Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.

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Blessings, my friends.

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 at its ending, you can see that I've just described the kind of hope that characterized 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 recognized, in fact, that in a sense, they were hoping all along for what they have received .

Hope is, in no exit situations in which anxiousness would normally overwhelm you, you are 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: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. Welcome to For the Life of the World, thanks for listening, and I'm here with Macie Bridge. Hi, Macie.

Macie Bridge: Hello.

Evan Rosa: It's so good to have you on the show after all this time of you supporting the show with such amazing production assistance and editorial and so many things about For the Life of the World.

Macie Bridge: Thanks for having me. I'm excited. Happy Advent.

Evan Rosa: Happy Advent. I like to say peace to your Advent.

Macie Bridge: Peace to your Advent. That's a wonderful rephrasing.

Evan Rosa: Yeah, I think this is the thing that at least for the last season of my life, I've tended to focus on during the Christmas season in general and the advent season, and making it a real distinction between the two is the complicated nature of these things.

Macie Bridge: Yes.

Evan Rosa: The complexity of what it means for Christ's incarnation and what it means for our humanity.

Macie Bridge: I think that's one of the beautiful parts of maybe growing into a more mature understanding of advent, at least for myself, how, how Christmas has evolved for me from the hope and joy of Santa Claus into now like taking seriously what does it mean to journey with Mary through the darkness and towards the light of what's coming. But it's an evolution.

I love the liturgical seasons, and I love the way that Advent breaks down into the four weeks of hope, peace, joy, and love and having a week to sit with each of those. And yeah, I love that it starts with hope as well.

Evan Rosa: Absolutely. That's what we're going to bring to the show today. If you're a recent listener, we started the show right when the pandemic started. And along with fear, as I remember it, one of the first emotions that Miroslav brought to the show was hope.

And I'm calling that an emotion on purpose here. Not just a sentiment or a concept, but I know at the time it was a challenging emotion to try to aspire to. That's maybe one possible reason that it's a way of configuring Advent.

Macie Bridge: Absolutely. As we enter into the darkness, grounding it in hope feels essential to being open to what's to come.

Evan Rosa: One of the episodes from that time, which is not related to Christmas, but is most definitely related to hope is Miroslav riffing on Emily Dickinson. I'll ask you to read that poem.

Macie Bridge: Sure. "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson:

"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all / And sweetest in the gale is heard / And sore must be the storm / That could abash the little bird / That kept so many warm / I've heard it in the chillest land / And on the strangest sea / Yet never in extremity / It asked a crumb of me."

Evan Rosa: That's a beautiful poem. Anything stand out?

Macie Bridge: I think I love Dickinson's imagery of the bird in the storm keeping so many warm, and I think Miroslav touches on this in the duality of fear and hope and how in someways those circumstances of fear or that feeling of fear is deeply intertwined with our experience of hope.

And yeah, Dickinson's imagery of the bird like flying through the storm brings that into a perfect little image for me.

Evan Rosa: Yeah, and yet it also perches, right? It finds a resting point. It's as if it's come to you from a long distance.

Macie Bridge: And the bird isn't inherently trapped by the storm. It's caught up in it.

Evan Rosa: And I mean, it's part of what the bird does is to be on the move. Hope seems to be always on the move. There's so much movement to it which is a little unsettling about it. And I think that's part of the nature of an already not yet kind of hope, which is how I read things like Advent darkness. I read it almost in a kind of a darkness of unknowing.

A darkness of ignorance or maybe chaos at times. It certainly can devolve into a kind of darkness of evil as well. And these things don't seem to leave us alone. So there's always a time and always an opportunity for hope.

Macie Bridge: And I think the bird kind of invites us to maybe not brace so much against that chaos and open up and keep flying.

Evan Rosa: And also see what comes to us in the midst of a storm. Yeah.

Macie Bridge: Well, thanks everyone for listening today. And here are some clips from For the Life of the World from May 2020, episodes 8 and 10.

Miroslav Volf: Hope is a strange thing, a thing with feathers perched in our soul ready to take us on its wings to some future good. In fact, hope is a thing that has already taken us to that good with the tune that it sings. "In hope," or perhaps by hope, "we were saved," writes Apostle Paul. In hope, a future good which isn't yet somehow already is.

A future good we cannot see still qualifies our entire existence. We might be suffering, we might be, as Apostle Paul did, we might be experiencing hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. We may be being killed all day long, as Apostle Paul writes, and yet, and yet, we have been saved, and we are saved, in hope.

Interpreting the phrase, "In hope we are saved," Martin Luther, Protestant reformer, suggested that just as love transforms the lover into the beloved, so hope changes the one who hopes into what is hoped for. How should we understand this creative power of hope? In his justly famous book Theology of Hope, Jürgen Moltmann distinguished between optimism and hope.

Optimism, if it is justified, is based on extrapolations we make about future based on what we can discern to be tendencies in the present. The present is pregnant with the future, and we are reasonably optimistic when we discern that the future to be born out of the present will be good. Now hope is different.

Hope is not based on accurate extrapolation about future from the character of the present. The hope for future is not born out of the present. The future good that is the object of hope is a new thing. Moltmann uses Latin term nove. It's a new thing that comes from outside the situation.

Correspondingly, the hope is also like a bird that flies from outside and perches in the soul. In the thinking of Apostle Paul, hope is underdetermined by reasons. We hope for that for which we don't have sufficient reason to hope. It is based on trust in the promise. In Paul's telling in Romans 4, God promised Abraham and Sarah that they will have a child in whom nations will be blessed.

But they were past their childbearing age. Still, they hoped. And they hoped against hope . When we hope, we always hope against reasonable expectation. That's why Dickinson's bird of hope never stops singing, never at all, in the sore storm, in the chillest land, on the strangest sea. Hope is, as I said, underdetermined by reasons.

It lives apart from reason and against reason. And that's certainly true, but it looks so, and it is so, when we look at things in abstraction from the reality of God. For the Apostle Paul, however, hope and God belong together. In fact, in Romans 15, he speaks of God as the God of hope, and he is echoing the Prophet Jeremiah from the Hebrew Bible, who speaks of Yahweh as the hope of Israel.

Abraham's hope is victorious, Paul writes, in the presence of God in whom he, Abraham, believed, the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist, the God who creates out of nothing, the God who makes dead alive, the God of original beginning, and the God of new beginnings.

That God justifies hope that is otherwise unreasonable, unjustifiable. When that God makes a promise, we can hope. When every course of action by which we could reach the desired future seems destined to failure, when we cannot reasonably draw a line that would connect the terror of the present with any future joy, hope in that God, the God of hope, still sings.

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 a quote, 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 suggests 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. 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 do not know how to pray according to the will of God. Now 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 determinate 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, enveloped 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 lives 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.

Now, 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 at its ending, you can see that I've just described the kind of hope that characterized 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 recognized, in fact, that, in a sense, they were hoping all along for what they have received. 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 hupomone, 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 the 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 kind of hope itself generates endurance. I think he means because we hope, we can endure present suffering. 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 exit situations in which anxiousness would normally overwhelm you, you are 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 featured theologian Miroslav Volf, production assistance by Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show.

For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.

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