Hope’s Promise for Christians in the Not Yet and In Between

I. Introduction

We naturally fall into habits of thought, into comfortable and convenient ways of drawing distinctions and expressing ideas, and in the ordinary course of things we do not even recognize the exercise of such habits. We simply find ourselves, without special self-awareness, recurring to the tried and true. Sometimes, though, we are jarred into moments of self-critical realization in which we discern that we do not have to think of things as usual. Such opportunities for recasting our imagination over familiar terrain must be cherished; we often make discernible progress in our understanding just on those occasions.

In this vein, Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Spe salvi calls us to consider how modernity has tamed the transcendent credentials and horizons of Christian hope, and thus how modernity has domesticated Christians, mostly without our notice. With Francis Bacon’s vision for the restoration of reason, the Pope writes, “The foundations of the modern age” were laid and “a new correlation between science and praxis” was established.¹ The resulting “transformation of Christian faith-hope in the modern age” has given rise to circumstances in which “Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man” (SS, 40, 65). Benedict gravely assesses the consequences:

A disturbing step has been taken: up to that time, the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay “redemption.” Now, this “redemption,” the restoration of the lost “Paradise,” is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world. This programmatic vision has determined the trajectory of modern times, and it also shapes the present-day crisis of faith, which is essentially a crisis of Christian hope. Thus hope too, in Bacon, acquires a new form. Now it is called: faith in progress.

(SS, 42)

Far from standing exempt from modernity’s recast form of hope, Benedict writes that Christians have fallen prey, often unwittingly, to customary ways of thinking that narrow and distort the scope of faithful witness. As he puts it: “Modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task” (SS, 57). Benedict for these reasons critiques the constrained and false hope engendered by modernity in the general culture as well as within the Church’s own culture. He invites us to share this critical task, writing:

A self-critique of modernity is needed in dialogue with Christianity and its concept of hope. In this dialogue Christians too, in the context of their knowledge and experience, must learn anew in what their hope truly consists, what they have to offer to the world and what they cannot offer. Flowing into this self-critique of the modern age there also has to be a self-critique of modern Christianity, which must constantly renew its self-understanding setting out from its roots.

(SS, 50–51)

SS undertakes both of the kinds of self-critique that Benedict identifies, and it calls all faithful followers of Christ to deepen and extend those critiques for the sake of the true hope found in Jesus of Nazareth.

SS offers a gift that we should embrace: the gift of being shaken out of stultifying habits of thought and life by being confronted by the ever-renewing wellsprings of genuinely hopeful Christian understanding and witness. Because Christians always need imaginative resources for cooperating with God’s work in the world, we should take Benedict’s message about “the true shape of Christian hope” as a welcome opportunity to reexamine habits of thought typical of Western intellectual life, both...