think or say: Life has no future! Reality lies only in the past! The present is sufficient! For whoever has a concern about the absolute future is concerned about God.26
Here I have substituted the word “future” for depth because the metaphor “depth” is only partly able to illuminate what many people mean by God (as Tillich himself was no doubt aware). What is signified by the term “God” is only fragmentarily conceptualized by reference to the dimension of depth . . . And yet the “depth” metaphor is by itself inadequate for pointing to the reality of what many people understand by God. It needs to be complemented by other ideas. Among these is that of futurity. Particularly in biblical religion, the idea of God is inseparable from our experience of the future. The Bible may even be said to have opened up our consciousness to a radically new way of experiencing the depth of reality, namely as essentially future.27 Even today’s secular experience of the future has been influenced by the biblical location of God’s reality in the dimension of futurity. This “eschatological” sense that the “really real” world lies up ahead, in the future, is shared by Marxists and capitalist consumer cultures alike—even though they may either explicitly or implicitly deny the existence of God. Ironically, the secularistic way of experiencing the future is an indirect descendant of the biblical optimism according to which God heals and addresses people in history out of an ever-receding future. The idea of God may have dropped out of the picture, but this future orientation has remained alive in many non-religious movements, oftentimes even more vigorously than in theistic settings. Today’s biblical scholarship has shown clearly that the ancient Hebrew religious experience differed from that of its contemporaries essentially in its loosening the sacred from its bondage to the circularity of nature’s seasons and placing it in the realm of the indefinite historical future. The central challenge for the early devotees of the biblical Yahweh was to forsake the safety of a purely nature-oriented religion and surrender themselves to the uncertainty of living in a history whose promise seemed to lie far off in the future.
If our emphasizing the future in this way seems to downgrade the importance of the past and of tradition, then this impression must be corrected. Openness to the future is the very condition of, and not an obstacle to, recovering the meaning of the past and the important traditions of our human history. The horizon of the future liberates significant events and traditions from the heaviness of merely having been and opens up a space in which they can come to life once again . . . Openness to the future should never occur at the expense of forgetting the suffering of forgotten peoples of the past or the wisdom molded by tragedy that has been deposited in the great teachings of our traditions—but these traditions are intended to instruct us, not to enslave us.
Another way to think about God, then, is as the absolute future. God is not an object of our experience so much as a dimension or horizon of our experience. Not all things that are real are potential objects of human experience. The dimension of futurity, as of depth, is certainly real, without thereby being subject to our intellectual or perceptual mastery. Therefore, perhaps God may be understood less as a potential object of experience than as a dimension, condition, and future horizon of all our experience.
As the absolute future, “God” means the irrepressible promise of fulfillment that emerges anew out of the infinite (and seemingly empty) horizon of our future each time we experience disappointment. “God” means the ground of hope that animates us to search further whenever we realize that we have not yet arrived at what we really long for.
The Absence of God
Locating God’s presence in the arena of the future can help us to understand the apparent absence of God. Scientifically oriented philosophers usually challenge theists to show some present evidence of God’s reality. They seek something in the manner of a positive, scientific demonstration of God’s objective contemporary existence. And when theists fail to adduce such verification, they are accused of fostering an illusion, that is, of being unrealistic. The existence of that which is said to be of ultimate importance is not even as obvious as that of a rock. How can the intelligent, scientifically enlightened person seriously believe in God?
Our answer to this question is simply that the scientific, empirical approach is oriented toward a region of reality—the present—that is insufficiently expansive enough to contain the reality of God. We may think of the appropriate region of God’s reality as essentially the future (although also embracing the past and present). Understood as the absolute future, the reality of God lies beyond the limits of what can be grasped in the present. The methods we employ in understanding the present are inadequate for orienting us to the future. Science is fixed on the present or past; it is incapable of dealing with the future since there is no way it can bring the dimension of the yet-to-come under any sort of verificational control. Only imagination suffused with hope can bring the future within view. The reality of God, therefore, must be approached in the same general way as we approach any aspect of the future, namely, by hoping and imagining.
Of course the empiricist will object that future-oriented imagination is a mere extrapolation from our present wishes, that our longing for the future and picturing it symbolically may have nothing to do with “reality.” However, this objection applies more to wishing than to hoping and we must carefully distinguish between these two postures. Hoping is an openness to the breaking in of what is radically new and unanticipated. Wishing, on the other hand, is the illusory extension into the future of what we want at the present moment.28 Wishing is not an openness to the future but rather is oriented entirely from the present. In order to hope, on the other hand, we need to relativize our wishing and open ourselves to the prospect of being surprised by the radically new. Such an attitude requires a courageous asceticism of its own, a painful renunciation of our tendency to cling obsessively to the present or past. Hoping is not an escape from reality, nor is it as easy as its critics insist.29 Hoping is an attitude capable of living tolerantly with the absence of God.
Religion
If the ultimate environment of our lives is not only depth but also the absolute future, then we must understand “religion” accordingly. We may say, then, that religion is not only concern for depth or the expression in symbol and ritual of a shared sense of depth. Without denying any of this, we must now add that religion, in connection with the horizon of an absolute future, is essentially hope.30
We must be careful to distinguish hope from other forms of desire. It may be very tempting to follow the suggestion of Freud that religion is nothing other than a product of the pleasure principle—that religion is an illusion, created by an intense desire to escape “reality” and merge in an infantile manner with maternal nature or a paternal God who would satisfy our hunger for gratification. We need not deny that there might be something to what Freud has to say here about the nature of human desire, but if we understand the idea of God as that which challenges us to open ourselves radically to the future, we must distinguish what we are calling religion from Freud’s position. After all, in Freud’s critique, religion is always understood as a regressive tendency, as a hankering for a lost love-object from one’s past psychic experience.31 This obsession with the idol of the past is the very temptation that biblical religion itself disowned, especially in the prophetic strains of that tradition. The Hebrew prophets would themselves have agreed with Freud that we humans are able to do better than simply spend our lives attempting to recover a lost parental love. They might even have concurred with psychoanalysis that many of our portraits of God are inevitably overlaid with regressive images of frustrated relations to significant others in our psychic history. But they would have also insisted beyond this that the place of encounter with God is in hope for a radically new future rather than in nostalgia for past safeties. They would look back to the past not in order to retrieve
