I. Postmodern Assessments of the Future Horizon

In 1964, Edward Schillebeeckx began to release collections consisting mainly of his previously published essays in a series known as Theologische Peilingen (Theological Soundings). After his 1967 lecture tour of the United States, Schillebeeckx collected some of his essays and lectures into the volume God the Future of Man. This book was unique for two reasons: first, it was originally published in English, not Dutch; second, it represents a major shift from some of Schillebeeckx's earlier, more dogmatic work.Footnote ¹ In this volume he begins to engage specifically with critical theory, and more generally with contemporary philosophy, in a manner different from his previous essays. This new direction helps to reveal the eschatological-hermeneutical structure provided by his methodology that would become so important for his major works over the next three decades. This structure was previously visible in the short book Christus' tegenwoordigheid in de eucharistie,Footnote ² which applies contemporary hermeneutics to the canons of Trent on the sacraments, and phenomenology to the problem of eucharistic presence.Footnote ³God the Future of Man represents a development in Schillebeeckx's “middle period” (which I believe includes roughly most of his work from 1966 until his valedictory lecture, Theologisch geloofsverstaan anno 1983, as well as many of the basic elements of the third volume of his Jesus trilogy).Footnote ⁴ It is interesting to note that Schillebeeckx began to develop a theological answer to the problem of mutual intelligibility between the church and the world in light of his experience at the Second Vatican Council and his subsequent reflections on the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes).Footnote ⁵ In his commentary on Gaudium et Spes, the problem of “a misunderstood ‘flight from the world’” comes up, and the Constitution warns Christians of two dangers in this regard: first, “fleeing from the world,” or the tendency to retreat into a church that is entirely closed off from society, and to leave aside the task of building a better future in favor of what is purely spiritual;Footnote ⁶ second, the equally dangerous tendency to preemptively identify a self-made future with the Rule of God.Footnote ⁷ In the Pastoral Constitution, Schillebeeckx sees a clear warrant for allowing the future to take pride of place for Christian praxis, but in a qualified manner.Footnote ⁸

By the publication of God the Future of Man, Schillebeeckx's views on the interrelation of the future, human praxis, and the gap between the church and the world had become more nuanced and, when viewed with hindsight, are nearly prophetic. It is in this work that Schillebeeckx has at least partially anticipated many of the developments and criticisms of the “postmodern” era. We can draw especially on these for our own contemporary efforts, even if Schillebeeckx was never directly involved in an explicit critique or assessment of “the postmodern.” There are two essential claims that will lead us into our own evaluation of the contemporary theological situation. First, after tracing the movement of secularization from the twelfth century to the present, Schillebeeckx concludes that the “twentieth century is experiencing the bankruptcy of all systems, including Christianity as a monological system.”Footnote ⁹ By this he means that Christianity, like other narratives, has by and large been content to carry on an internal monologue wherein each narrative speaks only to and about itself as the apotheosis of truth.Footnote ¹⁰ Dialogue with other narratives was not necessary, as long as they could legitimately claim to contain and explain the whole truth about reality, even if we might now doubt such claims. Second, “human freedom is so heavily burdened by [a self-made future] that there is real danger, no longer of a flight from the world, but of a flight from the future, and in many different forms—the ‘world’ has, in fact, become the ‘future.’”Footnote ¹¹ We will proceed from the first claim to the second, since they are interrelated.

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard is famous for his assessment, some years after Schillebeeckx, of the relative end of modernity and the beginning of what he termed “the postmodern.”Footnote ¹² This work continues to be important for understanding how we have arrived at the present state of affairs and for formulating a legitimate critique of contemporary society. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard contends that “the grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.”Footnote ¹³ The results of the “grand narratives” were exactly the opposite of what was promised: salvation and emancipation yielded war, worldwide depression, the gulag, and the Holocaust.Footnote ¹⁴ Lyotard, indeed, follows Theodor Adorno in declaring the symbolic power of Auschwitz as the final word on modernity's possibilities, not only as a paradigmatic example, but because the nature of the hegemonic master narrative is fundamentally linked to what it has produced.Footnote ¹⁵ The devastation and the genocide experienced during the Second World War, particularly in Europe, were, to some degree, inevitable because of the rigged interior logic of the dialectic of enlightenment.Footnote ¹⁶

Lyotard identified and criticized what have come to be known as “modern master narratives” or metanarratives, which include the great projects of technological and knowledge-based emancipation stemming from the Enlightenment. The two types of master narratives of the nineteenth century, those of knowledge and emancipation, based themselves on their presumed empirical character as sciences, and it was the scientific method that gave them authority and an aura of rational certainty. Narratives of knowledge were later merged under those of emancipation, since true knowledge must necessarily lead to human emancipation, either through technological means or through the use of reason and liberation from illegitimate authority.Footnote ¹⁷ The two main narratives of the modern period, capitalism and communism, emerged out of this matrix and rose to prominence in the mid- to late twentieth century. This became a massive struggle of economic and ideological systems embodied by the Cold War.

Since these master narratives seek to present a “universal history,” they also claim to apply to all of humanity and therefore claim regulative power over all particular narratives, which are really only individual instantiations of the one metanarrative.Footnote ¹⁸ Lyotard identifies one of the main characteristics of modern master narratives as the legitimation of the narrative from the end. This is an especially troubling modern phenomenon, which Lyotard describes in terms of the regulating ideal. The Kantian notion of the Idea in its conceptual function is invoked, “as [ideas] assist in conceiving reality through the mediation of a universal concept.”Footnote ¹⁹ The key turning point for modernity, however, is where the idea, or ideal, ceases to function as a regulative sign on the conceptual level. Instead, the idea becomes immanent in history, which gives it a cognitive function rather than a conceptual one, and makes individual instantiations and events proofs of the idea's reality and inevitability.Footnote ²⁰ The power of the narrative as a cognitive force is increased, when any and all events can be written into the narrative from the end, potentially legitimating whatever happens without regard for its particularity. This reverses the focus of the premodern era, which was firmly oriented toward a mythical past within a “universe of names,” or smaller narratives that are interdependent on one another and proceed from their mythical beginning.Footnote ²¹ There was, therefore, a shift in human thinking from maintaining or restoring a status quo or a pax deorum, and toward a different and more human future. We can, indeed, invoke the pax deorum of Rome as a prime example of premodern consciousness, if not one source of the ancient/medieval thought process: Rome should be as it was at the founding of the city, and Roman success and prosperity relied on the favor of the gods, whose peace and goodwill were guaranteed by tribute to the ancient traditions (mos maiorum) that allegedly went back to the founding. In other words, the legitimation for such a way of thinking always resides in the past, and its fulfillment is directed toward the restoration or perpetuation of that past.

The Roman claim to dominance by the will of the gods was certainly a hegemonic, cognitive pretension, but maintained a certain particularity. The Romans respected the Jewish religion precisely because it was old, and Rome did not claim to speak for all of humanity, nor for all of the gods, maintaining only that its religion be observed and acknowledged as the strongest. Other nations and peoples could keep their gods, but needed to submit to the Roman state, whose gods were more powerful. This is not the same as the universal pretension that Lyotard attributes to modern master narratives. The legitimation from the end, from the telos of the narrative, is an especially troubling modern phenomenon, which Lyotard describes in terms of the regulating ideal.Footnote ²² For the modern master narrative, standing outside of the narrative still entails being determined by the logic of the narrative—one is robbed of any power to speak, since the narrative, which claims to apply to all of humanity in all times and places, has spoken for you and determined the significance of your story ahead of time. The master narrative, as the product of scientific reason, strives toward a realizable “end” of history—a history that would become a universal history for all human beings.Footnote ²³ David Tracy has pointed out that such a narrative about reality is based on a logic of “sameness” and, at its core, a resurgent positivism.Footnote ²⁴ Your history will be meaningful, but according to (someone else's) predetermined criteria. The narrative linking of events, the way that the story unfolds, is quasi-automatic, and the violence of this process covers over its historical contingency, which should remind us always that “this could be otherwise!”Footnote ²⁵

The key aspect of a narrative's legitimation brings up the tension between the past and the future. Schillebeeckx highlights the gradual shift in Western culture to look to one or the other in what he identifies as the human “utopian consciousness” that is intrinsically bound up in our view of the past as either a golden age or a history of suffering and failure.Footnote ²⁶ Either the past is viewed as the legitimation for continuing things as they are, or it is the call to action through critical remembrance, and a call to change for the future. Either one, Schillebeeckx points out, is a “selective remembrance of the past,” and in no way a neutral exercise of historicist “research” into the objective value of history.Footnote ²⁷ According to Schillebeeckx, the process of secularization, or the realization that human beings can change their habitat and alter society, is primarily responsible for the shift from premodern to modern narrativity.Footnote ²⁸ Legitimation in light of the past was seen as nonsensical; since the past was a place of suffering, repression, and illegitimate authority, the future must necessarily be different.Footnote ²⁹ Legitimation for human activity thereby switched to a position of futurity: confidence in the future as better and more human (or even fully human and perfect!) is the legitimation for any suffering experienced on the way. The problem is that modern master narratives traded the regulative/conceptual function of the ideal for a cognitive/legislative one, meaning that the modern narratives went from being ideals to concrete ideologies. The violence of a revolution can be rewritten to fit the narrative because it is in service of a greater goal, or violence and suffering are themselves concrete instantiations of the ideal becoming immanent.Footnote ³⁰ It is the idea that “history is governed by a secular [immanent, man-made] universal subject and that a total meaning, which can be embodied in a system or programme [sic] of action, is contained in an individual, in human society or in history itself.”Footnote ³¹

The destruction of the system of modern master narratives means that the system of legitimation of those narratives is also destroyed, at least in theory. We can no longer claim the regulative ideal or goal as the universal legitimation for human actions. The problem of otherness has, to some degree, made this impossible, since we are confronted increasingly with examples of irreducible otherness (other religions, cultures, languages, and points of view); these “others” prima facie resist any of our attempts to write them into our own narrative. The controlling influence that predominant narrative traditions have had breaks down in this confrontation. Schillebeeckx called this phenomenon deculturization, while Lieven Boeve has named it detraditionalization.Footnote ³² Boeve also shows that the end result of this is not pure secularization, but a pluralization, or a process by which many smaller narratives share the same social space and exercise overlapping spheres of influence.Footnote ³³ According to Lyotard, the modern master narratives were discredited because they could not deliver the results that they promised.Footnote ³⁴ He judges “performativity” (“Does it work?”) to be the new criterion by which we evaluate narratives and their effects.Footnote ³⁵ The narrative of marketization has taken the place of the master narratives of modernity, uniting all of the previous narratives under a prevailing logic based on economic transactions and their performativity—their relative successes.Footnote ³⁶ Under this rubric, difference and authentic otherness are converted into commodities; they are options to be consumed in an ever-increasing market of options.Footnote ³⁷ Pluralization is the ally of marketization because it provides ever-newer material that can be packaged, advertised, and sold as opportunities to create and cultivate the perfect “self.”Footnote ³⁸ What this means, effectively, is that what has changed from the “modern” to the “postmodern” situation in terms of master narratives is a shift from the struggle of competing metanarrative-driven systems to the sublimation of all narratives under the logic of the market: we choose and consume the narratives or narrative elements that “work,” rather than explicitly working in service of the master narrative and its goals. The postmodern “narrative” about the value of smaller, local, nonhegemonic narratives is, at best, self-deceptive, and at worst a smoke screen for something larger and much more sinister. The supposed “plurality” of postmodern pluralization is immediately undone from within. “Selving” in such a context is reflexive and choice driven, but it is still a function of the market.

II. Postmodern Fragmentation of the Subject and the Flight from the Future

The concrete effects of the loss of the future as primary horizon, as well as the market narrative's ascendance as the dominant narrative of the age, can be seen in the ways in which people “become” themselves, that is, how they participate in the contemporary situation. If the being of humans is intrinsically linked to self-understanding, then the process of becoming will also be dependent on that self-understanding, and informed by the linguistic-cultural constitution of the context. The rise of information technology and social communication has only intensified the reflexive “selving” of human subjects. Reflexivity in this context is not the kind of self-reflection advocated by Jürgen Habermas, or the embodiment of the Delphic maxim “Know thyself” (gnōthi sauton). Instead, “reflexivity” here is a looking-over-my-shoulder, casting a glance at my neighbor whose gaze I must meet with an appropriately constructed image of myself. Never before have human beings been able to so artificially construct themselves and their own image as through social media and instant communication. This is not to condemn technology or its proliferation and the accumulation and codification of data. That would be to make a fundamental category error in the distinction between the tool and its user.Footnote ³⁹ The way that this technology is being used, however, continues the trend that affirms the dictum “To do is to buy” and modifies it as well: to be is to buy, to buy is to be.Footnote ⁴⁰ One's existence is being reduced to the momentary consumption and curation of a personality, an image of a self, and a carefully manicured “soul.”

This represents a new development in what Boeve has called the “culture of the kick,” limit-experiences that are meant to define and directly confirm self-consciousness with a sudden encounter with boundaries and alterity. Footnote ⁴¹ Anything that pushes a person “beyond him/herself”—an ek-static experience—helps to confirm that person's selfhood. By posting photos and memes online, or sharing “myself” via instant photo and dating apps, a person creates a carefully managed “buzz” or “kick” experience in the call to others for affirmation, admiration, and ultimately confirmation that the “self” presented in that instant is both good and real. This is a specifically digital idealized self, which stands at a distance from reality, but is still presented as supremely real. The hermeneutical movement between past and present, oriented toward the future (a better and different future) is inverted, such that both the past and future only serve as proof of the reality of the present.Footnote ⁴² Documenting our consumption has become the ultimate proof-positive of being—a fact testified to by the popularity of the “haul” and “unboxing” video genres on the Internet, which among many, many other adjectives, should certainly be described as alarming.Footnote ⁴³ The result is indeed a fractured subject, and the fracture is precisely in the uncoupling of the future horizon qua future from the actions undertaken in the present. “Does it work?” truly becomes “Is it working for me now?” And above all, “Is what I am doing convincing to myself and others now?” It is no accident that the “promotional” section of the social media app Snapchat's website answers the question of why “13- to 34-year-olds Love Snapchat” with three different headings. Under “Get Perspective,” the site tells us that “Snaps [instant picture or video messages] provide a personal window into the way you and your friends see the world.” “Be Here, Now” proclaims to us that the “stories” are updated in “real-time and expire after 24 hours.” Most alarmingly, “Express Yourself” brays at us that “Snaps reflect who you are in the moment—there is no need to curate an everlasting persona.”Footnote ⁴⁴

All of this returns us to Schillebeeckx's concern with the burden of human freedom. The break we experienced at modernity's end was a severe trauma, and a true failure of the human belief in the future. The end of this system of master narratives has not in any way dismantled the metaphysical character of economics. In fact, it has absolutized our understanding of economics as the Being of beings. We exist only insofar as we participate in the market. This system has expanded to include the counternarratives as well, so that they are no longer “non-beings” but rather a functionalized, commodified “other,” and ultimately just another consumer like us.Footnote ⁴⁵ The other's ability to speak is merely a reflection of its market share and a coercive form of participation in the market system. In fact, since the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled consistently that spending money constitutes a form of political speech, and therefore cannot be limited according to the US Constitution. Similar decisions have been reached that voided limits on campaign finance spending or anonymous campaign contributions in the recent cases Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014). This is a startling trend, and should be recognized as incredibly dangerous for society, or indeed humanity as a whole, because it redefines human rights in terms of monetary power. The implication is that if money is increasingly understood as the primary form of political speech, then those without money do not simply have less ability to speak, they also have less of a right to speak.

Late-market capitalism functions like a caricature of Platonism, wherein the Good is pure Capitalism, which we are striving to instantiate. Once this occurs, God will be in heaven, and all will be right with the world, but this is achieved through a supreme emphasis on the present moment. The “flight from the future” occurs in the almost exclusive emphasis on “now” as what matters, and indeed all that matters. The decentering or fragmentation that is involved here is a departure from the modern concept of the sovereign, autonomous subject whose radical freedom allows it to transcend its own historicity in order to understand and reclaim the past.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the modern master narratives, this extends to the future as well, where the subject is made both individual and universal: humanity itself is the universal, secular subject of history bringing about its own completion. The subject is a “center” or “centered” around itself and grounded in its own autonomy and ability to master its environment through knowledge. The postmodern fracture between future and present, which absolutizes the present precisely as representative of the future, is the source of great anxiety for us, and is temporarily alleviated by engaging in commerce. Each transaction affirms the picture of the self that we wish to project, but there is a slippage between the “I” that is projected and the “I” that projects. The unity is disjointed and above all, detemporalized. There is even a way in which consumption assuages the contemporary anxiety about the past and future: shopping in a store or online relieves the pressure of temporality by creating a false present. There is no scary future or traumatic past when the entire experience is engineered to prolong the sense of gratification achieved now. William Cavanaugh is correct in showing that consumerism is not at all about the desire for a particular thing, but it is about perpetuating desire itself, “for pleasure is not in possessing objects but in their pursuit.”Footnote ⁴⁷ It is the endlessness of shopping and consumption, and not buying itself (and, by extension, our use or enjoyment of a thing), that keeps us mired in the artificial present.

The production of wealth through consumption is a shortsighted goal and produces a paralysis in any long-term decision making. We can see this rather clearly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which itself was caused largely by the drive for short-term profits at the cost of long-term sustainability. This pattern has continued and even been strengthened by the crisis, rather than being curbed, thus negating the thesis that what drives the logic of the market and legitimates it is its own performativity, the emphasis on “Does it work?”Footnote ⁴⁸ Something is concealed in the logic of the market and exchange. If modernity were to be characterized by a phrase—perhaps “It will work (at any cost!)”—postmodernity could instead be a question, albeit a duplicitous one: “Does it work now?” or “Is it working (for me)?”Footnote ⁴⁹ The goal of the narrative, however, should be in question. What exactly does it do? We must distinguish between the commodification of the world and production of wealth as an end in itself, and the universal adherence to a narrative of marketization (really radical capitalism) in the service of universal emancipation. It appears that these two ideas are operating at the same time: wealth is sought after because wealth itself is good, and wealth is sought after because wealth produces good results for all in the form of more material wealth for all. The logic of performativity invalidates the second claim (it doesn't work!), but people go on accumulating wealth while causing immense harm to large portions of the population through pollution, unsafe and unjust labor practices (justified through an appeal to the human being's “right to work,” that is, to buy and sell its own labor as a commodity), predatory financial practices, or the creation of entire economies based on debt.Footnote ⁵⁰ In any case, performativity seems to apply only to the creation of wealth in se, with little concern for humanity as a universal subject of history.Footnote ⁵¹

III. Apocalyptic Economics Today: Postmodern Market Christianity

What is really at stake here is the ultimate source of human transcendence. What is it that calls us beyond ourselves toward the other, and what is it that causes our self-reflective gaze to return to ourselves and to make something else of what we are? There is a fundamental insecurity that comes with our recognition of the fracture in the self, something that, although given pride of place in postmodern philosophy, has been known for ages as Augustine's interior intimo meo, among other formulations.Footnote ⁵² An autonomous subject grounded in itself proves problematic, because of the otherness that is already present within the self. The dethroning of modernity has not done away with this autonomy, but radicalized it: the autonomous subject is supremely responsible for what it becomes through what it consumes; praxis has been identified with consumption. It is no longer given a place to become itself through concrete traditions, but must choose from many, and it is the “must choose” that has become the new ground or narrative about anthropology. The logic of economic exchange functions like an ideological form of metaphysics: failure is a result of personal responsibility, and those who do not prosper have not voluntarily adhered closely enough to the mandates of the market and the structure of reality. We must nuance this, of course, by acknowledging that older models of society, where one's identity was almost entirely determined by tradition and social status, were marked by the absence of choice. For this reason I will not go so far as to agree with Cavanaugh that “to make a tradition the subject of choice, however, is to kill it as tradition.”Footnote ⁵³ It is the loss of any kind of middle ground that has become troubling, and even distressing to the great narrative traditions.

Those who participate in the Christian narrative will experience God as the source of human transcendence. There is something here that is other than the progressive logic of modernity, the “now-centered” contemporary emphasis of postmodernity, or whatever “the postmodern” has become. The Christian narrative speaks about the impossible, not only the historical goals of men and women, or the actualization of a regulative idea, but “an unthreatened, final, perfect salvation applying to all.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The paradigm for this, as well as its connection to human experience, must be found within human history and continue to be found in the histories of women and men who experience and interpret the world, or else it will become, as we have seen, decontextualized and essentially “meaningless.” Transcending occurs in the basic movement of a human's being, and this requires that “something happens” (as Lyotard might put it), that alterity intrudes on the space of subjectivity. We must keep in mind, however, that the alterity already present within the human subject, that which calls us beyond ourselves, means that self-transcendence is present even in solitary contemplation. The reality of human beings as embodied creatures certainly precludes any purely solitary or monadic subject, and it is even the case that we form communities because of this interior otherness. The human subject is predisposed to be communal and social in its search for itself and for meaning (a point emphasized by Schillebeeckx's “anthropological constants”).Footnote ⁵⁵ This necessitates that we look for and be able to recognize and react to a genuine other, and not merely a functionalized other who echoes and confirms what we have projected.

The Christian narrative should, therefore, provide a radically different picture of humanity from the prevailing economic paradigm, based on its faith in God as both the universal subject of history and the cause and source of human transcendence. The process of secularization is a function of the particular freedom that humans have to humanize the world, and make it a more hospitable place through human action. We do not merely exist in the given state of nature as the unchangeable order of God's will. At a very basic level, this associates human salvation with the future, as what must still be accomplished, and not a divine order that existed in the past.Footnote ⁵⁶ Following Schillebeeckx, however, “hominization is not yet humanization.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Not all human manipulation of the world has proved to be good for humanity, especially if it does not have even partial salvation and emancipation as its goal—even if that goal is distant and at times experienced only as a protest against the oppressive situation of the present. This kind of self-transcendence must take responsibility for the future, without forgetting that it is prone to failure. The Incarnation provides us with the basic paradigm of God's salvific work in history; Christology is “creation underlined, concentrated, and condensed: faith in creation as God wishes it to be.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Jesus reveals the being of God in the only way that human beings can relate to it: in and through experienced history. These factors alone should give us sufficient reason to return to Schillebeeckx for theological insights that help us to navigate the contemporary landscape when we apply them to our own situation.

The eschatological model of Christianity is and must be different to keep it from being another ideology, a form of economics, or simply a master narrative of love, as Lyotard has asserted.Footnote ⁵⁹ The model of revelation, the model of salvation that is present in the Christ event is eschatological, not apocalyptic or ideological. Karl Rahner distinguishes the two rather well: “To extrapolate from the present into the future is eschatology, to interpolate from the future into the present is apocalyptic.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Schillebeeckx quotes Rahner directly in the essay “The Interpretation of the Future,” following Rahner in his understanding of “eschatology” over against “apocalyptic.”Footnote ⁶¹ Here I maintain their distinction between “apocalypticism” and “eschatology,” where apocalyptic is not a literary genre but rather the “false-apocalypticism” that, according to Rahner, merely reads “from the future into the present.”Footnote ⁶² Such “false” apocalyptic readings of the world lend themselves well not only to the modern master narratives but equally to the postmodern market narrative. In all these, time is hollowed out, and the future collapses into an immanent present. Any deviations from the prescribed course of action, including any failure or surprise, are either rewritten into the narrative or disqualified as meaningless. Thus we see the basic characteristics of the modern master narrative, which universalizes all events under one rubric of meaning and effects seemingly automatic linkages between phases (historical events) to fit the predetermined narrative trajectory, eliminating contingency and history's ambiguity. At the same time, the legitimation of the postmodern market narrative is supposed to be grounded in its performativity, with emphasis placed solely on the present.Footnote ⁶³ This marketization subsumes other narratives and gives rise to other ideological elements and even whole narratives, all of which are available for consumption. This interpretation partly explains the strange mix of evangelical Christianity and liberal capitalist economics that has come to represent a large cross section of the American religious landscape.

We must ask: if the modern master narratives supposedly place almost exclusive emphasis on the future, and if the basic symptom of what we have called postmodernity is its central focus on the present (with at least some short-term and indeed shortsighted reference to the future), then how are these two connected in Christian “apocalypticism”?Footnote ⁶⁴ The prevalence of a very distinct form of Christian apocalyptic leads us to examine it here as an example of a fundamental misuse of Christianity, in order to begin to formulate a viable alternative.

The temporal aspect of such apocalypticism is based on a reduction of real transcendence into an immanent reading of the times: the future comes into being in the same manner as a recipe. A future is not hoped for; it is known and implemented through discrete steps, making it little more than a logical extension of the present. It is a short-circuited utopianism that is simultaneously unconcerned with the real-world implications of present actions (especially when we consider the neglect of social justice, our abuse of the environment, or even the recent phenomenon of cyberbullying), while always invoking allegedly certain knowledge about the objective order of the world. An objectively known future coupled with an overly idealized past constitutes the perfect worldview for such false apocalypticism to play a constitutive role within the market, since without any ability or will to self-criticism there is little or no possibility of effectively critiquing the market itself. World-making action is, for this type of Christian narrative, limited to ways of bringing about the apocalypse rather than seeking out where God is already working in the world and actively renewing human history. Those who proceed according to the “prosperity gospel” or a strict apocalyptic view are not applying situational ethics, but rather an economically structured insight into the metaphysical constitution of the universe, in order to achieve what is held to be the “objective order” of things.

There is a direct relationship here to the preachers of the “prosperity gospel,” who teach, essentially, that the “American Dream” is also Jesus' promise for Christians, and that virtue is rewarded by the market.Footnote ⁶⁵ It is a natural outgrowth of televangelist Oral Roberts' patently unbiblical but perfectly marketable catchphrase, “Something good is going to happen to you!”Footnote ⁶⁶ This runs counter to the biblical witness, especially of the Gospels, where repeatedly it is bad things that happen to God's friends at the hands of other human beings. Jesus' assertion “The cup that I drink you shall drink; and you shall be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized” is hardly a comforting thought to the disciples, where the cup can be directly identified through a sophisticating rhetorical strategy with suffering, and baptism with a violent death in the narrative frames present in Mark's Gospel (Mark 10:39; 13:9–11).Footnote ⁶⁷ Even more disturbing, the logical extension of the “prosperity gospel” is that those who are poor or marginalized are and remain so because of their supposed wickedness or at least relative lack of Christian virtue, effectively damning those who do not equate material wealth or social status with God's blessing (this also correlates with our earlier discussion regarding the monetization of political speech). This point of view assumes knowledge of what a perfect market would look like, in the same way some purport to understand the objective order of creation from the Bible.

What remains is only to apply the right steps under the dictum do ut des in order to arrive at the ideal state of things.Footnote ⁶⁸ “Salvation,” then, can only mean being taken out of the world once that formula has been achieved. The best that human beings can do is to speed this process along, and like the sacrificial formulas of the Greco-Roman religion, God can actually be compelled to take action as long as certain conditions are met.Footnote ⁶⁹ In light of our earlier discussion, apocalyptic is therefore described in the same terms as the modern ideologies (applied in a postmodern way), and even acts as a kind of contemporary gnosticism. The knowledge possessed by apocalyptic Christians proclaims to have “let us into the secret and we already possess the ultimate and the real” as a distinct knowledge of the end of history, presupposing an ultimate, objective, and prior state of “nature.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Any god so conceived is “not Salvator, Saviour, as Christians call him, but Conservator, as the Roman Hellenistic religions called him.”Footnote ⁷¹ This is a falsification of any genuine faith in creation, to the point where the only “salvific” option is the return of the world to its objective form, either through genetic, preprogrammed, and inevitable development, or development through suprahistorical logical processes.Footnote ⁷² Either view of salvation is a type of “thinking from the end,” wherein the “End of Days,” the purportedly true objective state of the world, acts as the epitome of the (post)modern master narrative: we have seen the end of the world through (misreading) the Scriptures, which we can use to objectively evaluate the present.

Any claim made from this point of view will be subservient to an ideological view of the world that can readily be seen in various interpretations of contemporary events as well as in the degree to which the Christian message has been co-opted to serve “conservative” or “liberal” agendas, or (more troublingly) the hidden machinations of the market. In this case the adage caveat emptor should apply just as readily as do ut des, because the performative aspect of the market narrative does not need to be realized for such a narrative to continue: we never need to get to the ideal state of the market, and its alleged positive effects never need to be seen historically for the broader population. We never need to actually try to realize salvation in history for others, since God will do all of that by ending history, and until then there is a formula to follow that will speed things along. This formula happens to coincide with the free market, and God's blessings correspond to economic rewards.

What we have here is one, albeit popular, Christian attempt to combat what is seen as a rising pluralism in the world and to anchor “truth” to a fixed point. What it produces, however, is an ideological and wholly unbiblical Christianity that fits perfectly within the logic of the market, effectively making Christianity the tool of what it set out to fight—pluralization and perceived relativism, which are accelerated, not countered, by such an approach. The postmodern narrative continues of its own accord, producing short-term wealth for an extremely limited number of people without regard for long-term consequences, even when it fails on a massive scale. Apocalyptic Christianity can criticize other narrative options it perceives as threatening within the structure of the market, but it says nothing about the system itself that produces social and economic misery for so many. Without this fundamental critique, and without any future-oriented action that brings the gospel into practice by first looking after the social and material needs of the poor and marginalized regardless of their faith or creed, we will remain stuck in the false, fantastical, and self-perpetuating present. We must find another way of responding to the situation, but we need a different concept of Christian eschatology in order to do it effectively, where the future acts as a promise and not merely as proof.

IV. Schillebeeckx and an Eschatological Option for the Future

“In fact,” Schillebeeckx tells us, “only the ‘already’ allows us to say anything meaningful about the still unknown future.”Footnote ⁷³ A realized eschatology, where the “not yet” of the future is read through the “already,” must be based on the structure of God's promise to humanity.Footnote ⁷⁴ The content of this promise is “already realized in Christ (realized in fact, but nonetheless still really a promise), a promise-for-us, with the result that interpretation becomes a ‘hermeneutics of praxis.’”Footnote ⁷⁵ God, whose salvific will is for the “complete liberation of man,” makes this promise and has kept it in the resurrection of Jesus.Footnote ⁷⁶ As risen, Christ has defeated death and inaugurated the new messianic age. But insofar as that age or aeon is experienced only fragmentarily, it is still a hidden reality and an aspect of the “God who is to come,” the God recognized as humanity's future.Footnote ⁷⁷ This is the “new image of God” that Schillebeeckx develops in order to recover God's transcendence and to ground human self-transcendence, and it is precisely this insight that we need today.

Formerly, Schillebeeckx notes, Christianity was directed toward the past and intent on perpetuating that past as an order that was divinely ordained.Footnote ⁷⁸ In such a culture, oriented toward the past, “whenever we thought or spoke of God's transcendence we used, almost automatically, to project God into the past.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Likewise, “eternity” was a notion of the unchangeable, eternalized past, making transcendence primarily a matter of pure return to a state of grace, a Garden of Eden, or a state of contemplation and unity with God. The concept of transcendence, however, is malleable and can be reworked in light of our hermeneutical self-understanding.Footnote ⁸⁰ The orientation of human persons shows their character as transcending toward the future, through the ecstatic movement of the human subject beyond itself and its own limitations.Footnote ⁸¹ Human transcendence is grounded in God's transcendence as that which calls humanity beyond itself, being both wholly present with creation and also other to it as a transcendental horizon. The human experience of salvation coming from God associates God positively with the future of humanity, as the God who makes all things new. The human subject is able “by virtue of the divine transcendence within him to transcend the ‘already’ and strive towards the ‘not yet.’”Footnote ⁸² This is the eschatological nature of God's promise and presence to humanity, and “if divine transcendence really transcends and embraces, from within, man's past, present and future,” then we are correct “to associate God's transcendence with the future.”Footnote ⁸³ The hermeneutical movement between revealing and concealing, immanent expression and transcendent ineffability, takes on a sacramental character as instantiations of grace through signs that make an absent reality truly and phenomenologically present.Footnote ⁸⁴ If the ineffable God is our future, then we must admit that whatever this future will be, it will be surprising. God's transcendence is made available in history where it can be seen, known, and understood as salvific truth. In the same movement, this transcendence is made immanent and therefore subject to all of the same historical and contextual limitations as humanity.Footnote ⁸⁵ It is this historical experience that founds the Christian tradition as a “handing on” and reactualization of the original experience of salvation found in Jesus.Footnote ⁸⁶

Within this paradigm a constant and consistent hermeneutics is necessarily inherent in the movement between past and present horizons: becoming fully human “is attained only in self-transcendence, and in the sense that what is more than human is involved, through the gift of God.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Becoming fully what I wish myself to be, informed by my expectations and contextual-linguistic formation, means that the self will be projected beyond a future that is immanent and achievable. The constant hermeneutic retrieval of Jesus' life and message in the sacramental community of the church is a history of recontextualized experiences.Footnote ⁸⁸ The church as a political body practices its own hermeneutical self-understanding and exercises its sacramental character: it makes what is absent really present in the smaller narrative histories of its members. This makes Jesus “not only the interpreter of humanity, someone who shows by word and deed how to realize in a true sense what a human being is, but who, in so doing, is also the interpreter or the exegete of God.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The Christian narrative lays claim to being able to ultimately interpret humanity's character and destiny as self-transcending and hermeneutical.

The loss of one temporal horizon implies an impoverishment of humanity's ability to interpret the world and to make decisions about how to proceed in it. On the other hand, a temporalized existence is one that carries within itself the very possibility of self-transcendence, a kind of transcendence of the present moment from within time itself.Footnote ⁹⁰ Consciousness of lived time should bring both the past and the future into view, and open up questions about the relative meaning of both—as they are related to one another and how that relationship is held together, altered, or negated in the present.Footnote ⁹¹ An exclusive emphasis, “whether on future, present or past, runs the risk of narrowing or crippling truly human existence.”Footnote ⁹² An eschatological view of human temporal existence is valuable to our context over against what we currently experience as the primacy of the detemporalized “present,” but it will not hegemonically overcome our contemporary situation, nor violently supersede it, at least not in its Christian form. We can hope and reasonably expect that a gradual transformation of the horizon of (future) action can be accomplished from within the postmodern situation, leading us cautiously forward toward something different, a situation that might claim some of the better aspects of our past experience. There is nothing inevitable about this hope, but it must be actively realized through action, not mere speculation, in full awareness that we may not see our hope fulfilled.Footnote ⁹³ Certainly the plurality of the present situation, the aspect of choice in human identity formation, has particular value for human life and can be meaningfully retained. The emphasis on world-making action of the modern era, when balanced with respect for legitimate plurality, is also an attitude worth adopting. Plurality in this sense would mean contextualized plurality and an awareness of historical realities, rather than a decontextualized and commoditized plurality for personal augmentation and consumption.

The very particular Christian vision of eschatology offers four distinct advantages for dealing with the contemporary situation. First, it offers an authentic way of tapping into the ontological structure of human givenness. The finite historical human subject is, at its core, a critical-hermeneutical being, and although our ontological foundation is important, the contextual narratives that are built upon it present their own possibilities. The movement between temporal horizons, coupled with self-reflection and critique, should be respected. If we are seeking the humanum, what human beings are capable of, then it makes sense to begin with the already-given ontological foundation rather than placing undue emphasis on only part of it. A critical awareness of our temporality is crucial to integrating and placing the competing influences of traditions into a present context and deploying our interpretive powers in a meaningful way. Such an awareness also alters how “meaning” itself is perceived: future-oriented meaning has the potential for striving and self-transcendence. Detemporalized, present-oriented self-understanding, on the other hand, places the emphasis on self-presentation epitomized by the digital idealized self. Self-presentation by means of social media is nearly effortless; it allows us to present an ideal without having to reach very far for it, through a manicured image and selectively edited memory.Footnote ⁹⁴ The present reality does not need to be dealt with when an idealized, detemporalized version of the self can be presented so easily for the approval of others. Despite the positive spin given to this phenomenon by the marketing slogans of smartphone-app developers, it is the constant anxiety about our “everlasting persona” that drives us to obsessively document and share the current moment. This is a phenomenon that should be resisted (partially by engendering a greater awareness and engagement with history), but in a way that does not purely reject technological advancement. If the problem is highly nuanced, then any proposed or even provisional solutions must be so as well.

Second, the Christian narrative, as a mixture of experiences that meaningfully cohere under the rubric of the Rule of God, occurs along with many that do not. A distinct temporal awareness on the part of humanity should shift its interpretive weight toward the future horizon based on our understanding of God. The “new image of God” developed by Schillebeeckx retains a balanced view of God as immediately present to creation in a mediated and historical way.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is God who, on God's own initiative, comes “immediately near” as a “divine absolute nearness,” in and through historical events, which are indispensable from the human perspective.Footnote ⁹⁶ Truly, extra mundum nulla salus is the most correct formulation of God's salvific activity: creation and salvation are inextricably bound together; both are manifestations of God's overflowing love and total freedom to be God.Footnote ⁹⁷ The link between creation and salvation is seen from the human side in history.Footnote ⁹⁸ It only makes sense that God approaches us when and where we are able to understand. Because God is experienced in this way, historical experience and the hermeneutical mediation of experience through tradition must be given priority, even at the ontological level, such that “it becomes clear that ‘man's cause’ is in fact ‘God's cause’” expressed as human salvation in the Rule of God.Footnote ⁹⁹

Third, from the believer's perspective, Christian eschatology presents a view of temporality and history that is radically open. The openness is that of the process of human interpretation: the present and the past are open-ended in terms of their meaning, as is the future.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Openness to the conflict of interpretations, and indeed critical reflection on our own preunderstanding, are, from the Christian perspective, also an openness to the saving reality of God: “the interruptive event of grace.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Jesus, as the paradigm of God's mediation and as the eschatological prophet who reveals and conceals the Father, really can be described as “God's interrupter.”Footnote ¹⁰² The grace of God encountered in the revelatory event, one that both disjoints and continues a narrative from within, shows itself to be structured eschatologically: a transcendent “in-breaking” of grace (experienced as salvation or God's silent presence and condemnation of suffering) is immediately immanentized in the world, at which point it must be interpreted in and through the experiencing subject's hermeneutical-critical consciousness. The subject's framework for interpretation is altered by the event, but continues; through reflection it can preserve the event in an interpreted way. For the Christian narrative, these revelatory experiences reveal God by breaking open human constructions and expectations that are unjust and inadequate.Footnote ¹⁰³ God does not represent the “ideological stronghold of [closed or static] tradition and status quo, but represents a threat to them: he is a God of ‘change for the good’ and therefore judgment and grace, albeit in utter faithfulness.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Closely related to this is a fourth point: the eschatological openness of temporality not only refuses to close the possibilities of the narrative for the future, but also extends to our interpretation of the past. The realized eschatological future is one that is more than the future. It also contains elements of the present and is infused to its core with elements of the past. It calls for us to live authentically in the world in a way that has consequences for all of history. Because it is God who will ultimately justify, raise up, and save our history in a final way, the Christian can raise a serious objection to Artsybashev's Sanin. “Why,” asks Sanin's eponymous character, “should I get myself hanged so that the workers in 3200 A.D. can have as much food and sex as they want?”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For the believer, death does not have the final word: “Believers entrust the absurdity [of death] to God, the source of pure positivity and the transcendent foundation of all ethics; the mystical source of any ethical commitment, which still gives hope to the actual victim.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Of course, this is difficult; Christian eschatology, and, by extension, Christian action in the world, involve inherent risk. Eschatology is, after all, an operative view of the world and part of the Christian interpretive framework, structuring how human beings see, experience, and interpret the world. The fundamental trust in God that leaves the future open in this manner and that leaves one open to surprise (to revelation!) places our identity as well as our well-being at risk. By working in the world, in taking one specific course over another, we wager that our actions will be correct and that our understanding of God and God's will will be fruitful for human salvation. Like the disciples, this often involves drinking the same cup as Jesus, and being baptized with the same baptism.