Who Hopes for What One Already Sees?

We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, 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. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
(Romans 8:22-25, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

I just got back from the FGC Gathering.

I spent much of last week on the Burlington campus of the University of Vermont facilitating a workshop with nearly a dozen Friends called “Would That All the Lord’s People Were Prophets.” It touched on themes that anyone who’s been following these messages for a while might readily recognize, considering the possible ways Quakers and other seekers might draw upon Scripture as they work to make sense of their own spiritual experiences—and the principles that emerge out of those experiences.

We discussed the ways that some marginalized communities have engaged with the Bible, and one day’s conversation drew deeply from a work by the Black American theologian James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed. In this book, first published in 1975, Cone expands on ideas he’d begun elaborating in Black Theology and Black Power and A Black Theology of Liberation. “What has the gospel to do with the oppressed of the land and their struggle for liberation?” Cone asked. Well, everything.

“God in Jesus has brought liberation to the poor and the wretched of the land, and that liberation is none other than the overthrow of everything that is against the fulfillment of their humanity,” Cone wrote—and that message had profound significance for the Black Christian community, going back to the days of enslavement. Cone put it as plainly as possible: “Black theology is the story of black people’s struggle for liberation in an extreme situation of oppression,” a situation that had obviously not vanished even after emancipation (and one which has continued to the present day).

Nevertheless, he said, “we do not struggle in despair but in hope, not from doubt but from faith, not out of hatred but out of love for ourselves and for humanity.”

What could drive such optimism?

I can give you a simple answer: faith in God’s promise. But we can and should go deeper than that. (And if you want to call it something other than God, go ahead.) Because God doesn’t promise that heaven awaits us after a lifetime of suffering if we’ve behaved ourselves. God assures us that the blessed community will come to this world; in fact, as Paul says in Romans, this world is already struggling to bring the blessed community into being, and as we participate in that process of rebirth and redemption, God stands with us in solidarity—more than that, God actively supports us through the pain and the struggle in this very moment.

The first Quakers also believed that they did not, and we do not, have to wait for God to save us. The Lord has already come, George Fox declared early in his own ministry, and “his heavenly Day was springing from on high.” As another famous passage from Fox’s journal puts it: 

“Christ was come to teach People himself, by his Power and Spirit in their Hearts, and to bring People off from all the World’s Ways and Teachers, to his own free Teaching, who had bought them, and was the Saviour of all them, that believed in him.”

The resonance between Fox’s firm belief in the immanence of the blessed community and Cone’s optimism in “the restoration of humanity to its wholeness” struck me as I was preparing my workshop agendas, and the subsequent conversations I had with Friends each morning of the Gathering intensified that thought. A line from Cone kept returning to the fore of my consciousness:  “One is required by hope itself to live as if the vision is already realized in the present.”

Who hopes for what one already sees?

If we could see the blessed community before us, we’d have no need for hope for it—but we know that if we do not move in the direction of that community, even the glimpses we’ve caught of its potential will fade away, overrun by the oppressors of this world. So Cone’s call to “live as if” holds a powerful charge of prophetic imagination—and reinforces one of the ideals I held in mind as I was formulating the workshop in the first place. 

“Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets,” Moses told the Israelites (Numbers 11:29), “and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” Nobody can set out to become a prophet, of course—we can only choose to accept Spirit’s leading as it comes to us. If we do embrace the vision, however, and come together with others who have embraced it as well, we can support one another through the hard times as we work diligently toward the redemption of all our bodies.