..hope

Over this last break I had a chance to read Bob Zurinsky's dissertation. Mucho Moltmann. Reading it I felt like many of the ideas would be easy to adopt since they were articulations of underdeveloped thoughts that I have had recently.  Adding theological concepts because they are convenient/attractive seems dangerous to me, and intellectually lazy.  But it made me think more specifically about the role of hope and what it actually is.

These are my current thoughts:

Hope is often thought as wishing but this definition makes it a very weak/useless concept.  It also makes it unreliable (or completely dependent upon the outcome of the wish) and not a very confident way to interact with an all-powerful God.  It also makes it unnecessary to my theological framework, like I can just sprinkle it in here or there when I want to sound optimistic in my faith.  But I think that it's a little bit more than that.  Hope is one of the (few) things that makes Christianity distinct from other religions/belief systems. 

Hope is a form of knowledge.  If part of Christianity is that we know what certain aspects of the Kingdom will be, we can say that we know parts of  the future.  Granted, we might know exactly what the Kingdom will be like in detail, we do know that specific aspects of it will be true (equality/no hierarchy among people, for example).  Knowledge has power whereas wishing, which is passive, does not.  So if hope is a form of knowledge about the future then it should have the power to influence my thoughts about what the future looks like, how I think about it, and how I live in the present.  Hope as knowledge gets me excited and it makes an abstract, weak concept compelling for me to believe in.  Also, out of all of the books in the Bible, hope is most commonly referenced in Job.  This makes me excited too because I think that it makes hope more powerful than an emotion or an emotional response to the world.

So if hope is knowledge, perhaps there is also a system of thinking that can be marked by hope.  Over the last three years most of my theological exploration has depended primarily on my personal experience in the world and with God.  Mostly this is in response to the first 19 years of my life where my experience was always in tension with my religion and that meant my experience was wrong.  While this has been very liberating and important in my development, I feel ready to add other ways of thinking to my theology.  I think hope will be that.

Hope is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul, 
And sings the tune--without the words, 
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard; 
And sore must be the storm 
That could abash the little bird 
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land, 
And on the strangest sea; 
Yet, never, in extremity, 
It asked a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickinson