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Spring 2024 · Vol. 53 No. 1 · pp. 24–38 

Extravagant Hope, Urgent Patience: The Uncontrollability of Renewal

Paul Doerksen

It’s true that we are living in anxious times, but that anxiety, whatever its intensity, does not have the first or last word for Christians. That is, anxiety is neither originary nor conclusive, thanks be to God. Rather than focus on anxiety, I want to consider a narrative that leads with Christian hope as primary, as a defining reality from within which we can, without denying the reality of anxiety, nonetheless not be defined or defeated by that anxiety. In that spirit, I want to focus on Christian hope, but not in splendid isolation—hope is often connected with other virtues in the Scriptures, perhaps most notably grouped with faith and love as the so-called theological virtues. But here I will explore another connection, that of hope’s link to patience, wherein our extravagant Christian hope makes possible the practice of urgent patience. 1

Our task is to move towards and purposefully to inhabit the Kingdom which is the in-breaking gift of the patient God.

 I. EXTRAVAGANT CHRISTIAN HOPE

In Shawshank Redemption, a movie based on a Stephen King novella, hope plays a significant role, albeit a double-edged one. Long-term inmate Red {25} warns newly incarcerated and innocent inmate Andy Dufresne against hope: “Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.” Andy Dufresne survives jail and builds a future thanks to hope, and no small measure of ingenuity. Red resists for a long time, but eventually dares, hesitantly and insecurely, to give in to hope and following a dream. The movie ends with Red’s voiceover: I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope. 2

The designation of hope as a danger on the one hand, and as some kind of basis of redemption on the other shows that “hope’ ” is a “plastic” word, one that is malleable, serving to describe anything from the banal assertions of vague optimism to deep trust in the person and work of God, and many things in-between. For example, we use the word like this: “I hope to get a 20 percent raise this year”; we also use the word, quite differently now, when we refer to God as “the God of Hope” (Rom. 15:13); we speak of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). Frankly, the term seems especially vulnerable deployment in platitudes. I’m reminded of a scene in Breaking Bad in which the protagonist, Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher turned kingpin of a massive drug empire, goes to the hospital to receive chemotherapy; the chemo ward seeks to be as positive a place as possible, and so, on his way out, he is given a button emblazoned with the words “Hope is the best medicine.” Walter takes it, pretending to be grateful, but casually tosses it in the first garbage can he sees just outside the hospital doors.

“Hope is the best medicine” is just one of many ways that hope is construed, understandings which do not necessarily reflect a Christian view of hope, which is not simply an optimistic view of “creaturely operations,” an exercise of the imagination, 3 or confidence in progress or trust in a self-propelled process through human efforts at self-reformation. 4 Neither is hope some sense that we can simplistically leave everything to God and then all things will be better. 5 And while hope grounded in present-day arrangements is vulnerable to the danger of idolatry, 6 embracing some notion of hope that depends on averting our gaze from current, often devastating reality can hardly qualify as Christian hope in any real sense.

I’m trying to develop a theologically grounded understanding of Christian hope, an understanding that’s hard to fit onto a button, poster, or cool T-shirt. After all, “Christian hopes tend to be quite extravagant. To be saved is to have a radically transfigured self, beyond anything possible for one as a mere finite creature.” 7 Such an understanding depends fundamentally on Scripture. There are far too many mentions of hope to {26} offer any comprehensive analysis of the way the term is used, but I want to mention several passages which connect hope explicitly to God:

Psalm 43 (NRSVUE, passim)

5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help 6 and my God.

Psalm 130

5 I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
6 my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
7 O Israel, hope in the LORD!
For with the LORD there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.

Romans 15

10 “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people”;
11 and again,
“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,
and let all the peoples praise him”;
12 and again Isaiah says,
“The root of Jesse shall come,
the one who rises to rule the Gentiles;
in him the Gentiles shall hope.”
13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Colossians 1

27 To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. 28 It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. 29 For this I toil and struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me.

A. Refusal of Anonymity

Since our understanding and embrace of Christian hope is connected to God, it resists a generic or anonymous version of hope, one that in its attempt to be accessible instead becomes amorphous and tepid in nature, a free-floating abstraction. Thus, our consideration of Christian {27} hope begins with a “refusal of anonymity;” Christian hope is named, we might say. John Webster uses this memorable turn of phrase in his essay titled “God and Conscience.” Here Webster, in setting the stage for investigating the role of conscience in the field of moral theology, insists that discussion of conscience cannot proceed as though it’s a self-generated entity; instead, he spends considerable energy insisting that we begin our talk of conscience with talk of God—this is a refusal of anonymity. So, Webster argues that (a) conscience is created by God; (b) Christology, including the notion of Christ as judge is important; and (c) the wisdom of the Holy Spirit is necessary for an understanding of conscience. It is this recognition of Trinitarian structure which is a refusal of anonymity. 8

In his theological treatment of hope, Webster makes the same methodological move, showing that an understanding of Christian hope begins with the “identity of God as the object and ground of Christian hope, the one by and towards whom all hopeful action is directed. A moral theology of hope, that is, must start from the Christian confession of God.” 9 God brings creation into being, and in the action of creation, goes beyond an act of genesis to an act “which oversees, directs and protects the creation so that it attains that destiny.” 10 In the Son, creation experiences God’s intervention in the world with a view to reconciliation of that world to God. Put another way, Christian hope is possible because of the human life, death, resurrection, and presence of Jesus Christ in our world. Our hope is the kind that passes through defeat and crucifixion to resurrection. 11 As Spirit, God brings to completion the purposeful actions of the Father and the reconciling work of the Son.

. . . God is the ground of hope, for hope trusts that, because the Father’s purpose has been accomplished in the Son and is now at work in the world in the Spirit’s power, then human history is God’s economy. Within that space which the triune God creates, hope is neither a fantasy nor a gesture of defiance, but a fitting, truthful attitude and shape for action. In sum: hope rests upon God’s faithfulness, and God’s faithfulness is triune. 12

B. Hope as Eschatological

Hope that is grounded in the triune God, which refuses anonymity, is also fundamentally grounded in eschatology. In Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep, Tish Harrison Warren declares that “if we have hope at all, it is eschatological—that God will at last make this sad, old world new again.” 13 Put another way, Christian hope is “oriented to the future consummation of all things in the kingdom of {28} Christ.” 14 David Bentley Hart has argued that in the early church, “an eager certainty of the immanence of the full and final revelation of God’s truth in a restored and glorified cosmos—and not dogmatic purity—was the very essence of faithfulness to the Gospel.” 15 This orientation of hope to the future in the absence of current fulfillment nonetheless remains an orientation toward fulfillment of God’s promises. 16 The present danger of such an orientation is the temptation to let the radical difference between now and then foster a kind of hands-off approach to the world in which we find ourselves now, leaving matters up to God in the hope that all will be better someday. But hope is not compensatory in that way; rather, “the future to come is in the most important respects pulled into the present.” 17 The “motor” of the future remains the same as that of the present, namely, life in Christ; the same grace of God at work in the future is thus pulled into the present. Conversely, the power of God which will be fully manifest in the future pulls this age toward the future, which is in God’s hands. 18 Understood this way, hope draws us forward, a concept nicely captured in a short poem by eighteenth-century Mennonite poet Bernardus de Bosch (1708–1786), which reads as follows:

Faith has unfolded God’s Word here
Love built us this abode;
Hope continues to draw us forward
To see the Son on our souls;
Inhabit time carefully
And thus soar to the Ark of Salvation! 19

Thus eschatological reality, while not relieving us of current engagement in the world in which we find ourselves, nonetheless does relieve us of final responsibility. 20 The eschatological orientation of hope includes an emphasis on the promises of God; when hope is connected to God’s promises, we can resist the temptations that come to us in the form of speculative finality; in other words, our self-generated fragmentary anticipations are not given final coherence via eschatological orientation. 21 Rather, that hope is a witness to the promises of God, displayed in the resurrection of Christ and the power of the Spirit. Therefore, “Real hope does not evade the tragic, overlook suffering, or repress injustice by fixating on a future object or time. It faces head-on the world as it is but refuses to be governed by it. To put this another way, hope refuses the tyranny of the present. . . . [F]ollowing the form and pattern of Christ’s resurrection, it confounds current experience in its newness and the ways it utterly transforms existing ways of life.” 22

On a personal note, some years ago our family encountered a long struggle to embrace Christian hope as an ongoing, visceral reality. My {29} brother Levi, of blessed memory, after spending more than three decades with quadriplegia because of a catastrophic accident, was hospitalized for three years, beginning in 2010, much of that time in ICU, before he died at the end of that long ordeal in February 2013. I was assigned to deliver the eulogy at his funeral, where I tried among other things to grapple with the role of Christian hope during those dark days which haunt me still.

From the eulogy delivered at Levi’s funeral:

During Levi’s long hospitalization, the concept of hope often came to the fore. We talked about many things—hope for recovery, for a return to some measure of independence, for a modified 4 x 4 pick-up truck in which to roam around and so on—all of these are understandable and even useful. But I was confronted with this question on an ongoing basis—what happens if these kinds of things are simply not possible, as began to become clear at various times along the way. What exactly is the nature of Christian hope in this particular situation? Wanting to recover and so on of course makes sense and is good—but I’ve come to believe that much of what passes for hope is misguided. That is, if hope is only a sort of wish for things to improve, or if we think hope is based on asking God to do things on our behalf as if he is some sort of magician, then it seems to me that such hope, centered as it is in some notion of physical improvement means that I am not much different than a person who does not hope in Christ at all.

On the other hand, if our hope is too narrowly focused on the state of the soul in some future time, if our only concern is the immaterial dimension of life—then our hope is too narrowly constrained as well. So confronting suffering forced me to face the narrow, shallow, tepid nature of a hope that is either focused only on physical improvement on the one hand or only on the state of the soul on the other. I’ve come to believe that suffering can teach us to abandon illusions or wishes that masquerade as authentic hope. We must abandon the sort of hope that is the mere reflection of our desires; abandon hope that belies our fundamental self-centeredness; abandon hope that relies on human effort and technology; abandon hope of the kind that could exist whether God is real or not. In fact, it is only when we abandon hope that we can be open to receiving it anew, and then as a gift from the hand of God—but now reshaped, reconfigured—and {30} not by the logic of desiring and acquiring, but rather by the logic of cross and resurrection.

This hope in the resurrection is not just the flowering of dormant perennials, not the waking up of the hibernating beast, not the arrival of spring in the cycle of seasons. Christian hope is far more radical than that—it includes, but goes far beyond the desire to see, to walk, to be reunited with someone—rather, Christian hope embraces the hard truth of the gospel—that someday, through the power of God, things will be the way they are supposed to be. There is nothing sentimental about Christian hope, but there is something real . . .

Did Levi suffer so that we could learn something about the nature of Christian hope? Absolutely not—what kind of a world would that be? If that were the deal offered, I’d just decline, return the ticket. Levi’s life, marked as it was by suffering, was not merely one long punishment from God, or some life lesson for him and us—it was a human life like ours, lived in an attempt to make his way as a son, brother, friend, and baptized member of the body of Christ, may God rest his soul. And so we grieve and grieve, even while we place our hope in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which means that we are not entirely bereft or left without Christian hope.

And thus, the halting, even inconsistent, but real embrace of Christian hope comforted our heartbroken family and continues to do so.

C. Sins Against Hope: Despair and Presumption

Rejection of a Christian hope that refuses anonymity and is grounded eschatologically brings to the surface two forms of hopelessness—despair and presumption. Joseph Pieper, in On Hope, quotes Augustine: “There are two things that kill the soul, despair and false hope.” 23 Pieper develops this pithy assertion of Augustine’s by arguing that the faithful answer to our experience of creatureliness can neither be despair, the true antitype of hope on the one hand, nor can it be presumption, the fraudulent imitation of hope on the other. 24 The resigned acceptance or anticipation of nonfulfillment of God’s promises is constitutive of despair, which is an intense hopelessness. Jürgen Moltmann, in his Theology of Hope, takes up Pieper’s categories of despair and presumption as warnings against hopelessness, describing the cluster of problems such as resignation, inertia, melancholia and acedia which make up despair, which is a premature, arbitrary anticipation of nonfulfillment of what we hope for from God. 25 {31}

If such despair is an affront to hope, so too is presumption a form of hopelessness, understood as a “peaceful certainty of possession . . . fraudulent imitation of hope.” 26 This sin against hope takes the form of overreaching on the part of the human, assuming that it might be possible and even necessary to go beyond the limits of creatureliness, as seen for example in some of the initiatives of transhumanism. 27 Whether succumbing to despair or grasping the possessiveness of presumption, resting in hope, in the promises of God, is left aside, which results in canceling the wayfaring character of hope in God. 28 “In despair and presumption alike we have the rigidifying and freezing of the truly human element, which hope alone can keep flowing and free.” 29

D. Christian Hope Recognizes the Uncontrollability of the World

I want to extend this latter discussion of the distortion of hope into presumption, this warped but “peaceful certainty of possession.” 30 We cannot presume to know the future; the future cannot be extrapolated in any straightforward way from the present, since “what is realized historically can only be watched and hoped for, refracted indirectly through the prism of anticipation . . . not human control and construction.” 31 Indeed, what makes hope radical is the fact that it definitively transcends our ability to understand what it is. 32

Christian hope presses us to acknowledge that the world is uncontrollable. To think that the world is at least in part subject to our control is a strong temptation for us moderns. This temptation to assume that we can and should control as much of the world as we possibly can is a dynamic that is being recognized by many people, even as we continue to push further and further in our attempts to make things go where we think they should go. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has helped us understand these matters in The Uncontrollability of the World. In the introduction, he describes the difficulty of finding an English word to translate the German term he uses to identify the problem with which he is concerned, namely, Unverfügbarkeit. At first, he thought of using ‘elusiveness,’ then he tried ‘unavailability,’ then ‘unpredictability,’ then ‘non-engineerability,’ and then, along with his translator, finally settling on ‘uncontrollability.’ The burden of Rosa’s argument is “modernity’s incessant desire to make the world engineerable, predictable, available, accessible, disposable (i.e., verfügbar) in all its aspects.” This incessant desire alters our relationship to the world and produces “a world that in the end is utterly uncontrollable in all its aspects. We cannot control our late modern world in any way: politically, economically, legally, technologically, or individually. The drive and desire toward controllability ultimately creates monstrous, frightening forms of uncontrollability.” 33 {32} Because we try for control, Rosa argues, we encounter the world in which we find ourselves not as a gift but as a “point of aggression,” a series of objects which we must know to be able to control them as we relentlessly attempt to expand our reach. Encountering the world as a ‘point of aggression’ suggests an adversarial stance against everything and everybody in our purview, including but not limited to our own bodies, and leads to heightened and perpetual anxiety. And so, through the application of science, technology, economics, politics, and bureaucracy we seek to make the world fully visible, physically reachable, entirely manageable, and ultimately useful to us, pressing it into our service, as it were. 34

I find Rosa’s diagnosis of the modern world convincing, and his assertion that the world is uncontrollable also compelling. An embrace of Christian hope is central to resisting this modern compulsion to possession, to grasping, to wrestling things and people under our control, to encountering the world as a point of aggression. Hope leads us forward, but we might say that it lives only in the dark, insofar as what we will encounter is not ours to construct or produce. 35

And yet, importantly, hope does not leave us stranded, or suspended in some kind of limbo. As Oliver O’Donovan puts it, “The horizon of imperspicuous possibility makes more possibilities perspicuous.” 36 Put less obscurely, hope opens possibilities for the Christian that would otherwise be invisible.

II. CHRISTIAN HOPE ENGENDERS URGENT PATIENCE

One of those possibilities that I want to emphasize here is that of the practice of Christian patience, especially as it is connected to hope, as we see in the Hebrews 6 and Romans 15.

Hebrews 6

10 For God is not unjust; he will not overlook your work and the love that you showed for his sake in serving the saints, as you still do. 11 And we want each one of you to show the same diligence, so as to realize the full assurance of hope to the very end, 12 so that you may not become sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

Romans 15

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen {33} is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

We can add to these references two other passages of Scripture, which serve as a brief display of the broad strokes of a biblical view of patience, namely: (1) that God practices divine patience toward his creation, and (2) that humans are also called to practice patience. Regarding divine patience, the apostle Peter in 2 Peter 3 describes God as exercising patience with people, an offer that opens the possibility of repentance and salvation, and exhorts his readers, who are ostensibly the recipients of God’s patience, to wait in peace for the renewal of all things.

Second, James, in 5:7–11, adds a call for human practice of patience with an emphasis that is notably different than Peter’s. James counsels patience on the part of the reader, offers encouragement in the fact that the coming of the Lord is near, and provides examples to follow in the prophets of Israel, explicitly offering the blessed pattern displayed by Job.

A. The Patience of God

Just as Christian hope refuses anonymity so too does Christian patience. According to Karl Barth, “patience exists where time and space are given within a definite intention, when freedom is allowed in expectation of a response. God acts in this way. He makes this purposeful concession of space and time.” 37 Any discussion or description of God must not make the mistake of speaking of “attributes” that have an existence apart from, independent of, God’s own being. God’s patience is not some isolated “characteristic” among other “characteristics” of God —it is a dimension of what God is—or as Barth puts it, “the perfection of divine patience is a special perfection of love and therefore the being of God.” 38 In patience, God thus “conced(es) to this existence a reality side by side with His own, and fulfilling His will towards this other in such a way that He does not spend and destroy it as this other but accompanies and sustains it and allows it to develop in freedom.” 39 God is not thereby suspending the reality of the human experience, but rather “the fact that God has time for us is what characterizes His whole activity towards us as an exercise of patience.” 40

We also see patience in action in the earthly life and ministry of Jesus, perhaps especially evident in the Passion of Christ. Further, before Jesus went down to Jerusalem to be crucified, he promised his disciples that he would ask the Father for another Advocate who would be with them forever. This reference to the coming of the Holy Spirit as the coming of the gift of an Advocate is central to John’s account of things, especially in chapters 14–17 of John’s Gospel. The apostle Paul, in Romans 8, shows {34} his readers that life in the present circumstances ought to be shaped in part at least by an understanding of the glory that will be revealed. The work of the Spirit provides the power of the possibility of living the life of patience within the space and time provided by God’s patience revealed so clearly in Jesus Christ. In sum, God’s patience is expressed in Trinitarian form, which is essential for the faithful life of the church. Paying “close attention to God’s patience will enable the church to reflect more faithfully on God’s presence and action in the world, and to grasp the profound effects of the affirmation that God acts slowly; God takes time; God has time for his creatures and makes time for his creatures. God acts in this fashion not because of inattentive indifference but because of the strength of his resolve to bring his creatures to saving perfection.” 41

B. Human Patience

The practice of human patience is related to divine patience, but not directly analogous to it. Turning our attention to human patience ought not to lead us too quickly to a facile conclusion that runs something like: because God is patient, humans too ought to be patient; that is, the patience to which humans are called can be understood as being modelled directly on God’s exercise of that virtue. In a perceptive account of God’s work in creation as a display of patience, Paul Daffyd Jones, drawing on Karl Barth, focuses on God’s granting of space and time to the created world, wherein “space is opened for creatures, empowered by God, to combine forms of activity, passivity, receptivity, invention, and collaboration as they heed and make good on God’s patience.” 42 Jones observes that seeking to conform human striving to God’s action and attitude toward the world seems to seek for analogy which is not necessarily present in the relationship of God and human. 43

God’s patient provision of time and space includes Christ’s urgent petition that each and every one of us should act, without delay, in a manner which honours the covenant of grace. God’s patience, one must even say, awaits a dis-analogous response. We are not asked to do the impossible: correspond ourselves to the God who has time and space, and who gives time and space to us, by giving God time and space to act in freedom and obedience. Nor, for that matter, are we asked to exercise restraint or to take on the responsibility of incarnating God’s patience. Our task is otherwise: to move towards and purposefully to inhabit the Kingdom which is the in-breaking gift of the patient God. 44 {35}

CONCLUSION

I recently came across a very interesting sermon that was preached nearly a hundred years ago by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian. He was serving a church in Barcelona, Spain, and was assigned to preach the First Advent sermon on December 1928, a sermon in which he draws together hope and patience in a way I find constructive. Even then, in 1928, he bemoaned the spirit of that age, which, he claimed, was marked by impatience, an age that “wants to pick the ripe fruit even though it has hardly finished planting the seedling . . . Those unfamiliar with the bitter bliss of waiting, of doing without while maintaining hope, will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.” Bonhoeffer goes on to say that it’s not just the impatient who can’t wait—some others who don’t appear to be impatient also simply cannot wait. Specifically, the people who cannot wait are those who claim to already be satisfied, their appetites sated—these kinds of people can’t wait because they don’t think that there’s anything that’s worth waiting for; they no longer hope because they think they don’t need to—they’ve got what they need, thank you very much. Says Bonhoeffer, “Only people who carry a certain restlessness around with them can wait, and people who look up reverently to the One who is great in the world. Hence only those whose souls give them no peace are able to celebrate Advent, who feel poor and incomplete and who sense something of the greatness of what is coming.” 45

So, how can we express Christian patience, especially when we recognize the connection to hope in God? I contend that we need to recognize that Christian patience can move at various tempos, but that whatever pace we choose to follow, slow or fast, ought to be shaped by our understanding of patience and our embrace of hope. Perhaps the way to express this is to say that we are called to the practice of urgent patience, 46 drawing on extravagant hope. In this regard, I’ve often thought of the father in the well-known parable we refer to as “The Prodigal Son.” Much is made of the father’s hurrying in joy to embrace his wayward son who has come home. Fair enough, but we also ought to recognize that the final urgent sprint of that story is shaped by and comes only after and as part of enduring, waiting, watching, and hoping. The father distributed the share of inheritance against his own better judgment, he continued his work over the years, he worked side by side with his other son and employees, and all the time the working and the waiting were of a piece, a way of being which I’m calling urgent patience, made possible by extravagant hope.

Finally, insofar as the practices of urgent patience and extravagant hope are possible in our lives and churches and in the world in which we find ourselves, they are made so by “the love that waits, scandalous in {36} its patience, (which) will finally be unreserved in its haste to welcome us into the feast of reconciliation. In the meantime, we wait in joyful hope.” 47 That joyful hope in God too will pass, once we no longer have need of it:

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
Into the house and gate of heaven.
To enter that gate and dwell in that house,
Where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
No noise nor silence, but one equal music;
No fears nor hopes, but one equal possession;
No ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity;
In the habitation of thy glory and dominion,
World without end, Amen.

NOTES

  1. A version of this paper was delivered as a plenary address at Canadian Mennonite University’s recent Renew conference, titled “Leading with Hope in Anxious Times,” February 5–6, 2024.
  2. Quoted by Tony Attwood in “Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’: Hope Is a Dangerous Thing,” Untold Dylan (blog), September 6, 2018, https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/8431.
  3. John Webster, “Hope,” in Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, vol. 2 (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 195, 209.
  4. Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 158.
  5. Tanner, 163–64.
  6. This is Walter Brueggemann’s concern, since grounding hope in present life arrangements is “a strategy that inescapably produces the absolutizing of some power arrangement that soon or late becomes idolatrous and self-destructive.” Walter Brueggemann, A Gospel of Hope (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2018), 97.
  7. Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, 31.
  8. John Webster, “God and Conscience,” in The Doctrine of God and Theological Ethics, ed. Michael Banner and Alan Torrance (London: T&T Clark: 2006), 156, 157.
  9. John Webster, “Hope,” in Webster, Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, vol. 2 (London: T&T Clark: 2016), 196.
  10. Webster, “Hope,” 198.
  11. Herbert McCabe, God, Christ and Us, ed. Brian Davies (London, New York: Continuum: 2003), 12, 14. {37}
  12. Webster, “Hope,” 199.
  13. Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 2021), 59.
  14. Webster, “Hope,” 212.
  15. David Bentley Hart, “Tradition and Disruption,” in Plough 32 (Summer 2022): 70.
  16. Josef Pieper, On Hope, trans. Mary McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 13.
  17. Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, 164.
  18. Tanner, 164–65.
  19. I’m grateful to my colleague Chris Huebner for bringing this short poem to my attention.
  20. Webster, “Hope,” 214.
  21. Oliver O’Donovan, Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 152.
  22. Luke Bretherton, A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 196.
  23. Pieper, On Hope, 48.
  24. Pieper, 65.
  25. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 22, 23.
  26. Pieper, 65.
  27. Peter Leithart, “Radical Hope,” in Plough 32 (Summer 2022): 28.
  28. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 23.
  29. Moltmann, quoting Pieper, 23.
  30. Pieper, On Hope, 65.
  31. O’Donovan, Entering Into Rest, 57.
  32. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103.
  33. Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, trans. James Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), viii, ix.
  34. I’m drawing on and summarizing parts of chapters 1, 2 of Uncontrollability.
  35. Oliver O’Donovan, Entering Into Rest, 3.
  36. O’Donovan, Finding and Seeking, 162.
  37. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, The Doctrine of God, II/1, ed. G. Bromiley, T. Torrance, trans. T. Parker et al. (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 408.
  38. Barth, 407.
  39. Barth, 409–10.
  40. Barth, 417.
  41. David Lauber, “ ‘For the Sake of This One, God Has Patience with the Many’: Czeslaw Milosz and Karl Barth on God’s Patience, the Incarnation, and the Possibility of Belief,” Christian Scholar's Review, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 169, 170.
  42. Paul Dafydd Jones, “The Patience of God the Creator: Reflections on Genesis 1:1–2:4a,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 21, no. 4 (October 2019): 384. {38}
  43. God’s patience toward his creatures does not involve as logical consequence that humans ought to under all circumstances exercise only patience. Hans Frei, “God’s Patience and Our Work,” in “Hans W. Frei. Unpublished Pieces: Transcripts from the Yale Divinity School Archive,” ed. Mike Higton with assistance from Mark Alan Bowald and Hester Higton (1998–2004), 94, https://divinity-adhoc.library.yale.edu/HansFreiTranscripts/Freitranscripts/Freicomplete.pdf.
  44. Paul Dafydd Jones, “On Patience: Thinking with and beyond Karl Barth,” Scottish Journal of Theology 68, no. 3 (2015): 288.
  45. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ed. Isabel Best, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 8.
  46. I take the term “urgent patience” from Kevin F. Scott, “The Church and the Urgent Patience of Christ,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 27, no. 1 (2009): 5–23.
  47. Kelly Johnson, “God Does not Hurry,” in God Does Not . . . Entertain, Play “Matchmaker,” Hurry, Demand Blood, Cure Every Illness, ed. Brent Laytham (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), 81. “Hope is our grasp of the promise that the God who rules the world will let his reign appear universally, and the only universal and unequivocal way we can and should describe hope is as a courageous endurance in doing God’s will, a refusal to be distracted or disheartened in pursuit of the end in which action can rest.” O’Donovan, Finding and Seeking, 166.
Paul Doerksen is Associate Professor of Theology and Anabaptist Studies at Canadian Mennonite University. He has published on numerous topics including political theology and the relationship between theology and human rights discourse, and he has an ongoing interest in the interrelationship of literature and theology.

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