Hope Pt. 1, The Thing With Feathers / Miroslav Volf

Show Notes

• “Perhaps, we just need to say it. This is not exactly a hopeful time”
• “But hope is for the no exit scenario. Hope is for the life teetering on the edge”
• Fear is more characteristic of our time than hope is
• Optimism in the late 60s gave way to increasing pessimism in 21st century 
• Theologies of hopelessness are on the rise 
• How Covid has shaped our fear 
• Even before the pandemic, we feared more than we hoped 
• Dystopian movies and literature: we fear the loss of our culture 
• “Fear and hope seem like exclusive experiences, and that’s not entirely wrong, but it isn’t right either”
• Seneca writes: “Cease to hope and you will cease to fear…. Each alike belongs to a mind that is in suspense, a mind that is fretted by looking forward to the future”
• To give up on hope is to give up on any form of meaningful life 
• How our humanity is tied to our hope 
• “In fearing, we are still hoping”
• “The challenge is not to retain hope, but to conquer fear. Not all fear, but the kind of fear that paralyses us”
• How do we distinguish between hope and mere expectation? 
• “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stops at all/ And sweetest in the Gale is heard/ And soar must be the storm/ That could abash the little bird/ That kept so many warm/ I've heard it in the chillest land/ And on the strangest sea/ And yet never an extremity,/ It asked a crumb of me” – Emily Dickenson
• “In hope, a future good, which isn't yet, somehow already is”
• Luther – "just as love transforms the lover into the beloved, so hope changes the one who hopes into what is hoped for."
• The present is pregnant with the future
• But hope does not come from what is happening in the present, it is something entirely new
• Hope lives apart from reason
• Hope and God belong together 
• “The God who creates out of nothing, the God who makes the dead alive, that God justifies hope that is otherwise unreasonable”