HOPE

in Christian thought, one of the three theological virtues, the others being faith and charity (love). It is distinct from the latter two because it is directed exclusively toward the future, as fervent desire and confident expectation. When hope has attained its object, it ceases to be hope and becomes possession. Consequently, whereas love never ends, hope is confined to man's life on Earth. The ancient Greeks used the term hope (elpis) in reference to an ambiguous, open-ended future; but the Resurrection of Jesus Christ gave the term, for Christians, a positive expectation and a moral quality. Throughout the New Testament, Christian hope is closely tied to the ultimate hope of the return of Jesus Christ as the judge of the living and the dead. Yet this eschatological hope does not eliminate intermediate hopes for lesser goods, even for material blessings. Generally, Christian manuals of doctrine and ethics have given more attention to faith and charity than to a detailed discussion of hope as such. Nevertheless, whenever there has been an unusual concern about the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, theological discussions of hope have become very prominent, as has happened, for example, in mid-20th-century discussions of the theology of hope.