Prophetic Hope in an Age of False Promises for "Eternal" Life
Andrea Thornton, Bon Secours Mercy Health

Modern medicine is full of promise that new interventions and research will end disease and prevent death indefinitely. Societal hopes are placed in surveillance technology and the rigorous bureaucracies that maintain “quality” and “safety” but fail to make space for hope-filled dying. What is a Christian to hope for when diagnosed with a terminal illness? Is it better to pursue healing or to embrace death in hope of resurrection? Fostering hope has long been seen as the work of a chaplain, but the normative dimension of hope is underexamined in the competencies for professional chaplains or the foundational theories that inform spiritual care praxis. To address that gap, this paper offers a taxonomy of Christian hope for clinical decision making when death seems inevitable. It examines four views of hope that arise within Christianity, the orthodox view (as explained by Aquinas), and three developments in modernity: Existentialist Hope, Prosperity Hope, and Liberationist Hope. Each modern view will be explicated as developments in Christian theology that attempt to extend or adapt orthodoxy to contemporary values and problems. Then each will be applied to the context of medicine and terminal illness to show how clinical decisions can be expressions of Christian hope that depart from or align with orthodoxy. Finally, I propose that part of a chaplain’s prophetic calling within health care is to assess hope as it applies to goals of care and gently redirect hope in temporal goods toward eschatological hope and humans’ pursuit of our ultimate telos.