Theology and the Future of Humanity - a sketch for a lecture

What will become of us? Or, what will we become? Or, lest the notion of ‘becoming’ sound too passive: what can we become? There is no doubt that the destiny of humanity is rushing up to meet us at a speed unprecedented in human history. We are closer to the future than we ever have been before. A number of meta-narratives compete to describe the future of humanity. Some are infra-historical, and describe the future of human being, in progressive terms, as moving from glory to glory. The genre of this narrative is epic, with Adam cast as the epic hero emerging triumphant from the struggle of history. Others are apocalyptic, and describe the future in terms of an often disastrous rupture with the present, usually on account of human evil or ineptitude. Adam is cast in this narrative as a tragic protagonist, victim of his own nature.

These descriptions of the future of humanity may be religious or materialist. However, in neither type of story is the other possibility adequately described. The progressivist narrative (‘epic’) cannot account for the brute historical fact of human recidivism. The apocalyptic vision (‘tragic’) is deeply misanthropic, and in denial about the remarkable achievements of human beings. Both story-types are forms of an idealism which into which the actual human experience must be squeezed without remainder – which explains why they are currently in unresolved combat.

We can illustrate this from a reading of UK author Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth. Smith’s rich, sprawling, picaresque narrative of late twentieth century London is a telling description of life in a post-colonial Western city, where human identity is being re-shaped in the multicultural melting-pot. The novel humorously presents and critiques several competing futurisms – religious, political and scientific. For Smith, human destiny is not something we have a lot of say over. We may have small prisms of choice, but for thoroughly postmodern Zadie, to claim to have a uniform explanation, whether it be religious or rationalist, flies in the “teeth” of the hilarious that is happening all around us. In the words of those other misanthropes Radiohead: “we’re all accidents waiting to happen.” We are after all, victims of the random. The best future humans, for Smith, are those that don’t succumb to some fanatical programme for change, but just love. Smith’s answer to the tension between ‘epic’ and ‘tragic’ stories is ‘comic’. For her, Adam is a clown.
What then of ‘theology’? In a sense all of these narratives are ‘theological’, whether explicitly so or not. A Christian theology, however, presents a point from which both kinds of narrative may be subject to critique. Much of Smith’s critical vision finds itself endorsed from a Christian theological point of view. However, Christian theology tells a story of its own (‘gospel’) about the future of humanity. Adam, in this story, is redeemed by the second Adam.

As Irenaeus of Lyon observed, the New Testament compresses the story of humanity into the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. It is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which took place by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 4:17) that is the type of our destiny, sown in dishonour and raised in glory. Having made reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth, Jesus of Nazareth is the exact radiance of God’s being, the image of the invisible God. Remarkably, the transformation was won from within the human sphere, by a man in the likeness of sinful flesh.