The views expressed in this article are of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
Hope is whatever you wish for.
At least, this is the way we speak of hope today; it is the standard usage in twenty-first century American English. Hope is anything you want or can imagine. When I was in high school, I would say, “I hope she will go to the prom with me.” But it never happened and she never did. Today, I say things like, “I hope the Cowboys will win the Super Bowl this year.” Yeah, right. So much for “hope.”
Like faith, hope is a virtue that has lost its way through the thickets of language and culture.
When Luke says that Paul stood trial based on “the hope of a promise” that he has (Acts 26:6), this doesn’t seem at all close to proms or football games. Paul is risking his freedom on something more than wishful thinking.
If Paul risks his freedom for hope, then Abraham stakes his life and legacy on hope. Or, as Paul puts it, with “hope against hope” Abraham goes all in and believes God (Rom 4:18). This understanding of hope is most famously articulated by the author of Hebrews, who describes the type of hope that Abraham had—and we need—as an “anchor of the soul” (Heb 6:19).
From this we realize that hope in this sense is far more than a wish. It is a confidence that we have (cf. 2 Cor 1:7). When we say that “our hope is in the Lord,” we are expressing out extreme confidence that God will do exactly what he says he will do. And our confidence cannot be placid; it must be alive and active (1 Pet 1:3), just like our faith and love.
This is not to say that the writers of the New Testament didn’t also understand hope as a wish. Both Paul and John hope for journeys that may or may not ever were made (e.g., Phil 2:23, 2 John 12).
Clearly, much of this discussion hinges on the semantic range of the first-century Greek word ἐλπίς (hope), and how we gloss it in English. I would argue, though, that much more of this discussion is a bit deeper than semantics.
Hope in the New Testament
The New Testament writers do not spend much time on hope, at least compared to faith and love (and even those, perhaps not as much as conventional wisdom suggests). Jesus never teaches (directly) on hope; he only mentions it in passing to critique some of the counter-Judean positions (John 5:45). The Apocalypse of John never mentions hope, yet it seems it should be a great source of hope for believers. With the exception of some of Paul’s thoughts about faith, the New Testament writers largely eschew abstract discussions of these ideas in favor a more practical working-out of love, and faith, and hope.
Yet these three ideas do seem to represent the cardinal virtues of the Christian faith (1 Cor 13:13, 1 Thess 1:3, 5:8). At the same time, while faith and love are common points of discussion among Christians, hope is not. Let’s say it like this: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the least of these is hope.”
The irony of this is found in the text of Hebrews, in the writer’s explanation of what faith looks like. While none of the NT writers tend to define the concepts they use, this is as close as a reader gets to an explanation of faith. Here, the writer uses hope to define faith: “So this is faith: the reality of hoping, the tangible evidence of not seeing” (Heb 11:1, paraphrase). It is not inaccurate to claim that we cannot have faith if we do not have hope.
In fact, we can take it a step further. Hope is more than merely an ingredient of faith; hope is a co-reagent in the transformation of a human being from death to life. If we meet a person who claims to have faith, but not love, we would wonder about that faith. In the same way, if we meet a person who claims to have faith, but does not have hope—full confidence that what God says he will do he will do—we should wonder about that faith, too.
It seems to me that the earliest Christians understood the meaning and relationship between these three virtues implicitly, such that it didn’t often need much direct mention. Still, evidence of this crops up occasionally. For example, one of the earliest church fathers Clement writes to the Corinthians a century after Paul and argues that redemption comes to those who have faith and hope in the Lord (Clem. 12.7, emphasis mine). What is even more striking is that where James writes of double-mindedness as a danger for a believer’s faith, Pseudo-Clement warns of double-mindedness as a danger to a believer’s hope (2 Clem. 11.1–6).
Similarly, it is out of hope that Ignatius of Antioch pleads with the Magnesians that they might be convinced of the resurrection of Jesus (Ignatius, Magn. 11). Ignatius reminds his readers that Christ is the hope of the believer, much in the same way that Paul reminds Timothy that our hope is in God (1 Tim 4:10, cf. 1 Tim 1:1, 6:17).
We can continue with other examples of hope peeking through the discussion here and there in the early history of the church, but these don’t answer the fundamental question: How do we Christians embrace hope in our lives?
Hope for Today, Hope for Tomorrow
Hope can be just as tangible as faith and love. Let’s look at just two ways.
First, we can examine the lives of people of hope. Ignatius argues that when the prophets before Christ spoke, their actions were grounded in their hope for the coming of the Messiah (Ignatius, Phil. 5). These prophets did not wish the Messiah might come, their lives were grounded in the patient expectation that the Messiah is coming, whether they live to see him or not. They spoke their message as a consequence of hope (more than faith or love). As Christians today, one of our primary hopes is that God will wrap everything up in the consummation of the ages. The way we speak and live today should be grounded in that reality.
Second, Tertullian argues that the proof of our hope is in our everyday actions. He observes in his grand conclusion to his Apologeticus that many people want to build monuments to themselves, and that those monuments are their “resurrection”—they are tangible expressions of where their confidence lies (Apol. 50). As Christians, if we hope in the resurrection, Tertullian suggests, we should live out that hope, even if the world thinks we have lost our minds.
In the end, I admit that Tertullian is yet again my most hated interlocutor, my proverbial church father thorn in the flesh. As pastors, scholars, we like to create little pockets of our own resurrections on the buildings we build and the books that we write. Perhaps buildings and books are little more than the wishes for prom dates and football teams. If so, then maybe Ignatius is right; we should be like the prophets of old, go all in, preach the gospel in relative obscurity, because our hope is in Christ’s resurrection, and not our own. Maybe we should fade away in history, like the prophets, with only our testimony to Christ remaining; and all the while certain that God will do as God says he will do and we will live in eternity with him, forever, for sure.
Douglas Estes (PhD, University of Nottingham) is Associate Professor of Biblical Studies and Practical Theology at Tabor College, Kansas. Prior to this, he served in pastoral ministry for sixteen years. He has written or edited eleven books, including the The Tree of Life (Brill, 2020) and a forthcoming literary guide to the Gospel of John from Lexham Press. He is editor of Didaktikos and a member of the St. John Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
