The Distinctive Nature of Christian Hope

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - December 14, 2007

In his encyclical Spe Salvi, which we printed in last week's edition, Pope Benedict wrote that for a Christian, the "good news" is not meant to be merely "informative" but "performative." It is supposed to give us more than information: by its nature it is intended to change our lives. A Christian who hears the Gospel and strives to put it into practice distinguishes himself from others. This difference flows obviously through gradual identification with Christ; the one who lives as Christ lives, and loves as Christ loves, is going to be markedly different from one who doesn't. But Benedict says that the Christian difference also comes from the distinctive nature of Christian hope, which has the power thoroughly to transform those who have it in every circumstance.

Benedict wrote this encyclical on hope because he recognized that many in the Church have lost the true sense of what hope means. "We who have always lived with the Christian concept of God," he states, "have almost ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with God." Many of us no longer see the reasons for the hope that draws millions of converts into the Church each year, inspires young men and women to forsake worldly aims and enter the priesthood and religious life, keeps so many of the elderly joyful in the midst painful physical ailments, and gives scores of present day martyrs courage in the face of terrible persecution.

Benedict describes why many in the Church have lost this authentically Christian hope and how they can recover it. He explains how hope was lost by giving a "self-critique" of modernity in general and of modern Christianity in particular.

With his characteristic, encyclopedic brilliance, he traces how the modern scientific and political revolutions all but eliminated God from their understanding of hope. The euphoria that has flowed from centuries of ever-more amazing scientific discoveries led many secularists and even those in the Church to place their hope for the future in scientific progress rather than in God. This ideology of "faith in progress" proclaims that redemption from the problems that plague humanity — from illness, to suffering, to the weather, to corruption, to war — will come through scientific discovery and through political structures based on economic and political science. Recent inventions are always only the beginning; these worldly sciences alone are sufficient to bring about a whole new and better world. The only obstacles to this assured triumph, the ideology asserts, are the shackles of faith, the Church and the insufficient political structures of the day.

The pope says that this pervasive ideology has demonstrated itself repeatedly to be a false hope. Science, while bringing many benefits, has also created the threat of nuclear weapons and other terrors. Political revolutions, like the French revolution of the bourgeois over nobles, or the Marxist revolution of the working class over the bourgeois, have both produced terrible atrocities. The reason why science and politics will never be able to achieve the fulfillment of the hope that stirs the human heart, Benedict states, is because "faith in progress" has a fundamental anthropological flaw. It forgets the truth that the person is always free and vulnerable to choose evil instead of good. Science and politics are ethically ambiguous; they can be used for great good or great evil depending upon man's choices. For that reason, the human person in every generation and every instance must freely choose the good anew. No amount of technical or political achievement can ever substitute for the need for each person to progress morally through the proper use of freedom. Such ethical progress, Benedict says, occurs only when reason is made fully human by the differentiation between good and evil that comes from the saving forces of faith. Otherwise, the imbalance between man's know how and the lack of judgment in his heart becomes a threat for him.

Modern Christianity lost its characteristic hope, Benedict writes, not by accepting totally the ideology of "faith in progress," but by responding to it in an adequate way. Faced with scientific successes, the Church largely withdrew its attention to the individual and his salvation and left non-soteriological concerns to science and politics. In this way, it restricted the horizon of its hope and failed to recognize the greatness of the Christian task. Christians, Benedict says, must learn anew in what their hope truly consists, as well as what they can offer the world and what they cannot offer.

Christian hope consists in being with God in the world. It is a way of life that takes root when, having experienced in embryonic form "life to the full" through a transforming encounter with Christ, believers confidently await its fulfillment. The encounter with Christ is the experience of his love, which gives Christians the possibility of persevering each day in the midst of an imperfect world seeking to transform it through love. The world will be saved, Benedict says, not through science or politics, but through experiencing and sharing of God's love. This is the world's true hope. This is the distinctively Christian offering to the world. This is the performative meaning of the "good news of great joy to all the people" (Lk 2:10).

As we prepare for Christmas, there is a specific application of this teaching of Pope Benedict. The Holy Father mentions how the Letter to the Hebrews contrasts those who find their security in material possessions from Christians who find their "substance" in their embryonic possession of life in Christ (Heb 11:1, 34). Because of this "basis," Christians have a new freedom with respect to the material foundation of life. They consider it of little account and are able to be stripped of it during times of persecution, renounce it for a life of poverty, or give it generously away to others. Christians are, in fact, different when it comes to relating to the material world. This should influence not only their generosity at Christmas time, but also the types of goods they seek to give others this Christmas season.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.