The title of this post comes from a verse in Paul’s letter to the Romans where he describes the faith of Abraham as “hoping against hope”, (Rom. 4:18).

It is a curious phrase. What does it mean to hope against hope?

The simplest way to understand it is that hoping against hope is “hoping for something that is most likely an impossibility.” Or we could think about it in terms of two kinds of hope. That is, what Paul has in mind is one kind of hope hoping against another kind of hope.

“Natural” Hope

The first type of hope we can describe as a “natural” hope. The kind of hope we have when January rolls around or when we enter a new stage in life. In sports, it is the hope that springs eternal at the start of every new season. We have an expectation that what lies ahead promises something better than what we have today. Hope is born when we marry this expectation with the belief that we have what it takes to bring about that better future.

This kind of hope is largely about reaching a desired outcome and having the grit to overcome any obstacles that come our way. It is tied up with our capacity to attain what we set out to accomplish and our fortitude to persevere through adversity. When the chips are down, hope names our persistence to believe we can still achieve our goals.

Really, this is akin to how we usually think about optimism.

And so optimism, we might say, is the kind of hope we are called to hope against.

“Unnatural” Hope

This second kind of hope is not like optimism in that it is not “natural.” The desired outcome we hope for does not naturally emerge from the character of the present. We do not hope for something that can be reasonably extrapolated from current conditions. Rather our hope is in a future good that only God can give to us. In this way, Christian hope is “unnatural.” Or rather, it is super natural. Super, simply meaning, “above or beyond.” The hope that hopes against hope is a hope that goes beyond or above optimism. 

This kind of hope hopes not only when the chips are down, but even when optimism has lost all reason to hope. It is here where hope is just getting started. Hope begins where optimism ends.

In this way, hope is made possible by faith. As the Apostle Paul would have it, hope is born in the presence of the God in whom we believe, “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist,” (Rom. 4:17). So to hope against hope is to not allow our hope to be dictated by positive circumstances or limited by the promise of human progress. To hope against hope is to keep the hope even when we no longer have sufficient reasons to do so. We hope against what the present data tells us.

Hope is a Hard Ask

And this, of course, is what makes hope so hard. We live in a time where our vision of what is possible is entirely shaped by the hope that science, technology, and reason possess within themselves the capacity to make all things new (but mostly we just end up with all new things). And so, our default setting as a culture is to look askew at any hope that hopes above or beyond what can be achieved through human ingenuity and empirical know-how. We dismiss it as naive or Pollyannaish.

Even as a person of faith, it is difficult to shake the all too glaring question, “What’s the point of hoping for something you can’t accomplish or achieve by your own effort?” At best, it encourages an ineffectual passivity as we bide our time for the great by and by. At worst, it is delusional and traps us in an endless cycle of denial.

These are questions we’ll want to explore in the coming posts.

In the Christian tradition faith, hope and love are known as the three theological virtues.

To say that hope is the greatest of these may feel a bit off. If you are familiar with the Apostle Paul’s great ode to love in 1 Corinthians 13 you may know that it ends with these words: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Love is the greatest, not hope.

But the point St. Paul was making is that love can be considered the greatest because it will be the last one standing. There will come a time when faith and hope will no longer be needed. Not so with love. There will always be love. Why is that? First and foremost, because God is love. And when that day comes when God is all in all (1 Cor. 15:28) and we are welcomed home into the eternal embrace of God — the everlasting love shared between Father, Son and Holy Spirit — that is all there will be. Love.

But until that day arrives what sustains our love is faith and hope. Both traffic in the unseen and the not yet. As we wait for what we cannot yet see and yearn for what we do not yet have, faith allows us to trust in what is promised and in so doing, opens the door to hope. Hope, in turn, animates our lives toward the fulfillment of that promise.

Without faith, there is nothing to hope for. Conversely, without hope, faith is listless. Or, maybe we can put it this way: faith without hope is dead. So when hope runs dry, our faith begins to languish. But not only does our faith suffer, but also our resolve to act in love. 

A helpful way to see the relationship between these theological virtues is through the analogy of a journey. Among the many routes before us faith is what allows us to see and choose the path marked out for us in Christ; the one Jesus walked before us and continues to walk ahead of us. Love is both what infuses each step we take and the end toward which we walk. Hope is that which keeps us moving. It compels us forward as we anticpate the loving end for which we are destined.

And this, I think, is the greatness of hope. To love in the way Christ calls us to love — namely, to love even our enemies — is an act of hope. It is hope for our enemy and hope in God to vindicate us should our enemy choose to repay our love with hatred and malice. We need hope because hope enlivens us to stay the course (to keep the faith) even when (especially when) the way of love gets hard. 

All this to say, we don’t want to downplay love. Love is indeed the greatest in that it will last through eternity. But there are times in this journey we call the Christian life, where one of faith, hope and love will take on a greater role. Could it be that in our time, when the fulfillment of God’s promises seems so far off and we find it a struggle to keep on keeping on, that the greatest for us is hope?