Proleptic Public Theology
Ted Peters
Abstract. The proleptic accent in public theology begins with an underlying ontology, namely, the power of being is granted to creation by God’s future. To be is to have a future. To say it another way, in eschatology creation and redemption converge in God’s promised new creation. A vision of God’s new creation then structures proleptic ethics into provolutionary principles, middle axioms that connect God’s ultimate promise with our penultimate responsibility to establish a just, sustainable, participatory, and planetary society.
Key Terms. Public theology, prolepsis, eschatology, retroactive ontology, common good
Author Bio. Ted Peters (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a public theologian directing traffic at the intersection of science, religion, and ethics. Peters is an emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where he co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. He recently co-edited Astrobiology: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy (Scrivener 2021) as well as Astrotheology: Science and Theology Meet Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Cascade 2018). Peters has published an edited volume, The Promise and Peril of AI and IA: New Technology Meets Religion, Theology, and Ethics (ATF 2025). Along with Arvin Gouw and Brian Patrick Green, he co-edited the recent book, Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics (Roman and Littlefield/Lexington, 2022) and with Arvin Gouw co-edited The CRISPR Revolution in Science, Religion, and Ethics (Bloomsbury 2025). His fictional spy thriller, Cyrus Twelve, follows the twists and turns of a transhumanist plot. See his blogsites [https://www.patheos.com/blogs/publictheology/] and [https://tedp.substack.com/] along with his website [TedsTimelyTake.com].
Among other assignments, the public theologian frequently projects a vision of a preferred future, a conceptual picture of our world as a just, sustainable, participatory, and planetary society. These qualities of the envisioned future are middle axioms that bridge biblical symbols such as the new creation or the Kingdom of God with what is practically attainable by today’s human race on Earth.
The hinge upon which distinctively proleptic public theology swings is the conjunction of the future with the present. The prolepticist registers dissatisfaction with the present and contrasts the unsatisfactory present with a desirable or preferred future, a redemptive future. What is ultimately redemptive, theologically speaking, is the Kingdom of God. Through worldview construction, the prolepticist maps for the wider society what directions concerted human effort should take us in light of God’s ultimate future.
This term, prolepsis, refers to an advanced incarnation of a future yet only imagined or promised. In the prolepsis, God’s ultimate future erupts in the penultimate present with authenticity and redemptive power.
Biblical symbols such as new creation or God’s kingdom apply to the entirely of creation, not merely the Christian Church. God’s eschatological new creation will transform the entire world, so today the public theologian offers that world a moral impetus for subscribing to the common good. This means “public theology is to do with seeking to engage in dialogue with those outside Christian circles,” Fuller Seminary’s Sebastian Kim tells us (Kim 2011, viii).
Though the public theologian begins with biblical symbols, the discourse that follows engages the wider world beyond the church steps. In their pioneering anthology, A Companion to Public Theology, Katie Day and Sebastian Kim emphasize that public theology is for the wider public. “Public Theology is thus theologically informed public discourse about public issues, addressed to the church, synagogue, mosque, temple or other religious body, as well as the larger public or publics, argued in ways that can be evaluated and judged by publicly available warrants and criteria” (Day and Kim 2017, 4).[1] The proleptic accent in public theology is that God’s promised future belongs to the whole of creation.
The Proleptic Accent in Public Theology
For some time now I have been relying on a specific point of departure. In an all too terse summary: public theology is conceived in the Church, critically developed in the academy, and offered to the wider culture for the sake of the common good (Peters, The Voice of Public Theology 2023, 3). The five tasks or domains are: pastoral, apologetic, scientific, prophetic, and political. The two tactics are discourse clarification and worldview construction. The proleptic accent in public theology ties specifically to worldview construction.
The principal tactic of the proleptic public theologian is to raise up a compelling and inspirational worldview that includes a just, sustainable, participatory, and planetary society. This constructed worldview paves the path the present generation should follow toward transforming moral action.
To repeat, a proleptic worldview is grounded theologically in the promise of Christian eschatology. The biblical symbols of God’s future generate images of a redeemed creation. We find a healed creation in the vision of Isaiah 58:6-9, where the rich share their bread with the hungry. We find the healed creation again in the Peaceable Kingdom of natural harmony where “the wolf shall live with the lamb” in Isaiah 11:6. A vision of healed humanity appears in Amos 5:24, where justice and righteousness shall roll down upon us like an ever-flowing stream. It is in Micah’s vision of no more war, where swords are beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. We find healing in John’s vision in the Apocalypse, where God wipes away every tear from our eyes, and where death and mourning will have passed away (Rev. 21:4). Our hope and our moral North Star shines in such visionary symbols and is based not on unfounded wishes for an idealist utopia, but on the promise of God confirmed in the proleptic revelation of the future in Jesus Christ.
From Eschatological Salvation to Proleptic Anticipation
What is that proleptic revelation? It is the resurrection of Jesus on the first Easter. By raising Jesus from the dead, God inaugurated proleptically the transformation of all of creation into the new creation. Jesus is the first fruits, says St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:19. The rest of creation will follow. What happened to Jesus on Easter is the prolepsis of what will happen to all of creation in the eschaton.[2]
Or let us reverse it. God’s promised transformation of the present creation into the new creation happened ahead of time in the person of Jesus Christ. The Easter Jesus — in his person — is the prolepsis of the eschatological future of all things.
Jesus “himself has now become in person the reality of the future eschatological salvation,” writes the late Munich theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg. What happened in the person of Jesus on Easter is a prolepsis of what will happen to the entire creation. “Salvation means the transformation and redemption of the entire human family, and the entire cosmos that we call home,” is the way Kristin Johnston Largen, President of Wartburg Theological Seminary, puts it (Largen 2021, 192).
Biblical historian N.T. Wright turns this eschatological ontology into an ethical mandate. “The Christian task in the present is to anticipate this eschatology, to borrow from God’s future in order to change the way things are in the present, to enjoy the taste of our eventual deliverance from evil by learning how to loose the bonds of evil in the present” (Wright 2006, 96). When today we “loose the bonds of evil” we are acting proleptically. We are incarnating in the present what God has planned for the future. Or, perhaps otherwise said, we are drawing into the present the eschatological power of divine transformation.[3]
Underlying Retroactive Ontology
To be is to have a future. If someone takes away our future, we die. We pass from the present into the past, from being into non-being. The future then moves on without us.
God, the world’s future, creates by granting a future to creatures. The first thing God did in Genesis 1:1-2:4a was to grant a future to what would become the world. Even so, each genesis must be followed by epigenesis, by a sustaining and creative newness. Creatio continua is actually the duration of creatio ex nihilo.
To be real is to have a future. God is the ultimate reality because God is the future of all things. Out of grace God grants futures to others, thereby making creatures. Making us. We contribute to the world’s goodness when we embrace God’s future. We contribute to the world’s evil when we take a wholesome future away from others or from ourselves.
I dub this retroactive ontology. The power of being does not come to us strictly as a push from the past. That would be the future understood as futurum, as gradual growth, as progress. Instead and in addition, the power of being comes to us as adventus, as God’s power to make things new. God’s adventus calls us out of the non-being of the past into actual existence, into flowering and fulfillment. We can be confident in this future because it has already appeared ahead of time in Jesus of Nazareth. “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
This does not apply only to redemption. It applies to creation as well. God is still in the process of creating, creatio continua. When all things are redeemed, they will be finally created. The Easter resurrection of Jesus, we might say, anticipates what the cosmos will look like when it is fully created.
This is what Robert John Russell, founder and director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union, holds. When God raised Jesus from the dead on the first Easter, Jesus became the first instantiation of a new law of nature, namely, the law that says dead people rise. Dead people still have a future granted us by God’s grace and power.
Again, this is not only God’s redeeming action. It is also God’s creative action. Creation itself relies on the quality of newness. And newness applies not only to Jesus but also to all creatures in creation. “The proleptic character of resurrection, while grounded normatively in the Easter event and intended primarily for the redemption of humanity, can be thought of as extended to and efficacious for all living creatures” (R. J. Russell 2015, 345-346).[4]
The power of God’s ultimate future mixes every moment with the causal sequence influencing us from the past. We are not exhaustively predetermined by the past. We also experience a retroactive causal influence from God’s ultimate future. Time, according Russell, is like a feather. Temporal history is the spine. But each moment is like the point where the strand connects to the spine. Every moment in you’re an my life is touched by God’s future.
This is retroactive ontology at work. Proleptic ethics envisions a hopeful future based upon trust in an underlying retroactive ontology.
Prolpetic Ethics as Provolutionary Ethics
Yale feminist theologian Letty Russell uses the term advent shock to refer to our sense of maladjustment in the present when compared to God’s anticipated future fulfillment. “Because of advent shock we seek to anticipate the future in what we do, opening ourselves to the working of God’s Spirit and expecting the impossible” (L. Russell 1979, 102).
Advent shock signals that what is coming in God’s future is new, unprecedented, transformative. Because of the power of adventus, we can expect more fruit than the capacity of the fruit tree alone to grow it. We can expect today’s sinners to behave like saints.
Theology and ethics, then, should avoid seeking solace in the past and instead anticipate the future. We should avoid archonic thinking, according to which we find the essence of things in their origin, in a lost Eden to which we want to return. Rather, we should rely on epigenetic thinking, according to which the essence of things is found in their full quiddity that comes only with the eschatological new creation.
This means we replace revolution with provolution. The late Tübingen theologian Jürgen Moltmann emphasizes this. Too often, Moltmann complained, action planning in church circles is oriented toward the past, thinking in the category of re — for example, revolution, return, renewal, revival, reformation. Instead Moltmann advocates using the future-oriented category of the pro, replacing revolution with provolution. Moltmann maintains that “in provolution, the human dream turned forward is combined with the new possibility of the future and begins consciously to direct the course of human history as well as the evolution of nature” (Moltmann 1969, 32).
Proleptic ethics, I believe, should be accented by advent shock combined with a provolutionary thrust. Proleptic ethics begins with a vision of a healed global and even cosmic future and then works backwards to identify your and my moral responsibility in the present moment.
The proleptic structure of ethics is especially pertinent in the era of climate change challenge. Climate change is but one of many trends driving us to think globally and act locally. Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson foresees what must be done. “To select values for the near future of one’s own tribe or country is relatively easy. To select values for the distant future of the whole planet also is relatively easy–in theory at least. To combine the two visions to create a universal environmental ethic is, on the other hand, very difficult. But combine them we must” (Wilson 2002, 40-41).
The ecological crisis brought on in large part by anthropogenic factors calls for public theology. Secular voices can be heard begging for religious alliances. Economists and ecologists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, tell us that the world needs religious groups to take the lead in moral persuasion. “Religious groups can take the ineffable, the hard to grasp…and relate it to concrete moral action…it is important to frame environmental issues in moral and ethical terms” (Kearns 2011, 415). Laurel Kearns identifies three distinct types of religious environmentalism on the spectrum: (1) Christian stewardship; (2) eco-justice; (3) creation spirituality (Kearns 2011, 415).
Even though the ecological crisis is overwhelming, by no means is it the only assignment on the agenda of today’s public theologian. We are gasping from the suffocating gases of injustice coming out of the exhaust pipe of nationalism, racism, sexism, tribalism, and economic exploitation. Envisioning a better world is a twenty-four hour per day occupation.
Seven Middle Axioms for Ethical Action
Taking our cue from Moltmann, let me draw out the seven starter “pro’s” for Christian provolutionary strategy I developed in God—The World’s Future (Peters, God–The World’s Future: Systematic Theology for a New Era 2015).
Proleptic ethics provides middle axioms that connect the cosmic eschatological promise of new creation with a practical vision of where Planet Earth can go politically, economically, and morally. Here are the proleptic principles.
1. Project a vision of the coming new world order. This is part of the prophetic task of the proleptic public theologian. The redemption of the historical and the natural order is coming; and someone needs to say so. This first “pro” is perhaps the single most important element in the strategy of proleptic public theology. It reflects faith in the divine promise as well as provides the starting point for significant human action. It reflects our confidence that the ultimate future of the world belongs to God, even if we confront our own responsibilities for the near and medium range futures.
Since the late 1960s, futurists and scientists and ecologists have shuddered when facing the world problematique: a perfect storm of population overgrowth, pollution overgrowth; depletion of non-renewable natural resources; global warming; expanding division between the world’s rich and poor; and of course the threat of thermonuclear war. But instead of focusing on the problem, futurists asked society for a vision of a world beyond the problem.
Visions are akin to ideas or ideals. Projecting visions and ideals is the first and necessary step to any significant cooperative action. Dutch sociologist and pioneer futurist Fred L. Polak contended that positive images of the future are the primary causal factor in cultural change (Polak 1973). Such positive images pull a civilization together and unite its people in a single task. Nothing is more practical than a good idea, an idea that inspires and directs.
The proleptic public theologian is assigned to construct a worldview – a middle axion based on the promise of the Kingdom of God or new creation – that looks like a just, sustainable, participatory, and global society. Taking advantage of advent shock, the public theologian asks rhetorically: If in God’s future there will be no war, then why have war now? If in God’s future the hungry will be fed and the mourning comforted, then our proleptic task is to minister to the hungry and the mourning today. If in God’s future the lion will lie down with the lamb, then perhaps now we should seek to the degree possible to live in the realization that human harmony depends upon harmony throughout all of nature. With this in mind, the prolepticist could say prophetically that there is a new world coming that will be, among other things:
- organized as a single worldwide, planetary society;
- united in devotion to the will of God understood as the common good;
- sustainable within the biological carrying capacity of the planet and harmonized with the principles of the ecosphere;
- organized politically so as to preserve the just rights and voluntary contributions of all individuals;
- organized economically so as to guarantee the basic survival needs of each person;
- organized socially so that dignity and freedom are respected and protected in every quarter;
- dedicated to advancing the quality of life in behalf of future generations.
This is a schematic outline of a constructed vision. It is rational and terse, to be sure. But when contextualized for a specific local community, it should be rewritten accordingly.
Here is an example. The African Union lifts up a “Pan African Vision of An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens, representing a dynamic force in the international arena and Agenda 2063 is the concrete manifestation of how the continent intends to achieve this vision within a 50 year period from 2013 to 2063” (African-Union 2013). According to Nairobi theologian Nathan Hussaini Chiroma, the African public theologian should “contribute to our achieving the goals of Agenda 2063” (Chiroma 2020, 364).
2. Promote a sense of global community and even cosmic community. The second proleptic principle is an extension of the first. A significant element in the vision we project is the sense of planetary unity. The type of unity I speak of here is not an amorphous, cosmic oneness or a tyrannous fascism but rather “com-unity”—that is, unity-with. It is a unity we share with one another, with the world of nature in which we are enmeshed, and with God.
The environmental crisis prompts with considerable urgency the necessity for a single global community of moral deliberation. “Climate change involves a complex global set of both causal practices and felt impacts, and as such requires coherent global action–or, at a minimum, coordination across some critical mass of global players,” according to IPCC economists (Dryzek, Norgaard and Schlosberg 2011, 12). These global players belong to our theologian’s public. For eco-theologian Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, public is an adjective meaning “open and accessible” to all and “for the sake of all” (C. Moe-Lobeda 2004, 8).
Aspiring toward such a global unity requires that we on Earth replace “we-they” thinking with “us” thinking. The German term for community, Gemeinschaft, connotes intimacy and loyalty within a group of people. It connotes the qualities one would expect to find in a close family unit wherein each member’s identity is so tied up with the community that the success and happiness of the group are simultaneously the success and happiness of the individual.
The road from pluralism and division to a sense of global Gemeinschaft is going to be bumpy and potholed. Princeton public theologian William Storrar maps out the hazards that stand in our way. ” A truly public theology operates in the public sphere. Today the public sphere is global, torn and divided. Public theology should help to create a more inclusive public sphere in which the public anger of the silenced and excluded voices of the oppressed and marginalized can be heard and addressed by policymakers and practitioners” (Storrar 2011, 23).
How inclusive? Can we think of the whole world this way? Can we think of our interstellar neighborhood in this way? Are we ready to seek a common good shared by terrestrials with extraterrestrials?
3. Provide for posterity. The unity sought in global Gemeinschaft implies a community over space, a worldwide community. But what about community through time? What is our relationship with future generations whom we ourselves will not live to see?
Given the forecasts of futurists regarding depletion of nonrenewable resources and uncontrolled pollution of the biosphere, I pose the ethical question this way: does the present generation have the right to go on one last gluttonous industrial fling, using up all the earth’s fecund ability to support life, and then leave our grandchildren with only a cesspool of pollution for a home?
Unless decisions are made to alter current trends, this is just what will happen. Once we are dead, our children will attend the reading of the will only to find out that we have bequeathed them a garbage dump instead of a home. “If there is any moral precept shared by people of all beliefs, it is that we owe ourselves and future generations a beautiful, rich, and healthful environment,” we are admonished by sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson (Wilson, The Creation 2006, 5). We have a moral responsibility for the entire biosphere over both space and time. The task of the public theologian is to point this out.
4. Protect human dignity. By dignity I mean what Immanuel Kant meant, namely, that we treat each person as an end and not merely as a means. Dignity in this sense is at present basically an ideal. It does not fully exist. The industrial and emerging postindustrial society in which we live is organized around hierarchical structures and job descriptions, which makes persons interchangeable with one another. Value is derived from a giant economic machine, and persons function as cogs in the wheels that keep this machine rolling. To compound the indignity, whatever cog one becomes is often due in part to discrimination on the basis of one’s race, age, or gender, all impersonal factors irrelevant to the integrity or value of the person. Dignity is not a widespread present actuality.
Although this fact has gone largely unobserved, dignity is in reality future-dependent. In the wake of the Enlightenment we have come to think of dignity as being inherent. But this is not quite true.
Our experience tells us that before dignity can be inherent, it must be conferred. Dignity must first be bestowed. Then it becomes owned. Dignity has a grace or gift quality to it. This is because dignity is relational.
To experience dignity is to experience self-worth through being respected, honored, loved, or served—that is, to be treated as an end and not as a means (Peters, Conferring and Claiming Human Dignity 2025). This self-worth is gained through intercourse with a world of meaning that confers this worth. Dignity is dependent upon the web of interconnectedness that will finally unite all things, upon the anticipated whole of redeemed reality wrought by a God whose love for us makes us ends rather than means.
The conferral of dignity is central to the post-colonial agenda in public theology as Paul S. Chung understands it. “Public theology can be defined as a constructive-ethical way to address problems of stratification and reification in society and culture,” writes Chung. “These are often embedded with postcolonial conditions such as the problem of immigration, refugees, and a new form of racism and biopolitical control under the phenomenon of global Empire” (P. S. Chung 2025). Formerly subjugated communities need to be uplifted socially, economically, and politically. An equal seat at the table is indispensable to global Gemeinschaft.
The mission of the Christian community to every community consists in conferring dignity so that those upon whom it is conferred can stand up and claim it. “The church is under obligation to be responsible and advocate for the victims of every social order even to the extent that they do not belong to the Christian community” (P. Chung 2022).
5. Proffer the distinction between needs and wants. One of the reasons wealthy oligarchies overconsume and are slow to share with the working and poorer classes is that marketing blurs the distinction between needs and wants. We pretend that everything we desire has the status of a need. I submit that needs should be understood as those things that all people require just to be human: food, shelter, sleep, exercise, protection from danger, and such. These are the survival and security requirements at the bottom of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. They are satiable.
Wants, in contrast, have to do with our desire to be unique or superior. They are insatiable. The more we get the more we want. An ancient Upanishadic saying puts it this way: to believe you can cure a person’s desire for wealth by giving him or her money is like thinking you can put out a fire by pouring butterfat on it.
Basic needs have a moral priority over wants and desires. Ian Barbour, a principal founder of the new field of Theology and Science, says that “all persons have a right to life and therefore a right to the basic necessities of life, including adequate food for survival” (Barbour 1980, 259). Given the maldistribution of wealth in the world, this could mean that the rich will have to live more simply if the poor are simply to live.
Unless we can distinguish our wants from our needs—unless we can stop wrongly calling them all “needs”—we will not be able to fulfill our moral responsibility to meet first the needs of all and only then meet the wants of some. It is the assignment of the public theologian to make this point clearly and forcefully in public discourse.
6. Propose alliances. In 1963, Pope John XXIII wrote in Pacem in Terris that Catholics could cooperate with “all men of good will” in working for world peace (Pope 1963). In Laudato Sí of 2015, Pope Francis reiterated this invitation. “I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all” (F. Pope 2015, §14).
So also, I believe, Christians of every stripe should link arms with all women and men who share a positive vision of the future and who are willing to exert effort toward making it a present actuality. Members of churches should be willing to form alliances with whomever shares a complementary commitment to all or any part of their vision of a planetary community and of living at peace with nature. “We want a society where Muslims, Jews, secularists, and others are contributing to a rich, vibrant conversation about the common good,” avers Ian Markham (Markham 2020, 191).
7. Profess faith. If we allow futuristic forecasts that extrapolate from present trends regarding the climate change disasters or the growing prospect of economic depression to get us down and sap our energies, then we will have surrendered our faith in God. One quality of faith is to trust in the God for the future. For Christians, this trust is based on God having raised Jesus to new life on Easter. This same God promises to transform the present world into a new creation. Can the public theologian exhibit this trust when speaking to the wider culture about the common good?
Professing this faith may itself help to bring the projected new order into being ahead of schedule proleptically—that is, fragmentarily yet authentically. It is our way of embodying the prayer, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Professing proleptic faith could make the faith itself contagious. Others might catch on and join the project of bringing the future reality of God’s kingdom to bear on the present crisis.
Discourse Clarification and the Paradoxical Vision
Up to this point we have been explicating the tactic of worldview construction. The prophetic task of the public theologian also requires discourse clarification, and this frequently includes criticism of the status quo and current trends. It may include moral judgment.
Moral judgment begins with the truth. Commitment to truth is an ideal that Christians share with all world citizens of good will. The truth uncovers what stands behind subterfuge, false facts, and lies. “The greatest weapon against fear is truth,” according to Nigerian theologian Sunday Bobai Agang (Agang 2020, 10). “Public theology is needed to set Africa free by holding leaders to biblical standards” (Agang 2020, 11).
This is where the Christian doctrine of sin arms the public theologian with realism and wisdom drawn from both Scripture and Tradition. The theologian knows what ticks in the heart of the sinner. And what ticks is nearly always dressed over in self-justification, bravado, and lies. Exposing sin for what it is constitutes the most valuable contribution of the public theologian to the wider discourse.
Yes, classical Christian doctrine belongs in the arsenal of the public theologian engaged in rhetorical combat. “Public theologians argue that Christian doctrines of creation, sin, redemption, eschatology, covenant, and ecclesiology are informative for our understanding of the nature, meaning, and destiny of human life,” Fuller Seminary’s Hak Joon Lee reminds us (Lee 2015, 50).
South African public theologian Ernst Conrade adds needed nuance. “Christian discourse on sin may be viewed, at least from the outside, as a form of social diagnostics. It offers a contribution to the colloquial but also deeply disillusioned question: What has gone wrong with the world?” (Conradie 2020, x). Without nuance, the public theologian will appear to be just one more ideologue representing one interest group among many.
The upshot of this reminder about human sinfulness is that we need to hold the positive vision of the future in tension with our awareness that human malice can undermine the best of intentions. Pioneer Lutheran public theologian Robert Benne astutely reminds us that the positive vision projected by the prolepticist stands in qualified paradox with realism about human sin. When aspiring to a just and sustainable global society through political means, the public theologian must refrain from equating that society with God’s kingdom in its fullest. The public theologian shouldcaution the wider culture against idolatrizing imagined utopias and against the political parties that aspire to them. “Therefore,” Benne alerts us, “the paradoxical vision rules out salvific politics. All human efforts are relativized before the gospel. They belong in the penultimate sphere” (Benne 1995, 757-758).
Conclusion
Christoph Hübenthal and Christianne Alpers put it all in a tightly wrapped package.
“Public theology’s centre is Christ, and Christ is the centre and hope for all creation….Redeeming the world is exclusively the work of God. But by fulfilling its ethjical tasks and pursuing justice, human flourishing and the common good public theology foreshadows and depicts the universal salvation as it was already accomplished in Jesus Christ and is yet to come in its fullness (Hübenthal and Alpers 2022, 6).
In our treatment here of the proleptic accent in public theology, we have constructed a public ethic on the foundations of a Christian ontology. Reality, based on the biblical promise of God for a new creation, draws its power from the future. Not the past. Not the present. Rather, from God’s ultimate future.
When God raised Jesus from the dead on the first Easter, that eschatological future became momentarily present in the person of Jesus Christ. A new law of nature was instantiated, namely, the dead will rise. And with the resurrection of the dead the entire creation will undergo a transformation, a finalization, a consummation. On the basis of this divine promise, today’s public theologian has good reason to act out of faith when projecting a vision of a coming new world order.
We accent public theology with prolepsis when we confidently claim that moral achievements incarnate – authentically though only fragmentarily – ahead of time what God has planned for the redemption of the cosmos.
Public theology is conceived in the church by those of us who draw out the implications of Christian eschatology. Public theology is then critically cultivated in the academy, where sholars of multiple disciplines measure its soundness, coherence, and applicability. Finally, public theology is offered to the wider culture for the sake of the common good. By lifting up compelling visions of a just, sustainable, participatory and planetary society, the public theologian paves the path toward actualizing the ideal common good.
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[1] According to Ian Markham, President of Virginia Theological Seminary, “Public theology is the explication of, witness to, and agency toward the vision that God intends for social life within the parameters of the Christian tradition” (Markham 2020, 187).
[2] Is Christian eschatology compossible with scientific cosmology? The public theologian has a responsibility here, according to Fuller’s Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen. “The all important and central challenge to theology from the point of view of physical cosmology’s predictions about the fate of the universe is this: How can we even begin to reconcile Christian eschatology’s expectation of the imminent return of Christ and the bringing about of the new heavens and new earth in light of the extremely, almost infinitely long horizon of science?” (Kärkkäinen, Creation and Humanity 2015, 34).
[3] Theology plus ethics equals theoethics for Valerie Miles-Tribble at the Graduate Theologial Union in Berkeley, California. “Public theology can be understood as a pragmatic praxis component of practical theology. Practical theology concerns itself with faith in praxis that cannot be isolated from addressing matters in society at large…. As such, public theology is not politics, but by necessity speaks and acts with full awareness of political dynamics that rend chasms in the human landscape rather than forging equitable bonds of unity. An overarching aim of public theology, therefore, is to assess theoethical implications of Empire with public relevance for all humanity” (Miles-Tribble 2017).
[4] Physicist Robert John Russell takes up the knotty question of causality in a moment of prolepsis. Two points stand out. First, “prolepsis includes the immediate causality of the future.” But how can this be? Efficient causes come from the past, right? Russell contends that prolepsis constitutes “an additional contributing causal factor in making the present concretely what it is.” Second, “prolepsis includes a strikingly new topological view of the relation between creation and the New Creation. Such a topology would allow the eschatological future to reach back and be revealed in the event of the resurrection of Jesus….since both creation and New Creation are part of a single divine act of creation ex nihilo…” (R. J. Russell 2012, 320).