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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
We say amisse,
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
George Herbert, “The Flower”What does it mean to live in hope? And what are the theological preconditions and implications of a life so lived? In hope, we see the world as revelatory of more than its immediate, and superficial, self-presentation. In hope we affirm our confidence in God's sovereignty, and our conviction that God will be all in all. In hope, we see the world as intelligible only as God's story – not properly a “world,” with the spurious posture of autonomy that that word conveys, but rather as Creation, an event, irrepressibly expressing a self-transcending reference, the act of a loving Creator. We see the world as significant, the “semiosis” of God, and we live in the world, during the world, in hope, by participating in that semiosis – by treating the world as not exhaustively immanently and immediately significant, but as crucially transcendentally and eschatologically significant.
But today, during the world, it is not obvious that the world “means” more than itself, that it has a significance, and signification, beyond the literal. Augustine recognized this difficulty: “The existence of the world is a matter of observation, the existence of God a matter of belief ” (DCD 11.4). So hope must find a way to bring to expression this currently obscure but theologically foundational fact.
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