Faith and Hope

E.J. Dionne has a very appropriate Christmas column today on faith and hope. Here are some highlights:

Even more than faith and love, I think, hope is closest to the heart of the Christmas story. In an anthropological sense, Christmas celebrates new life and birth, a theme that crosses cultures and traditions. This sense of Christmas has a beauty all its own and embodies a nearly universal quest for renewal.

But in the theological sense as understood by Christians, the holiday is even more radical. Christianity -- drawing on the Jewish scriptures, particularly Isaiah -- revolutionized the concept of the divine by putting aside deities who dominated humanity in favor of a God who entered the world in human form.

. . .

I'm not trying to convert anyone here, but I do want to suggest that Christmas might help us see that both Christianity and Judaism are fundamentally progressive traditions. I do not use "progressive" in a narrow political sense. All great religious traditions are, in some ways and necessarily, both progressive and conservative.

But it's quite clear that the Christmas, Easter and Exodus stories are about freedom and liberation. All promise that the distance between God and humanity can be overcome, that deliverance is possible.

. . .

That's why I dissent from Christopher Hitchens's bold assertion in the subtitle of his bracing atheist polemic that "religion poisons everything."

On the contrary, for all of the sins committed in the name of religion -- yes, there are many -- the great faiths were indispensable in pointing us down a path toward liberty and justice. If I may borrow from Jesse Jackson, these traditions helped us, in dark times, to keep hope alive.

The Christian message is frequently drained of this larger meaning and interpreted, often by Christians themselves, as being solely or primarily about personal salvation. But this sells the tradition short.

Last month, Pope Benedict XVI issued a fascinating encyclical on the idea of Christian hope in which he explicitly disputed the idea of "the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others." Drawing on the theologian Henri de Lubac, Benedict argued that "salvation has always been considered a 'social' reality."

Read the whole thing here. It is well worth reading.