Longing and Hope

Chapter 1 in Plantinga's Engaging God's World: A Reformed Vision of Faith, Learning and Living

Plantinga begins with the idea we have a longing that nothing can fulfill apart from God and that we should find things to excite that longing for Him.  Longing is a part of hope, and “genuine hope always combines imaginations, faith, and desire.”  Plantinga uses Martin Luther King, Jr. as an example of a person who had a longing for justice and appealed to people’s hope.  Hoping for oneself but we should be too focused on ourselves.  Instead, as Simone Wiel says, we should

empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the word, this is the consent to the rule of … free choice at the center of each soul  Such consent is love.

Biblical hope is a yearning for the new heaven and earth, it is for shalom, which “means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, all under the arch of  God’s love. Shalom, in other words, is the way things are supposed to be.” 

Plantinga states that “nobody hopes for what he’s convinced is a lost cause or a logical impossibility.”  I think Christians should always be hoping because God can do anything and He is coming back, so everything will be made right.  Even when they feel something is a lost cause, they can still hope in Jesus Christ. And sometimes, that is the only place they can turn to. 

A point of discussion that struck me is that we should be here in the present, the here and now, and that we shouldn’t dream then.  Often, I have drifted away so I’m not here, experiencing life to the fullest but am in some other world, constantly thinking about stuff instead of just enjoying the moment.  Thinking about stuff, dreaming, is meaningless unless it leads to action. 

We also discussed the place of doubt.  Doubt occurs at the crossroads of life and on the way along the road.  Doubt is good for reflection and examination of life but is not good when it paralyzes you.  This definition struck me because I have often questioned how much doubt is healthy.  One must question oneself but to what extent is it too much?