perish in its perversion and that grace will finally triumph are all combined. With this faith and hope we need not flee from the present-day twilight between creation and consummation into the supposed clarity of a “hope for better times” in this world’s history. Much in the same spirit as Martin Luther, Johann Georg Hamann tells us that the future of the Lord “will come as a thief in the night and therefore there is no time for either political arithmetic or prophetic chronology to bring light.”21