Many work for peace, justice, and love. Karen asked if Christian faith offered optimism that is worth the time and effort. I think she was expressing the frustration a lot of us are experiencing. We felt we were overcoming our past shortcomings. We had elected a Black American president. We had a viable woman candidate […]
The third major biblical vision of the future is the promise of love. Let’s use Martin Luther King’s teachings to examine it. He specifically relates hope to the modern situation in the USA. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, the vision is the Beloved Community. He begins by describing it as “I have a […]
A second vision of the future prevalent throughout the Bible is God’s promise of justice. It’s important to understand we are talking about justice not law. Ours is a society of law that tries to provide fairness and equality in resolving conflicts between individual people and groups. The justice vision promises a caring community that […]
Most of the Bible was written to people who did not seem to have a future. Faith in God offered hope against hope (Romans 4:18). That faith was informed by stories that often included promises about the future in which peace, justice, and love prevailed. These promises offered encouragement for pursuing those visions in the […]
What seems to be the initial biblical scenario did not work out. Jesus did not raise the dead and then return with them to establish an eternal kingdom on earth. At first, believers were told to wait patiently. Some still do. However, most modified this vision of the future. Believers supposedly enter some kind of […]
There are a number of scenarios for the future in the Bible. Sadly, popular Evangelicalism has promoted those that do not offer much hope for 21st century believers. For instance, the Risen Jesus returning on a cloud assumes an ancient cosmology in which God resides in a heaven above and comes down to earth to […]
I was not sure where to go from here. I began with Karen’s question of whether faith offered a healthy optimism about positive change in society. After looking at how this was asked throughout the Bible, I elected to reduce it to whether there is even a future considering the violence of society. My first […]
Let’s examine how the question about the future is handled in the Christmas story. Matthew and Luke ask how there can be a child in the future if there is no sexual relationship. How can there be a future if the imperial empire forces a woman to travel in the final stages of pregnancy? How […]
The goal was to find some help from Christianity in answering the question, “Is there a future in light of the present world situation?” The first thing that struck me was that the fatalism many of us fight is derived from what is happening around us. How can you be optimistic, considering what is happening? […]
Karen echoes what I hear from many friends when she writes, “Maybe we need to explore healthy optimism as a positive result of faith. I feel overwhelmed by the events of day-to-day living that make it feel like there is little likelihood of positive change coming. It is often hard to keep showing up and […]
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