Hope and Faith in the New Testament and Modern Science

Hope is not just a small township in Arkansas.¹ It turns out to be the primary anchor that makes religious faith possible: Hope is the slender thread by which believers are anchored to the bedrock of their faith.² Hope for the future and religious faith are attitudes reflecting certain expectations. Yet all of us share hopeful expectations that have no religious associations; basically, it turns out, hope is a secular attitude with secular and existential expectations. Hope is also an essential aspect of religious faith, a necessary complement to religious belief.

Hope is “a feeling that what is wanted is likely to happen, a desire accompanied by expectation”; or stated differently, hope is an attitude that what is desired could come to pass. Faith, as exercised in Christian faith, “is an unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence.” As I understand these hopeful attitudes, they are similar but not the same. In First Peter (1:21) and 1 Corinthians (13:13) they are stated as different attitudes. They are both attitudes but they differ in the degree of confidence in which one holds the expectation that what one hopes-for could actually come to pass. Nevertheless, hope is a secular attitude utilized by religious believers in their faith. In its secular form hope is an attitude one holds toward what might be possible (not probable) in the future.³ As expressed in its secular form, hope is not necessarily oriented toward God or a particular God (for example, Acts 24:26; 27:20; Rom 5:4;1 Cor 9:10; 13:13; 2 Cor 10:15).

The word faith is also used in the New Testament to designate a body of religious belief to which one gives mental assent. Hence, in the New Testament faith is both an attitude (for example, Matt 8:10; Mark 5:34; Luke 8:48; Rom 3:28; 4:5, 19-20; 2 Cor 5:7; Gal 3:23-24) and the particular system of religious belief to which one ascribes (for example, Gal 1:23; 6:10; Eph 4:5; 4:13; Col 2:7; 1 Tim 1:2; 3:9; 4:1, 6).

There is a certain arrogance on the part of some writers of the New Testament who completely discount hope apart from that as exercised in their own sectarian faith (for example, Rom 1:21; 1:28-32; Eph 2: 11-12; 4:17-18; 1 Thess 4:13; 1 Pet 1:14). Nevertheless, “in Philebus 39e,” Plato “shows how human existence is determined not merely by the perception (αισθησις) which accepts the present but also by the recollection (μνημη) of the past and the expectation of the future.”⁴ In other words, hope for the future is a natural aspect or corollary of being human. Human beings are born with the capacity to hope. They are endowed by their “creator” with the inalienable right of having future expectations, as best it seems to each one. Someone who shares no religious faith might be led to express the following secular hope for continuity beyond the mortal field:

I hope that the considerable powers of the universe will not consign my personal consciousness to oblivion.

Such a hope would neither be directed toward a supernatural divine entity, nor would it be expressed confidently and unwaveringly. There is no certain proof or evidence to support such a secular hope. Yet, a glimmer of hope is encouraged in the fact that death is the great waster of consciousness in the universe and, to judge from life cycles on earth, the universe resists waste. Countless millions spend their lifetimes developing unique complex personalities that apparently disappear in the moment of death. Such universal waste and the tendency of nature to resist waste might lead someone to hope, in spite of the odds against hope, that something more may yet lie in our future. In earth’s ecosystem of life nothing material is wasted, but all is recycled; even some energy is transformed and reclaimed at each level of the food chain in earth’s ecosystem.⁵ This tendency of nature not even to waste nonmaterial energy encourages the slim hope that something more may yet lie before us. Such a hope is at least as certain as Abraham’s “hope against hope” (Rom 4:18; that is, continuing to have hope even though it appears baseless). Under the second law of thermodynamics, however, every energy transfer reduces the amount of usable energy in the universe and eventually no usable energy will be available. Thus, even this slender thread of hope is a hope against hope.⁶

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Other unincorporated areas and tiny villages in the U.S. also bear the name Hope.

²I posted an essay of the subject on hope on July 16, 2018: See Hedrick. “What lies behind Gospel Music.” http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=Hope

³Kierkegaard: “Hope, as a form of expectation, is an attitude towards the possible.” https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/win2021/entries/hope/

⁴Rudolf Bultmann, “Ελπις: The Greek Concept of Hope,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Gerhard Kittel, ed.; Geoffrey Bromiley, trans.; Eerdmans, 1964), 2.517-18.

⁵https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/energy-transfer-ecosystems/

⁶Stephen Leacock, “Theory and Common Sense,” pp. 369-70 in Louise B. Young, Exploring the Universe (Oxford, 1971) and https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/cellular-energetics/cellular-energy/a/the-laws-of-thermodynamics

Time at the Far End of Life

This is a very personal note to my brothers and sisters nearing the end of their allotted term. It is time to start thinking in critical time. Life eventually boils down to time, particularly for those of us at the far end of life: how much time do we have left and what shall we do with it? At age 89 I have just begun to ponder both of these questions some three months after the death of my wife of 67 years from Alzheimer’s. From age 20 through her passing she, and later our children, formed the basis of all my decisions about time. The time we spent was always our time together or, when the children came along, family time. When Alzheimer’s manifested itself, I became her caregiver and my time became her time.

How much time is left and what to do with it are not existential questions that necessarily trouble those in youth or middle age.  The very young initially have their time taken-up with schooling mandated by the state, family associated activities, and, later, things concerned with preparation for life’s long haul: occupation, marriage, children, etc. For the middle aged there is daily work for paychecks to pay for the things of life that have claimed one’s time. All things being equal, these two questions about critical time belong particularly to those of us at the far end of life, and those terminally ill. Once life has irrevocably changed (retirement, death of a spouse, advanced old age, terminal illness, etc.) we stand in a critical moment, at a critical juncture, where we are turning into that period of life we begin to recognize as our final days.

            The ancient Greeks recognized the nature of critical time and distinguished generally between two words for time: Chronos (χρονος) and Kairos (καιρος). Chronos designated “a definite time, a period of time, a while, a season,” but Kairos with respect to time designated “the right point of time, the proper time or season for action, the exact or critical time.”¹ The latter moment is where many of us now find ourselves, at a critical juncture facing the end of our days at some unknown point in the not-too-distant future. The question is very personal: what to do with these final days?

Since Peggy died, I have received advice for dealing with loneliness and grief in various forms: pamphlets from funeral homes, personal advice from good friends, calls from social workers, etc. The advice, probably coming from experience (personal and otherwise), is informally the same: seek counseling from a licensed therapist; find a support group; volunteer with some social service agency, hospital, or charity; take a class; perhaps take a trip where one is forced to make new acquaintances; find reasons to visit with old friends; take up a hobby or immerse oneself in hobbies of long standing. All of these are helpful suggestions. But, somehow, they have not resonated with me, being so close to the end of this final term of life (pardon the academic allusion). I have strong family support from my children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, most of whom live right near in my neighborhood.

What religious rationalists might do, when confronted with a ponderable crisis, is pick up a Bible. In spite of its many blemishes, mistakes, and other shortcomings it records the ponderings of religious folk of two ancient religions over a 1300- year period, roughly from the Israelite Exodus (around 1250 BCE to the writing of 2 Peter (around 125CE).² Not unreasonably one may expect here and there to find helpful suggestions. I found a convenient “hook” for pondering my last days in Eph 5:15-16 and Col 4:5. Two of Paul’s students, writings under the pseudonym of “Paul, an apostle” (i.e., they are putting words in Paul’s mouth)³ urge their readers to be wise “making the most of crucial time” (εξαγοραζομενοι τον καιρον),⁴ the only two instances in the New Testament that these two words are used together. How does one “make the most of crucial time”? The authors of these two texts do not share the specifics of their thinking about that question. Hence, everyone must decide for themselves what will be their specific response to their latter days. In short, they must decide in what they will invest themselves, considering their abilities, health, and interests.

            I have not yet finished the pondering process, but I have come up with four general suggestions (devoid of specifics because everyone is different) that have been helpful to me for staying engaged: 1. Make an effort to stay involved in living to the best of your abilities, and resist withdrawing into yourself. 2. Aim to make a contribution to the lives of others. 3. Learn something new every day (you just have to be curious). 4. Keep a sense of humor about yourself and your situation in life. There is nothing in these suggestions that is profound, but they are certainly cogent.

One other suggestion comes from the Apostle Paul himself. Writing from prison (Phil 1:7, 12-17) from Rome, Caesarea, or Ephesus (Phil 1:13; 4:22),⁵ Paul harbored hopes that his situation might yet change for the better (Phil 1:19, 26-27; 2:24). But whether it did or not was unimportant and he asserts: “I have learned how to manage in whatever circumstances I find myself” (Phil 4:11).⁶ Good advice for those of us at the far end.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹The abridged version of Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (from the 7^th edition of Liddell and Scott; Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Here are some examples in the New Testament of time used as “the proper time or season for action”: Mark 1:15; 11:13; Matt 13:30; 21:34; 26:18; Luke 12:56; 21:8; John 7:6, 8; Acts 3:20; 7:20; Rom 9:9; 13:11; 1 Cor 4:5; 7:29; Eph 5:16; Col 4:5.

²See Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths (Cascade, 2019), 2.

³For the pseudonymity of these two letters, see W. G. Kϋmmel, Introduction to the New Testament (Howard Kee, trans. 17^th ed. rev.; Abingdon, 1975), Colossians, 340-46; Ephesians, 357-163.

⁴This is my translation of the expression in Eph 5:16 and Col 4:5. In some older translations (for example, King James Version) one may find the expression translated as “redeeming the time,” which doesn’t quite communicate the Greek, in my view.

⁵See Kϋmmel, Introduction, 324-32.

⁶A. J. Dewey, et al., The Authentic Letters of Paul (Polebridge, 2010), 181. This is the only occurrence of αυταρκης in the New Testament. The usual translation of the word as “contented,” is inadequate.

What lies behind Gospel Music?

As regular readers of this blog may have suspected, I am a recovering Southern Baptist; yet I still enjoy listening to gospel music. A great number of the older songs I learned by heart in my youth. It is not their words, however, that attract me today but rather the subliminal “message” behind the words—the existential attitude that evokes the words. Behind the song writer’s literary certainty and the singer's rapturous expressions, the gospel idiom, the pithy metaphors, vivid imagery, and sweeping idealistic visions of what lies beyond life in the world for the faithful, I am most struck by two real-world attitudes. On the one hand, the certainty masks the awful existential dread of oblivion that occasionally wells up in quiet moments for all of us; on the other, the music and its performance reflects a primal cry of hope. The songwriters and singers express confident hope that life is not an episode of three-score-and-ten years that ends in nothingness; rather the music holds forth the promise of a future on the other side of our terminal episodes.

            One can easily get lost in the emotional mythical expectations evoked by the words and miss the simple hope (nothing more or less) that lies behind the language of certainty. Behind the confident language of Zion lies a fragile ambiguous hope parading itself as confident expectation. The writers/singers may appear supremely confident in their expectations but hope reflects only uncertain prospects, and believing it so does not make it so!

Early Christian faith reflects this same dissonance between hope and confidence.

Paul: “We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God” (Rom 5:2; see also Rom 8:24-25; 1 Thess 4:13-18; 5:8).

Acts: “Having a hope in God … that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust” (Acts 24:15; 23:6).

Pauline School: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:27; 1:5); “In hope of eternal life which God, who never lies, promised” (Titus 1:2; 2:13; 3:7).

Others: “Make a defense… for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15); “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for” (Heb11:1).

Early Christian writers do not call it a “certain” hope. I found only a few modifiers describing the nature of hope in early Christian faith. Once it is called a “lively” hope (1 Pet 1:3), once it is called “a better hope” (Heb 7:19); and another word that is used to describe hope is “blessed” (Titus 2:13). Once hope is described as “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Heb 6:18-19). It seems that the early Christians were under no allusions about the substance of what their faith held out for them—it was merely hope: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1-2). Paul described the tenuous hope of faith in this way: “hope that is seen is not hope—for who hopes for what he sees”; we hope for what we do not see (Rom 8:24-25). In early Christian faith hope was therefore not equated with certainty—that is, hope was not equated with a “bird in the hand” but rather with the “two birds in the bush.”

            Paul described Abraham, the Patriarch, in the following way: in hope he believed against hope that in his old age he would become the father of many nations (Rom 4:18). The dictionary defines “hope against hope” as “hoping without any basis for expecting fulfillment.” That definition, it seems to me, best reflects the character of early Christian hope as a whole; it is also what lies behind gospel music. Hope is a primal cry of faith, reflecting the attitude: I trust God in spite of the obvious finality of death.

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University