The Fabric of Hope

When it comes down to it, hope is theological. The most hopeful atheist philosophy there seems to be around is Marxism and Marxism leads to tyranny. The reasons for this are fairly well understood. Marxism expects progress towards a human-based utopia. The problem with this is that the utopia is in the future, and only a few people, the elite Marxists, know how to get there. Anyone who disagrees with them is clearly wrong, not proper Marxists, and, therefore, their interests, views, and rights can be ignored. This applies to Marxist theorists who take a different view from that of the leadership and to peasants who want to work their own land not be forced into collectives. The present and its inhabitants are means towards the end of the utopian future and they can be sacrificed for that future.

In terms of hope, therefore, human-based philosophies tend to fail. At present, there is a lot of emotional investment in scientific hope. The excitable ends of the press have pronounced vaccines to be practically the elixir of life. Saner heads, usually outside politics and the media, try to calm things down by observing that there is a long way to go, much is not yet known about the specific problem or the longer-term efficacy of the treatments. All, it seems, to no avail.

Hope is a part of the human experience. We all hope for things and to have the thing is not to hope for it. Hope is not something that is concrete, however. It transcends. If we try to nail down hope to something we are ultimately disappointed when the something turns out to be less than we hoped for. Thus the third part of Isaiah (chapters 55-66) can be characterised as a downbeat assessment of the returnees from exile to the Promised Land. It was supposed to be a wonderful future, but the present included oppression, poverty, and famine. The author of this section of Isaiah was forced to look ahead again, to the promises of God and their fulfilment.

In a similar way, some people who move to Sapin, Portugal and other countries, usually in the south of Europe, go in search of a dream of easier, slower living in the sun. However, they have to start businesses and, running a business anywhere involves hard work. A recent episode of A New Life in the Sun is sufficient. Two owners of a ‘glamp’-site are trying to fix their composting toilet:

‘Living the dream,’ one observes while trying to fit a bucket.

‘No. This is a nightmare,’ the other replied.

Hope, therefore, is an ever-receding target. If we obtain the hope the hope fails us. The hope gives us a direction to travel, not the attainment of the end. Attempts to obtain the end in the present or near future are doomed to failure. The businesses set out with great hopes; many obtain contentment, but whether they are really fulfilling their hopes and dreams is perhaps a bit moot. We have to take the rough with the smooth.

The main point is the direction the hope sets for us. False hopes can, of course, be dangerous. I think that suicide bombers, for example, are given a hope for a heaven where they are waited on hand foot, and finger, and where infidels are no longer an issue. These false hopes can give rise to evil actions. In the same way, Marxism gave rise to false hopes and the result was Stalinism. In some senses hope which is realised, or which is so specific that the believer expects is to arrive imminently, is a dangerous hope indeed.

On the other hand, skeptics could observe that a hope for the distant future, or for the intervention of a deity, is no hope at all. In the sense that the hope might be realised in, say, one’s lifetime, they might be right. Many people have proclaimed the imminent end of the world. So far, none of them have been proved right. But if hope is the promise of a better future, the direction of travel to achieve an improving world, then the skeptics are falling into the trap of finding the realised hope to be not a hope at all. Perhaps what matters here is the journey rather than the obtaining of a specific thing hoped for.

In Christian faith, of course, the direction of travel is set by God, and the map is provided by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The promise of God, the incarnation of his Son, gives us both the future to hope for, and the way to travel to attain it. Many people can point out the flaws in the Christian faith: the disunity, wars, support for slavery, anti-Semitism, denigration of the position of women, child abuse, oppression of others, and so on. Churches are institutions full of ordinary people who try to hold themselves to a higher standard than their society and usually fail. However, that does not mean that the promise of God and the hope of Jesus Christ have failed, it simply means that the churches have failed them.

If we try to sum the bad and good things done by the church we will have to take account of the efforts of some Christians to right wrongs, abolish slavery, establish equal rights for all and so on. We would also have to weigh the efforts of Christians against those of society as a whole, where the church has often reflected the norms of that society or attempted to lead the society towards a better future for all. This is not a calculation which, I think, anyone could enter into with any confidence of their ability to make it, let alone believe the outcomes.

Hope, then, arises, in its best form, as a theological construct. Hope in the promises of an omnipotent, omniscient God gives us a direction of travel. The promises always transcend what finite humans can achieve. The hope in the promises of God always lead us on; we never arrive.