1.Christian responsibility must take clear account of the situation in which and for which it seeks to present faith as hope. It must —briefly—begin by establishing the situation and giving an account of it. This account should at the same time show to what extent the "future" and, more specifically, a "planned or plannable future" is not today an arbitrary, but a central theme and problem of the Christian's responsibility.2

1. See especially Chapters I, II, and V of this book.

2. This attempt at a theological resume of the situation is unnecessary as long as the situation from which faith starts in the world appears as a unified corpus politicum Christianum, in which all the modes of worldly knowledge and behavior are seen only as functions derived from a unified Christian "world view." This is obviously no longer the case today. That is why a theological stocktaking is from time to time essential, although this involves a number of fundamental questions. On what information does it depend? How can they be theologically reproduced? It is not possible to go into these questions here in detail. See J. B. Metz, "Apologetics," in Sacranentum Mundi, Vol. I, New York, 1968.

I should like to provide this resume by first listing some characteristics of the world to which our Christian responsibility today must apply and from which it must start, and then by trying to gather these individual definitions to give a sense of that world and reality that governs our technological and planorientated attitude to the future.

(1) The place where the responsibility of the Christian community starts is the world, in its permanent and growing worldliness. I am aware that this proposition, which I endeavored to develop some years ago,8 is not unproblematical and also not unambiguous. It was, moreover, questioned at the time.4 Nevertheless, I should like to retain this formula for this account, which is more in the nature of a preliminary reconnaissance.

A worldly world—this is not a metaphysical definition of the world, which would ultimately prove to be an empty pleonasm. It is, rather, an historical definition of the world in its present nature. And if it is described further as a world that remains and grows in its worldliness, then this means that worldliness does not have merely a transitional character, but that of an epoch, which helps to determine the world situation for the foreseeable future.

A worldly world—this is the result of an historical process that began in the West and today, as the world becomes increasingly unified, is rapidly becoming the situation of all people and all cultures. Let us briefly consider here its chief features in order to understand the situation from which Christian responsibility for the future begins.

3. See Chapters 1 and 2.

4. The criticism was concerned chiefly with the theological interpretation of the "secularization" of the world. Whereas Chapters 1 and 2 of this work argue in a context that is markedly Christological (Chapter 1) or anthropological (Chapter 2), this chapter deals chiefly with the eschatological "political" context of the Christian Gospel, following Chapter 3. These various points of view of the theological interpretation of the problem do not exclude one another, although we are unable to discuss here their inner connection. (a) In Western history this process of the world becoming worldly has the form of "secularization." Since the late Middle Ages, slowly, but all the more definitely and irreversibly, man, his society, his science, his culture, his economy, have moved out of the great all-inclusive edifice that was medieval Christendom and its theopolitical structure, in which the theology and the Church possessed the key to every sphere of life. The political exodus begins early on: the national states emerge, press for autonomy, and create independent social and cultural centers. Since the time of Columbus men no longer go out to win back the Holy Land, but to discover the world. Philosophy throws off the tutelage of theology. As Kant was to put it later, it no longer wants to be a maidservant carrying the train of theology, but to carry the torch of reason in front of it. The Galileo affair was symptomatic of the momentous rejection by the natural sciences of the authority of the Christian understanding of the world. The age of the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the political, social, scientific, and technological revolutions that began in it on the other, show that the world now to a special degree and in a hitherto unknown way becomes the business of man, that he, man, now orders his affairs himself and takes them under the protection of his freedom and his political responsibility. In a sense, the world determines itself. It sets itself its own goals, which emerge automatically from within itself. The social structure of this world is no longer given directly "by the grace of God," but its organization now depends on human conventions and goals. For a long time the Church has observed this process only with resentment—to some extent even up to the recent council—regarding it exclusively as a falling away and a false emancipation and only very slowly finding the courage to let the world become secular in this sense and see this process not just as an event which is against the historical intentions of Christianity, but also as something that is partly determined by the innermost historical impulses of Christianity itself and its message.

(b) Moreover, this secularizing process—and this is of particular importance in this context—finds its form in the technological hominization and manipulation of the world. With the rise and development of the natural sciences, the world changed from being the environment enfolding man to being the object and material of transformation by man. "Whereas man in the pre-technological age knew only realizable aims set up by himself, inasmuch as they were pre-given by the structure of his own physical being and the reality surrounding it— whereas, in other words, he lived previously out of concrete "nature," pre-given to him and supporting him biologically and as a human being, he can now set himself aims (though not without limits) that he chooses arbitrarily, and in relation to them construct a ... world that did not previously exist in order to reach them. He not only interprets the world about him and its effects in terms of his human life, but he creates this world himself."6 From being an observer man becomes the transformer of his world reality; from being homo sapiens he again becomes homo faber—"but this time the overseer of a world and through that more than ever the overseer of himself. No longer an animal that has to work, but a creator":' homo creator, or, to put it more carefully, homo manipulator. And the world seems a world delivered up to him and his manipulation, a world hominized to an extreme degree.7 But this hominization is not limited to the pure world of natural objects; it is extended increasingly to all the spheres of man's life. It seems also to hand over the future of the world and of man more and more to rationalized planning. "Modern medicine and social medicine, modern sociology and similar branches of scientific anthropology testify to [such planning]. Modern biochemistry and genetics open up to man the first stages in methods to manipulate the biological origin of his life. He does not just passively experience his social and political fate, but plans long-term social and political systems; he discovers and learns to use methods to manipulate ideologically both the individual and human collectives—methods which, even consciously, are no longer the simple communication of knowledge to the other and the appeal to his free decision, but which by means of scientific and psychological techniques are able to change the mentality of both the individual and human collectives.... Man manipulates man through all the newly created social networks provided by mass communications, by the consumer-goods system, by political education under authoritarian systems, and in many similar ways. For all these new social networks—and they do not just simply come into being, but are planned and carried out with full calculation of their effects on humanity—are just so many self-manipulations of man."8

5. К. Rahner in Handbuch der Pastoraltheologie, Vol. II, Freiburg, 1966, p.189.

6. H. de Lubac, The Discovery of God, New York, I960.

7. See Chapter II.

8. К. Rahner in Handbuch der Pastoraltheologie, p. 215.

(c) The secularization process extends also to the radical pluralization of secular areas and to corresponding attitudes towards the secular. This state of affairs is familiar to us on all sides. The pluralization of our life, requiring as it does that we constantly change roles, often leads to a spiritual and intellectual "overburdening" which arouses in the inhabitants of this secular world quite new ways of seeking relief. The tendency grows to flee into an artificial world outside this one, there is a readiness to hand oneself over to an ideology which does away violently with these pluralist areas of life and experience and promises security. In his novel The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil describes this pluralistic situation and the consequences that follow from it: As "an inhabitant of Cacania," man in this pluralistic situation has at least nine characteristics, namely, "professional, national, state, class, geographical, sexual, conscious, unconscious, and perhaps also private. He unites them within himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a small hollow in the ground that has been washed out by all these streams. . . . That is why every man has another, tenth character, namely, the passive fantasy of unfilled rooms. It allows man everything, but not the one thing of taking seriously what his at least nine other characters are doing and what happens to them; that is, in other words, precisely the one thing that should fill him."9

(d) The process of the secularization of the world has, finally, from a religious point of view, the quality of denuminization, or, as Max Weber expressed it, of "dispelling the magic" of the world. However much today it might have become fashionable theological jargon to speak of a de-numinized, dedivinized, God-less world, there is concealed behind this work an inescapable, stinging truth. A secularized world is the world that experiences itself in its non-divinity; a world whose frontiers do not shade off into the infinity of God; a world that is not itself directly diaphanous, as it were transparent towards God, that is a world in which God does not "appear"; a world that does not present itself to man as God's majestic and untouchable representative, but as the building-site and laboratory of man and his planning; a world that seems, therefore, to have come down from its high dignity as the creation of God; a world which does not exist in pre-established order and from which an "eternal order of things" could be read, but which is coming into being as a result of human action, in the process of directed scientific and technological planning or social and political revolutions. This is a world where man discovers not vestigia 146Dei in nature and history, but the marks of his own activity. It is a world where at the same time man comes upon himself everywhere and is constantly in danger of regarding himself in Promethean style as the creator of this world and its history or of despairing at its stony facelessness, its lack of promise, at the process of radical objectivization which he himself has "taken on" —with both extremes seeming finally to come together.

9. R. Musil, The Man Without Qualities, New York, 1965.

(2) In order to grasp this secular world in its full weight and definition before taking it as the starting point of our Christian responsibility for the future and above all to ask the specific question about our responsibility for the future, we must enquire into the unified and comprehensive world view that governs this manifold secularization process in which the pre-eminence of man and of human action is founded in the shaping and realization of the world. We may formulate this second step in our attempted resume of our situation in the following proposition:

The process of the growing secularization of the world is governed by a world view that is coming into being in history beneath the primacy of the future.

The so-called "new age" in which the process of secularization is taking place is marked by a constant will towards the "new." This will towards the new operates on the basis of the social, political, and technological revolutions. Mankind in this new age seems to be fascinated by only one thing: the future as something that has not yet existed. The future is essentially reality that does not yet exist, that has never existed, that is truly "new." Our relation to this kind of future cannot therefore be purely contemplative or purely imaginative, since pure contemplation and pure imagination refer only to reality that already exists.10 Our relation to this future is markedly operative in character, and any theory of this relationship is therefore a theory that is related to action: it is characterized by a new relationship between theory and practice."

10. This idea has been developed chiefly by Ernst Bloch.

In this orientation towards the future man no longer experiences his world as something imposed on him by fate, as sovereign and untouchable nature surrounding him. The world appears rather as coming into being through him and his technological activity and hence becoming "worldly". The process of so-called "secularization," as we have endeavored to outline it above, and the primacy of the future in the modern view of the world are inwardly connected.

The categorical pre-eminence of the future in modern man's attitude to life and the world has been increasingly responsible for a crisis in the familiar religious concepts of the Christian faith. And the whole of the modern critique of religion, especially Marxist, could be summed up by saying that Christianity, like religion in general, is helpless against this primacy of the future in our understanding of the world. Thus this new world-awareness often regards itself as the liquidation of religious awareness, as the beginning of a poor-religious age, in which any orientation towards the beyond is seen to be purely speculative and must be replaced by an orientation towards a future conceived of purely in terms of planning and action.

This may, for all its brevity,12 serve to characterize the present situation from which Christian responsibility for the future has to start. I hope, at any rate, to have succeeded in showing that the question of responsibility for the future is not an arbitrary one, but central to the relationship between faith and the world today.

11. This new relationship between theory and practice, between reflexion and operation, is at the same time one aspect of the "end of metaphysics" that is proclaimed today on all sides. See Appendix II.

12. We are ignoring here an immanent critique of this situation and the dangerous onesidedness of the view of the world we have described "under the primacy of the future." One of the most important problems in this connection is the threatened loss of history, memory, and tradition in this world view and hence the threatened loss of content in historical activity that is determined by this kind of world view. Nevertheless, there remains here also the question of whether there is not a hermeneutical pre-eminence of orientation towards the future for the understanding of history and historical reality, of whether, then, the history of the origin of something can only be seen as more than the material of historical curiosity when it 2.

What form does the responsibility of the Christian community take and what possibilities are open to it in this situation? Is such responsibility still possible? And is it still necessary? How could it still be in any way a yardstick? How and where are there here today still points at which they intersect and therefore the beginnings of a fruitful conflict between the world process described and the Christian Gospel?

(1) Here we might consider, in a general theological way, the Christian responsibility for the one future of the world.

First, it could be shown that there is an inner causal connection between a view of the world governed by the primacy of reason—as an historical world actively coming into existence, and the Jewish-Christian view of the world found in scripture. This demonstration would not necessarily have anything to do with a subsequent adaptation of scriptural faith to the world situation described. This demonstration would not need to use intellectually dishonest tricks to make its point. It could serve chiefly to ask something more of faith and of the Christian community, namely, a readiness to share in the critical responsibility for the present world, not to seek the image of one's own future beside or above it, but in it, because faith itself is partly responsible historically for this world situation.

is seen in connection with "eschatological history." This question cannot be pursued further here. See R. Wittram, TJtkunft in der Geschichte, Gotringen, 1906.

Second, the peculiar nature of the Christian conscience for the future could be explained, the specific form of Christian hope, and it could be clearly stated that this hope itself liberates the elemeni of active shaping of the world, and that therefore the familiar alternative between orientation towards transcendence and orientation towards the future, between the promise and the historical demand, between expectation and fighting, between the eschatological hope of the Christian and the active shaping of the world, is fundamentally false. In this connection it would need to be shown that the hope which Christian faith has in regard to the future cannot be realaed independently of the world and its future, that this hope must answer, must be responsible for, the one promised future and hence also for the future of the world.

Neither of these general points can be pursued here.13 Moreover, as far as our subject is concerned, they are in constant danger of seeking to solve the particular problem by a mighty abstraction. The statement that Christian hope is not a sedative but a stimulator of active shaping of the world is correct, but it is still too general to suffice for the definition of the relationship between hoping and planning, between eschatological faith in the promise and technological planning for the future. When one talks in these generalities everything can be combined harmoniously. But what is the relation of Christian hope to planning for the future? And what is the relation between this technologically planned future and the expected future of the kingdom of God? This is a question we must face. We cannot get rid of it by ready distinctions, such as differentiating between a planned future of the world and a transcendental future of hope. It is precisely our problem that this planned future of the world seems more and more to take all the future from hope. "We must resolutely turn our backs on the easy distinctions that we always have to hand when we speak of the future in a Christian way;

the distinction, for example, when we say that politics is concerned with the future of this world, whereas the Church is concerned with the transcendental future. Technology and economics plan the future of things, whereas faith keeps guard over the personal future. In practice we know what is coming, but not who is coming, whereas faith does not know what is coming, but rather who is coming."14 These distinctions do not help us. They do not solve and liberate, but only veil the truth. And the question remains: what is the particular nature of the Christian's responsibility for planning the future in our technological society? '

13. See Chapter III. 150

(2) If I am right, this responsibility is of an indirect nature. This is that the Christian understanding of faith cannot interfere directly in the technological planning process. This planning process has its own laws and ways of proceeding. These laws • are part of its nature. But is any other responsibility possible towards this planning for the future except that of the immanent expert coping with things themselves?

Planning tasks, precisely when they are pursued in a comprehensive way and on a long-term basis, are always tasks involving government. Planning for the future is not only a technological and scientific, but also always a political problem. And the idea of a technocratic society in which, in place of politics, there is only technology, in which, then, all political problems of government are transformed into purely technological problems of planning, is an ideology, though perhaps a very modern one. "It is the case that pragmatic planning is dictated by the thing itself. But this compulsion does not work directly, but through the subjectivity of individuals and groups, in whose consciousness there are always those interests and needs from which alone the compulsion of the thing can be recogni2ed. It is seldom enough that what the thing requires is obvious to rarrauw г>^ "w- тгтк;^ everyone, and that it is, accordingly, at once possible to fulfill this demand. The usual situation is that of the clash of interests, the divergence of needs, of the complicated mutual interference and overlapping of these needs and interests. And the question of priority and of greater urgency is rarely settled by pure irresistible argument. It is also necessary to have influence. The social "pluralism" of organized interests is not made unpolitical by planning, but, on the contrary, is made political in the extreme. All planning of any dimension involves many different interests in many different ways, calling them forth and furthering their organization. Whoever wants to carry through planning must, therefore, in the classical sense, act "politically" and advance his plan, or himself, to those places where the decisions are made. This is the reason for the fact that, against the expectations nourished by the idea of technocracy, technicians and planning experts are increasingly involved in politics, instead of living in the certain expectation of the euthanasia of politics."15 The irremovable gap between planning and political domination is also confirmed by modern scientific theories of decisions, which work with cybernetic and mathematical, sociological, economic, and other models. For these theories can certainly rationalize social and political practice within a particular nexus of ends and means, but with its methods it cannot decide the priorities of the purpose to be pursued. Here decision—despite this scientific rationalization—becomes again a political problem.

14. J. Moltmann, "Die Zukunft als Drohung und Chance," in Der Kreis, p. 55.

It is at this point of the social and political dimension of planning for the future that the responsibility of the Christian indirectly begins: not by the Christian community itself again pressing towards political domination, but by its speaking from out of its Christian conscience on behalf of the future and making a liberating critique of the social and political reality in which these planning arrangements are set up. This requires, of

15. H. Liibbc, "Herrschaft und Planung," in Modelle der Gesellschaft von morgen, Gotringen, 1966, p. 28.

The Christian community finds the theological basis of its socially critical task in the eschatological dimension of its self-understanding, which is at the same time a dimension of universal humanization. And these eschatological promises of the scriptural tradition—freedom, peace, justice, reconciliation—cannot be made private. They force one ever anew into social responsibility. It is true that these promises cannot be identified with any social situation that has been achieved. In these identifications, of which the history of Christianity is full, that "eschatological proviso" which reveals the provisional nature of every stage that society has attained is abandoned. In its provisionalness, be it noted, not in its arbitrariness. For this "eschatological proviso" does not create in us a negative, but a dialectical and critical attitude to the society we are faced with. The promises to which it refers are not an empty horizon of vague religious expectations, but a critical and liberating imperative for our own present time. They are a spur and a task to make them effective in the historical conditions of our time and thus to "make them true." Our orientations towards these promises therefore, constantly changes anew our present historical awareness. It brings and forces us constantly into a critical and liberating position towards the social circumstances about us.

We cannot here elaborate on the socially critical task of Christian faith and the Christian community.16 Precisely in regard to its responsibility for the planning process in our technological society the Christian community must discover its "public" responsibility anew, that is, in a second act of self-under-standing—not in order to develop its own social and political conception separate from others, in a kind of "ideological selfauthorization," but in order to bring out the socially critical elements that are contained in the eschatological Gospel. Its "public" responsibility, therefore, is a responsibility that is critically liberating. As a socially separate institution the Christian community can formulate its universal claim in a pluralistic society without ideology only if it presents it as criticism.17 In conclusion I should like to mention some of these critical elements in regard to our planned technological society:

16. For detailed accounts of this "political side of faith" may I refer to my essays "Zuna Problem einer polirischen Theologie," in Kontexle 4, Stuttgart 1967, pp. 35-42; "Religion und Revolution," in Neues forum 14 (1967), pp. 461-464; "Priede und Gerechtigkeit," in Cwitas VI (1967). These aspects are summed up in Chapter 5.

(a) The Christian community must mobilize its socially critical potentiality, in the sense that it must protest against every attempt to regard the individual living at the moment simply as the material and the means for building up a technologically rationalized future, seeing individuality only as a function of a technologically governed social process. Here more than ever it must become the advocate of the poor and oppressed, who are "poor" precisely because they cannot be defined by the value of their position in the so-called progress of mankind.

(b) The Christian community will constantly assert in the public awareness of our social and political reality the gap between hope and planning: the gap that exists between what is sought in every movement towards the future and what has already been achieved. "What is really disappointing is experienced or predicted human life as it emerges or will emerge out of industrial society ... As long as socialism is being built up, it can preserve the magic of genuine transcendence. In the degree to which it is built up it loses this magic ... But can man live without any transcendence, after the transcendence of the future which follows the transcendence of God has been eliminated?"18 Hence the Christian community, for whom history as a whole stands beneath the "eschatological promise" of God, will not object to any attempt to make the future as a whole the content of technological planning and hence secretly—in a suspect ideological way—making science and technology the subjective content of the whole of history.

17. This task of Christian social criticism (which seems to me to be the primary form of "Christian social teaching") involves a fundamental problem that we are unable to go into here. See Appendix IV.

(c) As we have remarked earlier, the technological planning process has priorities and preferences in its programming which are not purely technological and rational, but social and political. Here the Christian community, with its testimony of love, will work so that in this social and political reality an awareness of solidarity grows up which does not shut its eyes to the needs of others and hence of the men to come, and which therefore concentrates the technological process of planning ' more than before on those troubles that threaten in our own time and, above all, in the foreseeable future as well: famine due to overpopulation, extreme contrast in economic conditions, educational opportunities, epidemic illnesses, and so forth. Thus the indirect form of the responsibility of the Christian community for planning for the future requires the "publication," the socially critical mobilization of its original heritage: hope and love. The Christian community must bring this "tradition" of hope and love into our planned society, which is more and more losing its memory and therefore losing its history.19 Without it our much-vaunted progress will lack that creative and liberating resistance through which alone it has a chance of truly being called "progress."

18. R. Aron quoted in J. Moltmann, "Hoffnung und Planung," in Modelle der Gesellschaft von morgen, pp. 8 If.

19. To reinstate tradition and to counter the increasing loss of memory and history in the self-awareness of our modern planned society is undoubtedly one of the most important social critical tasks (precisely of the Church). But we are not able to consider it further here, since in my view it necessarily includes the problem of institutions.

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