Romans 8:24

f. This sentence explains why Paul can speak of Christians as waiting for adoption, while they are nevertheless in the enjoyment of sonship. It is because salvation is essentially related to the future. “We wait for it: for we were saved in hope.” The dat τῇ ἐλπίδι is that of mode or respect. Our salvation was qualified from the beginning by reference to a good yet to be. Weiss argues that the sense of ἐλπὶς in the second clause (res sperata) makes it “absolutely necessary” to take it so in the first, and that this leaves no alternative but to make τῇ ἐλπίδι dat comm and translate: “for, for this object of hope eternal life and glory were we delivered from eternal destruction”. But the “absolute necessity” is imaginary; a word with the nuances of ἐλπίς in a mind with the speed of Paul's need not be treated so rigorously, especially as the resulting construction is in itself extremely dubious. Hope, the Apostle argues, is an essential characteristic of our salvation; but hope turned sight is hope no more, for who hopes for what he sees? We do not see all the Gospel held out to us, but it is the object of our Christian hope nevertheless; it is as true and sure as the love of God which in Christ Jesus reconciled us to Himself and gave us the spirit of adoption, and therefore we wait for it in patience. For διὰ cf. Romans 2:27. ὑπομονὴ : in 1 Thessalonians 1:3 we have ἡ ὑπομονὴ τῆς ἐλπίδος ὑμῶν used of a suffering but steadfast Church: ὑπομονὴ is the constancy which belongs to and characterises hope in dark days. In the pastoral epistles (1 Timothy 6:10; Titus 2:2) instead of the πίστις, ἀγάπη, ἐλπίς, of earlier letters, Paul writes πίστις, ἀγάπη, ὑπομονή, as if he had discovered by experience that in this life “hope” has mainly to be shown in the form of “patience”.