Feastings in God at Midnight: Theology and the Globalised Present

Abstract

This study relocates talk of “the future of God” in talk of the world's future in God, in God's creativeness expressed in hopeful performance. The context for the theological discussion is the significant pressure on possibilities for the very existence of hope generated by the detemporalised conditions for the making of selves in a “globalised” environment. Modernity's latest expression is closing the capacity for speaking adequately of the time required to become human, an erosion of selfhood in the accompanying erosion of certain ways of imagining time (Rowan Williams). This requires substantive ethical attention, conversation and interrogation simply because it renders fundamental possibilities for the shaping of human selfhood increasingly unavailable. In response, a theological vision is re-imagined to offer a constructive retemporalising interrogation and eschatological memory, with suggestions for beginning teased out broadly with reference to Eucharistie performance. Contrary to many expectations, this entails not so much a dreaming of a different world as a dreaming of this world differently, a temporality which is hope-generating, while critically attentive to the inequitable character of features of our world, and educative of ethical wisdom in a self-regulating and emancipatory witness of remembering and anticipating the transformative presence of God.