Brad Fregger: You know, these symposiums were developed for one reason, we had a very strong feeling that religion and science were really a lot closer together in our society than a lot of people realized. We felt that it was important to say that religion and science are not at odds with each other, they are really going down the same path. I was quoted in the newspaper as having said, “Religion and Science are related – both searching for the truth.” Tom Gates should have gotten credit for that quote because he’s the one that said it first. Religion and science are both searching for the truth, and today they are both moving in the same direction. They both can help each other to develop a better world. Well, the next speaker probably typifies the way this is put together better than anybody else that I know. Dr. Ed Lindaman was the original match that lit this particular firecracker, and those of you who know me will,hopefull, accept that analogy. He was with the Apollo project originally. He is in education as an administrator. He is deeply involved with futures as you can tell by reading the brochures. He is the president of Whitworth College, which is a Presbyterian college, and is doing many things up there relating to the future. He is also a very religious layman and a strong layman in the Presbyterian Church. Dr. Ed Lindman. Dr. Edward B. Lindaman
The subject that has been assigned, or what I agreed to talk on is, “The Christian Perspective in Futures’ Planning.” I have thought a lot about that subject, the relationship between, say, the Christian view of the world and how we move into the future. But I have to admit I’ve never really spoken specifically to that subject. And that’s what I want to do this morning, because I think there is a relationship, and since we have come out of over the last couple of thousand years a movement of civilization, western civilization that is predicated upon the concepts which we broadly define as Christian. Then I think we do have to take the time to relate that to futures’ planning. My hope would be there would be four or five other speakers, maybe one on the Muslim view or perspective for future planning or the Hindu perspective, for there are different kinds of views. I will give more of the Christian perspective because I believe it is the one which most dramatically affects the way we look at the future, and I will be very specific and really lay it out as I see it – not to impose it upon you, but simply to say “this I believe would be one way of saying that.” Fred Polak in his “The Image of the future”1 says that for the Christian there can be no discussion of a future in which there might be no Christianity. Christianity, by definition, is enduring. It is possible, he says, for the Christian to recognize that the outer forms of worship and ritual, and even possibly some dogmas, might conceivably change but never the essence of the faith which has eternal validity. Thus, when the professing Christian person applies his or her “Christian perspective” to the future, he or she is coming at it with a built-in bias. This is a powerful bias and therefore deserves our conscious inquiry and reflection. So that we can all begin at a common point it is useful to define our terms. Just what do we mean by Christian perspective? (This phrase is expanded to include Christian hope.) Christian hope has its origin in the event of the resurrection of the crucified Christ. That is, the cross reveals, even though metaphorically, what is truly evil in the world, the unredeemed condition of the world and God’s power to overcome it. For the believing Christian, then, the “saving future of God appears over this misery in the resurrection of Jesus. In this event hope is always kindled anew.”3 In more classical or traditional religious language we would say in Him (that is, the man, Christ, who lived, died, and rose again) the future of righteousness and the passing of evil can be hoped for. Or put another way, the resurrection “says” that humanity is possible. Over the centuries, for billions of believing Christians, this new possibility is what the cross has meant to them. The believer “sees” in the event that “the future of life and the passing of death can be hoped for.”3 As Heschel2 once put it, “God is not an echo.” In Him “the coming of freedom and the passing of humiliation can be hoped for.” In Him “the future of humankind’s true humanity (love, acceptance, compassion) and the passing of inhumanity, can be hoped for.”3 In short, then, the “Christian perspective,” or hope as I have chosen to call it, is that “through the history of Christ and the promises of the gospel, God reveals his future to persons and has thereby granted them freedom, which is what they seek. It says that “through the resurrection event, and thus through hope aroused, the future of God exerts an influence in the present and makes the present historical.”4 As a result, it is historically accurate to say that the Christian believer through the centuries has sponsored the revolutionary process of social change that moved us into a future of special sorts, by preaching a message that sets things in motion by stirring up the imagination, arousing new expectations, stimulating a crusading zeal to translate these hopes into the social structures of the world.5 The simple fact of preaching, setting forth the “Christian perspective” as an option of faith, is like putting sticks of dynamite into the social structures. The church, as a body of believers, in a real sense, can be held responsible for planting many charges of dynamite into useful and accepted social structures that at the time it had no desire to explode.5 L. Kolakowski attempts to broaden our concept of what seems to be impossible in Christian goals, hope, and perspectives when he says, “The faithful seem always to have goals (perceptions of the future) which at the moment are impossible to achieve but which give meaning to the present transformation.” He goes on to say, “What is now impossible can only become possible at all, when it is announced at a time in which it is still held to be impossible.”4 Toynbee5 names four possible ways of thinking and feeling about life and time:
Certainly the futurist is involved in thinking about the “rebirth of the world” and, therefore, to ignore the Christian perspective is to ignore a basic. Over the centuries there has been a continuous shift in our understanding of how God acted in history. God, the hope of religious persons, had, in the past, tended to function as a refuge, especially in those secular spheres in which people had not yet achieved a firm hold on the world. What people did not know or understand was, somehow, God. Lightning was “an act of God.” God served to explain the unexplainable. God the “Wholly Other” served as a substitute for the powers which people lacked. In the latter part of the 20th century, however, things are a bit different for most believers. Most believers no longer appeal to God (in their hopes) to make up for their impotence to change natural phenomenon. Science explains such matters as lightning. This brings about a radical change with respect to the basis of the Christians’ hope. The God whom we formerly, in the light of an earlier view of man and the world, saw as the “Wholly Other” now manifest himself as the “Wholly New”6; the One who is our future, who creates the future of mankind anew. Creation is not complete yet! And we can participate. “Man is hard of inner hearing, but he has sharp, avid eyes. The power he unlocks surpasses the power that is dazzling him.”2 He, instead of a refuge for our weakness (though, of course, this is still an attribute), shows Himself as the God who gives us, in Jesus Christ, the possibility of making the future, that is, of making everything new and transcending past inadequacies. To put it into the context of the Old Testament image, we would say that the God of the promise again gives us the task of setting out towards the Promised Land. This time the one we envision and begin planning for is a land that we ourselves, trusting in the promise, must reclaim and cultivate as Israel did in the past. The believer not only interprets history, but above all, he changes it, because he believes, because he hopes. Human freedom is the pivot of the historical event. Via human freedom, grace (the unmerited inflowing of power from God) is able to change history itself.9 Freedom means being able to participate in the creation of our own future.7 And being able to participate in the creation of our own future means being able to decide. If we cannot decide we cannot be free. But how do we decide? We decide best when we are “in community,” when we are with others of a shared purpose, and when the sense of community supports our hesitant steps into a planned/hoped for future. And where does this community exist? The Christian says it exists in the Body of Christ—the church. Koinonia is the Old Testament word that describes the prevailing spirit in a community of believers that empowers them to take a stand, to move out, and to care boldly. So we come again to the hope that supports the community, which in turn frees the believer to act—and thus to “make” the future. In the act of searching out the future, which is the preoccupation of both the futurist and the Christian, one steps across the boundary of the known into the unknown. When one is in the present, one can act. When one is in the future, one can only contemplate. When we are contemplating the future, we do so with a set of glasses—a myth—that focuses what we are enabled to see. As the Christian futurist contemplates the future—i.e., decides what he sees out there—he does so with built-in bias. Christ is there. And that shades things dramatically. In other words, if this Jesus of Nazareth really is the Christ, then the perspective of the future is under and entirely different influence than if He isn’t the Christ. Kenneth Cauthen8 suggests that the times now call on the Christian to concentrate less on remembering in faith what God has done in Christ in reconciling the world to himself and more on anticipating in hope what God will do through the Spirit to bring person to the joy of the promised kingdom. It may be more important at this moment, he says, to discern the intention of the Spirit than to declare the incarnation of the Son. What we have said, then is:
The gift of commitment to the future is a true manifestation of God in the present. As the faith perspective moves the Christian out in to the future, something happens. Kierkegaard sums it all up perfectly: “Not until one is finished with the future can he be entirely and undividedly in the present. But only by conquering it, is one finished with the future. And faith (and in the context of this paper, this means the Christian hope, or Christian perspective) does exactly this, for its expectation is victory.” REFERENCES
EDWARD B. LINDAMAN Edward B. Lindaman is the President of Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington 99251. Whitworth is a liberal arts coeducational institution which draws 1,200 students from 38 states and eleven foreign countries. The college was founded by the Presbyterian Church and continues to have a strong Christian theme in its program. Lindaman was formerly director of planning for the Apollo Spacecraft Project and more recently chairman of Washington State’s futures program, Alternatives for Washington 1985, instituted by Governor Evans in 1974. Lindaman serves on an important congressional advisory panel having to do with the decision-making process for federal research and development funding. He has lectured widely in the United States and Asia. As an official delegate to the World Council of Churches in Uppsala, Sweden in 1969, Lindaman represented the United Presbyterian Church. He has been chairman of the General Council of the Los Angeles Presbytery and president of the National Council of Presbyterian Men. |
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