Acts 17 and the Integral Structure of Christian Hope

Abstract

Acts 17 and the Integral Structure of Christian Hope Fr. Guy Mansini (bio) Because the despair human beings naturally find themselves in is complex, Christian hope must be similarly complex in order to respond to it. There is first of all despair over the evil we suffer, the evil that happens to us and that culminates in death. Try as we might technologically and after the pattern of Prometheus to turn fire to our protection from outrageous fortune and to the furtherance of health and the enhancement of life, in the end, we die. Second, there is despair over our moral failure and fragility. Try as we might to install the virtues in our moral action following the pattern of Aristotle’s Ethics, we rarely attain to more than continence. Moreover, even the virtuous man can be surprised by fate and reduced to a moral condition unworthy of his former aristocracy, thence to an unfortunate and ignoble death. The prospects for virtuous communities are at least as bleak as the prospects for virtuous individuals. Finally, and third, there is that deepest wound to our being, the suspicion that, after all, we are but orphans in a vast universe. Congruent with this suspicion that the universe is impersonal and cares nothing for our desires or our fate, all we may aspire to, beyond some temporary promethean mastery of the conditions of life, is a titanic but of course futile resistance to the entropy of things. We [End Page 89] may look to be Melville’s Ahab, and strive to plant a harpoon in the faceless brow of the whale. But that will not relieve us of the knowledge that the ways of the world cannot be bent to our advantage by either prayer or sacrifice. Moby Dick hears no prayers and accepts no sacrifice and neither does the universe.1 Neither then, properly, can we be even orphans, because the sky never was father to us nor nature ever mother.2 Christian hope must address all three of these grounds of despair. And so it does, as we know. The point of this article is that our hope does so only in addressing all three together, all at once, and that this must necessarily be the case. Conditions on the Natural Knowledge of God: Acts 17 and Vatican I In Acts 17, St. Paul addresses the Athenians at the Areopagus. He informs them, first, that the God they do not know but for whom they have an altar is the creator of heaven and earth and all the things therein (24). Second, he tells them that the times of ignorance are over, and that now all men everywhere are to repent (30) because the day of God’s judgment has been fixed (31). The time of ignorance of the true God is over, for Paul has just made him known, and men are to repent of their religious errors and faults in worshipping idols and human representations of the divine (24b–25a, 29).3 Third, Paul tells the Athenians that we know the day of judgment has been fixed because the one by whom judgment will be executed is a man whom God has raised from the dead (31). Now it turns out to be the case that unless we can repent, and unless we have faith in the resurrection of Christ and therefore in our own resurrection, we cannot come to acknowledge God as the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. In other words, these three things in the speech at the Areopagus are not loosely tied together, but tightly bound up with one another. Thus, the answer to our moral fragility contained in the command to repentance before a [End Page 90] God who judges us and can forgive, the answer to our mortality contained in the news of the resurrection of the body, and the answer to the question of our identity, sons and daughters of the God who creates heaven and earth, are given together; the answer to one cannot be given independently of the answers to the other two. That repentance for sins is possible, in the sense that we...