Around the Horn: Futurity
A theme that has fascinated me, and that I have started doing more research on, is how the concept of the future, and our orientation to it as Christians, shows up all over the place in 20th century theology. Normally labeled under the title "eschatology" the theme of futurity, as Jürgen Moltmann put it at the beginning of A Theology of Hope should be seen not as strictly a delineation of the "last things" to happen in history, but more truthfully as an analysis on how we are affected now by the in-breaking of the future in the figure of Jesus Christ. Though an "eschatological ontology" (or an explanation of how the future can effect us, which is definitely a counter intuitive concept) is usually most associated with Wolfhart Pannenberg. It is, however, quite a prevalent theme amongst a diverse array of thinkers. This is of course not even close to an exhaustive list. I just thought I would put down a few quotes from books Ive read to hopefully display its dispersion amongst thinkers today. I hope to in the coming weeks maybe write a post on eschatological ontology, delineating its logic, but for now here are some quotes:
“If the futurity of God is thus the structure of his trinitarian life with and for us, we do not need to safeguard God’s freedom by the clumsy device of calling the ‘dispensational Trinity’ the ‘image’ of an ‘immanent Trinity.’ For futurity is the condition of freedom. God is free over against the realized actualities of his trinitarian life with us, because he is always ahead of them; he always can be otherwise triune than he has so far been. This freedom is his trinitarian life.”
—Robert W. Jenson, God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 174.
“The saving power of God comes not from deafness to the communication of human attributes to the divine. Rather, God’s saving power comes from the divine future that transforms the dead into the living, the old creation into the new creation…For us today to be bound together with Christ is to be bound together with the future event by which the new creation will come into being and bind together the whole of reality.”
---Ted Peters. God As Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in the Divine Life (Louisville: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1993), p.174-175
“The doctrine of the Trinity describes the identity of God’s future under the different modes of his appearance to the world.”
---Carl Braaten. The Future of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p.106-107
“Both our being and our essence always exceed the moment of our existence, lying before us as gratuity and futurity, mediated to us only in the splendid eros and terror of our in fieri, because finite existence — far from being the dialectical labor of an original contradiction — is a pure gift, grounded in no original substance, wavering from nothingness into the openness of God’s self-outpouring infinity, persisting in a condition of absolute fragility and fortuity, impossible in itself, and so actual beyond itself. Becoming is an ecstasy, and nothing besides; it is indeed a constant tension — between what a thing is and what it is not, between its past and its future, between interior and exterior, and so on — but it is not originally a violent departure from the stability of an original essence. Our being is simply the rapture of arrival . . . creaturely becoming, in its original and ultimate truth, departs from no ground but simply hastens to an end.”
--David Bentley Hart The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing, 2003) p.244
"Because Jesus' resurrection confirmed his earthly claim to authority by the fulfillment of the eschatological future in his own person, he no longer just anticipated the judgment of Him with whom the eschatological reality begins as he did in his earthly activity, but he himself has now become in person the reality of the future eschatological salvation...Differently expressed, through the resurrection, the revealer of God's eschatological will became the incarnation of the eschatological reality itself; the ultimate realization of God's will for humanity and for the whole of creation could therefore be expected from Him."
--Wolfhart Pannenberg Jesus: God and Man 2nd Ed. trans. Lewis L. Wilkens and Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977) p.367
"The ascetic character of the ecclesial hypostasis does not come from a denial of the world of or the biological nature of existence itself. It implies a denial of the biological hypostasis. It accepts the biological nature but wishes to hypostasize it in a non-biological way, to endow it with real being, to give it a true ontology, that is, eternal life. It is for this reason that...neither eros nor the body must be abandoned, but must be hypostasized according to the 'mode of existence' of the ecclesial hypostasis. The ascetic character of the person, derived as it is from the eucharistic form of the ecclesial hypostasis, expresses the authentic person precisely when it does not deny eros and the body but hypostasizes them in an ecclesial manner. In...practice this means basically that eros as ecstatic movement of the human person drawing its hypostasis from the future as it is expressed in the eucharist...is freed from ontological necessity and does not lead any more to the exclusiveness which is dictated by nature...The body, for its part, as the hypostatic expression of the human person, is liberated from individualism and egocentricity and becomes a supreme expression of community--the Body of Christ, the body of the Church, the body of the Eucharist. Thus it is proved experientially that the body is not itself a negative or exclusive concept, but the reverse: a concept of communion and love...it does not draw its being from what it is now but is rooted ontologically in the future, the pledge and earnest of which is the resurrection of Christ."
--John Zizioulas. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, pp.63-64.
“If the futurity of God is thus the structure of his trinitarian life with and for us, we do not need to safeguard God’s freedom by the clumsy device of calling the ‘dispensational Trinity’ the ‘image’ of an ‘immanent Trinity.’ For futurity is the condition of freedom. God is free over against the realized actualities of his trinitarian life with us, because he is always ahead of them; he always can be otherwise triune than he has so far been. This freedom is his trinitarian life.”
—Robert W. Jenson, God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 174.
“The saving power of God comes not from deafness to the communication of human attributes to the divine. Rather, God’s saving power comes from the divine future that transforms the dead into the living, the old creation into the new creation…For us today to be bound together with Christ is to be bound together with the future event by which the new creation will come into being and bind together the whole of reality.”
---Ted Peters. God As Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in the Divine Life (Louisville: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1993), p.174-175
“The doctrine of the Trinity describes the identity of God’s future under the different modes of his appearance to the world.”
---Carl Braaten. The Future of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p.106-107
“Both our being and our essence always exceed the moment of our existence, lying before us as gratuity and futurity, mediated to us only in the splendid eros and terror of our in fieri, because finite existence — far from being the dialectical labor of an original contradiction — is a pure gift, grounded in no original substance, wavering from nothingness into the openness of God’s self-outpouring infinity, persisting in a condition of absolute fragility and fortuity, impossible in itself, and so actual beyond itself. Becoming is an ecstasy, and nothing besides; it is indeed a constant tension — between what a thing is and what it is not, between its past and its future, between interior and exterior, and so on — but it is not originally a violent departure from the stability of an original essence. Our being is simply the rapture of arrival . . . creaturely becoming, in its original and ultimate truth, departs from no ground but simply hastens to an end.”
--David Bentley Hart The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing, 2003) p.244
"Because Jesus' resurrection confirmed his earthly claim to authority by the fulfillment of the eschatological future in his own person, he no longer just anticipated the judgment of Him with whom the eschatological reality begins as he did in his earthly activity, but he himself has now become in person the reality of the future eschatological salvation...Differently expressed, through the resurrection, the revealer of God's eschatological will became the incarnation of the eschatological reality itself; the ultimate realization of God's will for humanity and for the whole of creation could therefore be expected from Him."
--Wolfhart Pannenberg Jesus: God and Man 2nd Ed. trans. Lewis L. Wilkens and Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977) p.367
"The ascetic character of the ecclesial hypostasis does not come from a denial of the world of or the biological nature of existence itself. It implies a denial of the biological hypostasis. It accepts the biological nature but wishes to hypostasize it in a non-biological way, to endow it with real being, to give it a true ontology, that is, eternal life. It is for this reason that...neither eros nor the body must be abandoned, but must be hypostasized according to the 'mode of existence' of the ecclesial hypostasis. The ascetic character of the person, derived as it is from the eucharistic form of the ecclesial hypostasis, expresses the authentic person precisely when it does not deny eros and the body but hypostasizes them in an ecclesial manner. In...practice this means basically that eros as ecstatic movement of the human person drawing its hypostasis from the future as it is expressed in the eucharist...is freed from ontological necessity and does not lead any more to the exclusiveness which is dictated by nature...The body, for its part, as the hypostatic expression of the human person, is liberated from individualism and egocentricity and becomes a supreme expression of community--the Body of Christ, the body of the Church, the body of the Eucharist. Thus it is proved experientially that the body is not itself a negative or exclusive concept, but the reverse: a concept of communion and love...it does not draw its being from what it is now but is rooted ontologically in the future, the pledge and earnest of which is the resurrection of Christ."
--John Zizioulas. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, pp.63-64.
Comments
I think another work by Zizioulas that might be pertinent to your interest in futurity would be his article "Towards an Eschatological Ontology"
TD
Thanks, I have heard of the article but been unable to get my hands on it, do you happen to know its location? Ive also heard he is publishing a book length treatment of the subject called Remembering the Future, unfortunately last I checked it got pushed back to 2012. Thanks for the reference!