Hope Vs Security

You gotta have hope. Life without hope is no life at all. A big shift in the Bible is a shift from looking at God as pushing history from the past and guiding it from the future. In the early part of the Bible, people looked back to the beginning of time, when God supposedly set the world in motion and decided it's fate as sovereign. As people got more sensitive to the problem of evil, the Bible stops looking back as much as looking forward, to a time in the future when God will make all things right.

Humans are future-oriented creatures. Living in this world, we have to have something to at least possibly look forward to. Now, I don't believe God is in all ways all-powerful. People who do rest in a kind of certainty that the future is set and that all will be well in every aspect of life. I would contend that this kind of certainty is not really hope. For hope implies uncertainty. Hope is what we believe can happen, and wish will happen, but do not know will happen. People who rest in certainty do indeed have the future-orientation that is necessary for happiness, but they get it at the expense of a sense of urgency of action. They lose their awareness that the future is to some degree in our hands. It isn't set. As such, they get complacent and put others at risk, for they do not see that there really are no guarantees in life. Life is an adventure, this is the ground of belief in God for me. But being an adventure, the possibility of failure exists, at least at points. The Universal Project may be vouchsafed, but individual projects within it cannot be, or else our lives are meaningless.

Of course, they are meaningless if there is no hope either. To believe that God is not all-powerful is not to believe that God is powerless. I believe that so long as I am here and tomorrow is a new day, anything is truly possible. For the world is ruled by a God who constantly seeds the universe with new ideas, and those new ideas, if they take root, can accomplish amazing things. I act in hope, in the belief that the world could get better. But not in the assurance that it will get better. We have a role to play, and we can impede the action of God. This gives me enough urgency of action to take up my cross daily, but keeps me from the illusion that the weight of the entire future is on my own shoulders and keeps me from despair. Religion's goal should be to undergird and make sense of meaningful, creative moral activity in the world and help us make sense of the experience of grace. A God that gives hope but not certainty accomplishes this, I think.