"Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." (Paul to the Romans 6:24, 25)Perhaps a few will remember an earlier page with the tricky title of "Hopeless Faith and Faithless Hope." For some reason that article created (provoked?) more response than any we remember. It's probably not a good idea to try to guess reasons. But I will.
In re-reading myself, the most likely disruption to complacency has to be the paragraph in which I say:
"I do not have faith in a 'person-God,' nor do I believe that there is anyone 'out there' that 'does anything.' Such a faith is hopeless. It is not reasonable to believe in a God that performs occasional miracles and offers occasional relief on an occasional basis for special people. I call such faith 'hopeless' because it doesn't work."Does that sound radical to you?
When I think that such thoughts trouble anyone at the end of the 20th century, I'm depressed. And I'm not easily depressed. The preachers of this century—particularly in the latter half of this century—have not been doing their job.
My "radical" ideas of God were in my mind 50 years ago. If not in my nighttime thinking while camped under the stars, then in my experience. For instance, at age 12, after praying for a bicycle for 5 years, I gave up praying and got a paper route and bought one. I had been a good boy, and all of that, still God didn't do what they say God did. The God thing didn't work.
In reading a book called "Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity," I was reminded of Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick preached through the mid-50's and was a popular exponent of modern biblical understanding. His congregations were packed. I looked up his autobiography to remind myself of his thinking. Back in the 1920's he was opening up the questions about biblical scholarship no other preachers tackled. He was basing his preaching on scholarship widely taught in the seminaries in the late 1800's! His book, "The Modern Use of the Bible," was based on that scholarship. I'm afraid that old book would still be surprising to this generation.
What depresses is the thought that so few clergy deal with the Bible in such a forthright way as did Fosdick. The Fundamentalists have not only stolen Jesus, but they have stolen the courage of clergy to deal openly with questions of faith. I recommend the reading of Fosdick's autobiography, "For the Living of These Days" for inspiration. My experience is the same as Fosdick's, that people are hungry for the very scholarship that clergy fear to offer.
"But you take away our hope," says one reader. I hadn't thought of hope as mine to take or give. Hope is one of the "is" things of life. What some people see as "hope," is really "wishing." Carl Sagan's last book "The Demon-Haunted World" has some good sense. For instance:
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is, than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." (p. 12)He also says:
"At the heart of some pseudoscience (and some religion also, New Age and Old) is the idea that wishing makes it so." (p. 14)As the century moves toward its close we are almost overwhelmed with a deluge of wishful spirituality, ungrounded in either religious tradition or reality. The U.S. (the "Christian" nation) is zanier than any other. More of us believe in aliens, UFO's, ghosts, angels, fortune tellers, faith healing, astrology, magnets, demons, spiritualism, etc., than any others in the world.
Faithful hope for me means keeping faith with the best thinking we have. It means having faith in our God-given brains to work on the questions in our lives. Faithful hope means accepting the ambiguity of life in which many answers have not yet appeared. Faithful hope means living without grasping at passing fancies that claim to provide hope when all they provide is illusion.