Hope

Hope is a great thing, when it is understood correctly. Hope, in the way we use the word has a very sour taste to it, it puts into play the possibility of failure. Maybe I think that because I am of the "glass is half-empty" variety. But if hope is certain, or at least positive, it is a great thing. We usually don't use the word hope, in our ironically negative and ambitious culture, in its positive sense. If we're trying to express anticipatory excitement, then we usually say things like: "I'm looking forward to...", or "I can't wait until..." We're not in this case leaving the door open, if you will, for what we anticipate to happen to fail to happen. But when we say: "I hope that I will get to see..." There's a tinge of uneasy, uncertainty in that comment, as if you might as well attach to the comment, "But it probably won't happen." So when we're told in the Bible that our hope is in Christ, if we understand hope in the contemporary sense, it essentially means nothing.
But I say again that hope is a great thing. Because hope is not all that it's made out to be. It's very simply the actual future experience. It ought not to mean anything to say "I hope such and such happens." It ought to mean something, and certainly it does mean something to say, "Although I have not experienced such and such, I know that I will". A first reaction to this attitude might be one of disgust, since it smacks of a sort of sad cosmic denial, but if one were to ask a very basic question, "Why do I live?" he should find that he lives because of hope. That despite his inability to "know what is going to happen" with same sort of certainty that he is presently certain that he is physically where he currently is physically, he knows it with the same sort of certainty. If it is a sad sort of denial to look forward to (hope for) a resurrection, is it not also a sad denial to look forward to dinner? There are thinkers who are consistent enough to say this is true, and I would never fault a person for living according to this way; in the moment as they say. "Carpe diem!" But what is at stake if he does look forward to a dinner that never comes? Disappointment? Embarassment? Maybe. But those feelings depend on the subject. They are not objective. For if one has already decided on a disposition of content, then he cannot be shaken. Perhaps one would say that this is still a sort of denial, and thus is dilly-dallying in potential untruths. I can certainly sympathize with this point of view, but I would say that a Christian is not afforded the privilege of only affirming the truth by means of the senses. "Faith is the evidence of things not seen, the assurance of things hoped for". Thus hope is a marvelously great thing. For it is assurance. If it were not assurance then it would not be faith, it would be false hope. And I don't wish to sound like the offspring of some certain 19th century Dane, but this paradox cannot be mediated".
Either there is a future resurrection or there is not. If we doubt it, and begin to structure our certainty based on our senses and experiences, if we're honest, objective, and truthfully unbiased we will see that there is clearly no empirical argument, nor proof, which will bring us the kind of assurance of hope that is as certain as our location in our current physical location to us. There really is no end to doubt.
The truth claims, we hold so dear as Christians, are not entirely irrational, but if irrationality be defined as starting from any other place in our thinking than the senses, I think this is an accusation we can take with dignity. Our assurance of a resurrection, is a genuine assurance, reasonable, rational, meaningful, and empirically indemonstrable to consistent skeptics.