The word ‘uncertainty’ is much in the news these days. A newspaper survey as I write this reveals uncertainty over; war and peace, economic performance, the rule of international law, the future of the prime minister, the reach of AI, and the prospects of more than one Premiership manager.
In October of last year, Kristalina Georgieva, Head of the International Monetary Fund captured the prevailing mood with the warning: ‘Buckle up: uncertainty is the new normal.’
But is uncertainty the new normal, or is a greater awareness of uncertainty the new normal? I came across an account, recently declassified, of how in 1983 amidst escalating Cold War tensions, the Soviet Union armed one hundred aircraft with nuclear bombs and had them combat ready on the runway to launch nuclear strikes across Western Europe. I was ten years old at the time, oblivious to the fact that the world almost ended before I had made it out of primary school.
Writing in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II CS Lewis wrote ‘Life has never been normal.’ His observation was that ‘Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies.’
Lewis argued that moments of tangible uncertainty and existential crisis actually do a service to those holding naive assumptions about what life should be like, noting… ‘We are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.’
If uncertainty is the progenitor of disillusionment where does that position a society buckling up for a ‘new normal’ of uncertainty?
Some contemporary voices argue that Western thought and experience stand on the precipice of an inevitable descent into radical disenchantment, where any quest for meaning or purpose is a futile pursuit. This is the disintegrated vision portrayed by 2025 Nobel Laureate Lazlo Krasznahorka, in his dystopian novels which portray history as a process of decay where we live storied lives without meaning or coherence.
Others, and the 2025 Reith Lecturer, Rutger Bregman is an example of this, observe that people cope with times of upheaval and collapse by embracing a vacuous morality and an ‘unseriousness’ which avoids engagement with the threats and challenges that society faces, in favour of trivial and trifling tasks and pursuits that are ultimately of little value or benefit.
But is there another way? Is there another perspective, another way of looking at reality, that embraces uncertainty, that welcomes disillusionment, and yet finds hope beyond what is lived and seen?
Recently I picked up a book called ‘Light in the Valley of the Shadow of Death’ a contemporary collection of essays, published by Langham Partnership, and written by Christian writers in Ukraine. Drawing on imagery from the book of Revelation Denis Gorenkov (a Ukrainian Army Chaplain) quotes how a friend was once told … ‘There is no road back to Eden. There is only one that calls us ahead to the New Jerusalem.’
Writing in the midst of a society experiencing profound levels of uncertainty, collapse, and disillusionment, Gorenkov shows how envisioning an apocalypse, an end of the human story, actually enables individuals in the here and now to ‘get used to uncertainty and keep going.’
Knowing that there is a end, a teleos, to human history, does not tell anyone what will happen next; however it does offer the assurance that what is happening now, and what will happen, is part of a bigger story, part of a coherent whole, part of something that on the final day will be revealed to have had meaning and purpose.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who pastored people at a time when it seemed all certainties had gone, contended that optimism in such times is not only possible, but is a moral duty, bound not by present realities, but looking beyond them.
If uncertainty is to be the new normal, in the times in which we live, followers of Jesus Christ, will do well to live, and act, with optimism, as history moves towards its end. Such optimism does not need to know the next chapter, but is content to simply know that there is an author; that He suffered within the story of humanity, He has been victorious, and that one day He will return and make everything new.
Niall Lockhart is Minister of Ballyhenry Presbyterian Church.
Please note that the statements and views expressed in this article of those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Contemporary Christianity.
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