I have long struggled with the notion that hope is a Christian virtue.
It’s always felt to me like kicking someone when they’re down. Don’t get me wrong; hope is great. But if Christians assign moral value to it, aren’t we implying a deficiency in those who feel hopeless? In my own dark nights of the soul, I’ve thought, Really? Life is beating me into the ground, and you’re telling me that my lack of pep is a moral failing? Gee, I’d better dust myself off quick, lest I be damned for the sin of my misery.
I’ll admit I tend to take things to the extreme.
But you see my point: if hope is a virtue, is despair an offense? In a world hurtling toward climate disaster, beset with brutal war and famine; in a nation experiencing political turmoil and even violence; can Christians really label pessimism a sin?
Indeed, the concept of three theological virtues—faith, hope, and love—is more a product of tradition than scripture. While each concept individually is discussed throughout the Bible, the grouping appears only a few times—most famously in 1 Corinthians 13:13: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
The other clear instance of this triad is found in 1 Thessalonians 1:2-3: “We always give thanks to God for all of you…remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Here, though, hope occupies the emphatic last place.[1] Taken together, 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians might show us a better way of understanding hope as a virtue.
While the Corinthians may have been lacking love, hope was perhaps the hardest virtue for the Thessalonians to maintain. Paul writes to them as they are apparently mourning some of their members. He is reassuring them, because they may not have expected any believers to die before Christ’s return. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 indicates that these earliest of Christians were worried about whether their loved ones would receive the eternal life they were all banking on.
Paul, the Thessalonians, and most early Christians had a thoroughly apocalyptic worldview. They were operating under the assumption that Jesus was coming back any minute. And if we’re honest, this is how all Christians, even two thousand years after Jesus’ life and death, are called to act. Be watchful, Christ tells us in every Gospel. Don’t store up your treasures here. The real Kingdom is coming.
Yes, Christianity is an apocalyptic religion. And in our post-Enlightenment world, a valid question has been raised. Doesn’t a faith focused on the hereafter make us complacent here and now? If you believe that a higher power will intervene soon enough and make all things new, aren’t you less inclined to make this world a better place?
It’s true that promises of heaven have been used by the powerful to pacify the poor, used by enslavers to quiet the enslaved. And sloppy apocalypticism, like the kind from which Paul is saving the Thessalonians, has led many down rabbit holes of ritualism and fueled the terror of being “left behind.” But apocalypticism can also be liberating—precisely because hope can be a virtue.
An apocalyptic faith doesn’t have to prevent its believers from doing something. In fact, it may be the only thing enabling us to do anything. The only thing preventing the paralysis of despair. Hope needn’t blind us to the reality of suffering. Indeed, how could we possibly stand to look at the bloodied face of a child just orphaned by war? How could we possibly bear to witness it, let alone move toward it and respond with compassion? How could we overcome our natural revulsion at the sight of death if we believed that was the end of the story? The grief of such work would be insupportable if we grieved, as Paul warns, “like those who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13).
Indeed, the right kind of apocalypticism engenders hope, and hope empowers action. Still, that doesn’t quite fix the problem we started with: isn’t it tenuous, even cruel, to make hope a core virtue of Christianity, when so many people’s circumstances merit despair?
To answer this, it might help to ask the same question about love. Love is often thought of as an emotion, and it is. But it’s also a choice. The feeling of love certainly promotes loving action, but it’s the choice—the choice to serve others, to keep your promises, to refrain from pettiness, to be patient and kind—that is virtuous.
Like love, hope can be a feeling, an upwelling, an effervescence. But it, too, can be a choice. And by choosing hope, we are able to carry goodness into the most desolate of spaces.
This is not to say that those who despair have simply made a bad choice. No, the opposite of the virtue of hope is not despair. Rather, it’s the rabid kind of cynicism that forecloses on all possibilities of goodness, freedom, and healing. It’s the cynicism that mocks the innocent and treats kindness with disdain. That cynicism does as much damage as complacency, and both are prime examples of sin.
Unlike cynicism, despair can harmonize with hope to the point that it is sanctified. The cynic refuses to cry out to God, self-assured that they’ll receive no answer. But the bereaved Rachel who weeps and refuses to be comforted; the psalmist who cries, as Jesus echoes, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—these are virtuous voices to be sure.
Mourning something implies that it mattered: it’s a language of love. Crying out to God implies that God, by nature, ought to care: it’s a language of faith.
Like faith, and especially like love, hope makes us vulnerable. A true cynic has nothing to mourn or cry about, while the hopeful person is pained by the disparity between this broken world and the Kingdom they long for. God has not called us to blind positivity, but rather to vulnerability—it is more difficult, but less cruel.
So before Christians dispense with the triad of theological virtues, and especially before we swear off apocalypticism altogether, let’s look at our human family. Let’s witness its pain, and feel it. Once we do, I believe we’ll see that choosing the hope of the world to come is exactly what we need to serve in the world today.
[1] As pointed out by Raymond Collins in Sacra Pagina: 1 Corinthians (2006).
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