One could argue with conviction that the Christian faith and praxis has as its objective preparing individuals for admission to heaven. Others would argue that the doctrine and dogma accompanying this process is driving people away from faith.
There are those who argue, convincingly, that the teaching attributed to Jesus by the authors of the synoptic gospels points to the primary importance of helping individual at point of need and pursuing social justice to achieve heaven on earth.
And then there are those who pursue both: achieving admission to the heaven of God and heaven on earth.
It is against this background I invite you to read the following passage by Karl Popper: Conjectures and Refutations.
“Work for the elimination of concrete evils rather than for the realization of abstract goods. Do not aim at establishing happiness by political means. Rather aim at the elimination of concrete miseries. Or, in more practical terms: fight for the elimination of poverty by direct means--for example, by making sure that everybody has a minimum income. Or fight against epidemics and disease by erecting hospitals and schools of medicine. Fight illiteracy as you fight criminality. But do all this by direct means. Choose what you consider the most urgent evil of the society in which you live, and try patiently to convince people that we can get rid of it.
But do not try to realize these aims indirectly by designing and working for a distant ideal of a society which is wholly good. However deeply you may feel indebted to its inspiring vision, do not think that you are obliged to work for its realization, or that it is your mission to open the eyes of others to its beauty. Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realized. In brief, it is my thesis that human misery is the most urgent problem of a rational public policy and that happiness is not such a problem. The attainment of happiness should be left to our private endeavours.
It is a fact, and not a very strange fact, that it is not so very difficult to reach agreement by discussion on what are the most intolerable evils of our society, and on what are the most urgent social reforms. Such an agreement can be reached much more easily than an agreement concerning some ideal form of social life. For the evils are with us her and now. They can be experienced, and are being experienced every day, by many people who have been and are being made miserable by poverty, unemployment, national oppression, war and disease. Those of us who do not suffer from these miseries meet every day others who can describe them to us. This is what makes evils concrete. This is why we can get somewhere in arguing about them; why we can profit here from the attitude of reasonableness. We can learn by listening to concrete claims, by patiently trying to assess them as impartially as we can, and by considering ways of meeting them without creating worse evils.
With ideal goods it is different. These we know only from our dreams and from the dreams of our poets and prophets. They cannot be discussed, only proclaimed from the housetops. They do not call for the rational attitude of the impartial judge, but for the emotional attitude of the impassioned preacher.
The Utopianist attitude, therefore, is opposed to the attitude of reasonableness. Utopianism, even though it may often appear in a rationalist disguise, cannot be more than a pseudo-rationalism."
Karl Popper, 'Conjectures and Refutations' (page 361-362 in the original edition; page 485-486 in the new edition).
In the 1990s I read Theology of Hope (1964) by Jurgen Moltmann. It was a major influence on my thinking as at the time I was studying for a diploma in theology.
His obituary published in The Daily Telegraph on10th June 2024 had this to say:
"Jurgen Moltmann was the most significant Protestant theologian of the 20th century.
"The basis of Moltmann's work was his conviction that true theology must always be related to concrete human situations and that the teaching of Jesus about the Kingdom of God requires of his followers commitment to the overthrowing of everything in the social order that is contrary to its demands. This led him to personal involvement in peace and other demonstrations.....and close association with the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America, where his work was specially valued by Catholic theologians.
"The message was of a God whose coming in the world lay not in some distant future but was a present reality, thus offering both hope and challenge."
The news of Martin Luther King Jnr's assassination propelled Moltmann into an interest in black theology and becoming a strong supporter of the USA civil rights movement. Moltmann's wife, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendell was a prominent supporter of feminist theology.
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