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Certain hope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

A. Phillips Griffiths
A. Phillips Griffiths
Affiliation:
University of Warwick, England
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Extract

In his recent article1 Stewart Sutherland rightly and trenchantly criticizes some accounts of hope which ignore, or radically misrepresent, how it is conceived in religious contexts. The most surprising, to me, is Chesterton's, that hope is ‘the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate’. Surprising, not so much for its content as for its source. However, this particular example could be of one who would risk giving scandal for the sake of wit; what he could have had in mind is that ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us’ (Rom. viii. 18; cf. John xvi. 33: ‘… you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer.’). Sutherland also makes clear the unhelpfulness (in this context, not the one they had in mind) of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ analysts' account of the concept; not least because it is given without reference to the religious concept, and often is irrelevant to the notion of hope ‘in its proper conceptual surroundings’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1990 , pp. 453 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 ‘Hope’, in The Philosophy in Christianity, ed. Vesey, pp. 193–206, Cambridge University Press, 1990Google Scholar.

2 Ibid. pp. 194, 198ff.

3 See Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘On Transubstantiation’, in Ethics, Religion and Politics, Blackwell: Oxford 1981Google Scholar.

4 Cowper's The Castaway is a haunting expression of the absence of assurance, but also of what may have been a manic-depressive condition. Without wishing to make any cheap gibe about Calvinism as itself depressive-manic, I would say that it seems dangerous to anyone inclined to that condition.

5 cf. Bunyan, ‘the Lord did … lead me into the mystery of union with the Son of God … for if he and I were one, then his righteousness was mine, his merits mine.’ (Grace Abounding).

6 (i.e. the reassuring doctrine of indefectability or perseverance.) Calvin, Institutes, Book III, passim.

7 Calvin, op. cit. II, 7, 16.

8 See Galatians, iii. 24–5.

9 Calvin, op. cit. II, 6 and 7.