Faith, Hope, and Love in the Kingdom of God

By Robert Hernan Cubillos

We live in a world full of challenges. The three graces can almost be seen as motors for Christian life in today's world, but the words faith, hope, and love have so many everyday uses that their technical, theological meanings are, for many, difficult to appreciate. Modern life also leaves many yearning for authenticity and meaning. Many religions have answered that need by calling to mind the image of a path. Always profound progressions, religious paths tend to be motivated either by practices (the act of walking the path) or focal points. Christianity has a focal point, an object, and it sees the three graces as distinctively content filled. The heart of this book is about helping people find the Christian path and their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual balance--an equilibrium that is sustained by a strong personal faith, an enduring hope for the future, and genuine love that will withstand the worst of times. It contributes to the category of Christian literature that provides a pattern for Christian living without surrendering the intellect to the more popular side of this genre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Apr 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781498222846

Robert Hernan Cubillos

Robert Hernan Cubillos is Assistant Professor in the Humanities Graduate Program and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He was accepted as a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University during the summer 2013 term and has published articles in several scholarly journals. He has also served on the Pastoral Staff at Rolling Hills Covenant Church in Rolling Hills Estates, California, for the past thirty years.

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Faith, Hope, and Love in the Kingdom of God

Robert Hernán Cubillos

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FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE IN THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Copyright © 2017 Robert Hernán Cubillos. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

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199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

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paperback isbn: 978–1-4982–2283-9

hardcover isbn: 978–1-4982–2285-3

ebook isbn: 978–1-4982–2284-6

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Cubillos, Robert Hernán

Title: Faith, hope, and love in the kingdom of God / Robert Hernán Cubillos

Description: Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978–1-4982–2283-9 (paperback) | isbn 978–1-4982–2285-3 (hardcover) | isbn 978–1-4982–2284-6 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Theological virtues. | Christian life.

Classification: LCC BV4635 C85 2017 (print) | LCC BV4635 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. October 31, 2017

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Walking the Path of Life

Chapter 3: Identifying the Path of Faith

Chapter 4: The Christian Concept of Faith

Chapter 5: Hope: The Things for Which We Wish and More

Chapter 6: The Christian Concept of Hope

Chapter 7: Love: It’s All You Need

Chapter 8: The Christian Concept of Love

Chapter 9: Faith, Hope, and Love in the Kingdom of God

Bibliography

Dedicated to my maternal grandmother

Nellie Hazel Walker Smith

who practiced the presence of the kingdom of God

by demonstrating the reality of genuine faith, hope, and love

Acknowledgments

Today’s concepts of faith, hope, and love are a synthesis from varied, sometimes disparate influences and sources. And the study of the kingdom of God is an immense undertaking in itself. Combining these subjects into a book feels like it has taken a lifetime to write. My hope is that I have reserved myself long enough to research, reflect on, and write a good work helpful to those interested in these distinct, yet related, subject matters.

I am grateful to my colleagues in the philosophy department at California State University, Dominguez Hills and the Dean’s Office in the College of Arts and Humanities, for their providing academic references to secure a visiting scholar position at the University of Cambridge, England, during the Summer 2013 term. Thanks go to Tyndale House and the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity for providing me with an academic home for several months along with the use of their libraries and other resources which were instrumental to my research for this project. Thanks also go to the library staff at CSUDH, especially the prompt services provided by the inter-library loan staff.

I am also very grateful to my church family at Rolling Hills Covenant Church. Its sabbatical policy with its very generous provisions made my travel to Cambridge possible. My gratefulness extends to the many congregants, church leaders, and pastoral staff members I have had the privilege of ministering to and with over the last thirty years. This church body has provided innumerable occasions for me to witness genuine faith, hope, and love at work in the kingdom of God locally and around the world.

Finally, my deepest thanks go to my family and their unending love and support without which this book could not be accomplished.

1

Introduction

What Faith, Hope, and Love? What Kingdom?

We use the words faith, hope, and love separately, but rarely say all three together. As a university philosophy professor, I hear these terms casually bantered about in philosophical discussions and recurrently read them in my students’ research papers and theses. My students have faith in human reason. They have faith that I will grade them fairly if they do their work in my courses and stick to the requirements outlined in my syllabi. In their agreement to disagree agreeably, my religious and nonreligious philosophy students even share a common faith of sorts: that there is an ultimate significance to our lives—a shared, secular faith for lack of a better term. We also share a number of common hopes, many of them equally important to others. For example, we hope that our nation will not suffer another terrorist attack and that cancer will one day be cured. Particularly important to my students is the hope that their education will transform them into a valuable, marketable commodity. They hope they will prosper, and that one day they will find love. Love, well, that is all anyone needs—at least according to John Lennon. The same goes for the kingdom of God. Even in popular culture we recognize images of the kingdom of God that are in large part drawn from the Bible: cherubim and seraphim, angels, thrones, God shining in glory, a well-attended magnificent heavenly banquet—all portrayed in a setting of clouds.

Most people have a sense of what each word means as a separate idea and can probably explain them, but it may be more difficult to explain their unified meaning and importance. Historically, Christianity has understood these three words—faith, hope, and love—very differently from the way they are currently used both inside and outside the church in North America. That is to say, these words have undergone a semantic evolution such that much of today’s popular-cultural definitions of these words differ from their scriptural-theological definition and usage. They are described in the Scriptures as God’s gifts for the human spirit.¹ Their purpose is to prepare, transform, empower, and complete us;² but toward what ultimate goal do they function? Paul extols them above the gifts of the Spirit—each of which is true, good, and beautiful in its own right.³ These gifts will come to an end. But the three graces are primary and when we understand and experience their purpose and of what they actually consist, faith, hope, and love serve to direct our life journey toward the kingdom of God.

While the four Platonic-Stoic virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance brought direction and order to Greco-Roman life—enabling ancient peoples to manage life in the world as it is—the Christian virtues that followed centuries later promised much more. Not only do they seek to transform the individual, the community, and the world, but they also prepare all people for the kingdom of God. Both points of view provided answers to life’s perennial questions for all people: How should I live my life? What values should serve as my guide for my life, my choices, and my plans? And What sort of person should I be and what way will enable me to walk through life best?⁴ But the three graces also help explain why Christians are the way they are, why they do the things they do, and the way in which they do them. The historic Christian church has referred to these as the three theological virtues, which connect us to God and to one another. They are also seen as helping us to understand the spirituality of our human nature. More specifically, in the context of Christian belief, the theological virtues, or graces, are the primary mutually affirming spiritual gifts given by God to help believers keep him at the center of all their considerations—at the center of the Christian life. As we will see, they also give shape to a Christian ethic formed by the gospel of Jesus Christ and the realization of a dawning and future kingdom of God.

For Aristotle, a virtue relates to the unfolding of human potential.⁵ According to his ethical theory, virtue is a practical knowledge of good conduct leading to habits that are beneficial for the practitioner and those around her. It was against this Aristotelian backdrop that Thomas Aquinas understood faith, hope, and love as virtues in the thirteenth century.⁶ Before this, at the end of the fourth century and beginning of the fifth, Augustine of Hippo sought to ground faith and hope in love and interpreted the three against the backdrop of Neoplatonic philosophy.⁷ Going further back, in the first century, Paul exchanged an understanding of the law as an external set of ordinances for an internal law of faith, hope, and love written on peoples’ hearts and shown in God’s redemption made possible through Jesus Christ. In this study I prefer to follow the tradition that sees these as graces, or gifts of the grace of God,⁸ primarily for theological reasons.⁹ I will refer to the collective as the three graces for ease of identification and to economize my words. My plan is to outline how the understanding of the three graces has changed in our Western culture and to assess those altered versions against the backdrop of Scripture. Either way, throughout Christian history, it has been assumed that a better understanding of faith, hope, and love results in a better understanding both of oneself and of God. Following this line of thinking, when we allow these gifts from God to become formative of the life of Christ within us, we experience their transformative effect. Life takes on a new vitality that includes preparation, outfitting, and renewed, intentional focus on seeking and living for the kingdom of God.

Overview

The Western cultural understanding of faith, hope, and love and various conceptions of the kingdom of God are sullied versions of the original, biblical concepts. I propose a renewed understanding of these for today by gleaning what we can from what Karl Barth referred to as the strange new world of the Bible.¹⁰ This requires an analysis of our cultural conceptions of faith, hope, and love against their biblical backdrop. Only then can we look at the confluence of three strands of thought that make up my interpretation: (1) the three graces and the renewed interest and work in ethics having to do with the concept of responsibility; (2) the kingdom of God, not as a realm or as it relates to God’s being, but as the identification of God’s loving and ruling presence; and (3) the role of the three graces in relation to the kingdom of God.

I will devote a small portion of text to examining how different religions, philosophies, and our culture construe the three words to show how they compare with the Christian understanding. My aim is not to catalog them exhaustively but to draw attention to their particular features within the theologies of the more prominent world religions in which the words figure significantly. I will also touch upon how the three graces relate to orthodox Christian belief. Whether we look at them at the religious or at the secular level, each of these supreme words is immensely important in its own right. This invites the question, however: How do we experience the religious variety of faith, hope, and love separately and as a unity? Should we simply practice each more intensely? Or more frequently? Or maybe demonstrate them to a greater number of people? Is that how one experiences them and benefits from them in a religious sense?

Instead of focusing on our efforts, and thus on ourselves, perhaps faith, hope, and love actually come from God. But in what sense? George Vaillant suggests that perhaps the Creator hardwired faith, hope, and love into our DNA in order to take the edge off our troubles, to help us screen out the unpleasant things in life.¹¹ To be sure, for a devout Christian, that faith, hope, and love might serve as a coping mechanism, but they are much more than this. Or perhaps they are touch points, for lack of a better analogy—the essence of Christianity through which one engages God, others, and the world.

Setting aside the concept of authenticity and the source of these experiences—transcendent or natural—for the moment, and to return to my overview, my primary focus will be on what I consider to be the most beautiful of all the possible human expressions. I mean this in two senses of the word: the verbal and the concrete expression of experiential reality. First, I suggest that of all the human words that can be spoken, the most profound and eminently meaningful are faith, hope, and love. Second, just like the heart’s joy or the mind’s assent to truth cannot help but compel some expression, when we receive these gifts and intend for them to take root in us, they compel expression in our life—perhaps because they are the most compelling and beautiful expressions we can experience. When Paul wrote, But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13:13), he implied that each of the words is great. Yet in what sense are they great? I suggest that they result from God’s action on us and the indwelling of God’s Spirit; the demonstration of his Spirit and power working within us. Thus it is fair to say that when these words are given expression in our life and actions—as understood by their scriptural-theological definition, not their popular-cultural definition—we are expressing the kingdom of God, our dedication to God and one another, and the reality of God’s constant and immanent presence in his world. The late German New Testament scholar Günther Bornkamm addressed the comparative importance of the three graces with the gifts of the spirit when he said, The triad of faith, hope, and love is the quintessence of the God-given life in Christ. No one is excluded from it; it is therefore greater than the ‘gifts of the spirit,’ which are bestowed on some but withheld from others.¹² The failure to use God’s gifts, or to stop using them, or to use them less once given is to God’s reject God’s gift.

Alongside my primary focus on the three graces, I will also focus on the concept of the kingdom of God. Searching for the ideal life seems to have become a favorite American pastime. We wonder, Am I in the right job? Am I in the right marriage? Am I in the right house, or is there one more ideally suited for me and my family? I will argue that of all possible standpoints in which humans can situate themselves, of all the points or frames of reference we can choose, the most beautiful, most profound, and most eminently meaningful is the kingdom of God. That is to say, the ideal place is where God desires us to be is in his kingdom. In fact, the theme on which Jesus spoke most often during his time on earth related to people’s preparedness for the kingdom of God. Moreover, Jesus redefined the idea of the kingdom of God itself that was current at the time, illuminating people’s understanding about it through the use of parables and highly symbolic actions. I propose that faith, hope, and love are to be essentially unified into sustaining and directing elements in our life—they are gifts that, once combined, are invaluable in the Christian life and that we draw on as we journey toward and experience the kingdom of God.

Yet, even today, as in Jesus’ day, the kingdom of God, as a subject, brings with it no shortage of confusion and no shortage of books, blogs, monographs, and journal articles on Jesus’ conception of it. And yet, the myriad of publications notwithstanding, there are still questions surrounding its nature and function: Who can enter and who cannot? Is it the same as heaven? Does it remain the same over time? Of particular interest are the three major eschatological approaches, each taking a different view on the coming of the kingdom of God: (1) the kingdom of God was and is entirely present, dawning with Jesus’ ministry; (2) it is entirely future; or (3) it is both present and future. It is my contention that the biblical writings assert the third option: that the kingdom is both here and now and in the future. Therefore, my focus is on the already/not yet aspect of the kingdom, something quite different from current notions about it and about heaven. I give significant weight to Jesus’ emphasis on the kingdom’s having already appeared. For instance, he declares, The Kingdom of God is in your midst, and If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you (Luke 17:21 and Matt 12:28, respectively).¹³ I will argue that those who practice authentic faith, hope, and love are thus in Christ and are members of the kingdom; they are under the sovereign and saving rule of God. These are the people of God, in the place where God wants them to flourish. We will come back to this crucial theme of the present aspect of God’s kingdom throughout the book.

In the Christian’s experience, faith, hope, and love inform, influence, and strengthen one another. While they are not a complete definition of the responsibilities of the Christian life, they are—perhaps paradoxically—the most basic God-given gifts and the most foundational ethical responsibilities for Christians of any era. As such, having and exercising faith, hope, and love are the highest privileges and the greatest responsibilities of the Christian life. They are not only a set of instructions that help the private individual walk more closely to God on our journey along life’s path toward our goal; they are also the public expression of the Christian experience of living for the kingdom of God—for God and for others while we are on the true path. To embrace faith, hope, and love is to embrace a certain way of life, namely, one prescribed by Christianity and the Bible, where the three words appear as God-given gifts that will withstand the tests of time (1 Cor 13:13).

The reader should take note that my interest is to define the graces in terms of the primacy of both belief and action in the kingdom of God (Mark 12:34). By this I mean that I will describe the role of faith, hope, and love in terms of the gospel of justification by faith (God’s declaration that a human individual has been restored to a state of righteousness in his sight),¹⁴ which brings people into the kingdom of God. And once the Christian has entered into the kingdom of God, the gospel of the kingdom becomes an invitation—the announcement of the possibility of a new life in the kingdom that relies on the three graces being lived out. Paul’s gospel of justification is not the same as Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom (Matt 7:23; Acts 28:30–31). However, both are integrally related, and I intend to show how they intersect. The gospel of the kingdom is not exclusively about the forgiveness of sins; that is the focus of the gospel of justification. The gospel of the kingdom focuses on drawing from a source of life outsides ourselves, learning to live a new life, right now, to walk the true path with the unfailing gifts of faith, hope, and love that leads to life’s answers.

The Role of Theology and Philosophy

Many think of life as a path stretching from the past into the future, with the lives of each one of us laid out as overlapping footprints on this path. Throughout our study, I will make use of path, way, or journey as a core metaphor of life. Many of the world’s religions refer to walking and the path of life in their sacred scriptures. It is this metaphor that often communicates the role of faith, hope, or love in religion. The far-reaching influence of our three graces and the related symbolism of walking down life’s path—inextricably linked in Christianity—are similarly played out in our philosophical and theological constructions. But like the microscope, which discovers and does not create, philosophy and theology, in reality, serve human inquiry in their attempts to give a systematic account and reveal the inner coherence of whatever passes within their views. To engage these preferences and given our subject matter, much of what I will discuss requires the use of philosophical and theological constructs.

Indeed, philosophy and theology involve comprehensive views of the world, and both address some of the toughest questions life poses to us. Both disciplines are generally thought to be academic, even arcane. An apocryphal assessment of both tells of an anonymous wag who once wittily described a theologian and philosopher as blind men in a dark room searching for a black cat that isn’t there—and finding it! In their more developed forms, the theologies of various religions tend to move from a descriptive stance to more prescriptive norms, giving direction to religious faith. Along this line, in its claims to authority, it is not uncommon for religious faith to absolutize its own position and to make claims to universality. But theology in its original sense and among its earliest practitioners was simply the study of God. In the centuries following Christ’s resurrection, theology extended its task to include a way of knowing God and what he reveals. Theology thus took on the role of a personal knowledge of God and the things of God in the context of salvation.¹⁵ Much later, beginning with the rise of universities and the academic study of religion, theology became more of a study about God. As such, it was a critical approach devoted to obtaining an integrated knowledge of the things relating to God. It is in this dual sense of personal, salvific knowledge and experience of God, on the one hand, and the critical or analytical process of weighing arguments from different angles, on the other, that I will use the term theology. A theology that is distinctly Christian also elevates various axioms or accepted revealed scriptural truths to summarize intricate concepts such as faith, hope, love, and the kingdom of God. These biblical-theological concepts function prescriptively or normatively, not only giving direction to the individual Christian and the community of the historic Christian faith but also serving as a public theology,¹⁶ modeling how one can engage one’s culture with a life that considers the theological graces to be values for life’s journey. Wolfhart Pannenberg advocates, Theology either illuminates the public understanding of human existence or it has no worthy claim on our attention.¹⁷ Thus my writing also reflects an interest to make the three graces and the kingdom of God understandable and accessible to the interested public.

In case the reader is one of the few who still do not recognize the plainly visible link between walking and life—that it is highly representative of what is valuable or important in life—let me offer one contemporary cultural example with which nearly every adult is familiar: The Wizard of Oz. I will unpack its theological construct to provide a clear indication to what I am referring when I say the role of faith, hope, and love, and then continue to introduce the way we will approach our subject matter.

Theology along the Yellow Brick Road

References to Oz permeate our culture. Why is this? Available on nearly every conceivable media platform and shown each television season, L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has also been recycled in musicals like The Wiz and Wicked, the miniseries Tin Man, and the film Oz The Great and Powerful, making it part of our culture’s repository of Americana. More than a musical fantasy adventure, its widespread familiarity and appeal is the result of its dealing with the exceedingly broad and enduring eternal questions that take most of us a lifetime to obtain even a scant hint of an answer. Like young Dorothy Gale, each of us at some point in our life ponders existence and asks the grand thesis questions: Who am I? (the question of personal identity), where did I come from? (the question of origin), why am I here? (the question of providence), where am I going, and am I on the correct road? (the question of destiny), how should I relate to others? (the question of personal and social ethics), where do I belong? (the question of home and community), and, is the world pleasant, antagonistic, or uncaring toward me? (the question of cosmology). At the height of his success, Sir Elton John sang of his future lying beyond the Yellow Brick Road. After reflecting on his life’s glitz and glamour, such questions prompted a song of yearning for a more simple life where such questions were more easily answered. Paul Nathanson suggests that on a much deeper level, The Wizard of Oz relates directly to these questions and to the issues of theology. He argues, "To what would otherwise be an ordinary story about the private dream world of a little girl, The Wizard of Oz in many ways adds to the cultural richness and depth of our notions of life" and how we live it.¹⁸

Life in this world is represented by Oz—and, more specifically, by the Yellow Brick Road that traverses it from one end to the other. It is characterized by the search for order in the midst of chaos. Consequently, it is also characterized by pilgrimage through chaos (the Haunted Forest) to the source of life, holiness, and order (The Emerald City) by staying safely on the path (following the Yellow Brick Road) and avoiding the source of death, sin, and chaos (the Witch’s Castle). Along the way, we may encounter divine or satanic beings (Glinda or the Witch).¹⁹

In the prologue to the book, poor Dorothy is unable to see her life and is troubled by the inadequacy of the world as it is. In what is perhaps the most penetrating theological critique of The Wizard of Oz to date, David C. Downing writes, "Almost immediately, she sets off on her journey down the Yellow Brick Road. Joining her on this ‘Grail-like quest’ are three friends, who, like Dorothy, are troubled by Angst, or spiritual emptiness."²⁰ Of course, after her final encounter and discussion with the Wizard, not only is her spiritual emptiness relieved as she will soon go home, but she also finally sees things clearly. And in the process she learns about courage (how to stand firm in the face of personal hardship), intelligence (how to live in appreciation for what one has and to be hopeful for tomorrow), and feelings (how to express love). At base, these expressions are entirely comparable to our topic. The courage, intelligence, and feelings granted in Oz are the modern civil-religious reflections and postmodern simulations of the transcendent reality and ethic of faith, hope, and love.

Three Friends and Three Graces

At this point, permit me to drill down deeper into the movie’s theological subtext and extract these implications—further into the vein Nathanson and Downing explored. What Dorothy receives from the Wizard near the end of the movie is analogous to a God-given revelation that her world will soon be set aright. As part of the kingdom blessings dispensed from Oz in the holy of holies are the imparting of authentic faith, hope, and love. Stated theologically, faith, hope, and love are gifts of God.²¹ The Cowardly Lion seeks courage and symbolizes faith. As he attacks Dorothy and the Scarecrow, he scares Dorothy’s dog, Toto. Dorothy’s recourse is to smack him on the nose, at which point the Lion bursts into tears. He laments this cowardice. It is my great sorrow, he says to the Scarecrow, while he wipes a tear from his eye with the tip of his tail, and makes my life very unhappy. But whenever there is danger, my heart begins to beat fast.²² Indeed, the foursome’s journey will be reversed several times because of his being prone to running the other way, even when they arrive at the Emerald City. To him is imparted what Paul Tillich referred to as the courage to be, another name for absolute faith.²³ Such faith has been known to create a space for courage in terrifying situations, and such courage enables us to move forward, testing that faith and in turn strengthening it. This reminds us of Paul’s final, staid appeal to the Corinthians, his four imperatives as apt for Christians today: Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith, be men of courage; be strong (1 Cor 16:13). With God’s gift of faith, Christians can personify a new vision of Christian strength in the world and a personal responsibility for it. God’s expectation is that in every step of life, faith will work (Gal 5:6; Jas 2:18).

The Scarecrow seeks a brain, which symbolizes new hope for humankind. He confides in Dorothy, You see, I don’t mind my legs and arms and body being stuffed, because I cannot get hurt. If anyone treads on my toes or sticks a pin into me, it doesn’t matter, for I can’t feel it. But I do not want people to call me a fool, and if my head stays stuffed with straw instead of with brains, as yours is, how am I ever to know anything?²⁴ Besides that, he is a failure at the very thing for which he was made, to scare crows. The birds come and simply rest on him. If he only had a brain—his hope is for knowledge, intellect. None of us want to be considered a fool by others. We hope that our brains will serve us well as we travel through life. Much of secular society and the academy exalts the intellect: we invest in enlarging the borders of knowledge, the scientific method is nothing less than our means of escaping ignorance and superstition, and we allege that it is our only hope for solving humanity’s problems.²⁵ A similar future-oriented enhancement to human well-being relates to God’s gift of hope. With it Christians also contribute to a new vision of hope for their surrounding culture and bear a responsibility for it. God’s expectation is that in every step of life the hope in us will endure (Rom 5:2–4; 8:24–25).

Last, the Tin Man seeks a heart, which symbolizes transcendent love. In the film adaptation of Oz, the Tin Man intones, Bang on my chest if you think I’m perfect, go ahead, bang on it! Dorothy raps on the Tin Man’s chest and it tympanis back an empty resonance, an echo of the barrenness he feels within. Many today journey through life with a wounded heart, a hollow aching, making them more vulnerable than most to the hurts and sorrows of today. Theirs is the desire for the love that rises above the heartbreak of everydayness that soothes the restlessness and the pains of human trauma, the all-encompassing love that finds its consoling source in the very heart of God. Augustine clearly saw this. As he put it, Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee.²⁶ So did the great seventeenth-century French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal when we paraphrased Augustine, saying, There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man.²⁷ Once received, that love of God is to flow through the Christian and into the world in compassionate, caring devotedness to others. And Christians are responsible to be worthy vessels of such love as they walk through life.

Dorothy’s three traveling companions are seeking fulfillment of needs that are, implied by symbolic extension, Dorothy’s own needs. For all intents and purposes, the three kingdom-type qualities are spiritual gifts that Dorothy must receive at this stage of her life journey to persevere. And this is precisely what happens. By becoming their friend (assimilating their messages of faith, hope, and love), Dorothy is able to complete her otherwise perilous journey to the Emerald City.

The symbolism of the three friends described here may not have all the merits of a spot-on, one-to-one correspondence to faith, hope, and love, but it is highly suggestive of some of the points I will make all the same. The three graces, personified in the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion, are transfigured back into her earthly friends (farmworkers Hunk, Hickory, and Zeke) who gather around her when she revives safe and sound in the real world. The implication is that now—with the help of faith, hope, and love—she sees things rightly and is ready to appreciate the real world because she better understands life and its meaning. From an explicitly theological vantage point, without the gifts of faith, hope, and love—combined with the guidance supplied by the Spirit of God—she could not have attained the stage of maturity needed to understand the meaning of being at home with her family, being at home in the world at large, and—by implication—being at home with God.

At the end of the film, with her exclamation, There’s no place like home, she signals she is ready to take her proper place at home, in the world, and, by inference, with God. Kansas has not changed; her home, though damaged, has not changed; and the people around her are the same. The main difference is in Dorothy herself. She now has eyes to see and ears to hear. At this instant, she recognizes in the faces of her three friends that faith, hope, and love are with her, and that the kingdom of God is nearby. And with the help of these friends, she has come to appreciate what she has. She is now better equipped to live her life, to more confidently step out on her life-walk; they will help her in her real-world journey toward the not-far-off kingdom of God.

This is what makes Dorothy’s journey instructive for us. Just as her persistent reliance on her friends (faith, hope, and love) and her belief in Oz (the kingdom) has a transformational effect on her—even in Kansas (the real world)—they can do the same for us. Just as Dorothy succeeded in her transformation, we can succeed in ours. With the help of God and his gifts of faith, hope, and love, we can fruitfully seek the kingdom of God, in our midst, in our world. What is characteristic of The Wizard of Oz, according to Nathanson, is that,

At the deepest level, the success of The Wizard is due to its function in American society as a secular myth. More specifically, I suggest that it functions very much like the civil religion. As all people do, Americans want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to maintain the political benefits of a secular state but also to nourish a spiritual identity based on religious tradition.²⁸

The Wizard of Oz is part of the American story, a legitimating myth, civil religion. But what is American civil religion? As Robert Wuthnow explains, The civil religion consists of Judeo-Christian symbols and values that relate the nation to a divine order of things, thus giving it a sense of origin and direction.²⁹ To elaborate on this, I will provide some background on our national culture and civil religion: the two human domains of meaning that have contributed to the predicament in which we find ourselves: the co-opting of the three graces. Here is where we find some explanations for the change in their meanings and value, and their replacement by civil-religious varieties or secularized versions.

National Culture: Civil Religion and Accommodation

If the purpose of the three graces is as important as I have argued above, then it is imperative that we have a correct understanding not only of their essence—their content—but also of their steady co-optation by the secular symbol system of civil religion. Thus I will discuss what faith, hope, and love have come to mean in the vernacular of contemporary American culture and how these current meanings have moved far away from their original conceptions. But here we are faced with a challenge: how to define the infamously fuzzy term culture.

A commonly accepted definition—and the one I will be adopting here—is Richard Niebuhr’s, one of the most prominent Christian theological ethicists in the twentieth century. He suggests that culture

is that total process of human activity and total result of such activity to which now the name culture, now the name civilization, is applied in common speech. Culture is the artificial, secondary environment which man superimposes on the natural. It comprises language, habits, ideas, beliefs, customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, technical processes, and values.³⁰

Through the long process of our nation’s secularization and the prominence of American civil religion, our ideas of faith, hope, and love have undergone subtle yet dramatic changes. Part of me is utterly amazed at how words and the concepts they reflect can become so encrusted into a culture but over time become diluted or even evolve and take on alternate meanings so that the very things they originally described are obscured or altogether lost. But perhaps this should come as no surprise. There are, after all, to borrow from Clifford Geertz’s famous web of significances analogy, many cultural strands interrelated in our society, and religion is one connected, shared strand.³¹ Religion does not stand alone, and it is not made of Teflon—when it makes contact, it sticks. Cultures consist of webs that humans spin, are suspended by, and through which meanings are exchanged as people order and represent their world. To define the mosaic of meanings that develop, Geertz says that culture "denotes a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which [people] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.³² I am particularly interested in how our culture has developed a reformulated version of the original Christian conceptions of faith, hope, and love and the kingdom of God. I suggest that much of the change appears to be brought on and is concurrent with the rise of civil religion.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that our religious life is characterized by diversity and vitality. It has typically been so in America. At the turn of the nineteenth century, religion and ethnicity came together in a new way, bringing civil religion into greater prominence and forming a quasi-folk religion for immigrants. In a broad sense, this common religion emerged from the ethos and history of American culture, in which the nation itself was the chief provider of a significant and vigorous social identity to these new settlers of America. Civil religion also serves to cohere, much like the religions of ancient Greece and Rome functioned as the servant of the state, gave it moral coherence, and served as its social cement.³³ The prime example is the emperor cult of Rome. While other religions were permitted to exist and practice their rituals alongside it, the cult required, at minimum, nominal acceptance of the head of state (the emperor) as both chief priest and as a quasi-object of worship. The social benefit accrued by unifying the masses and solidifying the authority of the state in the face of internal and external threats is obvious.

Sociologist Robert Bellah borrowed the term civil religion from Jean-Jacques Rousseau,³⁴ similarly noting that the pattern of American religious behavior had from the start shared a common denominator with Christianity, namely, the existence of God, an afterlife, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, and the exclusion of religious intolerance.³⁵ Evidence that the language and movement of civil religion was on the rise in America during the 1950s³⁶ can be found in the work of noted sociologist Will Herberg, particularly his famous work Protestant-Catholic-Jew, wherein he theorized that the American religious expression included the ideas that God was for America, he was pro-capitalist, and that American’s system of values, norms, rituals, and symbols provided our nation of immigrants with a sense of unity and purpose.³⁷ Or as Richard Niebuhr put it a couple of decades earlier, The old idea of American Christians as a chosen people who had been called to a special task was turned into the notion of a chosen nation especially favored.³⁸ Church historian Sidney Mead summed up this idea with the concise phrase the religion of the Republic.³⁹ With these beliefs, Americans of whatever faith, or even those who profess no faith, those who make the nation’s hope their own, or pledge their undying allegiance or love to their country, are able to experience and identify with the religion of America. As Bellah clearly notes, while America derived much from Christianity, this derivative religion is definitely not itself Christianity.⁴⁰ An imitative, heavily diluted version of faith, hope, and love was baptized in the civil-religious waters of American culture.

A Transcendent Of Our Own Making

Our social institutions attempt to replicate the transcendent or to make it more palpable. Harold Berman identifies the parallel elements of ritual, tradition, authority, and universality present in all legal systems, which are similarly present in all religions, as examples of institutions’ symbolizing elements of the transcendent.⁴¹ Graveside services catering to the nonreligious, euthanasia and the right-to-die movement, and living wills as the answer to the problem of the aging ill provide several examples of the secular echo of religious beliefs.⁴² So while Bellah states that civil religion is that religious dimension found . . . in the life of every people, through which it interprets its historical experience in light of transcendent reality,⁴³ in the end civil religion reveals the machinations of a culture bereft of a transcendent reference or ethic.

If civil religion attempts to replicate the transcendent, let me offer several illustrations on how it fails in its efforts to do so. Strive as it may to mirror the transcendent reality and ethic, the church of democracy musters its collective spirit with its sacred ceremonies on Independence Day and Memorial Day with parades, recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag, and its communal singing of the national anthem. Each has a common ritualistic form and a symbolic structure. Indeed, our presidential inaugurations express God-language, as do our swearing-in ceremonies. Holy days as well as holidays, Thanksgiving Day and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, are securely fixed on the American ceremonial calendar. In addition to the presence of religious symbols like crucifixes and the Ten Commandments in classrooms and courtrooms, and crosses on hilltops, civil religion has a retinue of patriarchs, prophets, and priests.⁴⁴ As Gerald Parsons indicates in his study of these and other collective religious behaviors,

In both the USA and the UK, the rituals of remembrance that emerged out of the two nations’ experience of modern war led to the establishment of sacred places and memorials and to the institution of annual rites, symbols, and ceremonies that recalled, honored and commemorated those who had died in the service of their country and its official values . . . [just as those that] emerged out of the catastrophic and traumatic disunity of the Civil War provides . . . a compelling demonstration of the way in which rituals of remembrance can embody and focus the aims of a civil religion.⁴⁵

Indeed, our use of religious language and our adoration of such quasi-religious images are—at best—an absolutely novel contrivance of transcendence, a socially constructed or communal ethic, or civil religion. Such Americanisms have been incorrectly equated with revealed biblical Christianity. To be sure, civil religion and biblical religion are incongruent, and yet many images and personalities are readily and lovingly embraced by Christians.

While it is easily established that the American culture has been strongly shaped by Protestant Christianity particularly and biblical theism generally,⁴⁶ we may summarize that religion is—as Tillich has pointed out—the heart of culture and culture is the form of religion;⁴⁷ religion, not biblical Christianity. There has been a veritable tug-of-war over America’s soul where the web strands of Christianity and secularism have coexisted in perpetual tension. On the one hand, the church labored hard to overlay its beliefs, values, and conceptions onto society. Mainstream culture could barely restrain such Christian-cultural osmosis, absorbing much of the formative force, and thus intertwined with it. On the other hand, in her efforts to convey eternal truths, the church was often compelled to accommodate her message to culture in order to be understood and to be pertinent to the times, examples of which I will offer below. In fact, R. L. Moore well expresses how religion becomes intertwined with popular culture in a mixture of ways, often by first opposing it; but religion almost always seems to find a way to embrace cultural trends in the competitive quest to remain relevant.⁴⁸ We could expand this idea by demonstrating how religion gives form and substance to, supports, mirrors, confronts, and evaluates the social order and other cultural forms, and how cultural forms do the same for religion. But either way, while Christianity may be the source of many of our public values, a great deal of our current views of faith, hope, and love originally inherited from the early church were refashioned into quasi-Christian, informal, and secular traditions that now need to be reexamined in the clear light of Scripture. At bottom line, the resulting civil religiosity excludes much of the content and conviction of biblical faith, hope, and love. But I do not want to jump too far ahead.

The Effects of Secularization

Alongside civil religion’s acculturation of Christian ideas and Christians, a long process of secularization has also contributed to a watered-down understanding of faith, hope, and love. While there may be many modes of expressing faith, hope, and love, and while institutions for perpetuating them may survive, their original biblical sense and importance have been obscured by other meanings. Their vital historical touch point is lost. As one of the dominating social outlooks of today, the secular humanist viewpoint offers a more naturalistic understanding of faith, hope, and love apart from a theological or transcendent explanation. Religion scholar Martin Marty explains this in his comments on American religion and unbelief—the sign dominating the sixties:

Secularism permits no transcendent reference, no witness to the activity of God in history, no possibility of belief that he is or belief in his actions or belief in the witnesses to him in the human sphere. It is self-contained, self-explanatory, self-enclosed. It can very well be the real religion of the modern world, incorporating most elements of what belonged to life in historic religions.⁴⁹

Much of what was incorporated into the cultural condition beginning in the eighties and nineties was a reaction against modernity, resulting in a radically skeptical postmodern outlook, especially toward the concepts of absolute truth and objective reality. The postmodern claim is that God and the things of God, including faith, hope, and love, are entirely simulations—that is, they appear as a sign or symbol, replacing the original and thus feigning possession of what one does not actually possess. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard explains,

All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange—God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence?⁵⁰

In addition to the religious elements of society being sanitized of the transcendent and becoming incorporated into secular, even postmodern culture, many of our social, religious, and political groups now do not share a collective purpose or common vision of America or of the world. Amid this social perplexity, neither is there a shared conception of faith, hope, and love. While the words remain in our colloquial speech, they have been robbed of their true core. They are not devoid of meaning, but they lost their ethical import and spiritual value when they were disconnected from their biblical and theological moorings. According to the work of George Aichele and Tina Pippin, the same has occurred with the kingdom of God.

The kingdom is an other world, whose connection to our present world of misery, ugliness, and disappointment is mysterious—never wholly certain except to the faithful, and never very far from the thoughts of even the most secular or least religious person. These images of the kingdom of God are so deeply woven into the fabric of our culture that they move and inspire us regardless of our religious views, or lack of them. We see and hear these images everywhere: not only in overtly religious contexts but in a wide variety of secular settings: magazine advertisements, popular movies and music, and many other places including ordinary, everyday conversations.⁵¹

I am bound to add in my view a refinement to the above and challenge the assertion that the kingdom of God is never wholly certain except to the faithful. As Eugene Peterson inquires rhetorically, Is our talk of a kingdom of God within and among us and our citizenship in it anything that can be construed as the ‘real world?’ Or are we passing on a kind of spiritual fiction analogous to the science fictions that fantasize a better world than we will ever live in?⁵² While on the one hand, the kingdom of God is not a fiction, it is reality; on the other hand, it is a transnational reality. The church and the secular have traded on the notion of the kingdom of God in their civil-religious discourse, but the Christian cannot assume her country is the kingdom of God. Don’t get me wrong. I am a citizen of these United States, and I have a deep love and respect for my country and its flag and easily get misty when singing about our land and those who have fought and died for our values. But to embrace civil religion is to both superimpose God’s will onto a nation, and identify the ideology of nationalism with the kingdom of God.⁵³

The Discounting of Faith, Hope, and Love

In addition to the rise of civil religion and the forces of secularization and their impact on religion and faith, hope, and love in general, are there other ways to account for the depreciation of faith, hope, and love in particular? The problem with Christianity according to the American mainline denominations—especially in light of civil religion, increasing secularization, and the enormous cultural value shifts of the 1960s—was that it turned off growing numbers of people. The age of accommodation⁵⁴ would ensue because the biblical-moral teachings on faith, hope, and love were considered to be entirely out of touch with the times, or unworthy of the times. The brand of Christianity known for its inflexible rules, truth-monopolizing, exclusivistic-minded church people, and distance from the problems of this world would be replaced by the struggling mainline denominations known by the fruit of their deeds not creeds activism, and their initiating the ecumenical movement and interfaith dialogues.⁵⁵ In their search for answers, the mainline churches would seemingly stop at nothing to strike the chord of cultural affinity and avert the exodus from their pews. Yet in their triumphal mergers and their moving from denominations to interfaith associations, they continued to reduce in size. Interfaith dialogue incorporated Buddhist meditation techniques and Hindu oblations into traditional Christian prayers and liturgies to enrich Christian faith and practice.⁵⁶ In the end, the more religious conservatives (antiaccommodationist Christianity) and religious liberals (accommodationist Christianity) defined themselves against one another by taking sides in the tug-of-war over America’s beliefs,⁵⁷ the more they came to be seen as religious factions littering the landscape of American religion. Moreover, Americans dissatisfied with both, wrote journalist Charles Ferguson, turned to cults promising earthly success and rapport with the universe.⁵⁸ These groups also had a stake in the tyranny of words, which often recast or completely redefined the meaning of biblical terms to accord with their theologies.⁵⁹ As it turned out, people yearned for transcendence from religion along with the type of genuine conviction only religion can provide, and accommodationist churches had nothing principally transcendent to offer anyone. Accommodationist pastors and theologians had recognized, correctly, that the social revolutions of their time were contributing to the destabilization of the most basic fundamentals of Christianity. In due course, successive generations of clergymen lost their stride, their steps revealed a loss of spiritual vitality and direction, and the Christian proclamation disappeared. A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.⁶⁰ In the process they had failed to either rediscover the biblical gospel or design a new foundation that could inspire an authentic allegiance stemming from a true, heartfelt conviction, a real faith, real hope, and real love. Christianity had been effectively emptied of everything that might bring the smallest offense to the sensibilities of a country undergoing dramatic changes. In the process of making Christianity worthy of today’s times and values, a kenotic loss occurred—many ministers lost the sense that they were called by God to serve his purposes and people, they lost sight of the kingdom of God, and they lost the good sense that they were to be engaged in efforts that had eternal consequences, in matters that were objectively true.

Indeed, one form of accommodation tended to lead to another (and another, and another),⁶¹ says Ross Douthat in his book Bad Religion. Applying these observations to our subject, it becomes quite understandable that the original, high-octane forms of faith, hope, and love were considered by the mainline church and secular culture to be too restrictive and too demanding. Thus the three words remain in our secular vocabulary, and perhaps in a sense remain germane to America’s happiness-seeking and pleasure-focused culture. Yet, over time, a little dilution here and reframing of Christian discourse there⁶² proposed to make them more pleasant to our permissive, secular culture, to the point where the mainstream thinks of them as happy-go-lucky, totally positive and wonderful concepts. Typical of our cultural refinements, we strive to change the things that prove challenging or difficult to us. Such has been the case with authentic faith, hope, and love. They presented a transcendent challenge to the individual and to secular society. So, naturally, we domesticated them by thinning them down, the result of which was an ersatz variety of faith, hope, and love. Devoid of the dignity afforded by God’s grace and Christian responsibility and with want of transcendent grandeur affording their purity and power, they have fallen into desuetude.

The question easily arises at this point: Has secular society so powerfully ingratiated itself into our modern outlook that it has altered our very character and invalidated all responsiveness to God? Have society’s secularizing elements really proven to be so caustic toward transcendent language that they have deranged authentic faith, hope, and love? Langdon Gilkey writes:

The issue of meaningfulness of language about the transcendent, about the ultimate reality or structure of things, about the sacral source, ground and aim of all, remains as difficult and as significant for the religious and so the Church life of our age as ever—for it is the secular spirit in us all, and not a particular philosophical expression of it, which generates this problems for the Church and for theology.⁶³

Gilkey rightly senses secular society’s deeming such God-talk and grace-talk as extraneous and even nonsensical to the masses, especially when agnosticism and atheistic naturalism are the mental defaults shaping their point of view. After listening to my students, it is plainly evident: the secular philosophical standpoint presumes theological claims to be senseless yet tolerable, but nonetheless invalid. No wonder the three graces have fallen on such hard times.

One final factor contributing to the secular distrust and suspicion toward the three words—and my students reflect our larger culture in this regard—relates to the cynical outlook so prevalent among Western cultures. According to Samantha Vice, Finally, along with hope, cynicism is also the enemy of those other famous virtues, faith and charity. If we value them, we cannot value cynicism. . . . The cynical stance prevents the cynic from interpreting people in any way other than self-interested or corrupt, and to see people like this is to see them in ways unmoved by faith, hope, and charity.⁶⁴ Moreover, Vice asks why it is that we should even care about these so called ‘theological’ virtues, especially when it is difficult to give a satisfying secularized account of them?⁶⁵ I disagree because, to varying degrees, the civil religious and secularists are baptizing each of the three words in their own backyards, redefining them to some extent, and making satisfactory use of them for their respective post-Galilean, scientific purposes, which only serves to contribute to the problem that I am addressing. Case in point, in a recent essay collection, nearly a dozen prominent secularists devoted themselves to contending that a secular Weltanschauung—purely so, without any reference or relation to God—can be as engaging and fulfilling, and can provide as sound a basis for human flourishing, as a religious Weltanschauung. The authors argue that where religion provides humans with faith in God, secularism provides enchantment in the world. And where religion provides hope, secularism provides optimism that it can deliver such enchantment. To end with, secularism aligns love with the potent effect of a positive version of codependence and its related cooperative feelings, which makes up the enchantment for which they seek.⁶⁶

Regrettably, Christians themselves were complicit in contributing to the problem in their portrayal of Christianity first and foremost as a list of dos and don’ts—with an extraordinary emphasis on the don’ts. This gave Western society the perception that Christianity is a stern, austere, and basically joyless journey across an unwelcoming or even antagonistic earth. Christianity had essentially forgotten that the three graces contribute in large measure to the exhilarating and celebratory side of the Christian life. So we put forth vague conceptions of faith, hope, and love, thinking that a less austere Christianity would make the church more appealing and less confrontational to secular society. Thus, among other contrivances, faith gave way to a variety of easy-believing options and naive emotivism, themselves admittedly incapable of rigorous demonstration or verification. Faith in its most secularized form becomes enchantment; in civil religion, nationalism. Hope became a gradation of optimisms: from wistful daydreaming, to an airy sanguinity having little foundation in reality, to a focus on human progress and the future of our capitalist society. In the context of secularism, hope becomes the optimistic yearning for enchantment; for civil religion, utopian capitalism in America and in the Middle East (where it is all but sworn to as a false god). It becomes socialism in Europe. Love has suffered the greatest dilution. It has been watered down to a set of expressive responses ranging from joyously spontaneous, fuzzy-wuzzy, angst-ridden, emotive adolescent fumblings to erotic pleasures, great and small, just to mention a few cultural variations. Its variants include possessive love, devoted love, and dependent love. Love can be subdued or completely wild, especially when it is rooted in sexuality and is associated with impulse or instinct. Civil religion transmutes love into social justice. And in its most secularized form it questions what is worthy of respect or wonder. An object may inspire love, but does it merit love?

From the standpoint of biblical Christianity, such contrivances of the original graces do not provide any of the benefits originally intended for the believer, and they simply do not compel us toward or assist us in our journey to the kingdom of God.

The Journey along Life’s Path

As I mentioned earlier, a conceptual model I will use throughout the following pages for talking about the relation between God and humans persons is the path, or way, or journey.⁶⁷ For some, the challenge is to discover this true path in life. Ancient and modern literature is replete with metaphorical references to the path of life and walking or journeying on it. Both are symbolic of how we live our life. One of the oldest pieces of literature, The Instruction of Any, is a familiar form of instructions given by a father to his son. From ancient Egypt between the fifteenth and twelfth centuries