Can progressive theologians talk about God’s Future?
By Tripp Fuller • Jan 28th, 2010 • Category: thinkingKarl Barth, the most influential theologian of the 20th century, said that all Christian theology is eschatology. The Apostle Paul is pretty serious, though flexible, about God’s future for the world. Jesus had a hard time NOT talking about the present-yet-coming Kin-dom of God. SO what happens when I asked some of the top progressive theologians ‘what does God’s future mean for our present?’
Here are Tony Jones, Harvey Cox, Dwight Hopkins, Glen Stassen, Donna Bowman, Delwin Brown, and Douglas Meeks
Tripp Fuller is married to an awesome lady Alecia and has a handsome little baby boy named Elgin Thomas (aka E.T.) and Pebbles, the Schnoodle. He and Alecia are both graduates of Campbell University (where they met), the Divinity School of Wake Forest University and ordained ministers. He is working on his PhD in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University. A few other things he digs are books, cigars, pipes, Shaq, guitar, pirates, fishing, the Counting Crows, and good conversations about Religion and Politics. The podcast is the most time consuming hobby he has ever had besides reading and blogging through Wolfhart Pannenberg's 3 volume systematic theology. Follow Tripp on Twitter | Tripp on Facebook
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Great question, Tripp! I loved the way you worded the question, but I found it odd that they didn’t really answer it well. Instead they focused heavily on the word “future” rather than “present”. Your question was clearly about what it “means for the present”.
I was really floored by how weak these answers were, considering they came from some people that I really admire. Here a couple of observations.
1) In General, they mostly misdirected the question toward some vague ontological ideas about time and questions of divine interaction versus human actions in the future. They didn’t really mention THE PRESENT ACTIONS we need to take. You and Dr. Clayton should add these as more examples why theology is falling out of public discourse and thriving only in the ivory towers of academia. These answers don’t preach.
2) Nobody talked about the nature of prophetic words as a CRITIQUE OF THE PRESENT rather than predictions about the future. How’d these theological geniuses miss that?
3) The more I hear theists (people who uses exclusively anthropomorphic language and images of God) try to flounder with questions like this, the more I want to be a non-theist. The anthropomorphic language seems more and more bizarre to me. The intellectual hoops continue and the hole gets deeper. Am I the only one that has this problem?
4) There is no mention about the possibility of God’s future NOT happening. This is the BIGGEST mistake of modern Christianity. Without the possibility of it not happening, we won’t do a darn thing about making it happen. Until Christianity becomes skeptical of the probability of the kingdom of God, that kingdom will always be “yet to come”. Tony was right that “God’s future” should be the thing that gets us out of bed in the morning. However, what might actually motivate us, is the possibility that the story might not actually happen. We do the story a disservice when we speak as if it is inevitable.
i’m with cox here… with a twist.
this is where that long group paper on the kingdom of god is helpful, and without reference to which, our talk about god’s future is kind of meaningless. for god, the future literally is now. from our frame of reference god’s present is a future and a past. confusing. which is why in the NT the kingdom of god is always referred to in the future perfect. “the kingdom of god is being revealed.” so the future of god must be tied to the progressive revelation we experience of god’s eternal kingdom for which jesus is something of a “hinge” if you will that gives us a special insight as to what a “citizen” of this kingdom might look like. his very being was also a future perfect being as both incarnate and eternal. so god’s future is the very being of the hypostatic union.
also, the idea that heat death is going to happen has yet to deal with the entropy gap. this is that the total possible entropy of the bounded universe increases faster than the rate of entropy at any given time. before this happens, long before, if it does, humanity will cease to exist. bad to base theological assertions on scientific misunderstanding.
peace out.
so… all of this is to say means that god’s future is revealed in the being of christ as the incarnate eternal one who revealed the kingdom to us in a special way by virtue of who he is, and was.
oh, that long paper on the kingdom of god was something i wrote with group in college… pronoun fail.
What God intends is our hope for the Future, God’s vision. The comments made by each individual were very thought provoking for me. I disagree with Mike L. when he says they did not really address your question of how it affects us now, in the present. I heard several of them speak to the NOW and how we are living and how our resources and energy is being used up. How our living in community now affects our future. The present and future is somehow intermingled and is an ongoing process. For me if I have a vision of things being better in the future where we will be in relationship and community with more harmony, peace and love, that tells me I have got to be part of that now, working with God to make certain that it comes into being. I do not agree that we must consider the fact that it might not come into being and thinking that way is going to make it happen. This is too negative. I know I am going to work much harder now to be part of that future that God envisions by knowing that God will ultimately bring this into being in God’s time and with us as God’s partners.