Hope Rejects the Majority Opinion

Hope is built upon the promises of God. Many of these promises are future oriented. Most of them feel like a contradiction. God says you are forgiven, you feel unforgivable. God declares you righteous, all you see is unrighteousness. God guarantees heaven, hell’s possibility shakes you. The unseen nature of hope creates tension with what we see (Rom 8:24-25).

Paul captures this dynamic when he refers to “hope against hope” (Rom 4:18). God promised Abraham a child, a hopeless proposal by all human standards. He and Sarah were well beyond the years of child-bearing. The promise was innate contradiction, on purpose. Abraham hoped in God’s ability against the empty hope of what he could see.

He rejected the majority opinion, he even dismissed his own conclusions on the impossibility of the promise. Hope does that, it rebels against the seen and grasps onto the promise of what cannot be seen. Walter Brueggemann in his book Prophetic Imagination captures this dynamic.

“Hope, on one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.”