Miroslav Volf investigates the darker side of hope, explaining what it means to “hope against hope” (Romans 4:18) and “hope in what we do not see” (Romans 8:25). He concludes with hope’s connection to patient endurance. This is the second of a two-part series on hope.
Miroslav Volf investigates the darker side of hope, explaining what it means to “hope against hope” (Romans 4:18) and “hope in what we do not see” (Romans 8:25). He concludes with hope’s connection to patient endurance. This is the second of a two-part series on hope.
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Show Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. For more information, visit faith.yale.edu.
Miroslav Volf: Our lives are caught in a whirlwind of accelerated change. We have no time for patience. Technological advances promised to give us life of ease. Having to endure anything strikes us as a defeat. And yet when crisis hits, we need endurance as much as we need hope. Or more precisely, perhaps we need genuine hope, which to the extent that it is genuine, is marked by endurance.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
What does it mean to hope against hope? This phrase comes from a translation of Romans 4:18, that Abraham, in hope, believed against hope—God's promise to him—even at his greatest test. Some might just call that grit or endurance. Maybe J.R.R. Tolkien's elves understood it in their concept of fighting a long defeat, never giving up even, and especially, when there's no way out, no exit.
Søren Kierkegaard in his works of love says, "the whole of one's life is the time of hope!" Hope for him is always oriented to the possibility of the good, always with reference to the eternal. Still, others might call this foolish, groundless, worried about the ways that such radical hope is literally unjustifiable and without reason or assurance. But hoping against hope is credited to Abraham as righteousness, or so the Apostle Paul says in Romans 4:22.
Two weeks ago, Miroslav shared some thoughts on help, noticing how the Stoics linked it to fear, as in give up on hope and spare yourself fear. He clarifies a hope that goes beyond mere expectation. And as Emily Dickinson offers, "Never stops singing that tune, even when there are no words." And ultimately for him:
Miroslav Volf: The God who creates out of nothing, the God who makes dead alive, the God of original beginnings and the God of new beginnings, justifies hope that is otherwise unjustifiable.
Evan Rosa: Now, if you missed Hope Pt. 1, The Thing With Feathers, you might want to go back and give that a spin for 15 minutes before listening here. Today, Miroslav turns to the darker side of hope, explaining hope against hope, and hoping in what we do not see. Concluding with hopes' connection to patient endurance, at a time when many of us feel like we're squinting in the dark for a path out of this mess, flourishing life means holding onto a hope against hope.
Miroslav Volf: We tend to identify hope with reasonable expectation. And when we don't see a way for our expectations to be fulfilled, we cease to hope. We become hopeless. But genuine hope remains alive when there is no good reason to expect something positive in the future.
Genuine hope is always hope against hope, as Apostle Paul has put it in Romans 4. You can describe this as indestructibility of hope. If you recall the poem by Emily Dickinson about hope, you can say that hope is a little bird whose sweetest song is not quieted even in the strongest storm.
For Apostle Paul, another feature of hope is crucial. And it's a kind of strange darkness of hope. Now, obviously, we don't generally associate darkness with hope. Hope is associated with some bright future. But for Paul, we can hope in the darkest hour because hope itself is a certain kind of darkness.
Let me explain. Apostle Paul writes, "we hope in what we do not see." Just in the verse prior to the one from which this is quoted, he twice connected hoping and not seeing. He writes: "Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?" We generally take the phrase, "hoping for what we do not see," to mean that we kind of have a clear sense of what it is that we hope for, but that the object of hope is still future and therefore not available to our experience, therefore, invisible to us at the present moment. We see it with the eye of our mind, but not with our physical eyes, so to speak.
Now in his commentary on Romans, Martin Luther suggested that we actually do not see the object of hope clearly, even with the eyes of our mind. That even in the eyes of our minds, it becomes insufficiently determined or even undetermined. This inability to see what we hope for is darkness of hope. Now, Luther gets to this interpretation by connecting the object of hope, "that what we hope for," from the content of petitionary prayer—that is what we pray for. Because Paul, immediately after speaking about hope, addresses our inability to pray in Romans 8:24-27. Here is what he writes:
Evan Rosa: “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”
Miroslav Volf: So you see here that for which we hope, or the object of hope and that thing which we do not see, corresponds to that for which we pray or the content of our prayer. We do not know how to pray as we ought, which is to say we did not know how to pray according to the will of God. From this Luther concludes that hope transfers a person into the unknown, the hidden and the dark shadow so that he does not even know what he hopes for.
Hope is often for the future good, the nature of which remains hidden because we don't fully know what to hope for. And what we are hoping for gets revealed to us in the fulfillment of the promise.
Now crucial in this whole thing is the relation between hope and its fulfillment. And crucial it is that it's different than the relation between goal and its realization. The goal is a determined future good, and it will be realized to the extent that we are able to achieve what we are aiming for. We set the goal and we control the process. Now the object of hope, on the other hand, is the future good that is underdetermined, even undetermined, and developed in darkness. And the fulfillment of hope is ultimately not dependent on us. Though we may have an object of hope in mind, we are open to surprises and we do not control the process.
Hope lifts from the openness for the good that differs from what we needed or what we wanted to happen when we started hoping. Hope is open to the difference between how we imagined fulfillment and how it arrived. Openness even to recognize in the actual fulfillment what we in fact have wanted all along.
If you look back at the beginnings of the story of Jesus and look at the hopes of all the characters at the beginning, and then if you look at the story of the gospel, it's ending, you can see that I've just described the kind of hope that characterize Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the hopes of disciples and other people around Jesus. These hopes were fulfilled after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now they, the disciples and the mother of Christ, had something quite different in mind, as they hoped for the deliverer of Israel. And yet when Christ was raised from the dead, they recognized their expectations as more than fulfilled.
They recognize in fact that in a sense, they were hoping all along for what they have received. Now, if you want fulfillment to be identical to the content of our antecedent desire, hope, hope for the future, is really not what we are after. In that case, we have a goal and we have a desire for it to be realized, and then we need complete control to make sure that that happens. But the consequence for situations in which we find ourselves today, situations in which we cannot control the future, will be that we will either fall into despair, or rage against our faith.
We are most in need of hope in threatening situations, which we cannot control. But it is in those same situations that it's most difficult for us not to lose hope. That's where patience and endurance come in. Apostle Paul writes, "If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." Patience is here a translation of hupomoné, which is probably better rendered as endurance, as steadfastness, perhaps something like patient endurance.
Now, neither patience nor endurance are popular words today. Our lives are caught in a whirlwind of accelerated change. We have no time for patience. Technological advances promise to give us life of ease. Having to endure anything strikes us as a defeat. And yet when crisis hits, we need endurance as much as we need hope. Or more precisely, perhaps we need genuine hope which, to the extent that it is genuine, is marked by endurance. When Paul in Romans 8:25 says that "if we hope we wait with endurance," he implies that hope itself generates endurance. I think he means, "because we hope, we can endure present suffering."
Evan Rosa: "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us." Romans 8:18.
Miroslav Volf: The hope for future glory makes present suffering bearable. Now in Romans 5:3-5, he inverts the relation between hope and endurance. There he writes:
Evan Rosa: "Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope."
Miroslav Volf: Now putting the two texts together, Romans 8 and Romans 5, we can say hope needs endurance, and endurance needs hope. Or, genuine endurance is marked by hope, and genuine hope is marked by endurance.
Some 55 years after his Theology of Hope, Jürgen Moltmann wrote an essay on patience about two dimensions of patience that we find in biblical accounts. And these two dimensions are forbearance and endurance. He begins the second paragraph of his essay on patience autobiographical:
Evan Rosa: "In my youth, I learned to know 'the God of hope' and loved the beginnings of a new life with new ideas. But in my old age I am learning to know 'the God of patience' and stay in my place in life."
Miroslav Volf: Youth and old age, Moltmann goes on to say, are not about chronological age, but about experiences in life, about stances toward life. Correspondingly, hope and patients belong to both youth and to old age. They complement each other. He continues:
Evan Rosa: "Without endurance, hope turns superficial and evaporates when it meets first resistances. In hope we start something new, but only endurance helps us persevere. Only tenacious endurance makes hope sustainable. We learn endurance only with the help of hope. On the other hand, when hope gets lost, endurance turns into passivity. Hope turns endurance into active passivity. In hope we affirm the pain that comes with endurance, and learn to tolerate it.
Miroslav Volf: Hope and endurance complement each other, and neither can be truly itself without the other. And for the Apostle Paul, both our hope and our ability to endure, our enduring hope and hopeful endurance, are rooted in the character of God. Toward the end of Romans, he writes about God of endurance or steadfastness, and about the God of hope. Those who believe in that God—God who is the hope of Israel, God who is the hope of Gentiles, God who is the hope of the whole earth—those who believe in that God are able to be steadfast and endure in fear-inducing situations they cannot change, and in which no good future seems to be in sight.
And more than just endure, Paul—who was the persecuted apostle, and who saw himself as always bearing in the body the death of Jesus—Paul was hoping from the God of hope for more than just endurance. He writes in Romans, "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy spirit."
Hope is: in no-exits situations in which anxiousness would normally overwhelm you, you're at peace and you rejoice. Hope is: in no-exit situations in which paralyzing fear would normally grip you, you are strengthening what is good, repairing what is broken, opening up new possibilities. Hope is: in no-exit situations, you are not safe, but you are already saved, saved in hope.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode was the second of a two-part reflection on hope. Featuring theologian Miroslav Volf. You can follow him on Twitter @MiroslavVolf. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu and subscribe to the show wherever you prefer to listen to your podcasts.
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