The image of the future

air. This is but a symptom of a more profound spiritual and intellectual révolution which overthrows God as First Architect, Builder, and Mover of the Universe. This révolution not only affects His créative function, but most especially His task in and power over time from alpha to oméga.

The old images of chaos and cosmos, the immeasurably distant pôles which God was thought gradually to be spanning through the work of His création, are now outmoded. The universe develops on the basis of immanent, demonstrable, and definable powers, not through the inscrutable opérations of transcendent powers.

In the older view of a God who revealed Himself in history, the stream of events in time mirrored God's disposition towards man.

The course of history was permeated with divine meaning, and the pattem fixed. Now the évolution of human thought regarding the future has liberated historical time from an intervening superhuman power and leaves it to its own destiny. Time is autonomous, and the future is no longer determined and directed by a higher hand.

God's removal from history is intimately related to His removal from this world. God has died not only a social death, but also an axiological, ethical, and cultural death.

At the same time that Pascal went over from the God of the philosophers and scholars to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Spinoza was exchanging the Jewish-Christian God for a metaphysical God as the really existing and eternal but impersonal God to whom man is in fact bound by the amor Dei, Then, closing off a long period of philosophical démonstrations of God, Kant, a century later, removed Him from phiiosophy on the grounds that this was a science of "pure reason," rationalizing only that which could be empirically known, and that God overstepped thèse bounds. He placed Him instead, as a postulate of "practical reason," in the separate field of religion. Modem phiiosophy has in gênerai continued this trend of not-knowing, emancipating itself from biblical révélation and Christology. Hère agnosticism prédominâtes, but with a few exceptions, such as the phenomenology of Max Scheler and Catholic existentialism, even the rétention of a philosophical or metaphysical faith goes hand in hand with a rejection of the Christian belief in a Personal God. The theological point of view has in gênerai made way for the anthropological point of view: God has made way for man.

In the work of Karl Jaspers, a theologian who was continually concerned intensively with Christianity, nothing remains of the Christian image of God but the mystical "ground of ail being," a "shapeless all-shape," a "silently speaking" or a "nonrevealing" tran234