We should be interested in the future if only because we will spend the rest of our lives in
it. We have always related to the future in particular ways. Moreover we evaluate imagined
futures and these evaluations affect the present in which we already live together in
anticipation hope expectation or uncertainty - even resignation. Certain future scenarios
require a concrete attitude from us so that we must prepare ourselves and also consider the
well-being of coming generations. Some broader orientations of life already contain rather
concrete notions of how we should relate to the future. Hartmut von Sass examines these four
levels of factual evaluative normative and implicative relations to the future in greater
depth to eventually ask what attitudes toward the future and accompanying emotions the
Christian faith already embodies - and this in the face of concrete challenges of a present
whose future has become fundamentally uncertain. Yet this undertaking encounters a theological
reservation concerning questions of last and penultimate things. Therefore the general and
theologically related question of the future is bound up with a recovery of eschatological
interests. The author first rejects the two traditional approaches that either understand
Christian images of the future realistically as outstanding facts or that weaken them by
declaring everything a pure or impure symbol. The moments of truth in both approaches are
preserved while their pitfalls are avoided by situating eschatology within a
practice-theoretical framework. Hartmut von Sass thus asks how the future - as eternal life
God's kingdom and resurrection into a new life - emerges through and within the practices of
faith. In doing so it becomes clear what strong assumptions faith carries in this regard:
despair is suggested as a form of 'sin ' whereas hope appears as one of the virtuous elements
of faith itself. Finally it is to be asked in what sense this promising faith might be linked
with corresponding political concerns. Likewise it is to be considered how God and the future
relate to each other if one takes seriously the well-founded assumption that God himself has an
open still possible and thus not predetermined future.
