“And now abideth faith, hope, and love,

but the greatest of these is love.”

(1 Corinthians 13:13)

Always the Apostle Paul talks about faith, hope, and love. He concludes his magnificent prose poem on the supremacy of love in 1 Cor. 13 with the sweeping affirmation: “So faith, hope, love, abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

But that is not all. Over and over again in his famous correspondence we run across this triumphant trinity: faith, hope, love. In the opening paragraphs of his first letter to the Thessalonians, the earliest of his extant epistles, Paul writes: “We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you in our prayers; Remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” There it is again: faith, love, hope.

And in his Colossian letter, one of the very last the imprisoned apostle dispatched from his cell in Rome, he is still writing about faith, love, and hope. Listen to him: “We heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which ye have to all the saints, For the hope which is laid up for you in heaven” (Col. 1:4-5).

What does Paul mean by faith, hope, and love? Are these just pious words he uses, grasped at random and thrust into reverent writing? Or is he talking about spiritual realities that sincerely mean something to him and ought also to mean something to us? Why is it always these three: faith, hope, love? Why not some others, like peace and joy and purity?

Does Saint Paul mean to say, “Here are the supreme Christian virtues: faith, hope, love; strive for them”? I think not. Roman Catholic doctrine has always held that they are not the supreme virtues. In fact, they are not virtues at all. They are spiritual realities that describe the total Christian life in relation to the three dimensions of human existence: the past, the present, and the future.

As Emil Brunner, the great Swiss theologian, says in his book Faith, Hope, and Love:

Every man’s existence is in the three dimensions of time. He lives in the past, in the future, and in the present. We live in the past — by memory. Without having our past with us, without remembering both our individual history and the history of man or mankind, we should not be human; we should be animals only. Man is the historic being, the being that has his past with him.

But we live also in the future — by expectation, hoping, fearing, planning. Without anticipating our future we should not be human either. It is as well the foreseeing of what we might, could, and should be that distinguishes us from the animals. We live, of course, in the present, but for the most part we are not aware of the fact that this “being in the present” is most problematic…. Somehow it must be true that we do live in the present; otherwise we should not live at all.

These are the three dimensions of human life: past, present, and future. And we owe it to Brunner that he has understood the Apostle Paul’s continual harping on these three chords, faith, hope, and love, and just these three and no others, because these reveal how the Christian lives in relation to Jesus Christ in each of these three dimensions of his life. The Christian lives in his past by faith, he lives in the present by love, and he lives in the future by hope.

First, look at what it means for the Christian to live in the past by faith. This is one dimension of your life and mine — the past. You have a past history and so do I and so does the whole human race. We cannot be too proud of that spotty record. We have an uneasy conscience about its innumerable failures and mistakes.

But there it is. As we survey it, guilt creeps in. What is guilt? Just our past seen in the light of a holy God. How can we handle that past, remove that guilt? We cannot remove it. The past is fixed by its very nature. Shall we just forget about the past and escape our guilt? Many have tried, though unsuccessfully, for we cannot forget and still remain human. The past remains as a dimension of our lives, and we find we must and do live in this dimension, either consciously or subconsciously.

But what we cannot do for ourselves and our past and our guilt, God can do. Christianity is called a historic religion, not because it is very old or very famous, but because it deals realistically with history, with this dimension of human life, our past. The Christian gospel affirms that God has acted in the stream of human history for our redemption and our salvation. The supreme, the culminating, acts of God’s redemption are the historic facts of the Incarnation, the actual human birth of the Son of God, his life, and his death and resurrection. All this God did in human history, once and for all, to remove the stain and guilt of our sin.

If we can and will accept by faith what Christ has done for us in the Atonement, then our past is redeemed and our burden of guilt removed. The Christian is just the one who lives in this dimension of life — our past — by faith.

There is a second dimension of human existence — the present. The Christian lives in the present by love. The past is gone. We cannot change it. Our only hope for redeeming it is through faith in Christ. But the present is here, plastic as putty in our hands. We are making it what it will forever be by what we are doing with each flitting moment.

How does the Christian express relationship to Jesus Christ in every present moment? Saint Paul says the Christian’s watchword for the present is love.

The Christian lives in the present by love and love alone. Not just any garden variety of affectionate feeling, however. Not love that is the Greek eros, our erotic attachments, our sexual desires in their most lurid or chaste expressions. It is not even love in the sense of the Greek phileos, or friendship, of give and take mutuality, a higher, but not yet perfect, love. Rather, the Christian lives in the present, says Saint Paul, in relation to Jesus Christ by incarnating the love of Christ, the Greek word agape, which is the love of God for sinful human beings. This is unmerited love, a love that goes out to give to the loveless and the unlovely, rather than a love that seeks to get. It is portrayed in Saint Francis’s petition: “Lord, where there is hatred, let me sow love.” It is made concrete by a contemporary Christian kneeling on this fifth day of May 1991, and saying, “O God, I pray today for Saddam Hussein and all the people of Iraq, especially for the suffering Kurds. Have mercy on Saddam’s soul and bless that afflicted nation.” Jesus’ words to his disciples interpret the character of this love, agape: “Love your enemies…. Pray for them which despitefully use you…. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?” It is seen as Saint Paul glimpsed it in Jesus going to the cross, the Eternal God dying for the ungodly. The Christian lives in this present dimension of his life by love.

But there is a third dimension of human existence — the future. We can anticipate the future by worry and anxiety and fear or by hope and optimism. Saint Paul says that hope is the word that describes the Christian’s relationship to this dimension of our life.

Most of us have done better by our first two dimensions than we have by our third. Perhaps this is the dimension of human existence that we should compare to an aging man’s waistline. It is the future that most troubles modern people. Could Saint Paul speak to us now, he might well paraphrase his own famous words, “So faith, hope, love, abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love,” by saying instead, “So faith, hope, love abide, but what you need most in the twentieth century is hope.” For now worry and anxiety, fear and despair fill our hearts. People have lost their sense of purpose. Hope is almost gone.

How generate hope? By affirming with the philosophers of the eighteenth century Enlightenment that human progress is inevitable? That the procession of history is onward and upward forever? That hope should just naturally characterize this third dimension of human life? The fact is that two world wars have devastated the earth and blasted man’s belief in automatic progress, and the scientific progress made in the discovery of atomic power has hung a mushroom-shaped cloud of doom over the human race. We’ve come to realize that all scientific development not only increases man’s capacity for service to his fellows, but at the same moment and in the same degree increases man’s capacity for cruel destruction of his fellows and the pollution of our earthly habitat.

No, the human race is not automatically related to the future with hope, and neither can we any longer accept the blasted doctrine of automatic progress. Is hope impossible then? Are we doomed to live in this third dimension-our future — with anxiety and fear and apprehension?

No, we can have hope, but only in Jesus Christ. For Christ is the lord of history. The future is in his keeping. And the Christian lives in this third dimension as he contemplates the future with a radiant hope only because of and through his relationship with Christ.

Very often when people despair of life and attempt suicide, they will give as their reasons something like this: “I have nothing more to expect from life. This, which meant so much to me, is gone. That dear one has died. This person has failed me. My health is gone. I have nothing to live for.”

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist, says that the crucial thing for one in such a despairing state of mind toward his future is not so much to persuade him that he may yet expect something good from life as it is to help him see that life yet expects something of him. The rosy tinting of the future with hope is, therefore, not so much the expectation of good things yet to come for us, but rather the sense of responsibility that life expects, our Lord expects, specific things done for others that we ourselves can, by his grace, perform.

For one man who had attempted suicide, meaning to life and the will to live were restored when he realized that he was responsible for providing an education for a child he adored; for another man, when he was persuaded that life was expecting him to finish and publish his half-completed scientific studies.

“A person who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately depends upon him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life,” says Frankl  in From Concentration Camp to Existentialism.

So hope of salvation for the Christian means, not only soul salvation in the coming consummation of all things in Christ, but the future fulfillment of sacred duties and responsibilities to others in Christ. Future respon­sibilities, not just future rewards, are a part of our joyously tenacious relationship to this third dimension of our life in Christ.

An observant young man was impressed by the poignant sight of an old woman whom he saw slowly trudging homeward from the Memphis Public Library on McLean Avenue and carrying a book titled All Our Tomorrows. Tragic? No. Hopelessly, incurably optimistic? No. There is the symbol of every Christian man and woman, moving on into the sunset, down the avenues of time, stepping into the shadows and confidently smiling, hope­fully progressing, because our future is hidden with Christ in God. All our tomorrows are safely secure because that future is under the sway of him whom the Eternal has made King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And the Christian facing the future — any future — joins his voice in the mighty chorus of angels and archangels, martyrs and apostles who proclaim, “Hallelujah, hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, forever and ever. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Amen.”