Editorial: Why Hope Is a Virtue

”The times may be bad, but they are the only times we are given.”

Gloom is a fund-raiser’s secret sauce. Spicing direct-mail appeals with threatening scenarios can be profitable for those whose ministry or livelihood depends on raising donations. Whether it is a relief organization fighting hunger, or a “faith mission” overspending its budget, or a secular organization like the ACLU warning (as it did in a recent mailing) about the “threats to basic rights” from the Christian Coalition, just a dash of panic in a chowder of dire news is a key ingredient in motivating people to part with their cash.

While there is abundant bad news with which to season fund-raising, confidence and hope remain the salt and pepper of Christian living. About five years ago, Christian social critic Richard John Neuhaus was being driven from the Pittsburgh airport to a speaking engagement. During the drive, one of his hosts persisted in decrying the disintegration of the American social fabric and the disappearance of Christian values from our culture. Cases in point were too numerous to mention, but Pastor Neuhaus’s host tried anyway. After the tedious drive, Neuhaus offered these words of advice: “The times may be bad, but they are the only times we are given. Remember, hope is still a Christian virtue, and despair is a mortal sin.”

A PEOPLE OF HOPE

Ancient philosophers such as Aristotle did not think hope was a virtue, but rather a passion — something that hindered rational living through unrealistic expectations. Nevertheless, from the first, Christians valued hope as a positive trait.

Easter is a time to remember that Christians are a people of hope. The New Testament writers consistently link hope with the Resurrection and the coming reign of God. Peter opens his first letter this way: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance… kept in heaven for you who by God’s power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

Note how Peter links the New Birth, hope, resurrection, our heavenly reward, and the Last Day. Biblical hope is eschatological: it looks forward to a good outcome based on God’s power and God’s character demonstrated in the resurrection of Jesus. That first Easter not only demonstrated God’s power and covenant faithfulness, it also transformed the status and destiny of the human race.

Athanasius, the great fourth-century defender and definer of orthodoxy, calls the Christian transition from death to life the “first cause of the Savior’s being made man.” “For no longer now do we die as subject to condemnation,” he writes, “but as men who rise from the dead we await the general resurrection of all.” Thus our hope is not for this life alone, but for the fullness of future life. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,” Paul writes, “we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19).

FIXED ON GOD’S FUTURE

This otherworldliness (or more precisely, future-worldliness) of Christian hope used to be a favorite target of skeptics and liberal theologians. “Pie in the sky by and by,” they charged, was a way of encouraging complacency and satisfaction with a seriously flawed political and social order. Not so, contemporary theologians respond. Precisely because Christian hope is fixed on God’s future, believers are freed from the security-loving ties that would bind us to the present order. Like Wilberforce who risked reputation and fortune to fight the slave trade, like Father Damian who gave his life to care for lepers, like Jim Elliot who forfeited his life to bring a violent people the gospel of peace, we are not to be tied to success, security, wealth, or power.

Rather, we are to be open to taking risks for God, to being pioneering agents of godly change. Knowing that God has secured our future, we can work for the world’s salvation and well-being, relieving suffering, discrimination, ignorance, and injustice wherever it is found.