Christians should place their ultimate hope in the City of God, the eternal kingdom built on the love of God and the enjoyment of God as its highest good, whose fortunes don’t rise or fall with this or that historical order. For those of us wrestling with these apocalyptic times, perhaps our anxieties reveal that our hope isn’t set on the City of God but on those things that moth and rust can destroy (Matt. 6:19–21). When the sense of doom sets in, do we take comfort in God’s promise that his church will withstand the gates of hell (16:18)?

I have a confession to make: Like many others today, I’m strongly tempted toward doomerism.

Every day online seems to bring the potential of fresh, man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. In the span of several weeks, you can read about the imminent collapse of the global financial system due to a war (which may or may not include nuclear engagement); potential pandemics originating in some far-off country; the possible disclosure of UFOs and extraterrestrials; and my recent nightmare fuel, the breakneck advances in AI and their the potential to rewrite global geopolitics, finance, and personal security, and to deepen the splintering and alienation of human cultures at a heretofore unforeseen rate.

It’s cliché, but we live in interesting (and therefore anxious) times. Yet the times seem not only anxious but apocalyptic—in both senses of the term. We teeter on the edge of events that are cosmically catastrophic, and for that reason, they reveal our basic, fragile condition in the world.

Only a fool fails to recognize that on any given day, he could walk out the door and get hit by a car, walk into a doctor’s office and be given a diagnosis from which he will not recover, or experience some other personal disaster. These can be paralyzing thoughts if you dwell on them, which is why we often set them aside.

That said, something appears qualitatively different when we consider global, cosmos-altering catastrophes. There is the kind of thought that stops all thought, that paralyzes and dizzies you in the same way you might lose your equilibrium when staring down the edge of a cliff.

We live in an age where, increasingly, we’re faced with the choice among not just the blue pill of ignorance or the red pill of hard knowledge but also the black pill of hopelessness and doomerism.

How, then, should we hope as Christians? And I do mean as Christians. Secular humanism’s story of the rise from cosmic slime to a descent into cosmic heat death is quintessentially doomeristic to the core, such that you can only avoid pessimism by not thinking about it too much.

Eastern stories offer endless cycles of cosmic birth and renewal with a potential karmic off-ramp into the dissolution of consciousness for good behavior or detachment. Those stories aren’t as grim, perhaps. But they’re also not the source of a hope for the future so deep and poignant that it can shine backward into the present and transform the darkness.

Here are a few meditations for struggling doomers looking for hope in a chaotic world.

It Really Has Always Been This Bad

We should begin with a bit of bleak comfort, but a crucial step for many: We need to admit how utterly catastrophic human history has been up until this point.

I think folks move past this point too quickly because it’s maudlin and bleak. But when you’re talking to somebody tempted toward doomerism, it’s rarely a good idea to try to argue him out of the rationality of his fears or anxieties of disaster. If you try to tell me why I shouldn’t be concerned about the advances in technology for warfare or general political destabilization on the basis of some worldly hope because “nothing ever happens,” you’re basically telling me you haven’t been paying attention to either the news or the course of history.

This is true even of some “Christian” versions of comfort that aren’t sincere exercises of the virtues of faith or hope. They assume that if God is good, then nothing really bad can happen (to me).

But you can only come to that conclusion by ignoring world history and the Bible itself. Consider what God has not done. God didn’t stop a plague from wiping out a quarter of Europe’s population. God didn’t stop volcanoes from erupting in the sixth century and causing a little ice age that led to the Justinian plague, agricultural disruptions, and famine across the Mediterranean. God didn’t stop the Lisbon earthquake, the French Revolution, the Spanish influenza, countless civil wars, the Holocaust, or Hiroshima. The mere existence of God—even the good, biblical God revealed in Jesus Christ—doesn’t mean that awful, history-altering events won’t darken the horizon in our times.

None of this should surprise anyone familiar with the biblical narrative, which depicts catastrophes beyond imagining: the flood (Gen. 6), the descent of the nation of Israel into civil war (1 Kings 12), idolatrous chaos (2 Kings 17), and eventual national death and exile at the hands of the Babylonians (2 Chron. 36). At the narrative’s center is the story of the darkest day in human history, when the sun itself hid its face at the horror of the bloody condemnation, torture, and death of the righteous Son of God (Matt. 27:45). The Christian story gets to the good news of resurrection hope only on the other side of admitting the grim news of the cross.

Christian hope is not Panglossian optimism or the ostrich’s comfort of a head buried firmly in the sand.

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