Mere Christianity -- Book 3, Chap. 10

Hope

We come now to the second theological virtue:  “hope.”  Hope is a:

A continual looking forward to the eternal world, (which) is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.  It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is.  If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.

Throughout church history those who “left their mark on Earth, (did so) precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.”

It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.  Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”:  aim at earth and you will get neither.

Why have most of us found it difficult to want “Heaven,” that is other than merely seeing again our friends who have died?

1.  Because we haven’t been trained to set our minds on the next world.  “Our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world.”

2.  When the real want of Heaven is present in us, we don’t recognize it.  How is that?

If we were really honest with ourselves we would realize that there is something in our longings or desires that nothing in this world seems to satisfy.  There are many things in this world that promise fulfillment, but in the end they don’t deliver.  We think something will make us happy (or satisfied) only to find out that “there was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality . . . something has evaded us.”

Now, what do we do when this happens?  There are two wrong ways and one right way:

The Wrong Ways:

1.  The Fool’s Way – The fool looks down upon the thing itself that promised to bring him happiness.  He goes through life thinking “if only . . .” he had tried another, then he would have caught what he was looking for. 

Most of the bored, discontented, rich people in the world are of this type.  They spend their whole live trotting from woman to woman (through the divorce courts), from continent to continent, from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is “the Real Thing” at last, and always disappointed.  

2.   The Way of the Disillusioned “Sensible Man” – This is the man who finally decides that the whole thing is “moonshine.”  He just settles down and learns not to expect too much and represses the part of himself, which used to long for happiness.

The Right Way:

3.  The Christian Way – As Christian we realize that every creature is created for a purpose, with desires that a satisfaction exists to meet.  “Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.”   

A baby feels hunger:  well, there is such a thing as food.  A duckling wants to swim:  well, there is such a thing as water.  Men feel sexual desire:  well, there is such a thing as sex. 

“But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.”

If I find in myself a desire which no experience is this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. 

If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.  Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. 

“Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire” (see P. Kreeft, Argument from Desire).

See Ps. 42:1-2; Jer. 2:13; John 4:10, 13-14

If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.  I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death:  I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.

There are some that will respond to all of this by mocking the Christian’s hope, that it is all just pipe dreams.  Lewis says that we should answer such ridiculing:

If they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.

Lewis reminds us that “all the scriptural imagery is merely a symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible.  People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”   

See Peter Enns, “Loving Christ While I Cheer For the Yankees.”