IS THE FUTURE OURS?

It is proper, we may suppose, for man to be conscious of the morrow. He seems to be thinking more about the future these days than at anytime in his history. It is partly a concern for survival and security, for there are such weighty issues as pollution and over-population. But there is much more. As never before man is in search for meaning. He hopes that the future will in some way provide that sense of direction that has escaped our generation.

An illustration of this concern was a recent conference conducted by Crozier Theological Seminary on Religion and the Future, which was staffed by notables from several of the major areas of our culture. Those who attended the conference came away saying that they could never return to life as usual, that it was “a mind-blowing experience,” and that they “suffered from information overload:” This was because the forecasts, trends, and ideas about tomorrow were so momentous. With the new information at hand about what the future might bring they felt they were standing on the threshold of a new world.

Harvey Cox of Harvard was there, and he talked about creating model utopian communities as a basis for creating world community. It was suggested that the next few decades will be revolutionary, for technology will usher in such sweeping changes that the lives of us all will be drastically altered. Julian Bond, the Negro legislator of Georgia, observed that there is no need to talk about world communities if we can’t get the pollution and racial problems solved. Charles Williams, head of the World Future Society and one who might properly be called a “futurist”, expressed the view that we have no more than 15 years to decide whether we move creatively into a new world or whether we continue to gravitate into some kind of catastrophe.

The futurists seemed to agree that the character of tomorrow’s world depends a great deal on the quality of today’s values. They have no doubt but what technology will produce an environment for us far beyond anything we can now imagine, and that if we can keep our values straight we can move toward “the abundant life” for all peoples of the earth. John Calhoun, ecologist of the National Institute of Mental Health, expressed hope that “the compassionate revolution” is on the horizon, which will bring such philanthropy and goodwill as to stagger the imagination. It is something like a description of the millennium.

What a challenge this is for the Christian! Let us all resolve to usher in a revolution that the world has not yet witnessed—the compassionate revolution. Arthur Scopenhauer, the pessimistic philosopher who saw the whole life as fierce struggle, recognized compassion as the greatest of the virtues and as the answer to his own pessimism. There is no adjective that better describes our Lord than compassionate, but there is no likeness of Him that is so opposed to the temper of our culture. Ours is an insensitive age. War, crime, violence, tragedy. suffering and injustice are so commonplace that we are complacent in the presence of them.

A future without compassion is indeed a bitter contemplation. Some of us have the opportunity to reflect the tenderness of Jesus in the classrooms of the nation. Others in the ghettoes, factories, offices. And some even in the halls of congress and the conference tables. The future is ours if we enter it in “the meekness and gentleness of Christ.”

All the voices at the conference were not in this direction. Some, like the prophets of Israel, predicted an early demise of our affluent society and the fall of our nation. The world is in such throes that it has no way to recover. The future gives us no greater opportunity than to make the best of a lost cause and to pick up what pieces we can.

Such gloomy forecasts are realistic if we choose to be a nation that forgets God, and if our churches elect to place their own institutional well-being above individual need. The future can be ours only as the present can be ours. It must be directed, not by men to whom God is dead, but by God-intoxicated men. Like Jesus has done for us, so we must do for the future: give ourselves so that the world may have life and have it abundantly.

The most insidious notion set forth by the futurists, however, was the humanistic idea that it must be man’s ingenuity that builds a better tomorrow. Technology and science will save us from destruction. Man is to be the creator of a new age. Even now he is “building the first public stairway to the stars.” Shades of Babel!

We must remind ourselves that sin will be as real in the future as now, and that the carnality in man will not diminish with time. The grace of God. and it alone, can bear us along into the future. It is God that presides over history, and man can “make history” only to the extent that he yields to the will of God in his life.

The future can be ours if we strive to make it God’s. We can be creators of a new age if we become fellow-workers with God, junior architects under the command of the Master Builder.—the Editor