I’ve been thinking a lot lately about tomorrow, about the future, about what it means and what it holds.

As people born and bred in Western Civilization, our thinking about the future has been deeply framed and formed by a Greco-Roman assumptions. Too often, we fuse the categories of Greek philosophy and Roman power with elements drawn from the Bible. Then we call the resulting fusion “orthodoxy.” When it comes to our understanding of history, I believe we have inherited from this Greco-Roman fusion a vision of history as a timeline, which forces us to think of history as flat, narrow, and … linear. We see ourselves moving along six segments of the thin timeline, being driven at a constant pace on a flat plane, from left to right. Whatever freedom we have on our flat plane is severely limited by the choices presented us within these six lines, and our future is limited to the options it offers us.

But some of us are questioning this conventional framing of history – and of the Bible. Instead of jamming, squeezing, cutting, and trimming the Bible so it fits into the Greco-Roman framework, we have been imagining what it would be like to understand history in light of the dynamic and spacious Biblical narrative. In that narrative, we discover three dimensions of God’s work in the world: liberation (from the Book of Exodus), creation (from the Book of Genesis), and peaceable kingdom (from the prophets, especially Isaiah, and of course, Jesus). From that perspective, we see history not as a time-line on a flat plane, but as a time-space in three dimensions. Suddenly we find ourselves not in a flat, determined universe with a fixed future, but in a deep, expanding universe with a future full of possibilities. At every moment, creation continues to unfold, liberation continues to unshackle us from existing limitations, and the peaceable kingdom continues to expand with new hope and promise.

This continual unfolding, expanding, and opening all flow from a generous, creative, and liberating God, a God as far different from the static theos of the Greeks as three wild dimensions are from a perfectly flat line. We find ourselves in a very different universe indeed, and living in it could be a very different experience.

But imagine what it would be like to live in this deep 3-D universe while thinking you were still living in the flat 6-line universe. That, I believe, is the condition many of us find ourselves in, and it explains why many of us find our religion limiting, cramped, and unlivable. We feel our religion asks us to live a flat life in a deep world. Many of us think we’re constrained by the Bible, when we’re actually constrained by the Greco-Roman framing of the Bible.

Why would people keep living in a flat, determined world? Primarily, I think, because their authority figures, especially in their religious communities, have taught them to. Why would their authority figures keep them in a flat, determined world? First and consciously, because they themselves believe that this is the universe that the Bible mandates for believers to inhabit through faith; they’ve bought into the Greco-Roman fusion as a pre-critical assumption. But I think there is a second reason, more subconscious: when you’re an authority figure seeking to keep people “in line,” it helps to keep them in lines.

Since the subconscious reason will probably only be resolvable once the conscious one is addressed, we need to do some serious thinking about how we understand past, present, and future. We need to raise some important new questions: What kind of universe do we believe God created? Where do we get our assumptions about God’s relationship to history? How have we been influenced by Greek philosophical categories and Roman conceptions of power, so that when we think we are reading the Bible, we are reading it through Greco-Roman lenses? Those, to me, are exciting questions, and they lead us on an incredibly important quest.

In the Bible, we find a variety of understandings of God’s agency in history. Some, like Job’s friends and the writer of Proverbs, think God controls everything according to simple, karma-like moral rules, so God makes bad things happen to bad people and good things to good people. Others, like Job and the writer of Ecclesiastes, find that view ridiculous, and they see chaos, accident, and injustice as part of the cosmic equation. Those who read the Bible with Greco-Roman assumptions must homogenize these voices and eliminate all tension between them, so generally they subordinate the latter to the former, and then fit the former into their six-state timeline.

But when we read the Bible as a conversation, less constrained by Greco-Roman assumptions, we look for revelation precisely at the point of tension between the two views. And in that tension, we see that God is not in control in the sense of being a chess-master moving pieces or a machine operator pulling levers, but God is in relationship, like a rider guiding a horse with a will of its own or a parent guiding a child with a will of its own. The universe, in this view, isn’t just an object upon which God acts by dominating fiat; it is a subject endowed by its Creator with millions of minds and wills, a community with which God relates inter-subjectively. Simultaneously, we see that the universe is not out of control in the sense of being chaotic, random, and purposeless, but it is out of relationship, like a child pouting in the corner at times, or like a teenager sneaking out the window at others.

Put more positively, we see that whatever happens in history, God is with us. God is present in all life’s joys and sorrows, successes and failures. God is present, gently guiding those who seek for God’s good dreams to come true, and gently warning and inviting those who are still pursuing their own selfish agendas to change their way. More striking still: God is even present in our misery and shame, suffering with those who suffer life’s injustices, grieving with those who have ruined their lives, and groaning in and through creation as a mother in childbirth, laboring for a better future to be born.

History and its future are not determined by God from this perspective, but in a sense, the future is doomed by God – not doomed to failure and destruction, but doomed to eventual healing and joy, doomed to resurrection, because the living God will never give up and abandon creation. The word for this positive kind of dooming is promise, meaning that we do not live in a predetermined world where the future can be predicted, as if God had already made the movie of history and it was digitally recorded on a disk somewhere. Rather, we live in a promised world, a drama in which God is one of the actors alongside us, working with and through us, and God has promised never to give up until there is a happy ending, where all death is caught up in resurrection and all defeat in the victory of grace. God’s values of justice, love, peace, and joy will ultimately triumph, and as the old mystic said, All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. This vision of tomorrow helps me live a very good today.

Brian McLaren was a church planter and pastor for twenty-four years. Now he is an author, speaker, and networker. He and Grace live near Washington, DC.  This article is an early draft of a chapter to be included in Brian’s current writing project.  You can learn more about him, and about the book of which this will be a chapter in early 2010, at brianmclaren.net.