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.