Future Shock & Christian Hope

RICHARD LOVELACERichard Lovelace is professor of church history at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and the author of Dynamics of Spiritual Life (IVP, 1979). This article was adapted, with permission, from Lovelace’s Renewal newsletter.

A respected church historian looks at the unsettling ferment of the near future and, rather than doomsday, sees exciting possibilities for religious renewal.

What lies ahead for human-kind? Every three years I teach, at my seminary, a course on “Christianity and the Future.” A decade of reading in futurology had taught me that futurologists hardly agree on what will happen to our planet and people. But there are several recurring themes, and those themes have important implications for the prospect of religious renewal.

The Future Seen Darkly

It is no accident that the scenarios of futurologists moved from humanistic optimism to soul-searching pessimism around the time of the Arab oil embargo in 1973. It was one year before the embargo that the Club of Rome (an elite international organization of economists and scientists) published its sobering The Limits of Growth.

The thrust of the report is that we are running out of everything, except perhaps people. Food prices are already rising because of the decreasing amount of arable land. Nonrenewable resources will be exhausted within 100 years. We could ration these and still continue to industrialize, but the energy use necessary for this would cause heat pollution, which might trigger climatic disasters Continued population growth points toward the scenario British economist Thomas Malthus predicted in the nineteenth century, with famines, plagues, or wars reducing the surplus of people.

At best—with perfect birth control, increased land yields, and recycled resources—industrial growth as we know it can only continue a little longer, “followed by collapse.” According to the Club of Rome, what we need to bail us out is a moral change in human nature, not more technological innovations.

True to this ethical approach, the Club of Rome recommended some heroic belt tightening. It urged zero population growth and massive reductions in the use of resources. Capital was to be concentrated on food production and distribution, and consumerism discouraged.

What was recommended would be like hanging a hard left turn while traveling 80 miles per hour. Yet the Club of Rome concluded that there is no necessity for this shift to stifle freedom or innovation. Religion, art, culture, and even some areas of technology could continue to grow. It is true that we must accept some tradeoffs in areas like material well-being and loss of freedom to determine family size. Other observers, however, have concluded that the force necessary to get the car to turn that corner may drastically alter our freedoms.

Heilbroner: Driven To Religion?

One such observer is Robert Heilbroner, an economist and historian who used to be a liberal optimist. In 1974, however, Heilbroner published An Enquiry into the Human Prospect, which was darkly pessimistic. Capitalism does not lead us back to the Garden; it just gives us more leisure for despair. Socialism is only a technological twin, equally based on addiction to unchecked, undirected cancerous growth. But since a controlled socialism is a little less dangerous than an uncontrolled capitalism, he says, we must abandon free enterprise—and perhaps also its attendant liberties, such as freedom of thought. The problem that liberals must face, says Heilbroner, is that there do not seem to be resources within human nature to make this shift. It is almost enough, he says, to drive us back to religion.

Technological Optimism

There are still some futurologists who are technological optimists. The most notable of these is probably inventor and author R. Buckminster Fuller. His optimism is based on a denial of the Second Law of Thermodynamics or entropy. That law teaches that everything in the universe is running down like an unwinding piece of clockwork. Fuller believes that life and knowledge are anti-entro-pic, and that humanity will survive by what he calls “ephemeralization”—doing more and more with less and less, as with printed circuits.

Fuller and the other futurologists we have mentioned thus far have been in agreement that we should move beyond industrial capitalism, with its addiction to material growth. From that we should move into a post industrial society based on moral, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual growth. Other futurologists, however, are apologists for what might be called postindustrial capitalism. Most formidable among these is Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute, a futurological think tank based in New York.

Toffler’S Projections

Another humanistic futurologist who seems equally realistic, and perhaps more ethically sensitive, is American social critic Alvin Toffler. His Future Shock, published in 1970, came before the limits-to-growth controversy, but already indicated that the movement into the future could be in many ways a “down trip.” His most recent book, The Third Wave, is a more complex but more positive book, an effort to analyze and describe the transition from industrial to postindustrial society. The first third of the book is devoted to an analysis of “the Second Wave”—the industrial urban society that developed in the West 200 years ago. It followed the First-Wave society, which was rural and agricultural. The great value of this section of the book is its clear light on the comprehensive way in which our life is structured and organized to serve—not the kingdom of God or the interests of the gospel—but the concerns and goals of industrial civilization.

Toffler believes the need for mobile family units discouraged the extended family and promoted nuclear families. All social institutions copied the mass-production techniques of the factory. The separation of production from consumption made us specialists extremely dependent on the market economy and on one another. Our lives had to become standardized, specialized, and synchronized, because these were qualities valued in the factory system. We became like the interchangeable parts of a machine, and politics and other parts of life began to resemble machines, Toffler writes. Industrial society promoted nationalism and patriotism over against loyalty to the world community. Whether it was capitalistic or communistic, it used undeveloped nations as pools of cheap labor and materials to feed its industries. The universe became a mechanical model of matter and causation which could be managed like a factory.

Options For Society

Some of Toffler’s insights smack of economic determinism, and others fail to allow for abiding human values in the industrial way of life. But they do jog us into realizing that the way society runs now, both in capitalistic and communistic countries, is not the only way it can run. And the rest of the book describes the postindustrial way of life which is now crashing against the old industrial wave like a crosscurrent in a tiderip, creating much of the present economic turbulence.

The actions of the OPEC oil cartel, for example, are simply an intelligent response to the fact that Second-Wave industries based on fossil fuels are on their way out. Countries that have been trading away their resources at an artificially low price must try to get a handle on First World living standards while they can. Third-Wave industries, on the other hand, are flourishing: electronics and computers, space industries, ocean farming and mining, and genetic engineering. Buckminster Fuller’s “ephemeralization,” doing more and more with less and less, really seems to be happening. As Computerworld magazine says, “If the auto industry had done what the computer industry has done in the last 30 years, a Rolls-Royce would cost $2.50 and get 2,000,000 miles to the gallon.”

Developments in electronics are turning this into the golden age of specialized communications. Now almost anyone can broadcast or publish not just what the majority wants to hear, but whatever any subcommunity values—such as the gospel. Tiny computers in cars and machines are beginning to guide us in preventive maintenance, and computer chips in cards will very soon handle all our financial transactions and do the family bills. (I’m waiting for that day. It is even possible that eventually your house might telephone you and request authorization for repairing its roof.)

Ethical Businesses

There are also agreeable possibilities for business life in the future. As is well known, our executives are studying Japanese business mores, which operate more productively by cooperation than by competition and “survival of the fittest.” And European firms are pioneering in flextime, the laid-back style that lets employees dictate their working hours.

Toffler describes other shifts that have larger implications. Conceptual paradigms are breaking down. Darwinism, for example, is undergoing destructive scrutiny within the scientific community, though biologists are at pains to hide this from creationists. The realization that “the survival of the fittest” is not eternal truth but a projection of Second-Wave industrial strategy into nature may affect the ethos of American business life. And the pillar of industrialism, the nationstate, is being superseded by a network of international linkages, the best known of which is the multinational corporation. We are seeing a simultaneous rebirth of local responsibility and a transcendence of national interests. According to Toffler, Christianity is simply the first of many networks aiming at “planetary consciousness.”

Toffler concludes—and I think most futurologists would agree—that, “The transition to the new diverse energy base will be erratic in the extreme, with a staccato succession of gluts, shortages, and lunatic price swings.” But the attainment of postindustrial technology will lead us in a quantum jump into a new age, the Age of Information. “For Third-Wave civilization,” Toffler thinks, “the most basic raw material of all—and one that can never be exhausted—is information, including imagination.”

Religious Implications

What are the religious corollaries of the shift to a postindustrial society? Perhaps the main implication that has been emering in the past few decades is something most Christains will welcome: the death of the Enlightenment, which was built on Isaac Newton’s mechanistic, materialistic version of the universe. The humane values this movement brought (its selling point against the Protestant awakening movement, which was its main opponent) will not be lost. Freedom of inquiry, the open market of ideas, cultural and artistic liberty, and humane technologies will remain. But these values have now been appropriated by Christianity (even by evangelicals), and the horrors produced by Enlightenment-based technocracy are extremely vulnerable to attack.

Futurologist Willis Harmon says that business and technical journals are hotbeds of ethical and theological speculation. Why? Because those who run our society have come to realize that without a primary concern for ethics, the transcendent, and even the supernatural, nothing works right in modern society. Harmon is not exclusively recommending Christianity, however. Some of the options he discusses involve spiritualism, parapsychology, and other forms of outright neo-paganism. As the end of the century approaches, the Bible—which seems to regard pagan religious counterfeits as the strongest and most deceptive enemy of true religion—may impress us anew with its relevance. Apparently we are headed for a bull market in religion after centuries of secularization. In such a market, Christians should find confidence in the fact that we have the strongest company!

The attack on the Enlightenment is also being pursued within the church. Survivors from the neo-orthodox movement against liberalism, which foundered in the 1960s through too many concessions to its enemies, are moving into alignment with evangelicals. This coalition is launching out against the dwindling liberal movement, which is also menaced by an awakening (or at least reacting) laity. The problem in mainline denominations is now not so much outright heresy produced by Enlightenment contamination, but orthodox language combined with sexual immorality or unrealistically radical politics. As we compare this antinomian “orthodoxy” with the legalistic “orthodoxy” of resurgent fundamentalism, we have to say again that the Bible, with its warnings against the problems in Corinth and Galatia, is a piercingly relevant Book. What I have learned in the struggle over homosexuality in the mainline church is that in periods of religious awakening, every subculture wants to bring its favorite sins and heresies into the church. Each subculture resists waking up fully and forsaking these.

The overall pattern in American Christianity is one of converging viewpoints, produced by the rapid dissemination of improved data—exactly what we might expect in the Age of Information. The evangelical subculture is gradually coming up with a theology of culture and social transformation grounded in the doctrine of the kingdom of God. It was diverted from the powerful kingdom consciousness of Jonathan Edwards’s theology by the dispensationalist heresy, and by allergy to the “social gospel.” But it is now getting back on track. Meanwhile the social activist side of the church, which inherited its kingdom concerns from Edwardsean evangelicalism, is being forced to take more interest in Christ who is the king—although outgoing liberals still mumble that the belief in Christ as the only savior is divisive and cannot unify a world full of Muslims and Hindus.

Social Crusades

What will be the major social crusades in the holistic evangelicalism of the postindustrial world? Amoral manipulation of human life is a major danger of the era of biological engineering. This new science can literally be used to turn the world into the Garden of Eden—or into the nightmare world of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The crusade against abortion is just one front of the war that must be waged against a naturalistic humanism that looks on humanity as an overcrowded cage of lab animals. It is likely that this war, which is just another phase of the attack on the Enlightenment, will continue to escalate.

Evangelicals and sympathetic mainline Christains may also increasingly join forces in attacking world hunger and other dimensions of social injustice. In New England, in the aftermath of a Billy Graham crusade, Pastor Gordon MacDonald is rallying leadership to attempt to fill the gap left by President Reagan’s cutbacks in social programs.

Falwell And Manners

Nineteenth-century evangelicals were also concerned about the “reformation of manners,” fighting decay in morals and mores, an area the Moral Majority has recently reopened. I continue to believe that Jerry Falwell’s activist fundamentalism is really a sort of southern neo-evangelical reform movement, which is not working to instigate censorship and fascism, but simply wants to restore the active evangelical social pressure against moral corruption. The “de-massification of the media” of which Toffler speaks—the availability of multiple competitive channels on television, for example—will free us from a strategy of repression. Instead, we can concentrate on positive Christian competition in drama, music, and art, and allow pornography to be brushed back under the rug where it can still be found by those who insist on it. Meanwhile, Third-Wave values may combine with evangelical teaching and the inevitable human backlash against socially destructive immorality to produce a new social climate favoring the family.

Remembering Evangelism

As evangelical social and cultural vision grows, evangelistic outreach must not be neglected. The labors of Billy Graham and other parachurch evangelism movements are now being appreciated by mainline Protestant leaders who are interacting with the young Christians produced by this evangelism. Catholic leaders are again recognizing that their main task is making church members into Christians. Meanwhile, Ralph Winter is stirring up missionary concern for the “hidden peoples,” the more than 16,000 subgroups among half the world’s population who have no close contact with the gospel. Princeton Theological Seminary is hosting two annual retreats for seminarians: a spring retreat on spiritual renewal and another each fall on mission. Also, the availability of cheap radios throughout the planet is presenting Muslims and tribespeople with the gospel their leaders tried to build walls against—another blessing of the Age of Information.

Information Promotes Unity

The exchange of information is also working to promote Christian unity, another gene in the classical evangelical heritage. What I call “regional ecumenical renewal” is rapidly occurring in many parts of the world. All the ministers in one California town meet together on Sunday morning to pray for one another’s ministries. In Wenham and Hamilton, Massachusetts, the Congregationalist minister meets monthly with the evangelical Anglican rector, the Orthodox Presbyterian pastor, the Methodist minister, and the Roman Catholic priest. This coalition was able to halt a “value-free” sex-education program in the high school, and instigate a substitute multitrack program with Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic options. On a much larger scale, representatives of many types of South African Christianity met for 10 days under evangelical auspices to “hear what God has to say about South Africa.” They did not reach agreement on all issues, but they did establish fellowship across the boundaries. And the body of Christ is closer to organic working order.

These are not just my own positive scenarios for the church’s future; they are things that are happening now. If we extrapolate a line from these points, we reach toward a worldwide spiritual awakening at a depth and breadth never before attained. This presupposes a wide knowledge of the biblical principle of life in the Spirit, along with the core of the gospel, but we are gaining the instruments to promote this. It also assumes a widespread hunger for deeper spiritual vitality, but this is now appearing: books on spiritual formation and spiritual theology are suddenly in demand.

Jonathan Edwards wrote out of the pit of Enlightenment darkness, predicting its destruction by the spread of information under the empowering of the Holy Spirit. Edwards believed that “God will make use of the great increase of learning as a handmaid to religion, as a means of the glorious advancement of the kingdom of his Son.… And there is no doubt to be made of it, that God in his providence has of late given the world the art of printing, and such a great increase of learning, to prepare for what he designs to accomplish for his church in the approaching days of its prosperity.… All the world shall then be as one church, one orderly, regular, beautiful society.”

This, of course, is a postmillenial vision of the kingdom, and it may be too much to hope for in ordinary history, although it makes a good target to aim at. It is entirely possible that postindustrial society will be dominated by a humanist Antichrist, and that we are headed into warfare with the most powerful and deceptive forms of the kingdom of Evil. We should be prepared for this, but continue to pray, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Calling On God

The most hopeful thing for Christians, at the moment, is the uneasiness of non-Christian futurists. Most of the world’s leaders and their followers are at their wit’s end to know how to survive the “crisis of crises” that many futurists predict before things begin to stabilize again. Perhaps Psalm 107 tells us what God is doing now. You remember that it deals with four groups of desperate people. There are those wandering in deserts, hungry and thirsty—their numbers are increasing today—and they cry to God and are delivered. There are those languishing in prison bonds—we think of prisoners of totalitarian states—and they cry to God and are delivered. There are those who are sick—we see their pitiful bodies on TV—and they cry to God and are delivered. And then there are those who go down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters—the merchants and managers of this world—and they are caught in a storm that lifts them to the sky and plunges them to the depths. “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed” (Ps. 107:28–29).

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” says Paul. What happens when a whole planet is driven to call upon the name of the Lord, and when the information is broadcast that his name is Jesus?

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