Discerning Hope: The Signs of the Times and the Paschal Shape of Hope

Abstract

The Second Vatican Council envisaged that the mission of the church in relation to its social and cultural contexts progressed through the collaborative ecclesial task of ‘reading the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the Gospel’ (GS, n. 4). By this engagement with the signs of the times, Christian communities help to discern, articulate and celebrate the hopes that arise within human hearts and societies for ‘life to the full’ and, thereby, to participate in the traces of God’s activity in the world. This conciliar teaching is grounded in Vatican II’s renewed understanding of the relationship between revelation and history, and of the incarnational principle that motivates and forms the church’s mission and identity. While Père Chenu had insisted that reading the signs of the times required the interaction of both sociological and theological perspectives, in the decades since the Council there has been disagreement about the hermeneutical priority of either sociological-empirical factors or of theological-theoretical frameworks in determining the ‘signs’ of the ongoing incarnation of the Word in new contexts. In this paper, I propose that a hermeneutic of the paschal mystery allows us to hold together revelation and history, Word and flesh, Spirit and cosmos in discerning the signs of the times. This eschatological approach brings both a prophetic-critical dimension and a sacramental-recognitive dimension to the church’s engagement with the ‘signs’ that express the hopes and aspirations of peoples and their contexts, both within and beyond the faith community. Through an analogia passionis, Christians perceive the paschal shape of these hopes, and are drawn into acts of validation, solidarity and advocacy for the new life emerging from the wounds of the past and the present.