Hope Today

By Cascade Books

Hope is not about uncertain possibility. There is a robust sense of hope: something has happened, and it has happened in a certain way. This volume addresses the question: What is the way of Christian hope? What does it mean to act with hope? And in particular, what does it mean to act, to live, with hope in our churches and in society today?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Apr 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781725271128

Book preview

Hope Today

Edited by

Matthew E. Burdette &Victor Lee Austin

HOPE TODAY

Pro Ecclesia Series

11

Copyright ©

2023

Wipf and Stock Publishers. 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

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8

th Ave., Suite

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, Eugene, OR

97401

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Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-7110-4

hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-7111-1

ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-7112-8

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Burdette, Matthew E., editor. | Austin, Victor Lee, editor.

Title: Hope today / edited by Matthew E. Burdette and Victor Lee Austin.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books,

2023

| Series: Pro Ecclesia Series

11

| Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-7252-7110-4 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-7252-7111-1 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-7252-7112-8 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH: Hope—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Eschatology.

Classification:

BT821.2 .H66 2023 (

print

) | BT821.2 .H66 (

ebook

)

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contributors

Preface

Friendship in the Meantime

Hope as a Virtue

The Ways of Perishing and the Practice of Hope

Hope as a Political Virtue

Eucharistic Hope

Race, Ecumenism, and the Church

The Pro Ecclesia Series

Books in the Pro Ecclesia series are for the Church. The series is sponsored by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, founded by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson in 1991. The series seeks to nourish the Church’s faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ through a theology that is self-critically committed to the biblical, dogmatic, liturgical, and ethical traditions that form the foundation for a fruitful ecumenical theology. The series reflects a commitment to the classical tradition of the Church as providing the resources critically needed by the various churches as they face modern and post-modern challenges. The series will include books by individuals as well as collections of essays by individuals and groups. The Editorial Board will be drawn from various Christian traditions.

titles in the series include:

The Morally Divided Body: Ethical Disagreement and the Unity of the Church, edited by Michael Root and James J. Buckley

Christian Theology and Islam, edited by Michael Root and James J. Buckley

Who Do You Say That I Am?: Proclaiming and Following Jesus Today, edited by Michael Root and James J. Buckley

What Does It Mean to Do This?: Supper, Mass, Eucharist, edited by Michael Root and James J. Buckley

Heaven, Hell, . . . and Purgatory?, edited by Michael Root and James J. Buckley

Life Amid the Principalities: Identifying, Understanding, and Engaging Created, Fallen, and Disarmed Powers Today, edited by Michael Root and James J. Buckley

Remembering the Reformation: Commemorate? Celebrate? Repent?, edited by Michael Root and James J. Buckley

The Emerging Christian Minority, edited by Victor Lee Austin and Joel C. Daniels

Repentance and Forgiveness, edited by Matthew E. Burdette and Victor Lee Austin

Contributors

Victor Lee Austin is theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. His most recent books are Friendship: The Heart of Being Human (Baker Academic, 2020) and A Post-COVID Catechesis (Cascade, 2022).

Matthew E. Burdette is an Episcopal priest. He holds a PhD in theology from the University of Aberdeen, having researched the theology of Robert W. Jenson and James H. Cone.

Carolyn A. Chau (PhD, University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto) is associate professor of religious studies at King’s Western University, and author of Solidarity with the World: Charles Taylor and Hans Urs von Balthasar on Faith, Modernity, and Catholic Mission (Cascade, 2016).

Elizabeth Agnew Cochran (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is associate professor of theology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. She is the author of articles in a number of journals, including the Journal of Religious Ethics and Studies in Christian Ethics, and has published two monographs on virtue ethics and Reformed Protestant moral traditions: Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics (T&T Clark, 2017) and Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics (Penn State University Press, 2011).

David Elliot (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is assistant professor of moral theology and ethics at the Catholic University of America and is author of Hope and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Wesley Hill (PhD, Durham University) is an Episcopal priest and an associate professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan. His most recent book is The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father (Lexham Press, 2019).

Peter J. Leithart is president of the Theopolis Institute, a Christian study center in Birmingham, Alabama, and teacher at Trinity Presbyterian Church (CREC). He is author most recently of a two-volume commentary on Revelation. He and his wife Noel have ten children and eleven grandchildren.

Preface

Hope is a four-letter word. Like a number of other four-letter words, it is promiscuously thrown about with little regard for what it really means. At the risk of being pedantic, could we begin with that adverb, hopefully? One learned (back in the day when one was taught to say one learned) that hopefully means with hope. Hopefully he filled the bucket means Full of hope, he filled the bucket. It’s not a way of saying you are uncertain whether he filled the bucket, but rather you are stating the manner of his filling the bucket. She hopefully finished her assignment properly tells us that she did finish her assignment and she did it with hope. Hopefully she turned in her assignment does not mean the speaker wonders whether she turned it in, but rather the speaker knows she turned it in and she did so full of hope. Hopefully he filled the grave would be a way of conveying that even with the tears of death in his eyes he acted with hope.

What this rather starchy old point of English teaching points to is that hope is not about uncertain possibility. It is not an optimism that things about which I am uncertain are actually in good condition. Now one might well say, I hope that she turned in her assignment. But that is only to say one is optimistic that this uncertain matter (whether she turned in her paper) is actually a matter in good condition (she did indeed turn in her paper). And we will grant that such optimism is not unconnected from the rich virtue of hope. But how different, how much richer it is to say, She turned in her paper with hope. Here is the robust sense of hope:  something has happened, and it has happened in a certain way.

This volume addresses the question: What is that way? What does it mean to act with hope? And in particular, what does it mean to act, to live, with hope in our churches and in society today?

Our authors are an outstanding group who have approached our topic from various angles and at various levels, from the Bible, to social criticism, to church life, to practicalities of our ongoing living. We trust you will hear us properly if we say, Hopefully they will speak to you!

Matthew E. Burdette

Victor Lee Austin

Friendship in the Meantime

Impaired Communion, Ecumenical Relationships, and the Virtue of Hope

Wesley Hill

The relationship between the theme of this volume—hope—and the theme of this chapter—friendship—is not immediately obvious. An exploration of friendship might seem more appropriate for a book on the theological virtue of charity than one on hope. Nonetheless, I wish to argue that hope is an essential virtue for the Christian practice of friendship—that, more specifically, hope is what makes possible the continuation of charity and the confidence in God’s eschatological reconciliation even in the midst of friendship’s painful vicissitudes in this time between the times that we now inhabit.

In order to make that argument, I turn to the one indisputably classic Christian treatment of friendship, the twelfth-century dialogues collected under the title On Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx, a Cistercian abbot in the north of England. My aim is not to summarize or distill the entirety of Aelred’s treatment, which in many cases simply represents a Christianization of Cicero’s De Amicitia from almost twelve centuries earlier. (Friendship, says Aelred, is agreement in things human and divine, with good will and charity [1.11].)

¹

I want instead to draw attention to the distinction Aelred makes between friendship (amicitia) and love (caritas).

Aelred makes this distinction three times, once in each of the three dialogues. In the first, he says this:

Divine authority commands that many more be received to the clasp of charity than to the embrace of friendship. By the law of charity we are ordered to welcome into the bosom of love not only our friends but also our enemies. But we call friends only those to whom we have no qualm about entrusting our heart and all its contents, while these friends are bound to us in turn by the same inviolable law of loyalty and trustworthiness. (

1

.

32

)

Here is the first statement of one of Aelred’s central themes: that friendship is a relationship of mutual trust, in which secrets can be shared without fear and souls can be knit together with affection and shared purpose. In this way, Aelred suggests, friendship differs from the love that we’re enjoined to show toward all people, even those who persecute us. That love should be indiscriminate, but friendship is highly discriminate because of the trust it needs as its basis. One may love all people, but one cannot trust all people.

In the second dialogue, Aelred expands on this thought briefly. Through the perfection of charity we have perfect love for many who are a burden and a bore to us, he writes. Although we consult their interests honestly, without pretense or hypocrisy but truthfully and voluntarily, still we do not invite them into the intimacies of friendship (2.19). What this adds to his first enunciation of the distinction between charity and friendship is simply that we are obligated not only to show charity to our enemies but also to those who may simply not appeal to us, either because of our disinterest in their pursuits or personality or else because of the trials their presence carries with it. Aelred insists that we should seek to do good to all people but, at the same time, that we are under no obligation to confide in all people.

And finally, in the third dialogue, Aelred makes the same point a final time: "With all affection I embrace many whom I do not