Hope in Hope

The concept of hope has been hopelessly trivialized by the modern mind, just as the concept of faith has. just as “I believe” usually means merely “I feel”, so “I hope” usually means only “I wish” or “wouldn't it be nice if....” But Christian hope, the theological virtue of hope, is not a wish or a feeling; it is a rock-solid certainty, a guarantee, an anchor. We bury our dead “in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection”. Feelings are subject to every wind of chance and change, from politics to digestion. But Christian hope has a foundation. It is a house built upon a rock, and that rock is Christ. “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight”, we sing to the “little town of Bethlehem”, the “house of bread” from which our souls are fed.
For Christian hope does not come from us. It is our response to God's promises. It is not a feeling welling up from within, something we can whip up at will. It is saying Yes to God's guarantees. It is the alternative to calling God a liar. It is the simple and commonsensical acceptance of all God's promises on the ground that, as Saint Thomas Aquinas put it in the great hymn “Pange Lingua”, “than Truth's own word there is no truer token. “
The object of hope is God himself, just as God is the object of faith. The creeds formulate faith, and God's promises formulate hope. But hope's object is not the abstract promises but the concrete God, the person who made them. God is always first, always the initiator. Even our seeking him is the result of his first seeking us. Therefore hope too must be our response to his initiative. God is not the response to human hope; our hope is the response to him..

 By: Peter Kreeft