The Enabling Virtue

The tradition of hope, he says, asserts both the obligation and the ability of "every generation" to engage "anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs" and to discover "the proper use of human freedom." Seen this way, hope is a promise but also a challenge. It does not guarantee success in human affairs. It only insists that success is possible.

If the long march of Exodus and the resurrection on Easter preach hope on a grand scale, the Christmas story is a far quieter tale that "usually gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants," as the Anglican bishop and biblical scholar N.T. Wright has noted.

But there is the religious interest in the incarnation and the natural interest in birth. "The kingdom of peace comes through a child," writes the German theologian J¿rgen Moltmann, "and liberation is bestowed on the people who become as children: disarmingly defenseless, disarming through their defenselessness, and making others defenseless because they themselves are so disarming."

A naive view, perhaps, but surprisingly realistic, since the best defense often requires us to drop our own defensiveness. This act of trust is made possible by hope, which in turn is the precondition for reform, renewal and redemption. Without hope, none of it is even worth trying.

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