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Futures-Human and Divine
By Ted Peters
Atlanta, John Knox Press, 1978 190 pp. $10.95.

Secular writers have written volumes of information about future probabilities and both social and scientific futurists have painted a wide variety of alternative scenarios of future events. Similarly Christians, through the ages, have written volumes about the future aspects of the gospel, about the coming Kingdom of God, and about future times. What is rare is for these two perspectives to be dealt with at the same time, in the same book. Ted Peters, Associate Professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, does this in Futures-Human and Divine.

There is no scarcity of forecasts about what kind of future the human race on planet earth is facing, but amid all these projections the question is which future do we want? and who is to decide? Should the vision of the secular futurists prevail? Or should the conceptions of Christian futurists prevail? It is not either/or, says Peters; the future is both human and divine.

With the year 2000 now within the span of our imagination, millennialist perspectives abound. They all seem to agree on one point we must make radical changes in the values that shape the economic and social systems of the western world What is the current value that seems to be causing all the problems? Futurists reply "selfishness. " And what are the values we must embrace in the future if we are to preserve the ecosphere and sociosphere for our grandchildren? The futurists answer again humanity over machines, nature in its own right,

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community over individual desires, and interdependence over independence.

Peters argues that the futures being described or advanced by the secular world are more than simply social science but are religious concerns! They may sound radical, but they are not at all new, certainly not to the Christian view of human nature. Peters' purpose is to show that future consciousness (regardless of who is practicing it) is an intensely religious phenomenon because it has to do with ultimate values.

In establishing the foundation of his thesis, he analyzes the nature of current consciousness about the future. It contains, he writes, elements of dissatisfaction with the present, combined with a hope for the new. There is also a feeling that the power of change itself seems to be beyond human control. In modern future consciousness there is a strong sense of the ultimate destiny of all humanity. These elements are ultimate, therefore religious. The concern for the survival of the human race is not a penultimate but ultimate concern. When secular futurists project visions of the kind of utopia they desire in place of oblivion, they sound very much like those who project the Christian vision of the Kingdom of God.

To compare and ultimately to interrelate human futures with divine futures, Peters uses pairs of words futurum and adventus, becoming and coming, futurology and eschatology. The futurum side of the equation is extrapolation The future tends to be "the past written large." The future of an acorn is an oak. Trends are indicative of what will happen. There is a sense of inevitability. Taking his cue from Moltmann, Peters writes that the Christian view is not only futurum, but differs in that it is also adventus. The future is open to new things yet to be created by God; this promise binds people to the future because it gives them a sense of history, and this history does not consist only of cyclic recurrence. It has a definite trajectory towards what has been promised by God. Because of the promise of a new reality to come (a glimpse of which we see in Jesus Christ), our evaluation of the present cannot, and should not, rest only on the old means of measurement. "If God's fulfillment lies in the future, then the value of the present is gauged by its relationship to that future." The future is not just becoming (from the past), it is also coming (from the future). Futurology does not account for the possibilities of God, only the possibilities of persons. Eschatology, on the other hand, looks to what God can do in and through history.

In a way secular futurists have "stolen" custody of the ultimate questions, and Christians are remaining silent about them. Futures-Human and Divine is for those persons who have not yet learned that Christians were born to "think in the future tense!" Being "future thinkers" is a dangerous occupation because people cannot deal with the future without first deciding what kind of future they prefer. This preference, when articulated or lived, then becomes a vision, an

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image, for all to see and/or to follow. Selecting futures is a tough choice in the midst of our complex society. It requires being informed on many subjects ranging from economics to technology from energy to space applications from genetics to world hunger.

Futurist literature is almost devoid of the Christian perspective. It is almost as though Christians are afraid to deal with the tension in the radical polarity between "what is" and the vision of the Kingdom of God revealed in Jesus Christ. This book may well be the beginning of a trend that will bring together the secular future with the power of the Christian future. I believe the secular futurist is ready for this dialogue Christian eschatology should enable us to plan with the tools of futurum, a technical understanding of current trends and events and where they might lead, but at the same time let our eschatology commit us to adventus--the open-endedness of God. The present, says the Christian, is preliminary compared to the possibilities of God in a future both divine and human.

Edward B. Lindaman
Whitworth College
Spokane, Washington