I HAVE on my shelves a fascinating book with the title Yesterday’s Tomorrows. It is, as the subtitle makes clear, “an historical survey of future societies”. In other words it is an account of the many fascinating ways in which men and women have sought to anticipate and construct the future, to try to see what it might be like and to suggest some programmes for bringing it about. There are many Utopias, not only that of Sir Thomas More in the 16th century. Down the Christian centuries we find men and women withdrawing to the deserts of the Middle East or the forests of Russia to live apart from the world, to live the life of the angels, as some of them might have said.

Monastic communities find, in the structure of their rule and their common life, an anticipation of the life of the kingdom of God. And because the gap between the ideal and the reality is always there, the history of Christian monasticism is a history of movements of reform and renewal; revolutions by tradition to restore a more perfect living out of the Christian Gospel.

There are seeds of revolution here. The fiery Calabrian abbot, Joachim of Fiore, in the 13th century, saw history as divided into three ages — of which the final one would be the time when the institutional Church of Peter would be replaced by the spiritual Church of John. It was a powerful vision which echoed from the Middle Ages into Protestantism, and the radical Reformation. Communities of the perfect, such as the 17th-century Levellers, where social hierarchies as well as ecclesiastical were overthrown, anticipated the new order that God would bring about at the end of time.

Part of the seedbed of American religion were radical Christian communities who looked to opportunities across the Atlantic to create a new society. The frontier spirit of America was partly fashioned by such transplanted Christian visions. The ideal community, the “pantisocracy” that the young Coleridge and his friends dreamed of establishing on the banks of the Susquehanna river had many parallels. The utopian visions of some of these communities included the overthrowing of taboos of gender as part of the ushering in of the new order. Others espoused a radical pacifism, or a rejection of technology, and advocated a nostalgic return to the simple life.

In these Christian questionings and experiments lie some of the roots of the green movement, and of the utopian elements in communism; others were fashioned by reaction against the Christian hope which longed for the coming of God’s kingdom. That longing is deeply there in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”, and at the end of the Christian creed where Christians “look for”, “wait with longing expectation for” the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

From its origins the Christ-ian Church has lived in the tension between the “already” and the “not yet”. Already Christ has come. Jesus preaches and embodies and lives out the kingdom, the rule of God. Yet it is all too obvious that the consummation of that kingdom is not yet. There seem to have been those in the very earliest days of the Church who thought that Christians would not die because Christ would come again, that there would, in effect, be no “age of the Church”. But that immediate return of Christ did not happen, and so Christians live in the overlap between present reality and the foretaste of the fullness of God’s kingdom of justice and love and peace.

Every year the season of Advent challenges us to define the horizon of hope by which we live. The Advent prayers and anthems and hymns are about watchfulness, waking out of sleep, casting off complacency, renewing hope. There is a proper note of judgment because the kingdoms of this world and the often illusory hopes they offer are under the judgment of Christ the King.

It is a hope which is an eternal hope, because, as St Paul reminds us, it is not a hope for this world only. Death, which seems to destroy hope, is in Christ the “gate of life immortal”. The God who has set eternity in our hearts is the God who meets us at our dying with the promise of his life.

Christ is the only norm by which we are called to judge history, and Christ is the one who gives us and shares with us the promise and the hope of eternal life.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe.