Hope for the Other
Friedrich
Nietzsche attacked Christianity for a number of faults. One of them, he thought, was the Christian
doctrine of resurrection and a blessed afterlife. On Nietzsche’s account, hope for immortality
is pernicious, in that it encourages a person to be satisfied with a miserable
life now because of the consolation to come.
You don’t
have to be virulently anti-Christian to be suspicious of hope. A contemporary Christian writer, Timothy
Jackson (Love Disconsoled), wants to
expunge hope from the list of Christian virtues. The center of Christianity, Jackson says, is
the ethic of agape love. Genuine acts of
love are undermined by self-regard, which expects some reward for good deeds. True agape love must be totally centered on
one’s neighbor, willing and acting toward the neighbor’s good without
consideration of one’s own good. Hope
brings in consolation, Jackson says, and true agape must be “dis-consoled.”
There is
just enough right in what Jackson says to make it initially plausible. Love really is the most important of the
virtues, the heart of Christian ethics.
We are commanded by Jesus to love as God loves (Matthew 5:48). Though we can’t actually do that (certainly
not by an act of will), but we live as disciples with perfect love as our
goal. Many theologians have argued that God’s
love—agape love—is “disinterested,” in the sense that it seeks the good of the
beloved without regard for the good of the self. A classical theologian like Thomas Aquinas
would say that God is eternally blessed, complete and entire. Since God is completely happy, God does not
need anything and he is not made happier by human worship or obedience. God commands our worship because he loves
us. We move closer to our best selves
when we obey God.
Someone
might object that Jackson’s view contradicts scripture. The New Testament repeatedly praises hope as
a proper virtue for Christians. This
objection is completely accurate, but Jackson would not be persuaded by
it. If hope detracts from love, he would
say, we must shed hope in favor of love.
Jackson is picking out what he thinks is the crucial part of New
Testament teaching and trying to be faithful to that. In practice, many preachers do this by
returning over and over to those biblical texts which seem to them to express
the more important truths. As a
theologian, Jackson is simply more open about it.
Nevertheless,
Jackson is wrong. It is simply not true
that hope is always self-regarding.
David Elliot, in Hope and
Christian Ethics, points to a common scene: a graveside gathering of family
whose loved one has been buried.
According to Love Disconsoled,
the Christian minister might praise the dead person as a faithful disciple of
Jesus and perhaps urge the family to emulate him or her. But the minister should not talk of eternal
life. “Love’s priority implies the moral
irrelevance of an afterlife,” says Jackson.
How is it
an act of love to disconsole those who are grieving?
Jackson, or
someone speaking on his behalf, might say that we hope for an afterlife for our
friends and loved ones because we want to see them again. That is, we sneak in self-consolation by
introducing hope for resurrection. But
is that true? Do I hope that Karen (my
wife who died in 2016) will be raised to eternal life so that I can enjoy her
company? Not really. What I hope is that Karen will experience
perfect happiness, what Thomas Aquinas called beatitudo, the beatific vision.
She has moved out of my life (except in memory) and into the life of
God. I would not hope for her to have
something less. If in heaven there is a
solidarity and fellowship of saints (so that we see each other again), well and
good. But my hope for Karen is that she
experience the highest good, which is God.
Hope is not
opposed to love, because we hope for others as much as ourselves.
There is
another point to be made about resurrection hope. The New Testament clearly teaches that we
hope for eternal life. Aquinas said our
goal was friendship with God. Perhaps we
need to live forever because our real hope is to know the infinite God. It will take eternity to truly know him.
