God's Unfinished Future - Why it Matters Now

In America today there is a battle over Christianity’s vision of God’s future. Popular apocalyptic works such as the Left Behind series pit the forces of good and evil in an imminent showdown where God will defeat the forces of evil, the earth will be annihilated, and the saved lifted up.

The claim of this conference is that this vision is a massive and dangerous distortion of the biblical picture of God’s purpose. This apocalypticism, in our tradition and others, supports a politics of polarization, violence, and extremism.

In a lifetime of teaching and writing, Jürgen Moltmann (Theology of Hope, The Coming of God) has championed an alternative to contemporary renderings of apocalypticism. His perspective is rich in its biblical grounding as well as socio-historical analysis, underscoring the political implications of all theological visions about ultimate things. Now at the pinnacle of a significant career, he offers a powerful story in which God is truly all in all and no life, no aspect of God’s good creation is abandoned.

To shed a particularly American light on these questions, theologian and author The Rev. Barbara R. Rossing, Th.D. (The Rapture Exposed) will trace the development of the prevailing narrative and propose a reading of the text that is both more life-giving and more faithful to Christian tradition. The Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes, best-selling author, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard, will reflect on how a vision of God’s future has served as a source of hope and direction in the African-American struggle of liberation.

From the fate of the individual soul and a model of universal reconciliation to the transformation of the cosmos and a vital focus on ecology, the promise of this conference is practical theology at its most important, as we explore together how a Christian perspective on last things and things that last can be a vital spring for moral life now.