By Scott Dickison
My dear professor, the late Peter Gomes, used to say about preaching, If you don’t know where you are headed, any road is sure to take you there. I’ve come to believe this wisdom applies to more in the church than just sermons.
Churches have a hard time thinking about the future.
I don’t think this is a particularly controversial statement, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. In some ways our tendency to look back and hold onto traditions and wisdom from generations past is one of the great gifts the church has to offer the world. We live in a “culture of now,” as Walter Brueggemann recently put it. We’re always searching for the latest thing, practice or program promising fulfillment or transformation.
And in another sense, not being preoccupied with the future and being attuned to the moment at hand can be understood as a spiritual discipline. Many of the world’s religions lift up an appreciation for the here and now as the key to a spiritual life. Jesus tells us to let today’s problems be enough for today. Thomas Merton, that great Christian contemplative, was known to meditate on the words, “Now, here, this.” The Buddhist practice of mindfulness has hit the mainstream, and Judaism might best be understood as a way of living that appreciates each and every moment, action and experience in life as a blessing from God. Not fixating on the future can be a spiritual virtue.
And yet.
And yet our generally large-hearted desire to hold onto things that matter and preserve and pass on the faith of our ancestors often leaves us fantastically prepared for the world as it was 50 years ago. Maybe more. We often keep circling around the same roads.
But before we start pointing fingers, let’s remember that the church is made up of people, and the larger truth is that when it comes down to it, people have a hard time thinking about the future. We resist putting money away for retirement and routinely lapse in dieting. Psychologists wonder if one of the single greatest factors in predicting a child’s future success in life is their ability to learn delayed gratification: to value future gains over and against short-term pleasures.
Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley insider (a founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook) has an interesting theory on how people generally think about the future, which he lays out in his recent book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. He says we can be either generally optimistic or pessimistic about the future, and have a generally definite or indefinite view as to how it will come about, leaving four possible approaches (and hold your nose as best you can at the sweeping generalizations).
Indefinite Pessimism. The indefinite pessimist assumes that things will turn out poorly in the end, and also concludes that there’s nothing we can do about it. Thiel says this describes Europe since the 1970s. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual, he writes. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania. (!)
Definite Pessimism. The definite pessimist believes the future will be bleak, but thinks he can prepare for it. It’s safe to say that so-called “doomsday preppers” would be considered definite pessimists.
Indefinite Optimism. The indefinite optimist believes the future will be better than the present, but he doesn’t know just how, so he won’t make any specific plans. Thiel says this has been the approach of most Americans for the last 50 or so years, and has shaped our thinking on everything from politics to philosophy and even (provocatively) liberal arts education, which in his view often translates into “preparing students for nothing in particular.”
Definite Optimism. The definite optimist believes the future will be better than the present and works to make it better. As an entrepreneur, this is, unsurprisingly, the view he claims is most productive. We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, he writes, and that means we need to work to create it today.
The interesting thing about this typology is that I can think of a Christian approach to all four of them. Some Christians, particularly those partial to the earlier chapters in the book of Revelation, have a generally pessimistic view of the world and humanity, and will either choose to throw their hands in the air and say “God will sort it out in the end,” or will start stockpiling food for the tribulation.
Others have a generally optimistic view of the future, preferring the biblical image of God wiping every tear from our eyes — which, not entirely coincidentally, is found in the latter chapters of Revelation. I’ve heard it said that Pauline scholar Robert Capon’s summary of Romans is essentially that God will sort it out in the end, so we might as well sit back and have a cigar — a statement of indefinite optimism if I’ve ever heard one. Others will take a more “definite” stance and focus on our role as “co-creators” in bringing about the Kingdom of God.
I would subscribe to a mixture of indefinite and definite optimism (though there are days, I confess, when pessimism gets the upper hand). I think the Kingdom of God is at hand, whether we’re ready or not; a belief I take literally to be the Good News. But I also think we’re invited to be a part of what God’s up to. Not because God needs us to, but because God wants us to. Maybe that’s the Even Better News. A friend of mine may have put it best when we were discussing these things not long ago. He said we should live like it’s all up to us and sleep like it’s all up to God. I like that.
In any case, churches are just like people in that how we think about the future shapes a lot of how we live in the here and now. Which makes me wonder if churches who are struggling to find their way in the present are suffering less from a crisis of identity and more from a crisis of theology. Perhaps even worse, a crisis of imagination.
One of the most important questions a church should ask, and ask with some regularity, is “who is God calling us to be today?” But I wonder how it would affect things if before we asked ourselves which road we should take, we asked ourselves where we — the church, the world, time, history, grace and providence — are headed.