trashing the Story thus far and wiping the slate clean, why not work creatively with the scenes and characters and plot twists we already have in the books, and then write the next chapter by building on what we’ve been fortunate enough to inherit?
Or as Wendell Berry once wrote:
“I have a considerable debt myself to Buddhism and Buddhists. But there is an enormous number of people, and I am one of them, whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity. We were born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams. We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it. A better possibility is that this, our native religion, should survive and renew itself, so that it may become as largely and truly instructive as we need it to be. On such a survival and renewal of the Christian religion may depend the survival of that Creation which is its subject.”
Good news
You don’t need to believe in any Old Man in The Sky Hocus-Pocus-Woo-Woo to acknowledge that significant parts of this Story, written thousands of years ago, have ultimately proven to be true.
