Dear Theophilus,

I want to talk to you about one of the virtues of Christianity, the virtue of hope. By understanding this virtue better, we will come to understand our faith better.

An often heard challenge to faith, from the side of atheists, is that religion is a crutch for those who do not have the courage to face reality as it truly is. Religion is just wish fulfilment by those who have not grown to the stature of full mature people. These are charges that are levelled at believers by those who do not believe and the reason why these charges have cause pain is that they do in fact hold some truth. This is what gives them strength and by discussing the virtue of hope, we will address these very charges and see what they teach us.

One of the sources of misunderstanding in this matter is that we confuse the terms hope and wishes. We equate the two but they are not the same. Hope is something that is unexpected because we cannot see the resolution. Hope deals with the unknown and it comes to us unexpectedly and it creates a new environment for us. Hope is something new because it does not come from us but it reaches beyond our resources and beyond what we seemingly can accomplish. Faith is the certainty of things unseen but hope does not offer the security of certainty. For this reason, hope already, implicitly, carries with it pain. We seek certainty so much, and when we can't close our hands around it, when it seeps away like water that we try to retain through our locked fingers, we experience anguish.

The disciples of Christ were hoping for a restoration of Israel from the bondage of Roman rule. But they were not hoping; they were wish and these two things are not necessarily the same. They sometimes coincide; but, more often, they differ. This comes out strikingly in the New Testament where, in spite of the prophecies of the Old Testament, there is still uncertainty. The apostles are initially incredulous. What they have witnessed is so new, it is so unexpected that you can almost hear them gasp, as you read the account in the Gospels. It is so new, so unexpected that they have a difficult time of it trying to convince the learned men. The Resurrection is something so new that we can talk about a new age beginning and we can talk about the end of the old.

However, the prelude to resurrection, to salvation, is doubt and confusion and strife and suffering. The introduction to resurrection, as Christ shows in the cross, is powerlessness. The background to resurrection is always impossibility. Through resurrection, what is not, is called into being. I want to point out to you that being given life beyond the grave is no greater a miracle than being given life each minute of your existence here on earth. We have become blase about the miracle of our life because we think we have learned much about life processes at the molecular level. We have become too blase and take the miracle of creation too granted.

When people talk about the resurrection, they run into problems because of the difficulties and confusion that we have been discussing above. We apply to the future life, not hope, but desire. We picture the future life in terms of what we want now, in terms of our present experiences and needs, and this, obviously, leads to absurd conclusions. But to hope for the conceivable, for what is familiar, is to cling to the past. We must guard against hope becoming simply a desire, a wish-fulfilment.

This discussion of the characteristics may make the last words of Christ more meaningful for us. They seem, to some, to echo despair and a sense of abandonment. I think that there is truth in this view because it does reflect the experience of much of humanity. But, there is something else here, as well. We see that divine truth is a unique kind of uncertainty that is a chief characteristic of hope. Hope is looking forward to what we know not and this, of course, brings us anxiety and pain.

Dear Theophilus: you may be cautioned that religion is a self-indulging wish fulfilment. You can answer that in your pain, in your doubt, and in your uncertainty hope paradoxically shows itself to be real and objective. You may be criticized for a childish conception of the after-life as if it were simply a glorified and sanitized continuation of life as we know it. The answer to this is in the hope and newness offered in the Cross and Resurrection of Christ, something that in its startling newness tells us that it is not a fantasy but a reality on which all things stand. This isa painful process and this is why many do not want to encounter it. But what choice do we really have? Either this or a meaningless and futile semi existence.