A friend asked me not so long ago, “Where can we find hope in such uncertain times?” Many of us have been asking this reasonable and pressing question for much of the past five years. As Christians, we can easily recite a couple of the 140 Bible verses that, in various different stories and admonitions, tell us that our struggles have meaning because our hope is in God. But what exactly is that hope? Having acquired both secular and sacred meanings, hope is an amorphous concept, disfigured under the weight of all we assign to it. We hope for good weather with an occasional snow day, justice, a long-lasting marriage, an end to the war in Ukraine, good health and healing, flourishing children, retirement on our own terms, and for Jesus to return.
This range of outcomes doesn’t bring much clarity. Is it something external to ourselves that we are forever chasing, seeking glimpses of its transcendence every now and then in some extraordinary act of God’s creation? Is it a belief – a sense of personal agency or grit that we will be able to accomplish the things for which we are passionate? Is it perhaps a feeling, a positive emotion that tells us we are living into our vocation, or a desire for sanctification, seeing God more clearly through the glass darkly? A sighting, a belief, a feeling, an affirmation, or a powerful motivator? Hope appears to be as mysterious as it is desired.
Those common ideas suggest it’s a tool to keep us out of a perpetual funk. But what difference would it make if we saw hope as something that resided within us? What if we imagined hope to be a personal attribute gifted by the Holy Spirit, in us but not of us, enabling us to desire and worship a God too mighty to grasp on our own? That is how Aquinas thought of hope as part of the trio of theological virtues, including faith and love. Aquinas defined it as “…a future good, difficult but possible to attain…by means of the Divine assistance…on whose help it leans.”1 For Aquinas, the object of hope is God – the promises of God for salvation and the completion of His kingdom. Even now, the Catechism of the Catholic Church echoes Aquinas defining hope as “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.”2 Even when we are pulled down into despair, the covenantal fidelity of God points us to His north star. In his deepest grief, Jerimiah writes:
But this do I call to mind,
Therefore I have Hope:
The kindness of the Lord has not ended,
His mercies are not spent3
Hope is a gift from God for the people of God. As philosopher Alan Mittleman observes, “We trust, have faith, and hope in God on the basis of what he has done, and what, we believe, he will do for us and for his creation.”4
While the gift and object of hope is God, it is also a means to persevere in faith as we anticipate the perfect culmination of God’s kingdom. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann made this point in his treatise, Theology of Hope,
Faith is the foundation upon which hope rests, hope nourishes and sustains faith. . . the weakness of our faith must be sustained and nourished by patient hope and expectation, lest it fail and grow faint. . . . By unremitting renewing and restoring, [hope] invigorates faith again and again with perseverance.5
Hope is not just an expectation but a fundamental orientation toward how we are to be in the present. It’s investing in the goodness that is either here or could be as we look to the unfolding of the eschaton that is both present and future-oriented, with its images of peace, joy, justice, and righteousness. It’s the consummation of God’s peaceable kingdom where justice will roll down, where the lion and the lamb will lie down together, where the establishment of a new Jerusalem will be a home for the righteous, and where there will be joy in the Holy Spirit.6
For Augustine, hope has this future and present orientation. He saw it as a virtue of “rightly ordered love,” reflecting both will and emotion. It is “a love or desire for objects that we perceive to be good, future and possible, but not yet seen or possessed.”7 Hope oriented toward God allows us to order our earthly hopes rightly, rather than placing false hope in the wrong objects, wrong people, or in the wrong ways.8 If our hope is oriented toward God, then, as Political Scientist Michael Lamb notes, people can rightly hope for temporal goods such as justice and peace and place hope in those who pursue and protect such civic-oriented goods.9
Like other virtues, hope has a golden mean with vices at each end. When unmoored from its grounding in God, it becomes disordered, its excess becomes presumption, and its deficiency is despair. As Moltmann writes,
Presumption is a premature, self-willed anticipation of the fulfillment of what we hope for from God. Despair is the premature, arbitrary anticipation of the non-fulfillment of what we hope for from God. Both forms of hopelessness, by anticipating the fulfillment or by giving up hope, cancel the wayfaring character of hope. They rebel against the patience in which hope trusts in the God of the promise.10
For Moltmann, presumption and despair land us in the present with no vision for God’s eschaton.
Cut off from God, yet still made in God’s image, we see the despair in Dante’s Inferno when he writes, “We have no hope, and yet we live in longing.”11 Martin Luther King, Jr. echoes the cost of disordered hope, writing, “Today’s despair is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow’s justice.”12 Additionally, in our post-modern world, despair is often masked as a bonhomie of resigned realism. Moltmann notes that “it can also be the mere tacit absence of meaning, prospects, future, and purpose.”13
Presumption, on the other hand, has a pernicious, “false hope” aspect, as if the desires of our hearts already align with God’s. It manifests itself in our pride-filled reliance on strengths, gifts, and self-sufficiency, relegating God to the sideline role of cheerleader. Or it’s the belief that earthly power equates to the heavenly, which can find us working to bring about a present worldly kingdom devoid of God’s eschaton, contemptuous of those who don’t see the world through our disordered expectations.
The joint siren calls of presumption and despair are always willing to take us down. But being filled with hope means eschewing their temptations to “sit this one out,” to hope for the best, to give up and give in, to bury ourselves in a small slice of the present, or to take matters into our own hands. It means renewing our trust in God, His word, works, and promises, and ordering our loves from that point forward. It means, as Mittleman writes, “wrestling with our demons and living by our better angels. It’s about conquering fear, banishing despair, renewing our power for love and work.”14 It also means that we don’t have to go it alone. We recognize God’s covenantal promises throughout the Bible are both personal and collective.
When viewed as an internal attribute gifted by the Holy Spirit to dwell within us, hope has the power to become a disposition, a habit of cultivated trust and confidence in God.15 It shapes forbearance as we wait upon the Lord in His own good timing, courage to pursue God’s ends when we don’t firmly see the path forward, and perseverance to keep pushing ahead when we don’t quite know what the end will bring. No one has been untouched by the seismic events of the pandemic, local and national conversations on race, and two contentious presidential elections, their hopelessness amplified by bottom-feeding social media. In response, with self-righteous presumption, we can vilify others who disagree with us or claim to see God’s hand in everything that goes our way. Or, in despair, we can cancel news subscriptions, delete apps, or plan to live abroad sometime in the next four years.
Or we can get up in the morning, like we did yesterday morning, as disciples of Christ, to do as God commanded the Jewish diaspora in Babylon, to seek the welfare of the city where God has sent us as exiles and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare we will find ours.16 Soon after this is published, my husband and I will cook dinner for 20 or so teenage foster kids who have recently decided our church is their Wednesday night home away from home. We want to be the hope they so desperately need.
Living a life of hope is a counter-cultural act of resistance to the endless despondency and contempt around us. It is an act of solidarity, recognizing that God’s promises are both individual and collective. In this season of Advent, there may be no greater incarnational pull to the good news of Jesus Christ than the witness of God’s people faithfully embodying the hope we seek.
Footnotes
- Summa Theologica II-II, 17.1.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church,1817.
- Lamentations 3:22
- Alan Mittleman, Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory (2009, OUP), 114.
- Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (Harper & Row, 1967), 13.
- Mittleman,127, 126.
- Augustine, The Augustine Catechism: The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Charity. Trans. Harbert, Bruce, ed. Ramsey, Boniface. (New City Press, 1999). 2.8
- Michael K. Lamb, Be what you hope for: What can Augustine of Hippo’s philosophy teach us about hope? Aeon Essays, (2023 July): ¶ 13.
- Lamb, A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought. Princeton (Princeton University Press, 2023.)
- Moltmann, 14.
- Inferno Canto 4.40
- Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here?: Chaos or Community (Harper & Row, 1967), 49.
- Moltmann, 15.
- Mittleman, 39.
- Mittleman, 58.
- Jeremiah 29: 7
