15. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 56.
16. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 57.
17. Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations, 464–67.
18. See Otto, Idea of the Holy.
19. See Tillich, Systematic Theology.
20. Ogden, Reality of God, 34–38.
21. Tillich, Courage to Be, 156.
22. Wilde, De Profundis, 18.
23. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 55.
24. See Tillich, Courage to Be.
2: Future25
Again let us start with the obvious. I would invite the reader to pause now and attend to the transient character of this moment. Notice how impossible it is to hold on to it, how it slips out of your grasp. Where did it go? It was present a few moments ago, but now its presentness has been lost and another present has slipped into its place. When that earlier moment vanished, did it slip into nothingness? Did it undergo an absolute perishing? The very fact that you can recall it, that it still persists in your memory, is evidence that it did not perish utterly. In some fashion or other, it still lives on. What we call the “past” is the repository of all those formerly present moments whose immediacy has now been lost to us and which have the enduring status of “having been.”
For now, though, our focus is not the past. We know that the formerly present moment took up a permanent dwelling in the past. But where did it come from in the first place? That edge of freshness that blended into a present experience lived only for a moment and then perished. Where did it come from? The source of that moment’s novelty we refer to as the future.
It is impossible for us to define the future. We cannot hold it out before us as an object of tangible grasp. It evades our comprehension. But we cannot avoid experiencing it or being affected by it. We cannot deny that the future, any more than the dimension of depth, is a part of our experience, even though we cannot bring it into focus. We are constantly being “invaded” by it, “overwhelmed” by it, “carried into” it, or we are simply trying to avoid it. The future is clearly an ineluctable aspect of our experience and not an illusion, though it is too elusive to be turned into an object for our examination in the same sense as, for example, a physical object in front of our eyes. There is something very slippery about the future. But even though it cannot be reified, there is still something inevitable about it.
If there is anything in our ordinary experience that lies beyond our control, it is the relentless conquering of the present by the future. Again, this is so obvious as not to need mentioning. But our approach in each chapter of this book is to begin with the obvious. We start with those experiences which are so matter-of-fact, so taken for granted, that we find it difficult to talk about them. Certainly, futurity is one of the commonplaces that evades our ordinary focal understanding. It is a dimension that our consciousness dwells in without usually focusing on. Indeed, focusing on it, as we are doing now, is likely to distort the understanding and feeling of it that we have in our spontaneous existence. Nonetheless, we must ask an unusual, strange-sounding question about it: what is the future? Perhaps the reader has never been confronted by such an apparently inane question before. After all, this kind of question seems to fall in the same context as other apparently unanswerable puzzles such as what is matter? What is reality? What is nature? What is truth? What is beauty? Similarly, at first glance, the question “what is the future?” generates little apparent hope for a clear or interesting answer.
Our question “what is the future?” cannot be an interesting one unless we have first felt the confinement of the past. But there is a paradox here. For we cannot feel the past as confining unless in some mode of present experience we have already felt the future. To know a limit as a limit is to be beyond that limit. To recognize the past truly as past means that we already have some vague sense of futurity. The future, even when it seems to be absent, has already quietly insinuated itself into our present subjective awareness. By comparison with the silent horizon of this future, our past shows up in awareness precisely as pastness. If the future has already inserted itself into our present, perhaps we may begin to feel a troubling conflict.
As with depth, the future is fundamentally a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It evokes in us ambivalent responses. We may, and often do, shrink back from it as an awesome and overwhelming terror, as a mysterium tremendum. We feel, with some reason, that it will loosen us from our moorings to the safety of the past. This severance may be a difficult one, depending on the degree to which we have made the past or present normative for our life. But the future is also a mysterium fascinans, compellingly attractive and promising a fulfillment not yet attained. There is something in us that longs for the future to deliver us from the decay of the past and the boredom of the present. We intuit a healing power in the future. We form images of it in our daydreams, in our symbols, myths, utopias, and in our religions. But as with the dimension of depth, our relationship to the future is ambiguous. The future is both the object of our deepest longing and, at the same time, an horizon that we would like to recede into a less threatening distance. We would rather make the past or present the absolute criterion of our lives than allow ourselves to be carried away into the unfamiliar freshness of the future. Our native openness to the future is usually awakened most intensely in those moments of our life and in periods of human history when the past or present seems insufficient to nurture our longings. This is why a sense of the future takes root most firmly among the oppressed. The reaching out for something radically new does not easily occur in the midst of ease and satisfaction with the status quo. Often it is only when the resources of the past and present have been spent that we begin to open ourselves willingly to the future . . . As in the case of depth, the future is not only an abyss from which we understandably recoil; it is also a ground that promises ultimate fulfillment.
However, not just any particular future is capable of satisfying us. Even if it happens that we arrive at an imagined “utopia” in our individual or social life, we inevitably find that it too will be relativized by the horizon of a future beyond itself. It will be exposed as finite and fragile and we will have to continue our quest. Each particular future is relative, so it turns out to be too narrow to appease the deep hunger for the future that constitutes the dynamism of human and social life. It is apparent that we never arrive completely at the future we long for and that if we momentarily think we have arrived, we are soon disappointed. It may be tempting for some of us then to interpret the future as an infinite void with no ultimate ground and to see our lives as futile forays into this infinite emptiness. The ever receding character of the future may seem to make despair the most honest attitude we can take toward it. More than one philosopher has taken this position.
The name of this infinite and inexhaustible future is God. That future is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of your ultimate future, of what you hope for in the depths of your desire. Perhaps in order to do this, you must forget many things that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means the absolute future, you know much about the
