Christian realism is a reminder of our limits and an affirmation of our hope. It tells us that our knowledge is imperfect, our plans are incomplete, and our expectations are inevitably distorted by self-interest. We are always trying to overcome these limitations, and we are often partly successful; but our partial successes make it all the more important to remember that the limits remain, mocking our confidence with ironic reversals and threatening our pride with forces beyond our control. Final answers and permanent solutions elude us.

Nevertheless, we live in a meaningful universe. Conflict, violence, and the relentless background drone of anxiety are not the ultimate reality. The coherence of our partial truths and the justice that expresses our imperfect love point to reality in a way that incoherence and injustice do not. So we feel ourselves always obliged to work toward a better approximation of justice and peace, and we cannot rest content merely in prevailing with our own interests.

Everyone experiences this dialectic of power and finitude, meaning and incoherence, hope and anxiety. For some, it signals a need to dig through the distortions of human subjectivity to the hard core of objective fact. For others, the persistence of incoherence and violence suggests that objectivity itself is an illusion, and the only order we will find is the one we make for ourselves.

For biblical faith, however, this unresolved tension in all human experience reveals the nature of ultimate reality and locates our place within it.