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TechnoratiMessage in a bottle to a weary world
The hope offered by Christianity can transform the world, says the Pope in his second encyclical letter.
Imagine
you are shipwrecked, all alone, on a desert island, emaciated by
hunger, parched with thirst, mind reeling on account of your
isolation from human company. You walk along the beach, searching the
horizon. Something sparkling in the surf catches your eye. You hasten
towards it and find a bottle, floating towards the shore, carefully
corked to protect the message rolled up inside. You grab the bottle,
open it and unfurl the handwritten scroll to read: “HELP ON WAY:
2MORROW SHIP”.
Suddenly, loneliness and despair are overcome by expectation, great interest in your rescuers, longing for salvation, and the hope to finally return home. No longer alone, you already feel protected by the affection of those coming to save you. Hope, like falling in love, transforms everything. All is bathed in a new light. Your world is changed by the arrival of the good news.
In an essay entitled Message in a Bottle the Louisiana novelist and philosopher Walker Percy explained the difference between “information” and “news” with the shipwreck example. In Spe Salvi, Saved in Hope Benedict XVI's recent encyclical on Christian hope, he offers a deeper distinction by contrasting that which is merely “informative” with that which is “performative”. Like Percy's “news”, Benedict's use of the term “performative” emphasizes the efficacy of Christian hope.
Drawing from British philosopher of language J. L. Austin and his theory of “performative utterances”, Benedict proposes that Christians tend to under-appreciate the vitality of their own hope because of habituation, almost as though it were a drug whose effects wear off with time. Due to such habituation, Christians can fail to appreciate the greatness of that in which they hope and therefore sometimes set their sights on a less lofty goal. In doing so, they miss the whole point of Jesus's message. They set their sights on salvation in this world rather than the next. To use the phrase made famous by political philosopher Eric Voegelin, they “immanentize the eschaton”. Hope in this world is no Christian hope.
Although primarily for bishops, Benedict addresses an audience much broader than the Catholic Church. In fact, Spe Salvi challenges nearly everyone on the planet, from agnostic secularists who set their sights on economic development and scientific progress to Marxist revolutionaries, and everyone in between, including Lutherans and neo-pagan environmentalists.
Dialogue with Lutherans
Indeed, perhaps Benedict's most challenging, yet affectionate, critique regards the traditional Lutheran conception of hope more as a personal conviction than the possession of an objective proof. Benedict's analysis addresses the difficulty of translating a Greek word, hypostasis, used in the New Testament Letter to Hebrews. It shows the deficiencies of the German word Feststehen, or standing firm in one's own convictions, and the comparative advantages of the term “substance”, to express how Christian hope is rooted in objective faith and maintained with objective proof. Christian hope and faith regard something real already present within the believer, even an embryo of eternal life held inside oneself, already, now.
Pope Benedict thereby challenges a central issue for the dialogue among Catholics and Protestants. Is Christian faith just about one's personal convictions? Is it merely one's certainty that saves? Or, is faith something objective, really held, to be performed through works, and received through sacraments that effectively convey the grace of salvation? Benedict responds: “Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a 'proof' of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a 'not yet'. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.” (Spe Salvi, 7)
Benedict refers to the Sudanese slave girl, Saint Josephine Bakhita, who, after being bought and sold among slave traders, brutally beaten and flogged, was bought by an Italian diplomat. Years later, after having been brought to Italy and having received the Christian faith, Bakhita discovered that she now had a new master, the best one imaginable, one who waits for her with love. Once enslaved by those who saw her only for her utility, she was freed by faith in a loving God who promises eternal life.
Benedict comments that some are not interested in Christian hope because of their lack of interest in the promise of Christian faith, namely, eternal life. For some, eternal life sounds like an endless continuation of this life, just more of the same. For others, eternal life sounds like something foreign and difficult to imagine. Many would like a continuation of this life, but with a few improvements. With Spe Salvi, Benedict proposes a robust version of Christian hope in an eternal life that includes all of the best, all at once, and forever.
The hope of science
In advancing the objective of Christian hope, Benedict refers to the Magi who set out from Persia to the Holy Land in search of the newborn king of the Jews and found him lying in a crib at Bethlehem. A star guided the Magi. At the very moment in which they knelt to adore the baby as king, “astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ” (Spe Salvi, 5). Astrology was overcome and astronomy was set free.
For Benedict, the coming of Christ opens nature to scientific study. Nature is no longer governed by fate, senseless destiny, or pagan gods fighting among themselves. For many pagans, the heavens determined human behavior. For some contemporary scientists, human beings are determined in their actions by the laws of nature, such as those propounded by moral and social Darwinism. But for Benedict, we are free because we live in a universe directed by a personal God, therefore, “reason, will, and love” govern the stars, not senseless fate or the blind laws of physics and genetic biology.
Referring to the God discovered by the Magi, Benedict writes: “And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we are free... Heaven is not empty. Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love.” (Spe Salvi, 5) Because of faith in a reasonable and loving God, the Christian is challenged to find meaning in nature through study and scientific experimentation.
Science, therefore, is to serve the human being by achieving deeper understanding of nature and new techniques to better our life in this world. Science should always serve the human being and should never be pursued at the price of destroying human life. Scientific progress is good in itself but inadequate and dissatisfying as an object of ultimate hope. Those who set their hope on progress, whether scientific or economic, anything merely material, diminish their own humanity with their deficient desire for something so limited and thereby lay the groundwork for attacking the dignity of others.
For example, to pursue a new cure for diabetes by destroying human embryos would be to take advantage of one human for the sake of another. To cannibalize an embryo for the sake of medical treatment entails a depreciation of the value of all humans, even a kind of slavery. One person is expended for the sake of another.
Just as Christian faith is “performative”, so too the encyclical. One cannot read it and remain indifferent. The shipwrecked man on the desert island has a choice to hide from the arriving rescue ship or to prepare and look forward to going back home. In the last analysis, however, the comparison fails. The Christian is quite different from the shipwrecked man insofar as the Christian hope for salvation does not remove the believer from this world, but rather challenges the Christian to make this world better, while hoping in a prize beyond our wildest dreams.
Rev. Robert A. Gahl, Jr., is Associate Professor of Ethics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, in Rome.
It was fantastic and educative. l really benefited from it. l encourage you Sr. Mary Christine to continue your good work in Christ which our Dad (Prince Philip Obioma Onyemere) has started. Keep it up. Your work has positive impact in people’s life style.
Your brother,
Ralph.
Thanks all for the encouraging comments, the civility and the thoughtfullness!
Thanks to “That Lesbian Down the Street” for offering some fascinating provocation regarding the flaws inherent to the comparison between the castaway in relation to the message in the bottle and the human existential plight in relation to Christian hope. In particular, you ask whether the ship’s captain would react with scorn toward the rescued castaway who didn’t fully believe in the message and doubted his imminent arrival. And, you conlcude: “A captain that would do such a thing is, I think, not such a great captain in the first place.”
Your helpful point emphasizes the wonderful gift that is Christian hope. Christ gives those who believe a piece of Paradise, now! Moreover, the force of Christian faith and hope is superhuman, even divine! The Christian’s hope should be unshakeable because, while in accord with reason, it is beyond reason. B16 offers the example of the Vietnamese martyr Paul Le-Bao-Tinh who wrote in a letter from prison: “the God who once freed the three children from the fiery furnace is with me always; he has delivered me from these tribulations and made them sweet, for his mercy is for ever. In the midst of these torments, which usually terrify others, I am, by the grace of God, full of joy and gladness, because I am not alone —Christ is with me. I write these things to you in order that your faith and mine may be united. In the midst of this storm I cast my anchor towards the throne of God, the anchor that is the lively hope in my heart.” The Divine Captain alleviates fear and despair while we wait. And when He comes, He will forgive as much as judge.
With prayers for abundant Christmas blessings for all and special greetings to you, Ken!
Thank you for your piece on the Pope’s new enclyclical
Your comment that Pope Benedict’s vision of hope is that
ETERNAL LIFE IS:
“ALL OF THE BEST
ALL AT ONCE
AND
FOREVER”
Make me want to read it even more--Merry Christmas-Claire V
I think Matthew solved that problem nicely, however I’d also like to offer my admiration, on an online blog where I have disagreed with anyone you are the first person to ever say, “you are mostly right” and I was astonished. I always expect a bitter argument about nothing with no result on either side. So my post has no other objective than to offer my admiration and astonishment
This commentary on the Papal Encyclical is indeed thought provoking, insightful, and challenging. It can challenge those who have not seen or read the encyclical to look for it. I dare to say also, it can challenge a dead faith or build hope where it appeared to have diminished, just as the encyclical itself is “performative”. The imagery of the bottled message is so catchy and impressive.
Rightly put, that is what Christianity is all about, the Christian’s hope is not self-explanatory, “we hope for things unseen” and there comes the challenge and performative action of the Christian. The more one looks and searches, the more one sees. One cannot see it all in this world; it is a leading hope, it leads to more discoveries. When queried, it becomes clearer. It brightens with prayers when obscure.
To the lesbian’s questions, there is need to keep the objectivity of the Christian faith and hope in view, if not, one may interpret everything as illusory. That is part of the emphasis of the Pope’s encyclical:
“Hope in a Christian sense is always hope for others as well. It is an active hope, in which we struggle to prevent things moving towards the “perverse end”. It is an active hope also in the sense that we keep the world open to God.”
Thank you Father for this wonderful contribution.
Fr. Gahl is the best.
And glad to see that people like the Lesbian Down the Street are reading his stuff!
The entire point of the Pope’s encyclical is to address the question raised by The Lesbian Down The Street. “In hope we have been saved”—in this life it is our very hope that saves us, not the ship itself. As St. Paul and Pope explain, this is not just a happy illusion. This is the point of the Pope’s discussion about St. Paul’s use of the Greek word for “substance”: hope and faith are objective realities, not just subjective desires, and this is because the ship really is coming.
To the lesbian down the street…
Of course, all metaphors are flawed and will eventually break down. However, your comment regarding belief in the arrival of the ship is well taken...but easily addressed.
Belief in the arrival of the ship is essential. One who believes in the arrival of the ship will be vigilant in preparation and stay close to the beach so not to ‘miss the boat’...rescue. One who does not believe in the arrival of the ship will not concern themselves with the rescue to come. They will likely leave the beach heading into the jungle for an easier existance, build a nicer hut, gather more coconuts, whatever the methaphor offers.
If the castaway without belief happens to be on the beach when the boat arrives they surely become a believer and, thank the Captian, are giving the opportunity for rescue.
Peace,
Matthew
Nice article there....emphasizes the fact of hope coz i cant imagine living on this planet without hope that life will get better even when it does not seem to offer anything or if it already looks better, it can only get better!!!sometimes/most times i think Hope and Faith are God’s gifts to some people BUT even other people can acquire them, if only they let them in!!!
Thank you Fr Gahl for this moving article. Yes...performative indeed. Christmas will not see me without a personal copy of ‘Spe Salvi’.
Bob Newman^^
“so-called"^^;; Looks like someone either doesn’t buy that I’m a lesbian or doesn’t buy that I live down a street… but moving on.
Thanks for your response^^ I see what you mean and all, and I can empathize with that glimmer of hope you’re talking about. In that metaphor I made up with me in my little hut, if it had been me who had received the bottled message, you’re correct; I would experience a hope that wouldn’t be easily relinquished, regardless of how improbable the situation was.
However, I think there’s one more flaw in the metaphor: if the ship did come for me after the message was sent… would the captain care whether or not I had truly believed the ship was coming? If I said I was doubtful of the ship actually arriving to save me, would he scorn me and leave me there? A captain that would do such a thing is, I think, not such a great captain in the first place.
But you’re mostly right, anyhow^^ Thanks for responding.
Have a nice day, all^^
A nice article.
To the so-called “That Lesbian Down The Street”
I understand your predicament with this idle lonely shipwrecked person, who places so much trust in this message in a bottle, however I personally believe that the message of religion is present in a much more reliable source then a bottled message. And even so, you can hardly expect the person to ignore the message entirely if s/he did doubt the suitability of sending the message in a bottle. I think any person who receives that message can hardly supress a slight glimmer of hope, even if they are happy in their make shift home. The metaphor, though flawed makes its point. I find the message true myself.
When I really began to take my religion seriously and finally understood it I felt in a similar way to the person described in the metaphor. And funnily enough the message was sent to me, not in a bottle, but on a golden palet with a message written in gold ink kindly inviting me is i wanted to be happy and saved, only problem was I ignored the message for many years because I thought I couldn’t be sured of its truth, I couldn’t trust the one who signed it, though I knew He was the Truth. That probably doesn’t make sence, but it does to me
A nice commentary on a fantastic Encyclical,
RFC
My response to this is, I hope, something to think about^^
This imaginary, metaphorical character, all alone on his desert island, must first be described as having made seemingly no effort to live in his new environment, save for taking sandy walks. Whether he made a dwelling or procured some foodstuffs isn’t described or even thought about; we are simply left to imagine that he sits on that beach utterly and entirely alone.
In this metaphor, is the beach meant to represent a life without faith? If it is, a mistake of monumental scale has been achieved; does this imply that I, an agnostic, will never find the joy in a child’s smile, or the happiness that comes from helping another human being in need, unless I believe in one eternal and omniscient savior in heaven above?
I suppose I must be on some other island, in my little grass-reed hut, eating coconuts and fish; hoping, as it may be, for some sort of savior, but absolutely ready and content in case no such thing happens.
But all of that is actually a moot point.
The message this poor, desert-island-entrapped man receives: HELP ON WAY: 2MORROW SHIP.
He is elated! He is praising the Lord above for his kindness! He is imagining all the wonderful company he shall receive when this vessel arrives to carry him away!
Does the ship ever come?
Whether he is indeed borne away on this vessel of salvation, or dies in his sleep some nights later consumed in the fancy that someone really is going to save him from his situation, is never disclosed or even discussed.
This is actually a surprising accurate description of religious faith in general, I believe.
He never wonders why in the world a ship that’s come to rescue him would send its message in something so inefficient as a bottle; or why a chat-speaking Tarzan appears to be the ship’s honorary letter-writer.
He just sits there, happily awaiting salvation.
Anyways, that’s just my take on it.
Have a nice day, all^^
Fr. Gahl has hit another one out of the park. Beautiful, thought provoking, faith provoking, and yes, hope provoking. Thank you Father for this most thoughtful and enlightening critique of the Holy Father’s encyclical.
Ken
PS: Met you at Ralph McInerny’s ‘dignity conference’ last year--the acquaintance of Dr. Pia deS. Hope you are well and please have a very Merry Christmas. Remember me in your prayers---I need them!
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