Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection, Tim Keller, 2021

Faith is a mixture of reason and experience, involving the rational and the existential, the theological and the practical. Only in the cross is divinity and humanity reconciled. With the church there will always be attrition and retention. 

• What is the difference between relative hope in human agency and infallible hope in God? 210-211.
• Christian hope means I stop betting my life and happiness on human agency and rest in God alone.
• If you know--and keep remembering--that resurrection happened and is coming, you won't ever be in utter darkness. 215-216. Epilogue (Ps 118:22-23).
• Darkness can happen to a believer (Ps 88:18), but it doesn't mean you're lost. It can happen at any time as long as this world lasts; only in the next will such things be done away with. It can happen without you knowing why. But there are answers, there is a purpose, and eventually you will know.
• On the cross, darkness was Jesus' only friend. On the cross, he paid for your sins so you know that in your darkness God is still there as your friend.

Christian hope is reasonable, full, realistic and effective. 206-211. Ch. 12 Hope for the Future.

1. Reasonable. Is there any alternative explanation for the eyewitness accounts (1 Cor 15:6)? N.T. Wright.
2. Full. Christian hope is the fullest hope possible. Every tear wiped (Rev 21:4), the wolf will lie down with the lamb (Isa 11:6), this world will be mended, made new, liberated from bondage to death and decay (Rom 8:18-23).
3. Realistic. Cf. Hegel's philosophy: Every age was better than the one before and history was moving upward. But this is not how God works, and not how human life works. Yes, history is moving toward a wonderful destiny, but not in a series of successively better and better eras, going from strength to strength. But it is often through hardship and difficulty that we grow (Ac 14:22), that we finally see truths about ourselves and become all that we should be. The secular idea of progress is naive and unrealistic. Only Christianity gives us a non-cyclical but realistic way to see history.
4. Effective. Christian hope works at the life level, the practical level. Human hope is always relative and uncertain, hoping, wishing anxiously that things will turn out well for you. But when the object of hope is not any human agent but God, the hope means confidence, courage, certainty and full assurance (Heb 11:1; Ps 125:1; Isa 40:31). Real courage comes from self-forgetfulness based on joy, and from a deep conviction that we are trapped temporarily in a little corner of darkness, but that God's universe is an enormous place of light and beauty, which is our certain final destiny. "...weeping may stay for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning" (Ps 30:5). With this assurance abiding "in the eyes of our heart" (Eph 1:18), our immediate fate--how the current situation turns out--can no longer trouble us. Defiance comes from looking at ourselves, but hope comes from looking at God.

Optimists look at troubles as temporary anomalies. Pessimists see the world as a bleak place. 181. The Great Reversal prevents us from wrecking our ship either on naive optimism or on hopeless pessimism. 133.

Ch. 11 Hope in the Face of Suffering. 

• The kingdom of God is marked by weakness, deprivation, loss and exclusion. In the life of God's people will be seen 1st of all a remarkable reversal of values. (Lk 6:20-26). They will prize what the world calls pitiable, and suspect what the world thinks desirable. 173-174.
• The way Jesus saved the world [the Great Reversal] and changed your life, and now becomes our way of seeing and living. So for Christians, they way:
• up is down,
• to true power is to give up power in order to serve [cf, to hold on to power to be in control],
• to true riches is to be radically generous with all you have, and
• to lasting happiness is not to seek your own happiness so much as the happiness of others. 178.
• Theresa of Avila's well known quote: "From heaven even the most miserable life will look like one night in an inconvenient hotel." 177.

Ch. 10 Hope for Justice (2 Pet 3:13). 155.

Ch 9 Hope for Relationships (Lk 14:13-14). 133.

Secular conservatism fights for the liberation of the individual from state power, while progressivism fights for the liberation of oppressed groups through state power. 132. Ch. 8 Hope in Times of Fear

• The Great Reversal, the deep pattern of God's salvation, is how God saves through the death of rejection, weakness and sacrifice, and yet through this death he raises us up, rescuing us from our sins and making us into something great. 131.
• The Great Reversal helps us see obedience to moral rules in a gospel light, not as a means to save ourselves [or to get what we want], but as a way to imitate, delight, and resemble the one who saved us through his death and resurrection.
• Every act of obedience to God is a "death" followed by a resurrection. Every time we obey God we give up the right to self-determination and die to control over our own life. Whenever 2 wills cross, we are given a chance to say no to self and yes to God. Thus. "somebody has to die." But "we die in order to live." [Elizabeth Elliot.]