Shopping the End-times Marketplace: The Problems of Progress and Delay in a Hopeless World

In 2011, I found myself in the sweltering August heat of Phoenix, AZ for the Assemblies of God’s General Council. The Council is held every two years to hold elections and business sessions, and, most importantly, to reestablish missional alignment for the denomination. I was a youth pastor and student at Yale Divinity at the time and was attending the Council for my very first time as an ordinand. The opening evening of the event featured a fellow youth pastor of a well-known megachurch who preached a lively sermon, full of conviction. As Pentecostals say, it was “on fire”—a poetic parallel to the August heat that contrasted with the cool of the arena. But it wasn’t the tone with which he preached that struck me. Rather, it was the familiar topic. Jesus was coming back soon, he said. We needed to be ready.

I grew up in the Assemblies of God, where eschatological expectation was the bedrock of the spiritual life. As a child it struck me with terror. I was afraid of being “left behind” in the so-called rapture. I didn’t know who Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye were until much later in life, but I’d nevertheless been captured with feverish fear about the Battle of Armageddon, the Tribulation, and the Great White Throne Judgment. The frightful events had grown in my imagination to be as big as the literary world Jenkins and LaHaye created in their popular fiction series, Left Behind.

As a budding theologian in my undergraduate years, I was able to—as some might put it—“deconstruct” the ways in which fantasy and false teaching had been added to the Christian message of hope and salvation. I grew less concerned about being on the wrong side of God’s judgment (though those fears still bubbled up from time to time), and more concerned about why Jesus was taking so long to show up. If my childhood years were plagued with anxiety about God’s judgment against me, my young adult years were troubled by an equally keen sense of the injustices of the world. I wanted Jesus to come back, not to judge strictly speaking, but to make all things new.

Terror and Last Things

Today people are gripped with a similar sense of terror, not because of the dread of LaHaye and Jenkins-style accounts of God’s coming judgment. Rather, people are afraid of the judgment humanity seems to be bringing on itself. Even otherwise optimistic humanists like Yuval Noah Harari seem to be shaken. His 2015 book’s subtitle boasted “a brief history of tomorrow.” It was already “history” because it was that reliable. The title, Homo Deus, indicated that tomorrow’s promise was humanity becoming god through what he called “Dataism.” He claimed every single thing would be reduced to a computable data point to create a single human-computer data-processing universe. The budding age of Artificial Intelligence we now find ourselves in suggests Harari was onto something.

Yet, Harari’s optimism has been significantly tempered by the advent of AI. The promise of becoming god through tomorrow’s (which is now today’s) Dataism has given way to the dread of AI totalitarianism. In his latest book, Nexus, he worries that “the dataset on which baby AI is trained” is but a handmaiden of an AI that “grows in power and authority, perhaps [becoming] a self-interpreting holy book.” Harari is worried about an unwelcome End, and the only way he can talk about it is in religious terms.  

Harari is but one late voice in a long line of great thinkers who have speculated, and at times manifested, the future. Collectively, they’ve created a marketplace of eschatologies, all of which are bound up in real-world economic forecasting. With dread, hope, or some combination of the two, consumers can choose the “history of tomorrow” they find most compelling and most apt at making sense of the present. And people can literally buy in to the eschatology of their choice by placing their bets (or not) on Wall Street.

By the early 18^th century humanist projects like that of Ludwig Feuerbach were making their mark on the intelligentsia of Europe. Feuerbach said “God” was the projection of all of humanity’s virtues, hopes, desires, and goodness. For him, “all theology is anthropology”—in other words, when humans talk about God, they’re actually talking about themselves. Importantly, Feuerbach suggested humans were, in fact, talking accurately about goodness. The only failure was to realize that humans, not God, are good. Feuerbach was arguing for what might be called a “kingdom now” humanism. The only thing preventing humanity from realizing its full and final potential was the failure to realize its full potential.

The same era saw Karl Marx offer a different sort of eschatology. For Marx, humanity was in one of two camps. The legacy of his thought in the 21^st century might be nowhere better seen than in the way that the word “bourgeois” is used by even upper-class elites to deride whatever they perceive to be out of touch with the real world. The accusation is always made to identify (or least express solidarity) with “the proletariat,” the working class. Whether he intended it or not, one can hear the echo of Christianity in his philosophy. Jesus also divides humanity into two groups—the sheep and the goats—and salvation in Matthew 25 has everything to do with materialist and classist concerns. But where early Christians envisioned divine intervention, Marx saw a day of reckoning forced by the necessity of history. The new, final epoch, he said, was “inevitable.” In the following century, numerous communist regimes took responsibility for hastening the End that would supposedly see the proletariat rise to secure their salvation. 

From the other end of the political spectrum, Francis Fukyama in the early 1990s retrospectively declared victory for liberal democracy and, with it, capitalist economics. Liberalism had taken the world by storm in the 20^th century, and this, he claimed, was evidence it had no remaining ideological rival. The first part of his seminal work, The End of History and the Last Man, is devoted to demonstrating how the liberalism of the West had taken root in the most unlikely places in the 20^th century, and how others would likely catch up in no time. The West, he said, had arrived in the “Promised Land.” Like Marx, his philosophy smacks of Christian imagery. He defaults to religious language. Yet, he—like Feuerbach, Marx, Hegel, Nietzche, and other humanist prophets—thinks God has nothing to do with eschatology. 

In the present day, the AI tech industry and its visionaries are once again resorting to religious language to defend what can only be described as their eschatological project. Where Harari has taken pause at the accelerating presence of AI, lauded futurist Ray Kurzwiel in his recent book, The Singularity is Nearer, continues to unreservedly celebrate its promise. The “Singularity” is coming, he says—the day when humanity will merge with AI. He describes the Singularity as a mystery yet to be revealed. It’s a mere metaphor because, at least at this point, humans cannot comprehend the radical shift existence will take. With the same confidence of a Pentecostal televangelist predicting the day and the hour of Christ’s return, Kurzweil has set a date for the coming technological glory: 2045. But unlike the church’s chiliastic content creators, he’s taken seriously by Bill Gates.

This small sample of thinkers is representative of the general trend of future-predictors offering an optimistic take on tomorrow. For all the incommensurate elements of their competing visions, belief in some providential, non-theistic Progress unites them. The word needs to be capitalized because it’s a quasi-spiritual force—something is driving history forward and doing so positively. Both Marx and Fukuyama are indebted to some extent to Hegel’s conception of Geist, a lively principle that makes sense of and gives linear cohesion to history. For the AI, on the other hand, the proof is simply in the pudding: we might actually cure cancer.

Problems with Progress

Christian theologians have long identified problems inherent in the idea of Progress, regardless of the unique individual humanist takes on it. At root, the concern is historical. The 20^th century might have been the bloodiest in human history. And it seems that in the present day even liberal democracy, with its resolute commitment to human rights, is regularly willing to pave the road of the future with the blood of dissidents. The bombs keep falling in the Middle East.

Criticisms of Progress are well-founded. The burden of proof probably should rest on AI apologists to show that this technology this time will be different. It’s dishonest to shy away from the obvious failures of humanity to progress. Nevertheless, the challenge of discernable Progress to its detractors persists. It’s undeniable (as Fukuyama argues) that scientific discovery and innovation really have raised living standards and, at least in some cases, bolstered liberalism’s defense of human dignity, especially when it comes to medical discoveries. Believing that history is but one damned thing after another with no sense of purpose seems to be as baldly false (and as bleak) as anything else. And is no more Christian.

The Introduction to Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas might be read as an invitation to discern the challenge of Progress. Addressing the res nova (“new thing”) of our moment, he presents answers to the question of AI with biblical imagery. Is humanity building a new Tower of Babel? Or, following “the way of Nehemiah,” is it rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem? In other words, “where is this all going?” is the only question worth asking, and he insists that the end we’re working towards must be framed eschatologically. To follow the “way of Nehemiah” in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem is to anticipate the New Jerusalem which comes down out of heaven.

AI apologists and Christians agree on at least one thing, which is that the final future is indeed bright. Whatever else might be said about how humanity might get there are important arguments to be had. But bridging the conversation with that common ground is important. Christianity is committed to history having meaning, and it’s worth maintaining that common ground even with the humanists. The Church Fathers engaged Plato and Aristotle without anxiety. There’s no reason Christianity can’t have a similarly sympathetic, and yet critical, engagement with contemporary philosophers of Progress. After all, Greek thinkers were no less religious about their philosophies than modern humanists are, including AI tech apologists.

Yet, for all the optimism of the billionaires of the world, it seems most people remain convinced that the future is a threat. Why this is the case resists a tidy explanation. One might blame the 24-hour news cycle. And all news is bad news. “Doom” is the word used for endless and listless scrolling on social media for a reason. Political polarization tears at the fabric of society, making family gatherings awkward if not dreadful. But all of these seem more like symptoms of the problem than the problem itself. While clearly none of these things are helping, there’s a collective lack of hope that runs deeper than the on-screen diet.

Christians are no exception to the feeling that the future isn’t bright. They are no less likely to watch the news cycle with anxious addiction or to find a macabre fascination with the doom-sayer media prophets. I think this is in part because there’s been an abandonment of eschatology in the church. My experience is anecdotal, but significant. Pentecostalism is nothing if not an eschatological movement. The Azusa Street Revival, which marked the beginning of the global and ecumenical take-over of the church with Pentecostal spirituality, was defined by an imminent expectation of Christ’s return. To be Pentecostal is to live in the pre-dawn light of God’s kingdom. But the last time I heard a sermon about Christ’s return was the sermon I heard in the cool of the Phoenix arena 15 years ago.

In the broader church, eschatological hope is thankfully still chiseled in liturgical stone. But it features very little from the pulpit. It’s telling that New Testament scholars have pointed out over and over again that the book of Revelation is a work of political theology. Yet, for all the concerns on the part of Christians in America about the direction the country is headed, eschatology seems rarely to play on the political imagination.

Why even a movement like Pentecostalism has moved away from its spiritual roots is probably due to innumerable factors. Academically, the topic is avoided because there are so many perceived pitfalls in end-times theological debates. Some are afraid of being defrocked for having a take on how the End will come that departs from denominational doctrine. At the grass roots of the local church, it seems that it’s avoided because eschatology is just more bad news. Those who have in the past peddled in eschatological forecasts have routinely said, “Oh, you think things are bad now? Just wait until the book of Revelation starts happening!” Pastors don’t want to be killjoys.

The Problem of Delay

Still another (and perhaps the most significant) factor that seems to have led to the abandonment of eschatology is, as I mentioned earlier, the problem of delay. Scholars and laity alike find it troubling that Jesus is taking so long to come back. Indeed, how long will it be until the tears are wiped from every eye? The problem of delay is another way of posing the problem of theodicy—the question of whether God is indeed good given the prevalence of evil in the world and his (apparent) refusal to quicken evil’s demise. 

The early church faced the question of delay head on. To God, they said, one thousand years is as a day, and a day is as a thousand years (2 Pet 3:8). I remember feeling like that was a cop-out answer when I was experiencing a season of depression in my mid-20s that was due in no small part to the overwhelming evil across the globe that I had steadily and deliberately internalized. At the same time, I never wanted to admit out loud that I thought the Bible was giving cheap answers. 

2 Peter seems to be saying blandly, “time is relative.” But, as it turns out, Einstein’s discoveries about the relativity of time two millennia later suggest that maybe that wasn’t such a bad take. It’s a crude and childish way of considering the problem, but I remember thinking that even if Jesus was traveling at twice the speed of light, then it could take him thousands of years to return, depending on his starting point. At the very least, scientific discoveries as simple as the speed of light meant that I could look at the stars and realize I was looking at light that burst forth from nuclear fusion that was triggered well before Jesus was born of the virgin mother due to the sheer distance of stars from earth. It gave me perspective.

Equally, delay might be the reason there’s no collective buy-in to any of the triumphalist narratives presented by humanist prophets of Progress, stretching from Feuerbach to OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. Society is in effect asking of all the humanist traditions what early Christian detractors asked of the church: “where is the promise of it’s coming?” (cf. 2 Peter 3:4).  Domination of the working class continues, which seems like a strike against Marx. Liberal democracy doesn’t seem so much to be gaining ground as losing it. Democracy is not taking hold in China, which only seems to be increasing its global influence. Globally, pragmatically effective strong men are enjoying real popularity in many places.. Even Fukuyama has tempered his early-90s triumphalist take in recent times. 

Similarly, populist critiques of the promise of AI are increasingly wondering when the promises the tech giants have made will manifest themselves. When will the scientific discoveries in health, productivity, and climate happen? Will they actually make life more meaningful or qualitatively happier? And at what cost are we placing hope in a future that seems anything but guaranteed? The increasing anxiety about the energy and natural resources data centers will demand mirror on a much smaller scale the critiques of political and social Progress. More people are wondering out loud if democracy needs endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran to sustain itself. More pointedly, does the way in which the new war with Iran has been conducted suggest democracy is actually on the decline in its epicenter, the United States? In sum, people keep asking, “Is the cost of historical progress worth it?” More and more people would rather keep their money in their own pockets.

While to some, Christ's delay might be a strike against the Christian faith, the overwhelming sense one gets in the NT is that the long wait of the last 2000 years is not so much a bug as a feature of the system. Jesus told his disciples that they must be his witnesses to the ends of the earth, which takes time. And while Revelation offers no clear timeline of eschatological events, it’s committed to demonstrating that history is jampacked with events of eternal consequence. 

The reason Christianity can claim that history is packed with meaning is because Jesus’s resurrection happened in history. The End, as Karl Barth and others have put it, has already come because resurrection is the eschatological event. All of this means that the promise of the End when all shall be well is premised on it already having happened for Jesus and in Jesus. 

Claiming that the End has already come in Jesus hardly solves the problem of delay since Jesus’s resurrection, like his second coming, is precisely what’s in doubt by Christianity’s detractors. But it is Christianity’s wager for legitimacy: if Christ has been raised, the End is guaranteed. If not, pity the church for its foolishness. It furthermore sets up the problem for all eschatologies—Christian, humanist, or otherwise. It invites the curious and neutral inquirer to ask what historical event(s) suggests that a particular eschatology is true. Does the French Revolution prove the liberal democracy is the end of history? Does China’s fusion of communism with a market economy suggest Marx was really onto something? What historical problem does AI need to solve to convince its detractors of the glorious future it will bring?

For Christianity, solving history’s problems still isn’t enough. The claim of Jesus’s resurrection is that the problem itself can be retrospectively undone. Death’s defeat on Easter means what happened in the past can be remedied and redeemed, which means all the evil of history, even of history yet to be written, can be remedied and redeemed. The blood-paved road of history cries out like Abel, and it will receive an answer. 

Christians can reasonably lament that resurrection in Jesus has become just one option in a marketplace of eschatologies in a post-religious world. But there’s no reason to deny the circumstances of the era. What’s left is to do is to name that there is a marketplace, and that everyone must buy something. From there, Christians should be content to make a defense for the hope within (cf. 1 Pet 3:15). Their claim is that resurrection will happen because it has happened. And the delay for future resurrection is a delay at the speed of Light.