Why don’t we know how things will end? [Questioning faith #27]

Ted Grimsrud—May 31, 2023

I have published two books that offer interpretations of the book of Revelation—in 1987 and 2022. I learned a lot during those 35 years, and I think that is reflected in the more recent book, To Follow the Lamb, being the better one. At the same time, I am happy that I still agree with most of what I wrote in Triumph of the Lamb, the first book. There is one issue, though, about which my views very definitely changed.

Triumph of the Lamb, the 1987 book, self-consciously provided an alternative reading of Revelation to the End Times-focused view I had been taught as a new Christian. That future-prophetic view has for a long time been very popular and remains so. I set out to refute that view and present what I believed was a better approach. I think I did a pretty good job of that and still affirm most of what I wrote. However, while rejecting the details of looking into the future, I still expressed hope for a happy outcome to human history. My views now are more explicitly uncertain about the End.

I concluded Triumph of the Lamb with these words: “From start to finish, the Bible records the fulfillment of God’s purpose in creation. There has always been a longing for a time to come when true peace shall reign over all the earth. Fear, hatred, and bitter tears will be no more. The affirmation of Revelation 21 and 22 is that this fulfillment, the conclusion of history, will be worth all the pain and struggle which humankind has experienced throughout the ages. The completion of God’s work is the New Jerusalem—the establishment of the holy city—within which God’s people will reign for ever and ever. If the city of Babylon is characterized by terror, deception, and injustice, the New Jerusalem is the exact opposite. There the nations walk in harmony and justice and peace, where the light of the glory of God guides everyone’s path” (Triumph of the Lamb, p. 164).

While I did not think that Revelation, or anywhere else in the Bible, taught a timeline for the End Times with specific predictions of the final events of history, I did believe that the Bible gives trustworthy promises that we will experience a genuine New Jerusalem at the end of time. I believed that Revelation was predicting that much about the future—and that we should believe that that prediction will happen.

So, I had quite a bit of confidence that we could know from the Bible that the human project will have happy ending. I no longer have such confidence. These are the final words of my 2022 book: “The peaceable message that Revelation proclaims, I suggest, is not a message the everything will turn out okay in the end. It is not a message of an interventionist God who is in control of history. It is a message of the sovereignty of love. It is a message of the call to let love shape our lives and ideals and convictions and loyalties in all areas of life” (To Follow the Lamb, p. 269).

I will return later in this post to the positive, peaceable message I believe the Bible has about human destiny. My point here, though, is that I no longer think the Bible should be read as predicting the future in any direct way—even in the sense of giving us a trustworthy promise about “a genuine New Jerusalem at the end of time.” I don’t believe that our hopefulness in life should rest on a conviction that God will heal everything in the end. I do not explicitly reject that kind of conviction so much as feel agnostic about it. I don’t think we can count on such an outcome, even if we decide we do want to hope for it.

I have two different reasons for this agnosticism. One is my sense of the way the universe we inhabit actually works. We can’t have access to direct knowledge of what is going to happen in the future (and we shouldn’t want to). Second is that I don’t think the Bible actually means to make any predictions about the ultimate future. I don’t think such predictions are important to the big story the Bible tells. The Bible, as a rule, is resolutely present focused, and insofar as writers allude to the future they are doing so in service to exhortations about the present.

Why we can’t see the future

Throughout most of human history, I imagine, people have tried to predict the future. The vast majority of those predictions, I am sure we would find, have been wrong—or too vague to be proven to be right or wrong. This predictive inaccuracy has been the case even for predictions based on writings of the Bible. So, when we think about the future, we have a lot of evidence from the failures of predictions that will support a conclusion that we would do best to recognize that we can’t know anything for sure.

Is this failure rate of predictions a reason to question the certainty of the bigger, more general prediction of the certain healing at the end of history? When I wrote Triumph of the Lamb, I would have said no. Now, though, I actually tend to think it probably is. Insofar as New Jerusalem (or something like it) is a prediction and not simply a desire, I don’t see why it would be any different from all the other failed predictions. Just based on evidence, I would tend to think that putting any weight on predictions of the future is not a good idea.

However, I now think this question about the future is more of a theological and philosophical type of question than an empirical one. Interestingly, it is partly because I believe that God is love that I am pushed to conclude that I must remain agnostic about history’s happy end. One of the central aspects of love, as I understand it, is that love is noncoercive and non-controlling. To love an other is to allow that other to be free, to be self-determining, to live with an openness.

A universe that has a God of love as ultimate, it seems, will be an open universe, a non-predetermined universe, a universe that is—in a profound way—unpredictable. I know that many theists will argue both that God is loving and that God is in control of the outcome of history. I don’t find that to be a coherent view. But it’s not that God chooses not to exercise such control and to pre-determine history’s course. It is that God simply cannot do so. Because God is love.

Now, if the Bible is actually trying to give us trustworthy predictions of the future, it is doing something that we now would see as impossible (or, at least, that I now see as impossible)—and as not consistent with the conviction that God is love. I’m okay with saying such a thing (see my earlier post on the Bible as “uninspired”—#4, “How can an uninspired Bible be truthful?”), with saying that the Bible is not authoritative on such an issue. However, maybe trustworthy predictions about the future are not actually part of the Bible’s agenda.

What the Bible says about the future

I will not suggest that the Bible does not contain any predictions of the future. However, there are several points we should keep in mind in thinking about such predictions. First, many of the predictions happen within the context of the particular stories that are being told in the Bible and should not be seen as meaning that the big story of the Bible as a whole is making such predictions. They reflect a particular aspect within a particular story and do not have broader relevance. Second, many of the predictions are conditional, they are made in the context of prophetic exhortation—as in, “do this or some bad thing will happen.” The point of the prediction is to challenge the hearers of the proclamation to change, not to detail literally what is going to happen in the future.

The third point is the most important. The orientation of the Bible’s writings is almost always mostly about the present and near future of their audience. Whatever might give the impression of speaking of the future is meant to serve the purpose of shaping life in the present. The Bible is about present-day life, how to live faithfully in the present. Such a present orientation, though, is not cavalier about the future. To live responsibly in the present is to be doing what matters most in shaping the future. Present faithfulness is not about self-gratification here and now but about investing in a way of life that will be sustainable and fruitful over time.

In fact, to be focused on future predictions is to be irresponsible in the present and to undermine the wellbeing of those who follow us. Thus, the orientation toward life in the Bible is, in a genuine sense, future oriented. But only in the sense that there is a powerful continuity between how we live in the present with how we will contribute to future wellbeing.

The positive, peaceable message of the Bible

I do find it meaningful to affirm a vision that healing is a consequence of human history. However, I think our best approach to that vision is to recognize that it is best understood as a guide for how we should live now, not as an ironclad promise of some future outcome. To separate the future hope from present responsibility is actually to risk severing ourselves from that future hope. All too often, future-oriented Christians have accepted, even embraced, present-day practices that are violent, destructive, and disrespectful.

For example, in End-Times theology’s typical view of the outcome of human history, you have extraordinarily massive God-originating violence that destroys most of creation and most living creatures. This violence is understood to be in service of an outcome that results in peace in the new heaven and new earth. This theology often has the effect of encouraging believers to approve of or even participate in violent acts that actually contradict the teaching of Jesus and the types of human behavior that make for peace.

In my revised interpretation of the book of Revelation, I have come to see New Jerusalem not as a future promise but as a present exhortation. I don’t actually find the image of streets of gold, et al, to be very inspiring. But the more general sense of New Jerusalem is of a place of reconciliation and healing—even for “the nations” and “the kings of the earth.” Even the institutions of oppression and the elite of those institutions who have ground so many vulnerable human beings into the dirt over the course of history may be healed. But the point is not to imagine some miraculous intervention of an all-powerful God at the end of history to make this promise come true. To the contrary, the point is that the way of the Lamb expressed in the rest of Revelation provides the only approach to life that might bring healing to the ground-down vulnerable and even to their oppressors.

I believe that Revelation serves as a powerful and creative coda to the rest of the Bible. This idea that the message is about method more than outcome, means more than ends, conveys a vision of life that is inherently positive and peaceable—and, even, hopeful. More so than belief in a kind of discontinuous promise that predicts an outcome that will not be built on our acts of love in human history. If we are to find New Jerusalem, that will only happen by practicing the kind of resistance to injustice and love for the vulnerable (and their oppressors) that Jesus the Lamb embodied.

Thus, I want to conclude that we don’t know how things will end because history is open-ended. And the only way to achieve a happy outcome is to devote our lives to working for healing. And finally (echoing Revelation), that there is worship/celebration that happens throughout history amidst the struggle for healing tells us that meaning and hope are intrinsic to lives that are lived oriented toward healing. Such living has its own reward.

Questioning Faith blog series