Hope, I think, is one of the most broadly misunderstood concepts in contemporary Western discourse. Hope, we’re trained to understand, is nice, but it’s ultimately hazardous, deceptive, blinding; it should only be trusted insofar as it can be balanced against “pessimism,” or, even more insidiously, “realism.” Hope, in other words, is dead faith. Or so we’re told.¹ 

Now, what does this mean for us, as Christians—specifically, Christians oriented toward radical social justice? After all, hope is the centerpiece of Christianity; Jesus is the very embodiment of hope, the sacrament of God’s love that proves that despair will never have the last word—quite a far cry from the dead concept of hope that lingers in the secular consciousness. How should we understand hope, given both its prominence in the faith and the suspicion held against it in secular society?

The answer, I think, might lie with two luminous thinkers of the twentieth century: Ignacio Ellacuría SJ, and Ernst Bloch. Through these two, we might be able to find a clear and more articulate truth about the hope that permeates Christianity—and, in doing so, we may come to more clearly understand how hope may allow us to constitute God’s presence and carry out God’s will.

Bloch, for his part, was not a theologian per se; he was a revolutionary utopian thinker of the twentieth century who worked within the framework of Marxism, while notably attempting to reject the trend toward “Vulgar” Marxism—the belief that the things of the world are determined solely and fully by economic circumstances, and that all products of a capitalist system are ultimately antithetical to liberation. Bloch, for his part, worked to highlight the “utopian function” of elements in society, highlighting the way in which art, literature, and all things contain an ideological surplus that may direct us to a more utopian vision of the world. Hope, in this way, was of central importance to Bloch; after all, if one were to reject all things produced through capitalism, one’s life would be rather hopeless, left only to despair among all the monuments to injustice. Instead, he argued, we might understand the latent potential of utopia through the concept of the prophet—one who denounces and announces, calling attention to a present imperfection and, through it, sketching the boundaries of a more perfect world. Thus, Bloch directs us to understand that we must conceive all things in the world as artifacts of a future utopia, items that speak to the latent utopian potential in the world which may, despite their unjust circumstances of production, direct us to both “an inner horizon which stretches vertically so to speak in self darkness…and an outer horizon of large breadth in the light of the world. Both horizons are filled with the same utopia” (Bloch 155). Indeed, he says, this paradigm is so profound that it also enfolds complaints, protestations, and remarks of criticism: “each and every criticism of imperfection, incompleteness, intolerance, and impatience already without a doubt presupposes the conception of, and longing for, a possible perfection” (Bloch 16). Through these criticisms, we make utopia in some fashion present among us, beginning to sketch out a sort of final justice, a terminal perfection for human society to reach—all called into being through hope.

So, there we have it. Hope is the tool through which utopia is made real, not the dead fixture that obscures our reality. But what does this mean for us as Christians?

The answer may lie in the theology of Ignacio Ellacuría. As one of the most famous liberation theologians in the Latin American tradition—who was born this month in 1930 and who was murdered by a U.S.-backed paramilitary group in El Salvador in 1989—Ellacuría makes one of the most cogent arguments for the integration of capitalist critique with the Roman Catholic tradition. In particular, Ellacuría (a Jesuit who was influenced by Saint Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises) advocated for an understanding of God’s liberative role in all of time, God’s power to make Godself present in the history of liberation. God’s transcendence, he says, is “something that transcends in and not as something that transcends away from; as something that physically impels to more but not by taking out of; something that pushes forward, but at the same time retains” (Ellacuría 142). Seen this way, God’s transcendence does not discard the material world nor force it to wallow in a state of misery; rather, God’s ability to be “freely present” (Ellacuría 142) is the very force that offers the chance to push humankind forward to greater liberation, greater justice, greater life, and to fulfill the Godly potential within them.

This conception of transcendence opens up an opportunity for us to understand hope through Ellacuría’s framework. Hope, we must understand, does not simply consist of waiting until Jesus descends from the heavens, flames licking off his body and lightning crackling across the sky as he strikes down capitalism. Hope means that we recognize God’s transcendent presence among us, hear God’s call to use our own divinely infused grace to bring the Kingdom of Heaven among us. To do anything else is to fold before the idols that permeate the world: idols of money, productivity, success, greed, selfishness, security, intolerance, and limited thinking. To worship God, the true God, the God of Life, we must use our hope to attune ourselves to the Godliness that permeates ourselves.

Placing Ellacuría and Bloch into conversation, then, we may gain a fuller understanding of the real, political importance of our hope: it is that which enables us to be both prophets of God’s kingdom and sacraments of God’s love. Through hope we may, like Bloch’s utopian prophet, denounce the idolatry of death and injustice that infest the world, and in so doing, direct ourselves to the real utopian latency and potentiality within ourselves. And, to draw from Ellacuría’s project, we may affirm the grace of this latent potential, the utopian Godliness infused into all of us—and, in so doing, we may recognize our role in vitalizing this hope by engaging in direct action against unjust and sinful structures of power. Thus, in working towards justice and mercy, we make God really present within and amongst this world and ourselves. We become, ourselves, sacraments of God’s incandescent presence, mercy, and justice. We become living incarnations of the Kingdom of Heaven—not only consecrated but also consecrating—that, through concrete action, make God’s life-giving reign more present throughout the world.

To return back to my original question, this is not the passive hope conceived by secular society, nor is it an optional kind of hope, where we may or may not turn it into action. This hope is one that necessarily involves both recognition and activity, in what Ellacuría’s Ignatian spirituality might call contemplation-in-action. To engage in Christian social justice, to become sacraments of God’s justice and mercy, we must fundamentally reconfigure the concept of hope itself. We must not accede to the paradigm that dismisses hope as bromidic and blinding, but must understand that hope is God’s call to action, the catalyst of the ongoing revelation of God in the world.

Attribution: Larrambla [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

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