Hoping Against Hope
- Rick Bonetti
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
I have noticed a recent resurgence of post-doom angst being discussed by various contemporary thinkers I follow, so I recently revisited John D. Caputo's poetic but difficult book, 2015 book Hoping Against Hope,
Caputo asks: If traditional religion no longer convinces us, is hope still possible?
He answers: "Yes—but only if we let go of certainty, control, and reward and embrace a fragile, groundless, but active hope rooted in love and justice." He points to mystic Meister Eckhart and addresses the preciousness of life before death.
The book is partly autobiographical. The Amazon summary says: "Caputo's conversation partners in this volume include Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but also earlier versions of himself: Jackie, a young altar boy, and Brother Paul, a novice in a religious order. Caputo traces his own journey from faith through skepticism to hope after the death of God. In the end, Caputo doesn't want to do away with religion; he wants to redeem religion and to reinvent religion for a postmodern time."
Religionless Religion
Caputo proposes: no fixed doctrines; no supernatural “interventionist” God, and no guaranteed salvation plan. Instead, religion becomes: a way of life; a sensitivity to justice, love, and the future; and a constant openness to what is still “to come.” He calls this a “religionless religion.”
Caputo asserts, “God does not exist-God insists”. This is his most provocative idea: God is not a being “out there”- God is more like a call, a demand, or a possibility. Think of God as the pull toward justice; the call to love, and the insistence that things could be better
So God isn’t something you prove—it’s something that claims you.
The “Nihilism of Grace”
Caputo accepts the post-modern insight that there may be no ultimate meaning, plan, or guarantee, but instead of despairing, he flips it: Acts of love, mercy, and hospitality should be done “without why," not for reward, salvation, or divine approval. Grace becomes a pure gift, with no strings attached. That’s what he calls the “nihilism of grace.”
"Hoping against hope” really means (borrowed from the biblical idea of Abraham, but reinterpreted) not hope based on promises or certainty; not hope grounded in doctrine, but instead, hope with no guarantees - hope in the face of meaninglessness, suffering, and even extinction. It’s a kind of stubborn, defiant stance: Hope anyway—even when nothing justifies it.
Caputo is not abstract for its own sake. His bottom line is care for the poor; practice hospitality; act with compassion, but crucially, do it without expecting reward or cosmic payoff - the action itself is the “kingdom of God.”
I asked ChatGPT: "Where did the phrase 'hoping against hope' originate, and what does it mean? It responded: "The phrase 'hoping against hope' comes from the Bible, specifically Romans 4:18, where Paul writes about Abraham. In many English translations, it appears as:
“In hope he believed against hope…”
The idea is that Abraham kept trusting in God’s promise that he would become the father of many nations, even when, humanly speaking, there was no reasonable basis for hope, because he and Sarah were old.
What it means: to keep hoping even when circumstances give you almost no grounds for optimism. It suggests hope that persists despite evidence, odds, or appearances.
So the phrase carries two layers:
ordinary hope: what seems realistically possible
deeper hope: refusing despair even when ordinary hope has run out
In common usage, it usually means clinging to hope in a seemingly hopeless situation.
Theologians like Kierkegaard, Moltmann, or Caputo use the phrase in related but sharply different ways:
Kierkegaard: “hope against hope” becomes the logic of faith at the edge of the absurd. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham is the model: from the standpoint of ordinary reason, he should give up the promise, yet he trusts anyway. For Kierkegaard, this is not optimism, progress, or positive thinking. It is the individual standing before God in a paradox that reason cannot secure. So in his hands, “hoping against hope” means faith when worldly expectation has collapsed.
Moltmann: The phrase becomes more historical and political. For Jürgen Moltmann, especially in Theology of Hope, Christian hope is grounded in God’s promised future, above all, the resurrection. That means hope is not just inward endurance in impossible personal circumstances; it is a force that resists resignation and works toward transformation in history. So Moltmann shifts the emphasis from Kierkegaard’s existential paradox to public, future-oriented, world-changing hope. “Against hope” here means hoping against the evidence of suffering, injustice, and death, because God’s future is not exhausted by the present.
Caputo: The phrase becomes more fragile, radical, and deconstructive.John D. Caputo uses “hoping against hope” less as confidence in a guaranteed divine outcome and more as fidelity to the call of the impossible. His hope is often stripped of metaphysical certainty. It is hope without strong assurances, without mastery, and sometimes without a settled picture of how God “intervenes.” In Caputo, hoping against hope means remaining open to the event, the promise, the insistence of justice or the kingdom, even when there is no triumphalist guarantee that things will turn out well. It is a more vulnerable hope than Moltmann’s, and less centered on Abrahamic faith as paradox than Kierkegaard’s.
A clean way to distinguish them:
Kierkegaard: hope as faith in paradox
Moltmann: hope as confidence in God’s future for history
Caputo: hope as weak, risky openness to the impossible
So all three resist despair, but they do not resist it in the same register:
Kierkegaard: existential
Moltmann: eschatological-political
Caputo: deconstructive-apophatic
The big difference is this: Kierkegaard asks, How can one believe when reason breaks down? Moltmann asks, How can hope transform history? Caputo asks, How can one remain faithful to a promise without guarantees?
I asked ChatGPT: "What does Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believe about hope in Omega as an evolutionary direction? It's repsonse was:
"For Teilhard de Chardin, hope in Omega means that evolution is not just random change but a directed movement toward greater complexity, consciousness, and spiritual unification, culminating in Omega Point, which he identifies in a Christological way as the final fulfillment of creation. Sources describe Omega as the goal and direction of cosmic history, not merely a biological endpoint, and as the point toward which personal consciousness is drawn into unity through love.
So his view of hope differs from ordinary optimism. It is not simply “things will get better.” It is the conviction that the universe has a deep evolutionary trajectory: matter gives rise to life, life to thought, thought to a kind of planetary consciousness, and this movement tends toward a final consummation in Christ/Omega. In that sense, hope is cosmic and evolutionary before it is merely personal.
A key Teilhardian idea here is the noosphere: the sphere of reflective thought and human interconnection that emerges out of biological evolution. Human history, culture, and consciousness are therefore part of evolution’s advance, not side issues. Hope in Omega means trusting that this long process of convergence is moving toward communion rather than fragmentation, even through conflict and incompleteness.
But there is a hard truth here: Teilhard’s view is deeply controversial. Many critics argue that he reads too much direction, purpose, and inevitability into evolution, and that this is difficult to reconcile with mainstream scientific accounts that stress contingency and with orthodox Christian theology in some respects. Even sympathetic reference sources note that his Omega vision is partly a mystical interpretation rather than something science itself demonstrates.
Put simply, Teilhard believes hope is justified because the world is being drawn toward final personal unity in Christ, not drifting aimlessly. If Kierkegaard’s hope is existential and Moltmann’s is historical, Teilhard’s is evolutionary-cosmic.
A compact formula for Teilhard would be:
evolution → consciousness → convergence → Omega
And the meaning of hope in that scheme is: the future of the universe is not meaningless dispersal, but fulfilled union."
Denis Noble is part of the Third Way movement in evolutionary biology that views natural selection as part of a holistic, organism-centered process. He co-authored Evolution on Purpose, published by MIT Press in 2023, which argues that organisms evolve with intention. Noble sees compelling evidence that purpose may be fundamental to life. He’s determined to debunk the current scientific paradigm and replace the elevated importance of genes with something much more controversial. In a Forbes article, Evolution May Be Purposeful, And It’s Freaking Scientists Out.
If you are really into this, watch an interview with Denis Nobel, Science is Reconsidering Evolution. Denis Nobel and David Sloan Wilson debate in their 2025 book Is Neo-Darwinism Enough?
Steve McIntosh's 2012 book Evolution's Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins reveals that evolution's purpose is "to grow toward ever-widening realizations of beauty, truth, and goodness."
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