The first thing we think of when we hear the word “hope” is the future. After all, I can only “hope” for something I don’t yet have, right?
Well, not if you’re a Christian. Hope, as a theological virtue, is inextricably tied to faith, which the Letter to the Hebrews defines as the “realization of what is hoped for” and the “evidence of things not seen” (11:1). Although the New American Bible may be stretching it a little by translating hypostasis (“substance”) as “realization,” it’s a fair way of understanding the sacred text nonetheless.
The point is that, through faith, we already participate in the very future we are waiting for. As Pope Benedict XVI elegantly puts it:
[Through faith] there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this “thing” which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does not “appear”), but because of the fact that, as an initial and dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it has even now come into existence. (Spe Salvi, 7)
In short, the redemption wrought for us by the Lord Jesus embraces all time—past, present, and future—but in a way that transcends all three precisely because God is subject to none. In fact, the phenomenon of time is much stranger than we would first think. The past existed but exists no more, and the future has never existed, so it seems we have only the present. But if the present, which was once future, instantly becomes the past, then it is hard to say precisely what the present is. Saint Augustine famously pondered this conundrum in Book XI of his Confessions to prepare us for an even greater mystery—namely, eternity—concluding that we can only understand redemption in eternal terms.
The eternal terms of redemption are at the heart of Benedict XVI’s teaching on hope in Spe Salvi (2007). Although the encyclical never mentions the name of Jürgen Moltmann—his former colleague at the University Tübingen—we can read it as a response to Moltmann’s “theology of hope,” often criticized for its exclusive focus on the future and lack of attention to what has already come to fulfillment in the present through Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection.
Simply put, if God’s revelation gives us the certainty that what He promises will come, and if He does not act outside of us but only through us, then the actualization of His promises depends entirely on us. Moltmann writes:
That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is . . . Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.
In 1968, students at the University of Tübingen—correctly or incorrectly—interpreted Moltmann to mean that enough was enough, and it was time to take matters into their own hands. They enthusiastically joined others across the European continent to protest and show that they could “no longer put up with reality as it is,” culminating in the shocking humiliation of a brilliant theologian by the name of Joseph Ratzinger who, during a routine lecture, was forced to cede his microphone to a student convinced that the only way to actualize the promised future was via a Marxist revolution.
This experience left a deep imprint on Ratzinger’s soul, urging him in Spe Salvi to argue that we do need patience, and we should find rest precisely because, by faith in the resurrected Jesus, we are able to put up with reality as it is, even while working tirelessly to bring God’s love into the world.
Faith, for Benedict, “is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent.” Rather, faith “gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a ‘proof’ of the things that are still unseen” (Spe Salvi, 7). In other words, the past (i.e., the death and resurrection of Jesus) establishes a future (i.e., His coming again in glory) that we really participate in now (i.e., through sacramental grace). “Faith,” Benedict continues, “draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet.’” Rather than the past simply determining the future, the very existence of the future “changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future” (Spe Salvi, 7).
There is a problem though. The presence of the future fulfilment in the here and now seems, at first glance, to exempt Christians from action in this world. It implies that they are not obligated to work for a better world, for if the “not yet” is already a “now,” what is there to change? What is there to act for?
Benedict explains that there is every reason to act in the here and now, provided we understand the true source of our action. “All serious and upright human conduct,” he writes, “is hope in action” (35). In other words, the effort we put into bringing Christ’s love into the world helps us and others see a future already present but yet to be realized. With his experience at Tübingen in mind, Benedict cautions:
[Our] daily efforts in pursuing our own lives and in working for the world’s future either tire us or turn into fanaticism, unless we are enlightened by the radiance of the great hope that cannot be destroyed even by small-scale failures or by a breakdown in matters of historic importance. (35)
In other words, even when I fail miserably, hope gives me the certainty that “my own life and history in general . . . are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere.”
A close reading of Spe Salvi reveals a very fine line between the hope that drove students to overturn their “masters” at the University of Tübingen in 1968 and the hope that sustained St. Josephine Bakhita, an African slave Benedict chose as his paradigmatic example in the encyclical. After being kidnapped by slave traders as a nine-year-old, Josephine was beaten till she bled and sold five times in the slave markets of Sudan. She bore well over a hundred scars from being flogged in her master’s house every day. Yet she eventually found hope in a new Master who, she discovered, “knew her . . . created her,” and “actually loved her” (Spe Salvi, 3).
In his magnificent poem Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot writes:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
The logic is as perfect as the poetry graceful, but it actually expresses the antithesis of Christian hope. Authentic Christian hope is oriented toward the future, but a future that informs the present. It is realized by the past, but a past ever present in the here and now. And if what is to come is already present, and what has been has never really passed away, then—as the Jubilee reminds us—all time is indeed redeemable.
