The Gospel of Hope

“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.”—Romans XV. 4.

The passage: Whatever was written before was written for our instruction, so that through patience and the encouragement the Scriptures give we might have hope.

Many people ask how we can recommend the Bible to Hindoos and Mussulmans—what authority it has that the Vedas or the Koran, said to be dictated directly to the Prophet, lack; what apologies will convince the learned; how the ignorant can be brought to feel that so strange a book deserves their attention.

Various plausible answers have been and will be given. But I think St. Paul can give us more light than any modern doctor, however familiar with our age. He was forced to face this very question, being Apostle to the Gentiles. The Scriptures he knew from childhood belonged to the Jews—a history of one separated people, whose songs and maxims asserted their own distinction, celebrated their triumphs, and seemed to doom other races to overthrow. What was he to do with these Scriptures among the very heathen whom the highest authorities believed shut out from God’s favor?

This doubt was tangled further by the opinions of converts. Some Jewish converts held that Gentiles must be circumcised before the Scriptures’ promises applied to them at all. Some Gentile converts, calling St. Paul their spiritual father, thought the Law flatly contradicted the Gospel, valuable only to show how far they had surpassed those still bound to it. Some Alexandrian converts dismissed the letter of the Old Scriptures as nearly worthless but treasured a hidden philosophy within it, reserved for the initiated.

Which view did St. Paul take? The Epistle appointed for this Sunday, from which my text comes, is the classic passage on the subject. He speaks directly of the Jewish Scriptures’ use for Gentiles, quoting Old Testament passages that apply to them. He calls Christ a “Minister of the Circumcision to confirm the promises made to the Fathers, that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy.” He takes up a phrase his Jewish opponents likely used often—a Root of Jesse who should reign over the Gentiles and in whom they should trust—and turns it to his own purpose. And he begins and ends by treating Hope, kindled through the Scriptures, as their great blessing, praying that the God of Hope fill them with joy and peace in believing, so they abound in hope through the Holy Ghost.

This differs from any of the views mentioned above. At first it seems to answer none of them directly. Strict Jews, exclusive Gentiles, and philosophical Alexandrians alike might object: hope is only one of several emotions Scripture stirs—so is fear—so how does fixing on hope explain the Scriptures’ fitness for Jew or Gentile, for one age or another? The objection sounds reasonable. Let’s test it.

I. Suppose St. Paul addressing those who thought the Old Scriptures spoke only to the Jew. Their grounds were plain: the whole record concerned a covenant with one family, the fencing off of that family, its lapses through contact with surrounding nations, the punishments that followed, the blessings for faithfulness, the curse for idolatry. It was not just particular texts but the whole shape of the record that seemed to support this reading.

“Granted,” says the Apostle. “I feel the force of this more than any of you. But since I’ve discovered these Scriptures to be books of hope, I feel the worth of that separation, that discipline, those protests against idolatry, that accumulating sentence against idolatrous practice, more than ever before. For that separation must have had a purpose beyond itself: some manifestation of God, some dominion of God over men, some final rooting out of idolatry never yet seen in the world. Nothing less can satisfy Scripture’s own words, the promises holy men lived and died by, the longings that were the most real, not the most illusory, part of their lives. So the Prophets’ words about the Gentiles are not stray exceptions—they reveal where their highest and soberest thoughts were tending all along, how far God’s thoughts exceeded their own, and how hope itself is only possible because we are made in the image of the God of Hope.”

This, I think, is also St. Paul’s answer to the idea that Scripture balances hope against fear. Scripture teaches two kinds of fear. One is fear of the evil that follows distrust in God—treating Him as enemy rather than deliverer, doubting His presence or provision. Scripture holds up examples of these consequences as warnings, and in doing so gives unbounded encouragement to trust and hope in God as the one who inspires and fulfills hope. The other kind is the fear of the Lord Himself, the righteous God—a fear the worshippers of visible gods could never feel, since such gods could be mocked or scolded even by those who feared them, as old Greek comedy and modern Italian peasants’ talk to their idols both show. Awe belongs only to what we know is holy and real, made by no one but our maker. The Psalmists and Prophets feared the God who delivered them from bondage, who was faithful and forgiving: “There is forgiveness with Thee, therefore shalt Thou be feared.” Their countrymen who lost faith in such a God, believing instead in one unforgiving, were cowards, not fearers of God—they feared where no fear was. The godly feared God because their hope was in Him; take away that hope, and their fear would vanish too.

II. Then there were those who boasted of the Gospel and the New Covenant of their baptism, and so spoke scornfully of the Law and Old Covenant. St. Paul could understand this too, since his own language about the Law’s weakness and the Gospel’s strength seemed to justify it. Could he now retract his own words, find some fine distinction that saved the old books without admitting he’d overstated Gentile privileges? He used no evasion, needed no such distinction. The one principle that Scripture was Scripture of Hope let him show the Gentiles they would lose enormously by renouncing the Jewish books, by cutting their Church off from the Church of the Fathers. Everything about the stability of their faith turned on whether they saw it as having dropped suddenly from heaven under Augustus, or as the unfolding of truth that had existed from the beginning, revealed by One whose goings forth were from everlasting. Receiving the Jewish Scriptures as testimony to God’s long preparation of the world gave them a sense of the permanence of God’s counsels and of God Himself. Rejecting them, dating their Church only from Christ’s Advent or Pentecost, would leave them with no sense of progressive revelation, no light growing brighter toward the perfect day—only the notion that God’s principles had changed, that the God of the old world had been conquered by the God of the new.

What would this do to their view of their own Gentile ancestors? Would they rise as the Jews fell? No—there would be no witness that the Light had been guiding them through their dark pilgrimage, no sign that the righteous God, though they mistook Him for idols, had been watching and preparing them for something better. Without the Jewish Scriptures testifying to a God of righteousness who cared for all nations, each nation’s history would look like nothing but a chain of delusions, and every noble deed or thought of the old heathen world would be traced to some evil source.

What would rejecting the Old Scriptures do to the future? The very distinction between Law and Gospel that justified the rejection would collapse. The New Testament Church would invent its own Law and set it above, or confuse it with, the Gospel entrusted to it. Having discarded the Old Scripture’s testimony against idolatry as no longer relevant, it would build a new and worse idolatry—harder to root out because dressed in the titles of the New Dispensation. The world would become not a world of hope but of dark dread, looking not to a God of Hope but to one waiting to cast his creatures into despair.

III. St. Paul could understand just as easily those who sought a mystical meaning beneath Scripture’s letter. He himself had said, “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” No one had suffered more from letter-bound Rabbinical commentators, and no one knew them better. But the spirit he found beneath the letter was the spirit of the Son of Man, speaking through every word of the Book to men’s hearts and consciences. He would not let phrases or maxims replace the living voice of the living Teacher, or block the connection between Him and His disciples. He never sought obscure or hidden meanings—the most human meaning, the one reaching most directly into the ordinary mind, was for him the clearest sign of divine origin. The forms of utterance varied because the hearers varied, but in every case the Divine Mind sought not to hide itself in veils but to strip away the veils that keep men from understanding. The parable was the simplest way of teaching those slow to hear; the moment their ears opened, Christ spoke plainly of the mysteries of the Kingdom and of the Father.

How different this was from those who thought common people capable only of coarse counterfeits of truth, willing even to feed them falsehoods to sharpen the contrast with the wise! The difference arose because the Apostle saw the Scriptures as written for men’s learning, so that through patience and comfort they might have hope; because he saw the whole education of man by his Maker as an education of hope, every hill surmounted opening a wider view, every road leading somewhere; because he believed the knowledge of God, which is eternal life, was meant not for sages alone but for men, in His Son; because he looked forward to obstacles being removed one by one until the earth was filled with the glory of the Lord, and all flesh saw it together.

IV. I said St. Paul can help us with pressing difficulties that modern teachers cannot. Perhaps I should say instead that he shows us what kind of help we need and where to seek it. Someone who feels keenly the gap between St. Paul’s mind and ours has observed that no age has had less living hope than this one. The two facts explain each other: our difference from St. Paul is explained if the spirit of hope that filled his heart has left us. If that is true—and each of our consciences can testify how much ground there is for it—then the apostolic language has become a foreign tongue to nineteenth-century Christians. As long as that gulf remains, no learned criticism, no loud reverence for Scripture’s divine authority, will bridge it. We may know more of the text, more of the customs it describes, than our fathers did; we may print fifty thousand copies for their one; we may be far more jealous of doubts about its authenticity—and yet the Book may teach us less, be less dear to us, simply because it once found in our fathers something of hope to receive it and turn its letters into life, and that hope has dried up in us, leaving the letter a mere letter, or a killing one. Wherever this is not so—wherever, on sick-beds or in lonely hovels, with few outward aids, the Book has interpreted itself and become a Word of Life—it is because the Spirit of Hope has come there and found in its words the nourishment such souls crave.

V. Are all our advantages over our fathers—historical experience, rigorous criticism, the discoveries of travelers, philologers, and students of nature—wasted for lack of this one gift? May we not say instead that God is teaching us, at this very time, how needful and precious these gifts are, and how ready He is to give the one we think withheld? A world of old faiths and traditions, of books and peoples either governed by them or on the verge of losing them, lies open before you, placed under you. You have conquered it, and are reconquering it, chiefly not by arms but by moral energy, endurance, hope. You know that conquest is only the beginning—civilizing it must rest on quite different foundations. You want to know how to recommend your sacred books to a people with so many of their own, how to show that yours carry an authority theirs lack. I answer, in the words of the Apostle to the Gentiles: proclaim your book to be a book of Hope. Show that you believe it fills you with hope for yourselves and for mankind. Then the difference between it and other Shasters, whatever antiquity they claim, will be plain as noonday—not a dry distinction proved by minute comparison or special pleading, but something that will show itself to the conscience of men before God. They will feel it is a book of hope because it kindles hope in them, delivering them from a gloom nothing else has lifted.

I need not prove that the fullest possible knowledge of what these peoples have thought and said will be of immense value to those preaching this Gospel of Hope to circumstances utterly unlike those in which Scripture was written—nor that such knowledge serves best when used to illustrate rather than confute, to bring out the whole truth that exposes and destroys false notions, rather than merely attacking them. Nor need I show that simple men with only a little of this knowledge, but strong sympathy, the gift of recognizing a brother under any disguise, and the glow of living hope, may do great things—provided they know, as such men will, what they cannot do and must leave to others differently trained and armed.

But I must speak of something on which everything else depends: whether we can acquire the very quality we seem most to lack, though it has been remarkably awakened by suffering and necessity—shall I say despair?—in our Indian soldiers, and in civilians turned soldiers when no others were to be had.

I have partly shown how this blessing may reach us. We too may gain it through despair—by finding we have no fountain of hope in ourselves, that what we thought inexhaustible has nearly run dry. So we may learn, as our fathers never did, the force of that strange phrase—the God of Hope. Which of us would have dared use it, had St. Paul not sanctioned it? Which of us would not have found it clashing with some theory of Divine Omniscience or Omnipotence? It is indeed incompatible with all such theories and grand abstract titles by which we fence in the Divine Nature and then congratulate ourselves on the vastness of our own conceptions. But how welcome such a name sounds to the actual fighter whose theories have failed, whose abstractions have vanished at the touch of real suffering, but who needs a living God—incomprehensible, yet able to comprehend and sustain all His creatures! What joy to hear of a God who hopes with us and for us, of whom the highest thing in man is the reflection! What comfort to know a fountain of Hope in Him at which our own springs may be renewed! What meaning it gives to our saddest experiences, to learn we could not know His fullness until we had learned our own emptiness!

And—most cheering of all—these discoveries are not for ourselves alone, but to make us better teachers of the world. “How,” the missionary asks, before knowing his field, “am I to convince heathen people the Bible is the Word of God?” Facing them, another question presses harder: the Word of what God? Am I to let this worshipper of Siva think the Destroyer sent this book to declare his will? Am I gathering evidence for divine origin only to have it credited to that? What can he do but turn from doubt to prayer: “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose perfect Image He is, whose will He came to do—save me from blaspheming Your name, from turning the pure witness of You into a witness for Your enemy.” And might not the answer come straight from Scripture’s own words, unglossed: The God of Hope—it is of Him I must testify, to Him I must ascribe these Scriptures. Doing so, how the people in them breathe again! How certain I become that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God not of the dead but of the living, each handing the torch to the next, the light growing brighter until He who holds the seven stars comes forth Himself! And His coming is to beget men to a new and living hope through the resurrection, to make that hope effectual for all mankind, to promise a final Advent when the Preserver and Deliverer is declared Lord of all, to the Father’s glory. Here is a continuous book because it is a book of Hope—one that can cheer those who, amid all confusion, have kept alive the dream of a God made incarnate to deliver, the dream of voluntary sacrifice, the dream of a glorious Avatar. The Book can set these dreams in order, show their substance, strip away what has corrupted them, by naming their source and their fulfillment.

One might expect readier access to Muslim minds, since they honor the same holy men, do not deny Jesus was sent by God, and are familiar with the idea of a sacred book given by God. Facts do not bear this out. Those with so many apparent points of contact with the Gospel present a harder, more impenetrable front than followers of any other faith. Nor is the opposition weakened as the old energies that once made Islam a terror to nations have weakened—the inertia of resistance is now mightier than the old vital force ever was. It should be so: the fatalist’s despair should resist a message of hope even more directly than perverted hope does. And it is a solemn warning to Christendom that Scripture’s names and maxims, once reduced to mere names, dead letters, or fictitious legend, do worse than fail—they darken and stifle conscience, blocking the living God’s voice. The Muslim theory of their book’s dictation, wherever it holds sway, makes understanding our book impossible. A book that assumes man made in God’s likeness, because the Man is His perfect likeness; that affirms God’s Spirit dwells with men’s spirits to raise and quicken them; that treats the words of God not as purest when unconnected to human struggle and hope but as proven sacred by their power to awaken human hope and energy—such a book must baffle a people who see an unbridged chasm between God and man, and so end up worshipping the letters they suppose came from God, instead of God Himself.

But though this is not the door through which our Scriptures’ hope can reach the Muslim, there must be some door. No people need hope more, none are so driven to dreams of the past—even to hopes of recovering an empire if they cannot recover a faith—to escape the burden of the present. They once hoped to make the world one great Empire of God purged of idolatry; they still look for a final Advent of judgment. Let us show we share both hopes. Let us tell them that what armed force could not accomplish—putting down everything that exalts itself against the invisible God, in heathendom or Christendom—we look to see accomplished by the proclamation that the Kingdoms of the Earth are the Kingdoms of our God and His Christ. Let us show that we leave outward crimes to outward force, but for society’s true renewal we hope in Him who came in great humility to reclaim for His Father all the power the heathen gods had usurped, who made the enemies of men His own enemies, and who will come in glorious judgment to satisfy fully the hope of all who have hoped in Him, for themselves and for all mankind.