hope?

I must confess I’m having a hard time hoping. I’m not sure where the world is turning. Sure, if you ask me the content of my hope and faith, I can tell you. I can tell you what I know in my head — in my understanding of the faith: the cross, the resurrection, the kingdom; but I confess that this knowledge does not match what I know in my body; I’m not feeling it. My body tenses when I watch another video. I don’t celebrate what I see in the church. I’m not even sure where my political and social “allies” are headed. It’s wrong. I know it. My body knows it. If anything, it’s my head and its trust in knowledge that’s fighting reality. I live in this dissonance.

I’ve been dabbling in some German theologians in the past year+. Jürgen Moltmann may be one of the first that I revisit when I first started working at the seminary in the summer of 2024; in part because he had just passed, but also because I recall his work was really influential when I first encountered it in my eschatology class when I was doing my seminary studies. My encounter with his work changed the way I preach and articulate the Christian faith. I’ve since looked at some of his partner, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel’s work (though I have yet to dive deeply into some of her work on friendship, but it looks very interesting), and Dorothee Sölle (I’ve written about her work previously).

I’m coming back to Moltmann’s work because I need to recenter myself on hope. Moltmann writes extensively on it; it’s the foundation for his understanding of faith.

In the introduction ofTheology of Hope, Moltmann writes:

In the contradiction between the word of promise and the experiential reality of suffering and death, faith takes its stand on hope and “hastens beyond this world,” said Calvin. He did not mean by this that Christian faith flees the world, but he did mean that it strains after the future… Thus, in the Christian life faith has the priority but hope the primacy. Without faith’s knowledge of Christ, hope becomes a utopia and remains hanging in the air. But without hope, faith falls to piece, becomes fainthearted and ultimately a dead faith.

Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p19-20.

That last bit is where I’m at. It’s hard to hope right now. I would much rather give into my anger/frustration and fall into despair at what I see. But even as I write this, I realize that is really another way that “flees the world.” It feeds this desire to “win” and be “victorious” over evil or retreat to apathetic idleness… and that may really be a path to let evil win.

Pursuing goodness, even when good doesn’t “win” or have the hope of winning… that’s a hard pill to swallow. But maybe that’s the backwards way of Jesus that faith and hope call me to follow. That pursuing the righteousness of Jesus may actually be the path to losing. That in pursuing it, I’m not supposed to expect a silver lining. In straining for this kind of future, I may not “conquer” my enemies, but at the very least I will not be contributing to the brokenness and horror that I’m seeing now.