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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 divine. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot 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 it as past but rather to find precedents for looking forward to the surprising action of God in their future.

The heart of religion, in this context at least, may be thought of as hope for an “absolute future.” Such hope is not a renunciation of the reality principle if it turns out that the substance of reality lies in the future rather than in the present or the past. There is no evidence that the present and the past exhaust the limits of reality. It may be that the “really real” lies up ahead and that our historical existence is only a fragmentary and inadequate anticipation of this future. Our anticipation of the fullness of reality would then take the form of imagining the future in such a way as to allow for its entrance into the present. A certain kind of adventurous dreaming would be the way in which we would follow the Freudian imperative to “face reality.” A failure to construct creative visions that motivate us to action and usher in the future would be a refusal to be realistic. And if the fullness of God’s being is essentially future, then realistic religion consists in the hopeful and imaginative quest for this future.

25. The following text is an excerpt. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 25–46. Reprinted with permission.

26. Haught paraphrases Tillich, substituting the term “future” for depth. The expression “absolute future” comes from Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, 59–68

27. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope.

28. See Williams, True Resurrection, 178–79.

29. See Williams, True Resurrection, 178–79.

30. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 19–36.

31. See Freud, Future of an Illusion.