Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow...

So, looking through my archives regarding Forster's short story, I came across this, which was concerned with a now forgotten movie (aren't most of them?  Quick what won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022?  Or 2015, for that matter.  Googling is cheating.), for which I found this review, which I quoted from, then and now:,

Eschatological hope...is active. It demands engagement....This is not the case for Tomorrowland’s futurological optimism. In this Disney-world there are a select few who are chosen to go to Tomorrowland as the innovators who will shape our future. Our hope is in them. Our hope is that someone else will do the work needed to right the world’s wrongs. We can go about our business, confident that someone out there is doing what needs to be done. We can feel free to ignore what is causing those problems, to avoid asking who benefits because of them, and to neglect considering what it would take to fix them.

[Which is pretty much the way we treat everything, anyway.  The courts must save us from Donald Trump and, when they don't, damn the perfidious Trump for using due process of laws and equal protection to weasel out of electoral accountability! (The problem with that "analysis" is that it still rests on voters rejecting a convicted felon, which, HELLO!, Trump now is (thank you, NYC!). So the courts weren't ever going to save us from a second Trump presidency and, yes, he could campaign from prison.  Well, as much as he's doing now, eh?)]

As in the film, when something momentous occurs, it won’t be on account of us. We, like them, will simply raise our smartphones and post pics. Doing something to change the world? That’s for the elites. For the chosen. Not for me.

Of course, the writers of Tomorrowland certainly mean for us to identify with the heroine. We are supposed to understand ourselves as one of the chosen, with a contribution of our own to make. However, the trope of the Chosen One in such stories always entails the fact that there are many more who are not chosen than who are, more who stay at home than who embark on the hero’s quest.

From a futurological perspective, this makes perfect sense. Building a better world is for those with requisite aptitude and training. From an eschatological perspective, though, this is anathema. The theology of active, worldly engagement that a critical eschatology extols takes its model from Jesus’ open invitation to all to turn toward and labor on behalf of the kingdom of God. All are charged with loving God with their whole hearts and minds and with loving their neighbors as themselves, which means that all carry the responsibility of contributing to the furthering of God’s eschatological mission.

There are to be no spectators.

In stark contrast, Tomorrowland exhorts us to take comfort in the existence of an elite cadre of gifted technologists who, among themselves and apart from most of us, will “make the world a better place.” This is a false messianism that short-circuits hope.

Eschatological hope, on the other hand, causes us to question our world without ceasing because we know that no human technology or system comes without a cost to someone somewhere. It causes us to address suffering and injustice where we find it because that’s what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves. Unlike holding out for a hero, this hope charges us all with taking on that responsibility. The exceptionalism of American-style individualism has no place in eschatological hope, which is held in common for the common good by the common disciple.

Start here:

All are charged with loving God with their whole hearts and minds and with loving their neighbors as themselves, which means that all carry the responsibility of contributing to the furthering of God’s eschatological mission.

There are to be no spectators.

"Religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all."

Then go on to that last paragraph, about technology and systems that always come with a cost, one we are often quite willing for others to pay on our behalf.

Then let me jump to something I wrote in that post 9 years ago:

The common good is really only applicable to those we think worthy of it's protection.  Which is why Christian soteriology came up with the Rapture and various visions of the Tribulation (as I remember from my college years when I did some research on the subject, the three schools were:  Pre-millenialists, Post-millenialists, and, of course, amillenialists.  All a matter of who got to enjoy the "Millennium" and who got to suffer the Tribulation when.  Can't be givin' that grace o' God away without a price, now, can we?).  But eschatological hope that expects the arc of the universe to bend towards justice is not necessarily a hope for punishment, too.  Yes, justice is frightening to the unjust; but that's one of the core teachings of the Hebrew prophets:  not that God is anxious to smite evildoers (the hoary cliche that somehow judges Christians but never Jews, although it's false to both), but that to the unjust, justice would be a living hell.  Mostly because those who had been enjoying the fruits of injustice would lose that privilege, and those denied justice would finally bathe in its waters.

Out of context that opening sentence loses its appositive meaning.  The common good is, of course, applicable to all.  Which is the problem; we want individuals to deserve the common good.  The injustices we systematically (and through systems of thought and governance) inflicted on central and south America are producing the refugees of that violence and social disorder on our borders, and we reject them because they don't "deserve" what this country has to offer.  One might even see their plight as God's justice.  That justice is, to others, a living hell.  But it would still be justice to take responsibility for what we did 50 years ago, that led to the events of today.  Stephen Miller, to name just one, is terrified that the justice of the refugees will cost him the privileges of being a white American that are, in part, based on injustice to others. The opposition to DEI and affirmative action can really only be understood that way, too:  as justice coming to set right what has been done wrong, and justice has a way of taking privileges away from others.

Just ask Donald Trump.

Or, as Jesus put it:  the first would be last, and the last first.  Because justice as humans practice it, is never real justice.  The justice of the baseliea tou theou comes from outside humanity; it comes from God. And there is nothing more terrifying than to fall into the hands of the living God.  It isn't terrifying because you will be punished; it is terrifying because it will be true justice; and who among us wants to be truly treated justly?

But is that frightful, truly? The Hebrew prophets always see that as a paradise: a holy mountain upon which nothing is harmed; a beacon to the nations (the people of the world, not nation-states) that will draw them as they want to live as that nation exhibiting God's justice, lives (sort of the way America inspires the world to be consumers, but with much less injustice and wanton waste).  The vision offered by America just demands you participate by buying, by consuming.

The vision offered by eschatological hope is that you participate by making it happen. 

Late arriving, but a new object lesson in what I'm talking about:

Hovde belittles Native Americans, says socialism is to blame for alcoholism, depression rateshttps://t.co/hTm7OzvWro

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) June 3, 2024

Gee, how did native Americans wind up on reservations in the first place?  (Everything new is old again:  Sainted Reagan's Interior Secretary talked like this for his entire tenure in that office.  He was forced to resign after three years for mocking the concept of affirmative action.  How far we have progessed since then....)