from the frank realities of despair, hope could be a mere abstract consideration. When confessed to be part of the conditions that give rise to and break through serious and sustained despair, there is a far-reaching understanding of the meaning of hope that seems possible. Indeed the combination of hope with despair is indispensable in and for Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope, from his early work, Theology of Hope, to his recent, steadfast reflections: In the End—the Beginning: the Life of Hope and Ethics of Hope. Hope is also engaged in Pamela McCarroll’s 2014 writings, Waiting at the Foot of the Cross and The End of Hope—The Beginning. Addressing the despair in a lack of a basis for hope also evokes or invites the helpmates of prayer and justice. Chapters 2 and 8 focus on this utterly basic triad of terms. As virtues, hope, prayer, and justice are more than mere “terms” or concepts or ideas. They are discipline virtues which have stood the tests of time and, when in a conjunctive relationship, intimate a power greater than when only on their own.16
Hope and Realism Combined: Leaven of a Just Realm beyond Our Eager but Meager Strivings
To approach combining hope with realism is to ask of each virtue discipline what it contributes and challenges—each on its own and with a consistent mutual inter-penetration. What does hope critically and constructively offer to realism? What is hopeful about realism is that hope protests the givens in any status quo situation, lest they be rendered a resigned fate. Hope strains and stretches to seek meaning by way of a firm grounding in even despair, since “despair is suffering without meaning.”17 Hope is what qualifies tragedy and realism and is what challenges temptation to mere wishful thinking, with little foundation in reality.18 By pressing the premature limits—an assumed once-and-for-all fate—of a poverty situation or a system of assumed inequalities, the practices of hope open up fresh and further options, and more inclusive possibilities. It is what theologians and ministers affirm to be the prophetic and not only the pastoral function of ministry. A genuine restlessness is felt and honored—what Moltmann further depicts as an “unquenchable hope” due to ministers remaining unreconciled with what is.19 There is the promise and lure of professing the biblical God with whom all will be all, and which cannot rest until all is fulfilled and until peace with justice with dignity for all is included.20 There is also the critical penchant of realism to press the profession of hope for its actual basis, that its practice be more or other than that of mere wishful thinking. If it is wishful thinking or ungrounded aspirations that reign, then the “dashed hopes” of disillusionment are inevitable.
What becomes realistic about hope, thus, is that with the check and balance of realism there would be an analysis of the phenomenon of hope that disciplines one to look for the grounds of hope and the contributing field force conditions for its realization or at least its further approximation. Among still other ingredients, there are the agents and/or agencies by means of which the goals of hope are earnestly and patiently pursued.21 Indeed as one commentator and student of hope professes:
. . . all hopes—whether ultimate or penultimate, whether regarding eschatological futures or tomorrow’s weather—are characterized by (a) formal structure of a hoper, who intends something in the future, as that which is hoped for, on the basis of a particular ground of hope. If any element is missing, we are without hope.22
Theological and Christian writers on hope—and biblical and possibly spiritual writers in general—are wont to ground the basis of their hope and the possibilities of its fulfillment in God. Moltmann, we will see, attests to this especially—as do a host of other thoughtful writers. However, there is not space to elaborate on a full discussion of combing and applying hope and realism. Suffice it to note that Reinhold Niebuhr was not alone in affirming the centrality of realism. In addition to John Bennett there were also the existential and phenomenological influences of European theology and philosophy. Representatively, Paul Tillich wrote of belief-ful realism, wherein an intuited, philosophical and biblical sense of hope was twinned with taking seriously and fully the given situations under scrutiny and engagement—“ . . . that is an unconditioned acceptance of our concrete situation in time and of the situation of time in general in the presence of eternity.”23 The translator of this volume, Reinhold’s younger brother H. Richard Niebuhr, adds in the book’s preface:
By the connection of belief-ful and realism the most fundamental of all dualisms is called into question and if it is justly called into question it is also overcome. Faith is an attitude which transcends every conceivable and experienceable reality; realism is an attitude which rejects every transcending of reality, every transcendency, and all transcendentalizing [. . .] Evasion is possible in one of two directions, either [. . .] a beliefless realism or in the direction of idealism.24
Hopeful Realism for Urban Ministry: Animating Contrast Awareness
There are helpful reflections on the meaning of hope and realism combined. Douglas Ottati writes a whole book by the title of Hopeful Realism. Therein he asserts
(T)his practical stance and attitude [. . .] refuses both easy optimisms and cynical pessimisms [. . .] that we do not really know ourselves when we concentrate on our abilities apart from our limits and our faults [. . .] that we do not truly know ourselves when we consider our limits and our faults apart from our abilities, and apart from the traces of true communion in community that we encounter in God’s world.25
For our purposes hope and realism are summoned to support the pervasive need of urban ministries to take note of what is happening in their ministries in the city, with all of the rough and tough conditions of survival, coping, facing the same old oppressive and lonely situations upon release from prison, hospital, or any of a number of post-recovery challenges following a short or long-term stay in treatment facilities. Hope and realism are combined to gain the fuller force of synergism, the uncovering and release of perhaps neglected and even repressed energies for change. Hence Ottati prefaces the above perspective of hopeful realism with this theological summary:
. . . (I)nterlocking symbols, such as God’s sovereign reign or dominion, creation, sin, providence, and redemption, yield a particular picture of life-before-God-and-God-before-life. They support an outlook that encourages us to participate in God’s world; to recognize that we are fitted for true communion with God in community with others; to acknowledge our significant but limited and dependent powers and capabilities; to expect diminishment, estrangement, conflict, fragmentation, and death; but nevertheless to look for enlargement, reconciliation, and life.26
It is not only at the level of analysis or a detached reflection that a hopeful realism can be professed. Prayer offers the complementary if not deeper and wider resources of confession. That is, confessing the limits of one’s own and one’s ministerial situation along with and grounded in the catalyst of recognizing and willingly honoring a contrast-awareness arousal—an awareness that takes negative experiences, especially of indignities and inequalities, seriously and persistently as to be resolved, with a socially just outcome. I know not of a more articulate statement describing this core concept than that of the late Catholic theologian and biblical scholar, Edward Schillebeeckx. Worthy of elaboration, he professes:
The contrast experiences of the two World Wars, the concentration camps, political torture, the color-bar, the developing countries, the hungry, the homeless, the underprivileged and the poor in countries where
