When You Wish Upon a Star
Paul, a bond-servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth which is according to godliness, in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago, Titus 1:1-2 NASB
Hope of eternal life – “CHRISTIANITY is mainly wishful thinking. Even the part about Judgment and Hell reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept. Dreams are wishful thinking. Children playing at being grown-up is wishful thinking. Interplanetary travel is wishful thinking. Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.”[1]
In the absence of certainty, Frederick Buechner’s comment seems correct. Maybe our wishing it was so is the basis of making it so. Since the introduction of Hellenism, the solution to the reward and punishment problem for Western thinking has been justice in the next life. We hope that God will fix the imbalance of good and evil in the ‘olam ha’ba. It certainly doesn’t appear to be happening in this world. We might say the same thing about eternal life. We hope that the idea is true, that God’s promise is good, that we will see our loved ones again in an everlasting life after death. You will notice how Paul describes this as hope. He could have written, “in the reality of eternal life,” or “in the certainty of eternal life,” or something a bit more concrete than “hope,” but he didn’t. Does that make Paul a predecessor of Buechner? Is eternal life just wishful thinking?
Paul uses the Greek term elpídi from elpís. But I suspect he doesn’t use it in its classical Greek sense. The classical Greek sense is found in Plato:
Hopes are subjective projections of the future. Good elpídes are hope in our sense, though later elpís is often used for this. Hope for the Greeks is a comfort in distress, but it is also deceptive and uncertain except in the case of the wise who base it on scientific investigation.[2]
For the Greeks, hope really is wishful thinking, that is, a sort of mental comfort that may or may not be true but offers us some relief at the moment. If eternal life is a Greek idea, that means it’s just mental aspirin. It treats the symptom, not the cause.
But Paul is a Jewish Greek thinker, and the use of elpís in the Jewish Greek world doesn’t mean making you feel better when things go wrong. Elpís is the Greek translation of the Hebrew bāṭaḥ, and bāṭaḥ isn’t about treating symptoms. bāṭaḥ is about trust and yearning. Consider Bultmann’s comments:
It is not a dream that offers comfort but may also be illusory. The life of the righteous is grounded in a hope that implies a future because its point of reference is God. To hope is to trust. It is demanded even in good times. It is not our own projection but confidence in what God will do. God is our hope (Jer. 17:7). It has nothing to do with the calculation that may give a false sense of security. We are not to trust in riches (Job 31:24) or righteousness (Ezek. 33:13) or religious inheritance (Jer. 7:4). God can scatter all our planning (Ps. 94:11; Is. 19:3). Politicians who build on calculable forces will be confounded (Is. 31:1). Hope looks to him whom none can control. It is thus freed from anxiety (Is. 7:4) but must be accompanied by fear of God (Is. 32:11). Hence it must be a quiet waiting on God (Is. 30:15); the fault of Job is that he will not wait (Job 6:11). If God helps in present distress, he will finally put an end to all distress (Is. 25:9 etc.). Hope, then, grasps the provisional nature of every earthly present and is increasingly hope in the eschatological future.[3]
When Paul writes about eternal life, he presupposes the Hebraic worldview and in that worldview God is the absolute anchor of the future. Hope isn’t wishing for something. It is trusting in someone—someone whose promises are completely reliable. Put Disney on the shelf. Jiminy Cricket might sing “When you wish upon a star,” but Paul doesn’t. Neither should you.
Topical Index: hope, bāṭaḥ, elpís, eternal life, Titus 1:1-2
[1] Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner by Frederick Buechner
https://a.co/4KsoDT0
[2] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 229). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.
[3] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 230). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.
Amen!… and emet.
There is a principle/law that looms over the “things and stuff” of the cosmos that presently obstructs our view of the true reality: it is the principle/law of sin that leads to death. The power of this principle/law governs our perception of true life by its deceptive reversal of our perspective and vantage, reversing our perception of the true order of life. We suppose that we begin living out lives that end in death, whereas the true reality is that we begin our lives in death, and can only be rescued from death’s grasp by being created/born anew. Christ Jesus, the firstborn from the dead, is the Divine Agent of this new creation (through the sevenfold Spirit of God) that begins in death and ends in life and is eternal… apart from sin. This is demonstrated through the power displayed through Christ’s own resurrection from the dead, the pre-eminent assurance of the true hope, for which we expectantly scan the horizon of our own temporal conditions.
This is no wishful thinking; rather it is by faith in the Son of God whose divine work (as the final Davidic King) is according to the oath that Yahweh swore to David. If our faith is not rooted in trust of this God, who has shown mankind what is good, and what this Lord requires of us—yet suppose it is in this life only—then, as Paul says, “we are people most pitiable.”
Christ Jesus inaugurates a world/creation in which death is beginning, not end.