The Bible is a collection of writings documenting man's search for God and for responses from the biblical God, who throughout recorded life has resisted communicating with humanity, as though history is a long game of endurance. If this is true, then the lesson to humanity is that it must endure, we must all endure : thus so is Hope defined.
Christianity is wrong if it seeks to assert that its scriptural writers, and the stories they tell, are privileged over all others' quests for God. Christianity has a critical truth to convey, albeit not the specific truths, through the specific stories, chosen and insisted upon by the church : that men can have a part of the divinity they seek. Jesus is God in the same way that righteous men throughout history, and now, are God. Maybe the concept of life lived in harmony with the principles announced by Jesus IS God.
Faith that a life lived righteously is its own reward; such is the meaning of salvation. Endurance of this faith, through endurance of life, requires but also provides the hope that through the lives we live in the way we live them we will learn, know, some of the joy which comes with realizing, and accepting, that our lives contribute to the body of goodness and beauty in life - natural and human righteousness - that is God.
