The Larger Hope: Where the Name Comes From

I've never told you where the name of this site comes from.

It's time I did, because the story behind it says more about why I do this than almost anything else I could write.

A boy behind the staircase

The philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart tells a story in the opening pages of his book That All Shall Be Saved about a friend's son. The boy was seven or eight years old at the time, recently diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome — bright, sensitive, the kind of child who feels the world more sharply than most of us do and has less natural armor against it.

One Sunday, a visiting priest mentioned the eternity of hell in his homily. Just mentioned it, the way it gets mentioned in a thousand sermons every week without anyone thinking twice. But this boy had never really absorbed that part of the tradition before. Now he had. And what followed was three days of panic, and then a long stretch of depression. He came to understand, for the first time, that the universe he lived in supposedly contained an eternal torture chamber, and that people he knew might end up there forever.

Nothing could calm him until his father finally convinced him that the priest had been repeating something untrue — a scare tactic, not a fact about God. That settled the boy's panic. It did not settle his trust. From then on, if his parents even suggested going to church, he would slip away into a narrow gap between the staircase railing and the wall, where they couldn't reach him. Eventually his parents stopped trying. They saw it from his side. They haven't been back to Mass since, except as silent guests at a wedding or two.

Hart's point in telling this story isn't that the boy overreacted because he was unusually fragile. His point is closer to the opposite: that the boy's reaction was actually the clearest-eyed response anyone in the story had. Most of us have simply built up enough callus, enough practiced not-thinking-about-it, to hold a doctrine like eternal conscious torment in our heads without our hands shaking. The boy hadn't built that callus yet. He just heard what was actually being claimed about God, and his whole body told him the truth: something here is deeply wrong.

I think about that boy often. I think about how many of us were that boy once, and then spent decades training ourselves not to feel what he felt.

A poet who couldn't let go of hope

Now I want to take you somewhere that seems unrelated, but isn't.

In 1850, the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson published In Memoriam A.H.H., a long elegy written over seventeen years for his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died suddenly at twenty-two. The poem is Tennyson wrestling, stanza by stanza, with grief, doubt, and the question of whether anything about the universe is actually trustworthy.

Near the end, Tennyson writes some of the most quietly haunting lines in English poetry. He doesn't claim certainty. He's a man stretching out "lame hands of faith" in the dark, gathering up whatever scraps of trust he can find. And what he finds, against everything his grief wants to tell him, is this:

Read that last line again. And faintly trust the larger hope.

That's it. That's where this site's name comes from.

Tennyson wasn't writing a theological treatise. He was a grieving man, not even fully sure of his own faith, reaching for the only thing that made the universe bearable: the trust — faint, unproven, but real — that not one life is finally thrown away. That nothing walks toward nowhere. That whatever God is doing with all this pain, the ending is good, and it reaches everyone.

That phrase caught on. Decades later, when the Reverend Thomas Allin wrote his landmark 1885 book making the historical and biblical case for universal restoration, he chose Tennyson's poem as the epigraph — the words you read before the argument even begins. The title of Allin's book was Christ Triumphant, but the phrase that stuck, the phrase that generations of hopeful Christians have used ever since to describe this whole conviction, came from a grieving poet's faintly trusted hope.

The Larger Hope.

Why I borrowed it

I didn't pick this name because it sounded nice. I picked it because it's honest about what this actually is.

I am not going to stand here and tell you I have this all figured out, that every hard text is fully resolved, that I've never had a 2 a.m. moment of doubt about whether I'm just building a more comfortable God because the uncomfortable one was too much to carry. I have had those moments. I still have them sometimes.

But like Tennyson, I find myself stretching out lame hands of faith and reaching for something that, when I look honestly at the character of God revealed in Jesus, seems more true than the alternative. Not a certainty I can hand you with no loose threads. A hope. A larger one than I was given as a young man. Faintly trusted, the way Tennyson trusted it — not because the evidence removes every doubt, but because the alternative requires believing something about God that I no longer think is true.

And here's the thing that connects Tennyson's poem all the way back to that boy behind the staircase: both of them are responding to the same wrongness. Tennyson couldn't make himself believe that any life gets thrown away as rubble. The boy couldn't make his body accept that the God he was being told about was actually loving. They were having the same reaction, a century and a half apart, from two completely different starting points — a grieving Victorian poet and a frightened American child.

When that many people, across that much time, have the same gut-level recoil from the same doctrine, I think it's worth taking seriously. Not because gut reactions settle theology by themselves. But because sometimes the conscience is picking up on something true before the mind has caught up to articulate it.

What I want this site to be

I don't want this site to be a place where doubt gets shamed or where hard questions get waved away with a verse and a smile. I want it to be a place where the boy behind the staircase could come, eventually, and find a version of God he wouldn't need to hide from.

I want it to be a place where you can stretch out lame hands of faith, the way Tennyson did, and not be told that's not enough — because faintly trusting a larger hope is still trust. It's still faith. It might, in fact, be the most honest kind there is.

That's the name. That's where it comes from. And that's still, all these months into this project, exactly what I'm trying to build here with you.