Hope Against Hope

During one of my first meetings with NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness) in relation to my son’s condition, the moderator listed some “Predictable Stages of Reactions” to a diagnosis of mental illness. The first stage, “Dealing with Catastrophic Events,” included shock, denial, and “hope against hope.” It was a passing phase, they said. I remember my immediate, unspoken response: “I will always hope against hope!”

As I kept pondering this definition of “hope against hope” as a stage to overcome, I remembered the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, the receptacle of all evils. After Pandora opened the box, the last to come out was hope. Since then, philosophers have wondered if hope was the last evil or a remedy the gods had mercifully allowed to alleviate the pain.

Most of us don’t bother with this question, as hope is typically seen as a good thing. We say, “While there’s life, there’s hope.” For Dante, the absence of all hope was hell.

I finally understood what NAMI must have meant when I saw a book by Meg McGuire entitled Blinded by Hope: One Mother’s Journey Through Her Son’s Bipolar Illness and Addiction. It is a story of learning to cope with what even a mother cannot change. “I keep chasing the dream that one day I’ll wake up and Ryan will be the bright, promising artist he seemed destined to be before mental illness rewired his brain. The unfairness is that mental illness is stronger than a mother’s love,” McGuire says in the prologue.

In her experience, her refusal to give up a hope nourished by her son’s reassuring words prevented her from accepting reality and caused her to enable his damaging behavior, including drug addiction.

My reaction at the NAMI meeting was due to the fact that we spoke different languages. They spoke of a hope grounded on a fragile and uncertain belief that things could get better or return to be as they were—a wishful thinking or vague optimism. In that case, they were right in encouraging people to leave it behind. To me, the phrase “hope against hope” was invariably attached to Romans 4:18, where the apostle Paul tells us of Abraham: “In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations.”

Paul sandwiched this statement between two promises God had made to Abraham: “’I have made you the father of many nations,” and “So shall your offspring be.” Those were the grounds of Abraham’s hope. Yet, even those promises would not have been sufficient to support his hope if Abraham had not known the character and power of the God who made them: “the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

Unlike the ancient Greeks, the Jews did not seem to question the nature of hope. In the Old Testament (especially the Psalms), hope is clearly positive as part of a vision of history grounded in the faithfulness of God and proceeding in a linear manner toward the fulfilment of his promises. As Paul said in another letter, “I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Tim. 1:12).

What Is Hope?

Traditionally, faith, hope, and love have been called the “theological virtues” because they have God as their foundation and aim and are gifts of grace which come from outside of us and are unobtainable by human effort.

Of the three, hope tends to be the least discussed and understood, maybe because it is not always easy to distinguish it from faith. In fact, some might interpret Hebrews 11:1 (“faith is the assurance of things hoped for”) as saying that faith is superior to hope. In reality, faith and hope work together. In fact, according to John Calvin, often described as the “theologian of hope,” hope, “the expectation of those things which faith previously believes to have been truly promised by God,” is essential to the life of faith:

“Faith is the foundation on which hope rests, hope nourishes and sustains faith. For as no man can expect anything from God without previously believing his promises, so, on the other hand, the weakness of our faith, which might grow weary and fall away, must be supported and cherished by patient hope and expectation. For this reason, Paul justly says, ‘We are saved by hope.’ For while hope silently waits for the Lord, it restrains faith from hastening on with too much precipitation, confirms it when it might waver in regard to the promises of God or begin to doubt of their truth, refreshes it when it might be fatigued, extends its view to the final goal, so as not to allow it to give up in the middle of the course, or at the very outset. In short, by constantly renovating and reviving, it is ever and anon furnishing more vigor for perseverance.”

Keeping Hope

In spite of many biblical encouragements, it’s easy to lose hope. Imprisoned during the religious wars of the sixteenth-century, Italian poetess Olympia Morata said she and her companions were “trapped between hope and fear,” a familiar feeling for most Christians.

Even Paul, who filled his letters with exhortations to hope, confessed his feeling of hopelessness while traveling through Asia Minor: “For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.” Looking back, though, he could add: “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (1 Cor. 1:8–9). This is also a lesson many of us have learned the hard way.

Keeping our hopes firmly on God rather than our abilities or even the goodness of others is not always easy, but the Scriptures provide enough reminders to get us back on track. More subtle, in my experience, is the temptation to restrict the scope of hope by attaching it to specific expectations, imagining or praying for a particular outcome or a carbon copy of a positive past experience. It is more subtle because it doesn’t seem to distract our gaze from God. We place our hopes on him while being specific about the way we want him to act.

This, I believe, is the kind of hope that McGuire described as “blinding”—a specific hope that distracted her from reality. It is a very popular type of hope today, when people talk about “manifesting” their dreams (or thinking of them as if they were fulfilled).

The problem with this type of hope is not only that it can blind us to reality and lead to disappointment. It also places human limitations on God, “who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Eph. 3:20).

Remembering God’s active power and unsearchable wisdom can jolt us out of our fears. But it can also be disconcerting, because most of us like to be in control of our lives and even our hopes. And yet, hope always includes an element of uncertainty. As Paul said, “Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:24).

Paul sandwiches this definition of hope between a description of the groanings of the whole creation “in the pains of childbirth ... as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” and the assurance that the groaning of the Spirit will help us in our weakness in prayer (Rom. 8:22–27). We can trust the Spirit to sustain our hope (cf. Rom. 15:13).

Commenting on how Abraham could “hope against hope” in the face of a seemingly impossible promise of God, Calvin wrote: “All things around us are in opposition to the promises of God: He promises immortality; we are surrounded with mortality and corruption: He declares that he counts us just; we are covered with sins: He testifies that he is propitious and kind to us; outward judgments threaten his wrath. What then is to be done? We must with closed eyes pass by ourselves and all things connected with us, that nothing may hinder or prevent us from believing that God is true.”

This may sound like a type of blinding hope, but it’s not. Unlike optimism, wishful thinking, or a hope that is tied to human imagination, biblical hope is realistic. It acknowledges both the realities of this world and the overarching reality of God’s action and being. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes hope as “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.” Like an anchor, it enables us to look onto an uncertain future without losing our bearings, because it’s “a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf” (Heb. 6:19–20).

Just as God allowed Elisha’s frightened servant to see the heavenly army God had arrayed all around them, he often reminds us of the greater realities that are hidden from our physical senses.

This is expressed well in a famous poem by Francis Thompson:

The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

And this was Paul’s conclusion after recounting his loss of hope in Asia Minor: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:16–18).

A Challenge for the Church

When Paul told us to be ready to answer “anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15), he assumed that our hope would be so evident as to elicit questions.

I don’t know how frequently inquiries about our hope come up in casual conversations. I only had one person asking me this question directly. It was after my son died and this person wanted to know how I coped. But if Thomas Aquinas was right in saying that hope “is not a passion but a habit of the mind” which “does not flow from our merits, but from grace alone,” hope should permeate our outlook and our speech.

But it needs to be true hope, not simple optimism tinged with Christian hues. According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, “Optimism spreads a monochrome glaze over the whole world, blind to nuance and distinction. ... The card-carrying optimist responds to everything in the same rigorously preprogrammed way.”

Christians can easily fall into this kind of optimism because it is comfortable. It allows us to use pre-programmed Bible verses without getting too emotionally involved. While these verses are generally true, what is often missing is a willingness to patiently listen to others in order to respect the “nuance and distinction” in their experiences.

Quick answers are often the result of fear. We are afraid to face situations that raise difficult questions. But a properly cultivated biblical hope frees us to love others without fear of losing our theological bearings and without a compulsion to provide definite answers and tie expectations to specific outcomes.

If biblical hope is tightly connected to faith, it is also tied to love. “Love hopes all things,” Paul tells us (1 Cor. 13:7), and this frees us. We can hope all things for all people because we don’t know how God will work in their lives. We can show the reasonableness of the hope that sustains us. But we also need to be consistent with our words, and strive to mirror the faithfulness, love, and patience “of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope” (1 Tim. 1:1). It is a high challenge for Christ’s church in a world that persists on building fanciful castles on false hopes. But it is a challenge the church is equipped to meet.