The Meaning of Christian Hope: Reflections on a Teaching by Pope Benedict XVI

Conversations about hopes and fears are the most serious that can be had between close friends. It’s been noticed by philosophers that there is a certain anxiety we all live with, caused first by the nothingness from which we all come to be, and then intensified by the difficulties of the present which make us fear for the future. This anxiety can recede into the background when times are good. But in times of real trouble our anxiety rushes forward and threatens to define us. In such times hope must stand forth to meet fear.

The man we know best as Pope Benedict XVI had earned a reputation as one of the world’s foremost Christian thinkers long before he ascended to the Chair of Peter. In his second Encyclical Letter, Spe salvi (“in hope we are saved”), Benedict elaborated on themes explored in the book that so much served to increase his world-wide notoriety, Introduction to Christianity (1968 as Fr. Joseph Ratzinger) and which he reflected upon in a more tightly focused way in his fifteen page article “On Hope” (Communio, 1985 as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger). It is this latter piece upon which I offer a summary and commentary.

 

Hope the defining characteristic of the Christian

Ratzinger takes us to a few moments from the writings of St. Paul and highlights something that might startle us. We may be accustomed in our time to thinking of Christianity as chiefly a moral system, the “Golden Rule”, and anyone who lives this way is a true Christian even if he doesn’t profess explicit Christian faith. The great theological thinker of primitive Christianity, St. Paul, does not define the Christian in this way. Rather, Paul says that the difference between the Christian and the pagan is that the Christian lives with God because the Christian has hope in God (Eph 2). Pagans live without the promise of God and therefore are “without God”, which means they live hopeless lives, cowering in fear of suffering and death. The grief of the pagans at the loss of loved ones, for instance, is different than Christian grief, since pagans grieve as those who “have no hope” (Thess 4:13). The grief of unbelievers is the grief of despair and so the life of the pagan is defined by St. Paul as the life of despair. But the Christian life is the life of hope.

Many in our time, says Ratzinger, will like to deny that hope belongs only to believers. Not only can atheists have hope, but some have even said that it is only the atheist who can really hope authentically, because true hope must be social, and thus about the salvation of humanity and not just the individual. But if one is a “believer” one is concerned only about oneself. The salvation of the world must be left to those who turn away from the idea of God and turn themselves to the project of making the world a better place, such that true hope “for the salvation of all” is a project of atheism and not of Christianity. Modern science and technology have given hope real teeth, say secularists, and so the pretensions of Christianity have been unmasked. Ratzinger shows that in order to deal this challenge we need to ponder the meaning of hope.

 

Hope for Perfect Love: the Meaning of My Life

 We know that hope is about the future, always. Human beings live in time, and therefore not merely “in the moment” but also with an abiding concern for the future that is tied up with the evaluation of the past that we call memory. We are not “present only” beings. As Ratzinger says, hope “signifies that man expects of the future some joy, some happiness that he does not now have” or that he has glimpsed but then lost.

Ratzinger argues that we can understand the meaning of the hope if we look at its opposite, fear. What we fear is not the irritations or minor setbacks of everyday life. We fear that our lives in their totality might be ruined, or made unlivable. The hopeless person is afraid that it might have been better for him (and everyone else!) had he never been born. Says Ratzinger, “in this case, death, which is the end of all hopes, becomes the only hope.”

He then recalls the words of St. John (1 Jn 3:26), that “perfect love casts out fear.” Fear, in the end, is the despair of finding this perfect love, a love which in the moment of fear we realize has always been the great hope of our life. “If the fear that transcends all fears is in the last resort fear of losing love, then the hope which transcends all hopes is the assurance of being showered with the gift of a great love.”

Ratzinger wants us to notice, though, that even in admitting that our hope is for love, we return to question of death and the fear of death: if all those who have loved me eventually die, leaving me alone in the face of my own death, won’t it be true that death itself will be seen to be the strongest thing, the one thing that can conquer even a great love? And the answer to this question must be yes—unless there is a love that is infinite, that goes beyond death, that has in fact conquered death itself. Is there such a love? If there is, then that love alone is the hope of the Christian.

The secularist (one who is an atheist in practice if not in philosophy) has said that true hope can only lie in the human power to bring about world salvation. And so hope by this definition, as Ratzinger reminds us, must be hope in what humans can achieve on their own. But can humanity by itself overcome death? For as we’ve seen, death is that which threatens to have the last word for us, the thing that appears more powerful than love. It remains then to wonder whether my desire for a great love is a desire for the impossible. If it is then human life is absurd, since what other creature of the world needs something which lies beyond the world? What other creature longs for the world itself to be different, transformed, paradisal?

 

Faith and Hope

All of us humans, whether believers or not, are in the same boat here. We’re in this together. What makes Christians different is not that we’re some sub-species within the human race, but rather that we have been given, says Ratzinger, “certitude about God” and about the “promise” of God. That Christian certitude we call “faith.”  We can say that faith, for the Christian, is that knowledge of the object—God and his promise to us in Christ—which makes hope possible. Without faith, we are threatened with ultimate despair that what we most desire is impossible. Faith is a power that works against despair. We can see that in a certain way faith and hope are interchangeable. Ratzinger points us to St. Peter, who says “always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope” (1 Peter 3:15). We should say then that Christian hope is the desire that sustains us and that faith is our knowing that we do not hope in vain.

We’ve said that hope is based on the future and therefore is about something we do not possess but rather desire, and now we can say something more: hope in a certain way makes it possible for us to possess now something of that which we hope for in the future, beyond death. As Ratzinger says, hope is “an anticipation of what is to come….through hope, what is ‘not yet’ is already realized in our life.” The great moment in sacred scripture where we see this principle of “now and not yet” set forth is Hebrews 11:1.

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (KJV).[1]

 The great American satirist, Mark Twain, famously defined faith as “believing something you know ain’t so.” False. Yet there is a paradox in this essential Christian definition of faith, but a paradox is not something absurd. Rather, a paradox is a way of expressing a truth that is so profound, and therefore strange and perhaps even marvelous, that it must be formulated in a way that seems like nonsense (e.g., “he who would save his life must lose it”). Since what I hope for I do not possess, it seems contradictory to say that I have “realized” what I do not have. And since we normally speak of “evidence” as something we grasp and can “see”, it also seems contradictory to say that we see evidence that we can’t see. But we can think of it this way: we have received, by faith and in hope, a kind of “down payment” on a reward that has yet fully to be given to us. This down payment sees us through until the full gift is in our possession.

There is something more. If we go back behind the English to the original Greek word (as Ratzinger so astutely points out to us), we find that it is hypostasis—“substance” or enduring foundation. This word “substance” means, says Ratzinger, “what stands and that on which one can stand.”

“In other words, to believe is to have touched ground, to approach the substance of everything. With faith, hope has gotten a footing. The cry of waiting wrung from our being is not lost in the void. It finds a point of solid support to which we must for our part hold fast” (Ratzinger).

So while Christian faith belongs to me it is not just my subjective sense of confidence or certainty—for I can be certain about many things which are not worthy of certitude. Rather, my faith is a participation in the word of God which affirms that “the self-revealing God who speaks in Christ is what endures, the reality that lasts, the only true [substance].” This faith is a supernatural gift to me. The Christian is not engaged in optimism or wishful thinking but is sharing in the fidelity of God to his Word.

Now we must realize what we Christians have done in embracing this gift of faith: we have traded in our false hopes, which we formerly made to rest on faulty “substances”, bad foundations, for true hope that rests on something firm. Ratzinger points out that in the earlier chapter of Hebrews the writer uses a number of words that signify the false foundations of the created world which cannot serve as the “substance” of authentic hope: money, power, prestige, social and economic stability, even friends and family ties of blood and marriage—all things that of themselves are subject to corruption and death. We can spend our lives trying to establish a secure “position” in the world, but in so doing we are building houses on sand. A life defined by the pursuit of a secure position is not really life at all, but a hiding from life, a hiding from the truth about life, ourselves, and God.

 

Hope and our work in this world

Ratzinger has accomplished so much for us already. To come face to face with the truth about Christianity means that I can clear away the confusion that comes from the world-debates about the meaning of faith, even those which rage on within the Church. What a gift it is to be clear about the reality which defines me more deeply than any other “identity” I may take on.

Yet, says Ratzinger, we must get back to the challenge of the secularist. If Christianity is just an escape into interior knowledge (even if it were true) then the world outside is still left in hopelessness by the collection of Christians who are only concerned with themselves but not with the world. Even some claiming to be Christian in our time say that “what we should do is create living conditions such that the flight into interiority becomes unnecessary, since suffering would be eliminated and the world itself would become paradise.” In short, how does Christian hope affect my life in the world, my work, my attempts to meet my own material needs and those of my family, my social and political responsibility? Isn’t it my contribution to the “earthly paradise” that ought constitute the mission of my life? If we could together make this world heaven itself, then there would be no more need for interior dispositions like faith and hope! Isn’t this what the true Christian should be committed to?

Ratzinger actually says that this question is not entirely illegitimate.

“Is [that paradise-world] not more certain to begin when people are freed from the greed of possession and when their interior freedom and independence from the domination of possession have awakened in them a great goodness and serenity? Besides, where do we begin transforming the world if not with our own transformation? And what transformation could be more liberating than one that engenders a climate of joy?”

Christians, then, do begin with themselves, with practicing an interior way of being. But we do not stop there. The joy that comes to us by our interior practice of the faith spills out into our external lives, into the world of work and social responsibility, which world of action is no less a part of who we are than what happens inside us. The Christian lives out his hope in the totality of his life, first in the heart, but also in his work. Hope, says Ratzinger, drives us to the energy of movement that takes place in the practical world of daily responsibility, for we cannot raise ourselves or help to raise others without action, without work among our fellow human beings.

But our work in this world can only be hopeful when we give up the drive for possession, the desire for having instead of being. When our lives are dedicated to gaining security for ourselves through possession we are merely joining the rest of the evolutionary kingdom of nature in its endless cycles of competition for limited resources. As Ratzinger says, “it is precisely this greed for possession that shuts man out of paradise.”

Thus, although the Christian life does not begin with ethics and a global social responsibility, it does lead directly to them. We human beings are “tied to creation” and “there cannot be any salvation” for us “that would not equally be the salvation of creation.” The world is not simply that place we will “leave behind” for a salvation that awaits us elsewhere. Rather it is the life of God that comes down to earth and makes it new, the paradise of God’s peace. The world is the place where salvation happens, and the world is waiting for this salvation, just as we Christians are. The world is waiting, says Ratzinger, “for man transfigured, man who has become the child of God. This man gives back to creation its freedom, its dignity, its beauty. Through him creation itself becomes divine.” We can bolster this statement by referring to the word of sacred scripture, from the Book of the Apocalypse:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away….And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them” (Rev 21: 1-3).

 

The prayer of Christian hope

The fallen world, however, waits in forgetfulness of creation. The world of fallen humanity has forgotten its origin in God and its destiny as the paradise of God. For the fallen world there is nothing but itself, and so whatever paradise is to be had must be a paradise of its own making. But the fallen world cannot free itself of the greed for possession, and so it waits not in serenity but in restlessness and violence and stumbling futility. The fallen world is what it is because it does not hope rightly, and it does not hope rightly because it does not pray rightly. The fallen world prays to itself, ergo, to a god which cannot save.

But Christians are the ones who pray as Christ has taught us. The Our Father is the model of prayer for Christians because it is the prayer that comes from the mind and heart of Christ, the prayer that the very Word of God Incarnate has given to us.

Let’s finish our reflection on Ratzinger’s teaching by listening to the man himself, once again.

“The Our Father….responds to the daily anxieties of people and encourages them to transform these through prayer into hopes. It is a matter of each day’s subsistence; it is a matter of the fear of evil which menaces us in multiple ways; a matter of peace with our neighbor, of making peace with God and protecting ourselves from the real evil, the fall into lack of faith, which is also hopelessness. Thus the question of hope goes back to hope itself, to our longing for paradise, for the Kingdom of God with which our prayer begins. But the Our Father is more than a catalogue of subjects of hope; it is hope in action.”

 

[1] I use the King James Version of Hebrews 11:1 because it is the most direct English translation of the passage from the original Greek. Our American Catholic NABRE says “realization”, which is not incorrect but it is expansive, such that it departs from the concrete image of the Greek hypostasis, better rendered in English as “substance”. Ratzinger tends to read his New Testament in Greek before choosing a translation, often his own.
 

---

Fr. Byron S. Hagan is the Parochial Vicar of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Northeast Minneapolis. He is a frequent contributor to MSPCatholic.