Hope and Faith: Why Both Matter

In the 100th episode of my favorite TV show, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain travels to Paris, the location of the first episode.  This time, however, he meets up with esteemed chef Joël Robuchon, the latter of whom is particularly renown for having scored the most Michelin stars in the world.  As Robuchon and Bourdain walked down the alleys of one of the street markets of Paris, Bourdain asked if things are better today than they are in the past. "A lot of people are nostalgic about the past," Robuchon answered, "but I do not believe that; things are better today than they were."  Robuchon was addressing the wide variety of quality ingredients that are much easier to obtain today than they were 100 or even 50 years ago.

Robuchon hits on something that I think we all struggle with every now and then: nostalgia about the past.  To some extent, we all hear about "the glory days of yore."  Conservative Christians lament about declining moral values today, although historically things were no better during Christendom's heydays, particularly during the Renaissance.  As America's standing and influence in the world wanes and possibly gives way to China in the not-too-distant future, Americans are easily tempted into thinking that if only things were "the way they were" in Reagan's or Clinton's days, we'll be #1 again.  Churches think this way too, particularly smaller churches.  If only we did things the way they did back then, everything will work out and our numbers would increase again.

Now, I'm not saying that the past is not important, but history has been incorrectly viewed as prescriptive of the future.  To be sure, the past can be instructive, but the past rarely repeats itself with stunning precision in the future.  Yes, recessions always happen, but each iteration is different.  To say that if the GOP pursued Reagan's policies, or the DNC pursued Clinton's policies would be to discount the fact that the administrations of Reagan and Clinton were vastly different than those we live in today.  Neither Reagan nor Clinton would've received the same accolade today if the world they lived in were post-9/11/2001 and post-9/14/2008.

The fact of the matter is that times change, and they never repeat themselves.  Christians lamenting about a presumably more "moral" past are cherry-picking the past.  Modern traditionalist Catholics who yearn for the days of Innocent III are suggesting that it was better when non-Catholics are burned at the stake, presumed guilty until rarely proven innocent.  They are suggesting that life without toilets, without modern medicine, without the modern economy, without education for everyone, and one where the vast majority were vassals of the nobility, is much better than today.  The fact - the happy fact - is that the vast majority of those of us in the developed and developing world are enjoying a world with decent sanitation.  Most Christians in America do not need a church where the walls are painted with biblical scenes in order for us to understand it - we are told (sometimes with great difficulty) to open up our bibles and read it.

I think this lesson - that the past is the past, and is not prescriptive of the future - is a lesson that must be learned in our political circles because it is stifling any original and creative efforts to bring the nation back into firm footing.  Modern economics, after all, is a young science, having been born in 1971 with Paul Samuelson's doctoral dissertation.  Since then - only 40 years thence - the data available to us is still not enough to make conclusive determinations on which policies work for sure and under what conditions.  The number of recessions, for example, in the past 40 years has not even reached into the double digits!  Scientists in the natural sciences are used to calculations with thousands, millions, and even billions of data points!  But because America is stuck in the rut of "if only things were back when it was Reagan/Clinton", politicians are ideologically quagmired into returning to Reagan/Clinton era policies when the post-9/11 decades are vastly different than those of Reagan/Clinton.

Similarly, Christians often view some time in the past (depending on who, it ranges from the early church to the 1970s and perhaps even the 1980s) with nostalgia.  Oftentimes, the view was, "if only things were as 'moral' back then, wouldn't everything be better?" First of all, morality is contingent on the situation at hand.  War, for example, is rarely entirely just or entirely unjust.  Some situations dictate that war is just while others (in my view, many others) are clearly unjust.  To say that "God made use of war and therefore we [the USA] can," suggests that the USA is the Old Testament Israel, which it clearly is not (for one, the USA is stereotyped to be a Christian, not a Jewish, nation).  It also suggests that we are a people constituted for the expressed purposes of being God's people on earth.  Our Constitution is quite clear, however, that this is not the case.

This nostalgia about the past is not what Christians are called to possess.  Instead, Christians are called to be a faithful and hopeful people.  Unfortunately, what it means to be just that has been somewhat lost.  "Faith" is not merely belief, as many evangelicals suggest.  Faith (and Hope) consists of an identity formed from an understanding of the past (faith) and the future (hope).  To have faith is to understand and own our past, and allow it to instruct us on the wisdom of the present.  It does not prescribe, as I've said earlier, but instructs.  The high church traditions, in my opinion, teach us a valuable lesson in their honoring of the saints, for the saints are stunning examples of imperfect people who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, taught us what it should mean to be a follower of Christ.  Hauerwas goes the other way and suggests that the church should be thankful of its heretics, because it is through them that we learn, albeit the negative way, the same lesson - what it should mean to be a follower of God.

"Hope" is even more misunderstood, ostensibly by its use in everyday language (I "hope" this is going to happen).  This kind of hope - the vernacular kind - is wishful thinking.  I didn't study for my calculus exam, and I'm hoping (i.e. wishfully thinking) that every question will be a simple first-derivative question without use of chain rules.  Of course, every now and then, this kind of hope delivers, like the one time in Calculus II (at Wheaton College) when the quiz before Thanksgiving weekend was one where you get all 100% credit for just putting your name on the quiz!  But this is the same hope that we see in casinos all the time, the one in which "the house always wins."  Theological hope, on the other hand, involves having a vision of the future and striving in the present to make way for the coming of that future.  We can rightly have a vision of a church where young and old, poor and rich, black and white (and yellow and brown and perhaps blue and green), weak and strong come together at the Eucharistic Table and partake together.  But if we are truly a hopeful people, we take steps now to make sure that our churches welcome the young and old, poor and rich, etc.  To hope and then sit smugly and being satisfied with where we are at the present is simply wishful thinking.  To hope for equality and be happy with our all-white, all-black, or all-Asian church not only is wishful thinking, but also makes fun of the idea of equality.  It only relegates equality to being unrealistic, and so it only encourages us to maintain inequality. 

When we misunderstand faith and hope, we start latching on to historical or idealistic references in order to find our identity forgetting that we are people living in the present under present circumstances, not a people living in the present under past circumstances.  We starting thinking back to when Pastor John Doe led a congregation of 1,000+, and thinking that if only we did what Pastor John Doe did, we would have that 1,000+ congregation count back.  The problem with that is that Pastor John Doe is not here anymore, and even if he were, times have changed.  How do we minister to the people of 2011 is the question we need to answer, not "How do we minister so that we're back to the good old days?"  A nostalgia about the past only comes from hopeless people.  For Christians, particularly "Bible-believing" Christians, this nostalgia is misplaced particularly since the book of Revelation is one massive entreaty of hope!  But if we don't have faith (i.e. we do not understand and own our past), we become a listless people, latching onto whatever theological fad that happens to blow our way.  One day it's progressive, the next it's fundamentalist.  Yet another day it's Christian reconstructionism.  And a fourth day it's the emerging church, and then the fifth, it becomes the emergent church.

What Christians need to recover are the virtues of hope and faith.  Of course, hope and faith are not always pretty!  Our histories are never nice and clean.  We all have our dark spots, and our places where we pray that nobody will ever know.  Every country has had their day in the historical darkness.  But to reject it and to say, "No, that's not our story" is wishful thinking.  I do not relish the fact that for centuries Chinese have been fighting Chinese, but I can't "forget" those parts of history and "remember" only Confucius and then the Qianlong imperial administration.  To be American is to own up to the fact that even though we claim to be the bastion of freedom, there was a time when that freedom was enjoyed only by an elite few (namely, white bourgeois men).  And there was a time when conservative Christians upheld the structures that supported that elitism.  Yes, we should be ashamed of that blotch in our national story, but we can't forget it, nor should we wallow in it.  We must match those blotches with the hope that there will come a day (hopefully not too long from now) where freedom is enjoyed by all strata of American society.  But for that hope to be of a theological kind, it is a hope that must propel what we do today.  If we do not speak and fight for such freedom to be enjoyed by rich and poor, black and white, etc., the "hope" we have becomes wishful thinking. 

Of course, we can't reflect on hope and faith without reflecting on love.  That's because hope and faith need an anchoring point in the present.  It is only because we love equality that we can hope for it, and we can reach back into the past and reflect on how we can move towards equality in the present.  For Christians, it is our love of God that motivates are hope and faith.  And the beauty of it all is that the Scriptures provide a starting point for our faith, and an ending point for our hope.  A fuller picture of our faith comes as we study church history, a hodgepodge of exhilarating and really shameful lows.  And a fuller picture of hope comes as we see how our church today can be a reflection, however imperfect, of the great kingdom of God to come.

Politically, the same principles apply.  But the problem plaguing America is the same problem plaguing China (oh, the irony), namely that the love is misplaced.  Instead of loving justice, peace, freedom, or anything remotely transcendent, both nations have prostrated themselves to financial prosperity.  And both nations would do anything in its power to attain it again.  Hungry for the days of yore (actually, 7 years ago) when the stock markets are booming and everyone's wealth was built on the shaky grounds of a burgeoning and over-inflated housing market, it is absurd for politicians to think that we can return back to those days!  But the rhetoric continues along this line.  And as a result, politicians, devoid of any real hope, deflated and possibly driven to some measure of desperation by China's impending economic prowess, look back to Reagan and Clinton for policy prescriptions.  What we need are fresh, original, and creative ways to kickstart the American peoples' drive to innovate, produce, and succeed.  And to do that the government needs to provide a compelling narrative for people to love and say, "Yes, this is who I am, and I will give my all into this!".  Making money is not compelling enough, especially in recessionary periods.

What's troubling China is a problem of a different sort, namely, their own identity as Chinese people.  Unlike America, China's history stretches back thousands of years.  But with countless civil wars, Western imperialism, Japanese occupation, this history has become very, very bitter indeed.  The final straw, perhaps, is the Cultural Revolution, which essentially deemed faith (i.e. the Chinese narrative) as dangerous.  Now, without faith, China moved from being socialist to capitalist in a span of 30 years!  That we hear horrific stories such as a child selling his kidney to buy an iPad (this was a few months ago) is symptomatic of a China that has lost what it means to be Chinese.  We should not be surprised - it was Deng Xiaoping who, in the 1980s, proclaimed that "making money is patriotic!" 

So, faith, hope, and love.  In our day today, these three theological virtues remain ever so important.  Where we place these three is telling of who we are.  Let us be wise, therefore, and place these virtues in the immortal, invisible, and only-wise God.