Okay, there have been two reasons why I've delayed this post. One, sheer busy-ness. the offlien world and its silly demands. Tsk-tsk. Secondly, and perhaps more truly (I could have found the time were it not for this) the ongoing discussion with dante in hope 2 needed to be played out a little more, and still does. Nonetheless, here's the next installment.
The Utility of Hope
Okay, I believe this is a tricky element in speaking about hope (or her sisters faith and love) because of the capacity for self-manipulation. If we build a case for why hope is useful, we may be tempted to claim it even if we don't find it to be true. We may say that hope does good things for us (even if it's delusional) and be led to make ourselves hope as a trick of the mind, a way of sedating ourselves so that we may carry on with life. And isn't it just this sedating effect of religion that the world critiques and laughs at? It may indeed be stronger stuff than opium for the masses. This critique can not be answered, but only heard, and met by testimony, the witness of truthful hope.
All this notwithstanding, there is a place where hope does in fact have utility. It is useful in that it motivates action and sustains patience. Hope, (the reconition of wrong and the belief in possibility), gives action direction. It reacts against what it recognizes as wrong and and in the direction of what changes it believes to be possible. It perserves, knowing that while not all depends on my efforts, the tasks to which I set myself can matter, can hold significance. So hope provides a framework for praxis, for the practice of important things. It is a guiding and sustaining framework.
The total loss of hope (in either component, recognition or possibility) destroys this framework, breaks the posssibility for praxis. The structure for our action is leveled when we totally lose sight of either possibility or of the wrong. Is it possible that action at any level reveals the presence of some inherent hope in that direction? (If so then hope may be found in some surprising places!) Hope built awry or seen unclearly may provide faulty framworks that go off in unuseful directions or are unable to sustain weighty living, so there must be constant effort in pursuing clarity and truthfulness in hope. Faithfulness of praxis means allowing our structure of hope to be challenged and critiqued. It must be an open structure, with the possibility of being torn down and built anew.
So hope then has utility as a structure for action, guiding and sustaining it. But we lose one or both of the elements of hope, than our action may become distorted. can I propose the following scenaio of reality? Can it be that our churches have become separated from their true hope by allowing their recognition of wrong in the world to be distorted? In other words, our churches have lost touch with the things that are really wrong with the world, and this has led us to pursue the wrong courses of action. Meanwhile, some in the church who see correctly this wrong have lost touch with the possibility that it can be otherwise, and have thus been robbed of their own courses of action. and so we end up with a distorted church. this is my perception, my recognition. It may need to be clarified, torn down, rebuilt, or redecorated. but is coupled with the beilief that this status is not the final word! This may be what the church is, but it is not all she can be, not all she will be. This is my belief in possibility.
Next: Hope 4 - Identity.
Posts
3 comments:
Dante, Steven@pvcc.org is my address, and I'd love to read the paper.
I absolutley agree that we learn something about our hope from the world, whether Marx's version of it or oterwise. that critique is very important, and openness to it is a check to our own self-driven understandings.
stevepvc,
Just wanted to say that I do have some comments in response here but I'm too tired to do it now. I'll put them up asap, hopefully during the Friday afternoon b-ball games. Later.
I had a few thoughts concerning your post.
First of all, I’m wondering what you mean by “truthful hope.” Could you elaborate more on this?
I think you’re right in saying that hope provides a framework for praxis. But the process of how this works is specific to each individual. I don’t necessarily think that it always, as you say, “reacts against what it recognizes as wrong and and in the direction of what changes it believes to be possible.” Sometimes hope itself just provides contextual meaning to whatever a particular person is experiencing. It’s not necessarily always moving. I’m also curious as to why you use the pronoun “it” here as opposed to the pronoun “they,” the person choosing such hope.
I also think we have a language problem here. Take, for example, your typical bourgeois congregation. What does hope mean to them? They’ll give it a thorough theological backing but in essence hope is completely superfluous to their life. They are essentially self-sufficient. For them, other things have taken the place of the function of hope that you speak of. So at that point it becomes a language problem b/c the mere discussion of hope really has no meaning for them. It's a foreign word. They don’t need it as a framework for the practice of important things. They get along just as well without it. Some of Bonhoeffer's reflections in LPP come to mind here. I have more to speak to this but not enough time to do it now.
Concerning your last paragraph. I’m pretty confident your category of “some in the church who see correctly this wrong have lost touch with the possibility that it can be otherwise, and have thus been robbed of their own courses of action” is directly or indirectly tied to me. The question that’s missing to your description though is “why?” Why do they lose touch with that possibility? In other words, what happens when that person (including me), having seen correctly such wrong, is rendered incapable of seeing new possibilities precisely b/c of the nature of how the “wrong” came to be. The only thing that has “robbed” those courses of action is the very recognition that you speak of. But a lot of this depends on what you mean by courses of action as well. For me, those courses of action at this point are multifaceted, most of which would not be recognized as courses of action at all. I do think you are correct in saying that the church has lost touch with the things that are really wrong with the world. It’s a problem more fundamental than what most think, in my opinion.
Well, just some initial thoughts. I hope this is coherent b/c I just got off working a double and I’m relatively scatterbrained but I wanted to post a comment before Monday. Let me know if I need to explain something.
Post a Comment