The Logic of Hope

Of the three Christian virtues, faith hope and love, hope is the virtue I hear about the least in sermons and books. I certainly have no memory of ever being directly exhorted to cultivate more hope in my life. Yet in numerous places in the bible, Hope is commended as one of the elementary staples of the Christian life. (Rom 5:5; 1 Cor 13:13)

“Hope” seems to stand out from the other two virtues. Faith is easy to grasp, for it is wedded directly to our basic concepts of religion. Whoever heard of calling oneself “Christian” but having no faith in the basic articles of belief, or whoever heard of a “faith” that had no expression of personal piety? Likewise, love is a pretty intuitive concept, for it forms the basis of Christian ethics: it tells us how we ought to treat one another. So Faith is foundational by definition. Love provides the practical relevance of Christianity. Why should hope have a place among these two fundamentals?

Perhaps one of the reasons hope is seldom discussed is because of an abundance of wealth. Hope is by nature a future thing, and since we have so much comfort in the present, why bother with the comforts of the future? What if we regularly faced real poverty, with bare bread and water, or with a regular risk of death by exposure? Hope does seem to have more gravity in a context of suffering, for though the destitute are helpless now, it comforts the sufferer to know that one day justice will be made reality. Though the present may be all death and disease, the future will be life abundant, which makes the present more bearable.

Nevertheless, I would like to argue that hope needs place of prominence in our minds regardless of our standards of living. Hope remains fairly shallow if it is only seen as an answer to present financial misfortune. It’s unfortunate that hope doesn’t get more air-time, and so I hope to throw out some seeds of reflection on cultivating the virtue of hope by reflecting on a few aspects of hope.

First off, I take it as basic that our hopes must be firmly rooted in reality. We have all now and then taken our pipe-dreams seriously, or been around people with wildly unrealistic personal ambitions for honor, power, and wealth. Such hopes tend to either be corrupting by nature, or be doomed to failure from the outset. Needless to say, we would do well to avoid such false hopes. Bad hopes corrode the soul, or they fizzle out and die in a crippling burst of disappointment. Genuine hopes fuel people with an energy that is difficult to quench. Idealy, those genuine hopes reflect a concrete reality to come that is more than just a private ambition or religious preference.

What this means is that the heart and mind must have a sense of assurance, a certainty that what we hope for will come to pass. It can’t be a passive wish, or a plausible theory. It must take its seat in our hearts with a weighty certainty that fixes our eyes. The author of Hebrews compares Christian hope to “an anchor of the soul”. (Heb 6:19) Hope is so essential because of its weightiness in the Christian life. It is that bedrock, that mass of iron below the surface that keeps faith alive in the midst of the howling tempest. Without that anchor, trials and distractions can capsize and shipwreck faith.

In a very general way, “certainty” is something often associated with empirical evidence. Again I wonder if one of the reasons hope isn’t the hot topic it should be is because the logic of hope fits uncomfortably with scientific investigation. The logic of Christian hope is not subject to surveys and scientists. It’s not something we can cherish by ourselves and get ourselves up into a state of certain hope by engaging in various sorts of “proofs”. Christian hope is based on the promise of God, and no Christian hope deserves to be called such, if it isn’t rooted in an encounter with the God whose Spirit inspires confidence. Simply put, God is good, and knowledge of God’s goodness, especially his love for us shown in Christ, I think is what forms the chief core of certainty that rallies the Christian heart to have an unwavering hope in an unimaginably wonderful future that is yet unseen.

Faith

Faith is a much maligned virtue. In common usage faith is often described as some sort of flighty mental activity that is the antithesis of evidence and reason. I can’t help but feel a little insulted at this misunderstanding of faith, as if one of the primary Christian virtues Jesus calls us to is shutting our minds off. Of course, genuine faith is nothing of the sort. Faith requires mental content, and well-reasoned reflection. I’ll briefly write about these aspects of faith in turn.

For starters, faith requires content, and is far from an empty-headed activity. I’m not sure if my experience can be applied to everyone, but I find it impossible to exercise faith in something I’m ignorant or uncertain of. Faith as an act requires some knowledge of the person we’re trusting. In fact, I would say it requires a lot of knowledge. How much would you trust a stranger? Would you trust a stranger to give you good directions? Would you trust a stranger with your wallet? How about your soul? Why then would anyone expect a person to come to a meaningful faith in God apart from any knowledge about him? If you're a particularly skeptical kind of person, you likely want some sort of reasoned evidence for faith, and faith just ain't gonna happen without some basic questions answered. In my experience, any kind of faith that isn’t accompanied by a good knowledge of God’s acts and commands, as well as clearly articulated reasons why a person believes, ends up showing itself sooner or later as a fragile faith, or worse, a counterfeit one.

This idea of a good knowledge of God’s acts and commands brings us to the next characteristics of faith I’ve chosen: reasoning. Faith is something that, the moment you try to do it, forces you to reason intensely about it. It’s one thing to say: “I believe in God”, but what is that faith in God unless it’s related to other things in your life? “Faith in God” is not a coherent concept unti it has a context, for it is not as if we are bodiless souls floating about in a void with the Lord. When faith is flexed it is flexed in places and relationships. What does it mean to believe in God in the workplace? What does it mean to believe in God in relation to friends, family members, governments, other religions? Faith demands reasoning because when faith is exercised, it is brought into conflict. A faith that does not reason is a faith that cannot act, and a faith that does not act cannot be faith, for faith is by definition a verb.

To be sustained, faith needs regular education. Knowledge must constantly be on the increase. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for a Christian to work hard at increasing their biblical knowledge-base (and their knowledge of the world where they are doing their believing) early on in their spiritual walk, only to cease studying and reflecting for many years. Some may suddenly find themselves having a crisis of faith in their early 40's as they try to get by on the faith of their early adulthood. Or perhaps more commonly, a teenager may find their Sunday-school faith irrelevant to their growing adulthood, and may cast off their childhood faith altogether. In a sense, we are supposed to cast off our childhood faith, but that is so we may embrace a more mature understanding of God. (1 Cor 13:11) Without regular content, reflection, exercise, and age-and-situation appropriate study, a person’s faith will not and cannot amount to much.