Give reason for your hope

THIS is an indication that appears in the first letter of St. Peter. The complete text is the following:

“Sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being ready always to satisfy everyone that asks you a reason of that hope which is in you.” (3,15)

Nowadays, Christian believers are going through increasing pressure to explain their faith and hope in God, in eternal life, in religion, in supernatural life, etc.

This could be because the world is becoming more and more secularized, that is, detached from a culture where the spiritual and supernatural realities not only still matter but are its prime ethos.

The world, it seems, is plunging headlong into a purely earth-and-time-bound worldview. It cannot imagine a reality beyond this world and this time. Everything has to stop in death and in what may be foreseen as the end of the world.

Part of the reason is that the Christian faith, as taught in many places and as practiced by many people, has become, to the eyes of the worldly-wise, out of touch with what is commonly understood as our reality.

Many people are now openly saying, for example, that prayer and the sacraments are meaningless to them, that faith has nothing to say to the developments in science, arts and entertainment, that Christian moral principles are not in sync with people’s mentalities and lifestyle today, etc.

There are those who, in spite of their supposedly Christian education and upbringing, still cannot figure out what the Church is and what role it plays in the life of a Christian believer.

This is the big challenge we are facing now. People are not anymore living by faith. They do not know how to relate their faith to their earthly affairs, and vice-versa. There’s a big, yawning disconnect between the two.

Knowing how to give reason to our faith and hope is truly the urgent and most needed task we have today.

Of course, mastering the doctrine would be a great help. And that’s already a tall order, since it involves a big body of knowledge to be studied. And it’s constantly growing.

The only consolation is that there is a unifying spirit in all of this corpus, such that if one gets that spirit, he would not have difficulty studying it. He kind of gets an automatic key that makes him understand what he believes.

Which brings us to a more important point. Giving reason to our faith and hope is not much a matter of words, doctrines and arguments. It is more a matter of the spirit.

St. Paul says it beautifully: “My speech and my preaching were not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in showing of the Spirit and power, that your faith might not stand on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.” (1 Cor 2,4-5)

I don’t wish to put into contrast the doctrine and the spirit, but we have to understand that both should come together. They are inseparable just like a living body cannot be separated from his soul.

Thus, faith and hope should not just be an intellectual affair. It has to affect and imbue our whole being, from our thoughts and will to our feelings and desires. Our faith and hope should be seen in our behavior, in our reaction to things, etc., since actions speak more loudly than words.

When the faith is studied not only with the mind but also with the heart, then that faith and its accompanying hope enter into our whole being, transforming us. It would be a faith and hope that truly bring us closer to God, that is, to sanctity.

In this regard, some words of Pope John Paul II are relevant. “Let the theologians always remember the words of that great master of thought and spirituality, Saint Bonaventure,” he said.

“He invites the reader to recognize the inadequacy of reading without repentance, knowledge without devotion, research without the impulse of wonder, prudence without the ability to surrender to joy, action divorced from religion, learning sundered from love, intelligence unsustained by divine grace, thought without the wisdom inspired by God.”