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Category: Hope
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Hopeful Thought for the Day
More from Augustine’s Confessions:
Who will grant me to find peace in you? Who will grant me this grace, that you would come into my heart and inebriate it, enabling me to forget the evils that beset me and embrace you, my only good? What are you to me? Have mercy on me, so that I may tell. What indeed am I to you, that you should command me to love you, and grow angry with me if I do not, and threaten me with enormous woes? Is not the failure to love you woe enough in itself? Alas, for me! Through your own merciful dealings with me, O Lord my God, tell me what you are to me. Say to my soul, I am your salvation. Say it so that I can hear it. My heart is listening, Lord; open up the ears of my heart and say to my soul, I am your salvation. Let me run toward this voice and seize hold of you. Do not hide your face from me: let me die so that I may see it, for not to see it would be death to me indeed.
Just as divine hospitality requires at least some violence to make it flourish, so also God’s love requires that he become angry when his love is violated. For God not to get angry when he is rejected by people made in his image (and redeemed in Christ) would demonstrate indifference, not love. When God steps into a world of injustice, he shows his love in particular ways. . . . Love, it seems, requires passionate anger toward anything that would endanger the relationship of love. . . . Hospitality bespeaks the very essence of God, while violence is merely one of the ways to safeguard or ensure the future of his hospitality when dealing with the humps and bumps of our lives. Divine violence, in other words, is a way in which God strives toward an eschatological situation of pure hospitality.
– Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross.
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Hopeful Though for the Day
The death of Jesus on the cross is the centre of all Christian theology. It is not the only theme of theology, but it is in effect the entry to its problems and answers on earth. All Christian statements about God, about creation, about sin and death have their focal point in the crucified Christ. Al Christian statements about history, about the church, about faith and sanctification, about the future and about hope stem from the crucified Christ. . . . [T]he centre is occupied not by ‘cross and resurrection’, but by the resurrection of the crucified Christ, which qualifies his death as something that has happened for us, and the cross of the risen Christ, which reveals and makes accessible to those who are dying his resurrection from the dead.
— Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God
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Reading on "Hope"
Our theme for this coming Sunday is Hope and the Cross. How did the cross, a symbol of shame, become a symbol of hope? We’ll discuss how various theories of the “atonement” – satisfaction, Christus Victor, and moral example — complement each other and offer hope against the power of sin.
As reading for this week, I’d like us to focus on Colossians 2. Take a few moments each day to read through this chapter of scripture. By way of some background on this chapter, the teachings that were troubling the Christians to whom Paul writes this letter probably were “Gnostic.” The Gnostics taught that Jesus was not really God incarnate, because they believed physical matter was essentially evil. They taught that Jesus’ body was a sort of illusion or phantom and that his death on the cross therefore was in a sense not “real.” They further taught that only a few people with secret, insider knowledge, usually involving mystical signs or words, would be saved, and that they were in a position to pass along that secret knowledge, which they had learned privately from Jesus. Think a bit about how this background informs the concepts of “fullness,” “headship,” and “life” that Paul uses in this chapter.
Another interesting bit of background is Paul’s use of the terms “power” and “authority.” This also relates to his refutation of the Gnostics, who claimed to possess special power derived from their insider knowledge. It is also a broader reference to the eschatological themes in Paul’s theology and elsewhere in the New Testament. A first century reader familiar with Jewish apocalyptic literature would recognize a political reference in Paul’s use of these terms. The Roman powers claimed the very authority of the gods. Paul’s references to “power” and “authority” here, then, relate to the entire range of political-spiritual-social forces that could threaten to disrupt the hope of God’s people.
After you read this passage each day, take a little time to meditate (think intently and prayerfully upon) these phrases that appear in the chapter:
“fullness in Christ”
“Christ, who is the head over every power and authority”
“alive with Christ”
“disarmed”
“triumphing over them by the cross.”
As you read, pray, and meditate on these scriptures, what does the Holy Spirit convey to you about the nature of the cross of Christ in relation to “hope?”
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Hope in a Troubled World
Starting this Sunday, I’ll be teaching a six-week course titled “Hope in a Troubled World” at 9:00 a.m. at my home church, Cornerstone Christian Church. Here’s the info:
Hope in a Troubled World
Summary
We live in a world that seems to be falling apart. The rise of terrorism, the earthquake in Haiti, poverty, AIDS, corruption, war, the breakup of families, lingering illness, the loss of a loved one – these and many other tragic circumstances can cause us to wonder how we can dare hope for something better.
Yet the scriptures tell us that “faith, hope and love” are the basic virtues that characterize life in Christ (1. Cor. 13:13). What is Christian hope, and how does it connect to the other cardinal virtues of faith and love?
This study will reflect both a theological and spiritual exploration of the theme of hope. We’ll dig into the theme of “hope” in the scriptures and in the great statements of Christian faith from past ages in order to establish a theological perspective on hope. We’ll also engage with Christian writers, poets, philosophers and others who will help direct our spiritual perspectives towards enjoying and living out the hope we have in Christ.
Text
Our primary text will be the Bible.
We’ll also explore portions of the following books (these are not required reading, but you may find it edifying to read one or more of these): NT Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (Harper One 2008); Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium (Eerdmans 1999); Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Fortress Press 1993); Blaise Pascal, Pensees (various editions); Augustine, City of God (various editions), Confessions (various editions); C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (various editions), A Grief Observed (various editions), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (various editions), The Last Battle (various editions); Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Baker Academic 2006); Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford Univ. Press 1998); Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Zondervan 2006).
Schedule
Week 1: The Hope of the World. What does scripture say about the human condition? What does it mean to be separated from God? What is the story of God’s pursuit of relationship with us? We’ll set the stage for our conversations by framing the Bible’s grand narrative of creation, fall, and the hope of redemption.
Week 2: Hope and the Cross. How did the cross, a symbol of shame, become a symbol of hope? We’ll discuss how various theories of the “atonement” – satisfaction, Christus Victor, and moral example — complement each other and offer hope against the power of sin.
Week 3: Hope in Loss. Can we find hope in the losses of life? We’ll discuss Biblical themes and images of comfort, solace, trial, testing, and perseverance in the face of suffering. We’ll also examine how God participated in our suffering and loss through the incarnation of Christ.
Week 4: Hopeful Desire. What is your greatest hope? What does it mean to love God with “all your heart, all strength, all your soul, and all your mind” (Luke 10:27)? The Bible and the Christian tradition have much to say about the ordering of our desires, the true meaning of hope, and the link between hope, faith, and love.
Week 5: Abiding Hope. Where does hope reside? The Bible uses the metaphors of “abiding” in Christ and of Christ being the “vine” in which our lives should be rooted. These pictures teach us about hope in seasons of growing as well as seasons of waiting.
Week 6: Hope in the End. The line between hope and despair intersects the present at the point of our beliefs about the future. What will the future bring? Will hope be left behind? We’ll conclude our study by examining “eschatology” – the “last things.” We will see that although the Biblical imagery of judgment is dark, the final word in scripture is one of hope: that God will put an end to the ravages of sin so that the desire of all creation for peace can be realized.