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Of course, they are not inspired by the Spirit of God but by the spirit of our time. Their hopes and fears are their utopias and their nightmares. They do not preach from public squares or ecclesiastical pulpits. Their stage is the media, from newspapers and magazines to television and the World Wide Web. Sometimes they reflect a pretentious sort of intellectual moneymaking entertainment or high-brow showbiz, which have overtaken the role of the former revival preachers, especially for upper-class society.

We Christians of the new millennium do not need such modern, sensationalistic prophecies and messages. We have no need of their predictions of abundant well-being or of universal mischief, because we live with the promises of God. In the first pages of the Bible, in fact, we possess prophecies that help us understand our exciting but overbearing world—and thus point implicitly to God's promises for his church.

For a long time now, the building of the Tower of Babel has been compared with highflying technological progress; today this old story becomes more acute than ever: "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves'" (Gen. 11:4a). But God saw through their presumptuous plans: "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will now be impossible for them" (11:6).

Does this not sound rather similar to the programs of self-confident scholars who, looking upon our new millennium, proclaim their prophecies of hope? Some of them predict that humanity should, with the progress of science, recreate itself by breeding a superior species and become its own creator, overcoming fear and death, and gaining for the élite a much longer and happier life, perhaps even life everlasting. All possibilities seem to be open. Unbelievable dreams of science fiction can become reality. Babel seems to have become our cosmopolis, the terrestrial globe. The tower is then the program of a new human creation, in which human creators bring into being a better humanity and a better world more fitting for them.

The real background of these presumptuous dreams becomes visible again in the story of the seduction of Adam and Eve in Paradise: "'You will not surely die,' the serpent said to the woman. 'For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil'" (Gen. 3:4-5).

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June 11 2001, Vol. 45, No. 8