Updated: 2/24/20
Then will be the end, when Christ will hand over the kingdom to God the Father. This is when he will abolish all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For “he has put everything under his feet.” But when it says “he has put everything,” it is clear that this does not include the one who put everything in subjection to himself. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subjected to him who put all things into subjection under him, that God may be all in all (I Corinthians 15:24–28).
This passage makes it clear that the universe does not have 2.8 billion years to go, a low estimate, let alone 10 followed by 100 zeroes years, which is the high-end estimate these days. It asserts that the universe will not slowly wind down. There will be no heat death of the universe. In contrast is the eschatology of modern humanism. The frozen wastes of the lifeless, timeless cosmos is the humanists’ alternative to the fiery sanction of the eternal lake of fire (Revelation 20:14–15). Grim as the heat death of the universe may be, it is far more comforting to a covenant-breaker than the thought of the eternal lake of fire. I discuss this eschatology in Appendix B. It is not the eschatology of the Bible.
The eschatology of the Bible has to do with history. Specifically, it has to do with the extension of the kingdom of God in history. There is a temporal limit to the extension of the kingdom of God. Paul described it in this passage. It has to do with the reign of Christ in history. There is a debate among premillennialists, amillennialists, and postmillennialists regarding whether Christ will be bodily present in the final thousand years of history in order to extend His reign. Premillennialists insist that He will be. Amillennialists and postmillennialists deny this. Here is the Bible’s cosmology: history will play out when the kingdom of God in history has played out. It will have fulfilled its purpose.
Here is what Jesus said about the era of sin-burdened history. It will involve uninterrupted kingdom competition between covenant-breakers and covenant-keepers.
Jesus presented another parable to them. He said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while people slept, his enemy came and also sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. When the blades sprouted and then produced their crop, then the weeds appeared also. The servants of the landowner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How does it now have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘So do you want us to go and pull them out?’ The landowner said, ‘No. Because while you are pulling out the weeds, you might uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, “First pull out the weeds and tie them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn”’ (Matthew 13:24–30).
This parable confused the disciples. They asked Jesus to explain it. He did so.
Jesus answered and said, “He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world; and the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Therefore, as the weeds are gathered up and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all the things that cause sin and those who commit iniquity. They will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth. Then will the righteous people shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him listen (vv. 37–43).
As I have described in my analysis of this passage in Chapter 29 of my commentary on Matthew, this parable is about continuity in history. The final judgment will end history. It will also end the competition between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of mammon. This competition is a zero-sum competition. With respect to all those who are brought by God’s grace into the kingdom of God, each person is taken out of the kingdom of mammon.
This does not mean that economic growth is a zero-sum competition. It is not. Laborers in both camps can and do increase their productivity. Common grace is given to covenant-breakers so that they may become more fruitful in history. But it is clear from Paul’s language that the economic inheritance is transferred to Christ at the end of time. He is the Son. He is heir to the promise. Those who are part of His kingdom will also inherit as members of His church, which is His bride. I explain this in Chapter 48, "Bride Price."
What about in between now and then? Here is what the Psalmist wrote: “Do not be angry and frustrated. Do not worry. This only makes trouble. Evildoers will be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord will inherit the land. In a little while the evil man will disappear; you will look at his place, but he will be gone. But the meek will inherit the land and will delight in great prosperity” (Psalm 37:8–11). Here is what Jesus said: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). [North, Matthew, ch. 4.]
It is clear from these passages that there is a fundamental limit to growth: time. We live in a cursed finite world. There has been a major debate since the 1960s regarding the limits to economic growth. Critics of the free market argued that the primary limits to growth are natural resources, which include unpolluted air and unpolluted water. Another limit that humanists have pointed to is the limit of space for human beings to occupy. Statistically, it is impossible to have uninterrupted growth of population at any percent above zero. The compounding effect inevitably becomes exponential. The vast increase of population since 1800 has dwarfed all previous increases. But so has the increase in per capita economic growth. So, the question arises, what is the most fundamental limit to growth? Is it time? Is it population? Is it natural resources?
Various humanist economists have argued that the primary limits to growth are natural resources. This became a public debate in the second half of the 1960s. Critics of the seemingly uninterrupted economic growth of the free market, especially in the United States, argued that the world would soon run out of natural resources. One of the early books that argue this way was written by an environmentalist-economist, Barbara Ward: Spaceship Earth (1968). She argued that the earth is like a spaceship, and therefore it needs a commander. The commander should be a central planning agency for the whole world. A much more popular book was titled The Limits to Growth (1972). The authors were MIT economists. They tried to persuade readers that unlimited economic growth is impossible. We will run out of resources. The problem with this argument is easy to state: the primary economic resource is human creativity. This was the argument of free market economist Julian Simon in his book, The Ultimate Resource (1981). If human ingenuity can find ways of maintaining output or even increasing it with a reduced quantity of resources, the limits to growth become indeterminate. On the one hand, if we are talking about increasing the quantity of resources in order to increase economic well-being, then there will be limits to growth that end the process. On the other hand, if the basis of economic expansion is a reduction in the quantity of raw materials used up in the production process, then economic growth can continue until innovation and cost-cutting reach limits. We do not know what these limits are. There is no way that we can know this. The decisive characteristic of discovery and innovation is that most people do not see them coming.
The Bible teaches that the ground has been cursed. Adam’s body was cursed. So, our bodies are cursed. But this does not mean that there cannot be discoveries that reduce the level of the curse on our bodies. We have made these discoveries over the past century. The Bible teaches that a major extension of life lies ahead. Isaiah wrote: “For see, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things will not be remembered or be brought to mind. But you will be glad and rejoice forever in what I am about to create. See, I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and her people as a delight. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and be glad over my people; weeping and cries of distress will no longer be heard in her. Never again will an infant live there only a few days; nor will an old man die before his time. One who dies at one hundred years old will be considered a young person. Anyone who fails to reach the age of one hundred years old will be considered cursed” (Isaiah 65:17–20). This is literal. It has yet to be fulfilled. [North, Prophets, ch. 15]
There is nothing in nature that would limit pro-growth discoveries. We do not need to cultivate more land if we can steadily increase the productivity of the land already under cultivation. This is taking place in the United States, according to a 2015 study by Jesse Ausubel, “The Return of Nature How Technology Liberates the Environment.” It may be possible to use hydroponics to turn urban real estate into gardens if the price of food rises. This is being done on a small scale around the world. In short, the main limit to growth is a lack of specific knowledge.
We are seeing an exponential reduction in the cost of information by means of computer technology. This reduction in cost should lead to discoveries that enable us to reduce our costs of production of physical goods. In any case, it is plausible. At the end of the 1970s, the microcomputer revolution had begun. It became increasingly clear that the crucial economic resource is accurate information, not physical resources. The decline in the cost of information became exponential. This has became known as Moore’s Law, which applies to the number of transistors on a silicon chip, but the phenomenon has been going on at an increasing rate ever since the invention of the commercial telegraph in 1844. In the days of Jesus, the speed of information transfer was about one mile per hour. It was a little over this in 1820. The railroad increased this speed to a maximum of 60 miles per hour over short distances in the early 1830s. After 1844, it was 186,000 miles a second, minus the time it took for the telegraphy and the time it took for a runner to deliver it.
With the abandonment of economic Communism in mainland China, beginning in 1979, Chinese economic growth began to expand at a rate never seen in history. No large nation has ever experienced anything like this rate of economic growth. The abandonment of Communism by the Soviet Union in December 1991 launched a comparable economic transformation in Russia. Free market ideas spread into politics. Since then, most of the world has risen out of abject poverty. It turns out that the crucial resource was freedom, not physical resources.
Resources are scarce, but human ingenuity seems to be able to work around these limits. With better knowledge, more capital, and more efficient production methods, the world has escaped the predictions of the pessimists who believed that the world was running out of natural resources. In any case, if demand rises for a resource, and output remains the same, its price will rise. Entrepreneurs will start looking for new supplies of it, or ways to produce it less expensively, or substitutes. There will be price signals before supplies run out.
There is no question that a rate of population growth of 2% per annum would transform today’s 7.5 billion people into 50 billion people in a century, and three trillion people in three centuries. There is no way that this is going to happen. The rate of population growth is going to slow. It has slowed down all over the world over the last half-century.
God’s command to Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply will no longer apply, once mankind has established dominion across the face of the earth. At the present rate of population growth, this will not be much longer. Then dominion will become more obviously a covenantal process than a biological process. It will become more obviously a competition between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of mammon.
One of the themes of science fiction is this: a future fusion between computers and humanity. This fusion will produce an evolutionary leap of being. This was the theme of a popular movie in 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In the movie, this evolution was presented in an optimistic fashion: a sign of progress. A rival vision, quite pessimistic, is this: digital technologies will lead to computers that control the world or robots that control the world. This theme goes back to a letter to the editor written by New Zealander Samuel Butler in 1863: “Darwin Among the Machines.” He wrote this:
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them. Their minds will be in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture them. Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment.
He then wrote a popular utopian novel, Erewhon (1872), which extended this theme in three of the novel’s chapters: “The Book of the Machines.”
As Moore’s Law has extended into more and more areas of life, the fear that Butler articulated in 1863 has begun to spread among the world’s scientific and literary figures. This dystopian scenario is becoming increasingly prominent. No one has any real-world suggestions about what to do about it. Technological development is highly decentralized. It is growing rapidly. It is extending its influence into more areas of life. As its price falls, more is demanded. Those who defend the free market tend to shrug off the threat. “Let the market decide.” Those who still have some faith in central planning see little hope because there is no worldwide government with sufficient power to direct technological development by the threat of sanctions. The invasion of the algorithms is taking place at a rapid rate. The key question is this: “Will this rate of digital innovation become exponential?” At present, this seems likely.
This is no laughing matter anymore. This is no longer simply a theme of science fiction authors. As the cultural extension of algorithms and robotics continues, humanists will have to face the implications of their theory of evolution. It is quite possible, given humanism’s presuppositions, that digital evolution may replace man’s biological evolution. Not only is it possible, it now seems likely to some humanists. Digital evolution progresses by several percentage points per annum. Human biological evolution supposedly develops only over tens of thousands of years. Digital evolution is about to become exponential today. Biological evolution supposedly has not made a leap forward in about 150,000 years. What could reverse digital evolution? Nothing seems likely at this point.
Man is made in the image of God. This image is personal. We live in a world of cosmic personalism. This is an inescapable implication of the Bible’s doctrine of creation. This means that life is not digital. It is biological. Man has been given dominion over all life forms.
Biblically speaking, it is impossible for machinery to evolve into life forms. The answer to Butler’s letter to the editor is simple: machines are not guilty because machines are not alive. Machines are not responsible because machines are not alive. He predicted this: “Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them.” This is true because the following is not true: “Their minds will be in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no regrets.” They will have no minds.
If man is not made in the image of God, then Butler’s vision is not only likely, it seems inevitable. If life is as much digital as analogical, then the evolution of digital life forms is virtually guaranteed. Their triumph over humanity is also guaranteed. Digital progress is so rapid; biological evolution is so slow. This assumes that there is such a thing as biological evolution. Humanists insist that there is. They insist that it is the dominant aspect of the development of life. Only with the evolution of man did biological evolution get replaced by cultural evolution, according to the humanists’ scenario. But now cultural evolution has led to digital evolution, and digital evolution seems about to become exponential. It is uncontrolled by any central planning agency. It now seems uncontrollable by any force except for unprofitability in the free market. Digitalization seems increasingly profitable to developers and users.
These are deeply theological questions. The theology of humanism places man at the pinnacle of the known universe. But this is true only because of evolution: biological and cultural. Now man faces competition with impersonal forces of digital evolution. It is not clear to humanistic social theorists how man can win this competition. They do not accept the Christian answer. Actually, there have been two Christian answers. One is that biological evolution has been directed by God. Another is that there has been no such thing as biological evolution. Both versions insist that there is a God, He is sovereign, and He does direct the affairs of mankind. The evolutionist has no god to appeal to for deliverance. His only god is god by default: mankind. Mankind has now created a scenario in which he seems likely to be dethroned unless the Christian view of man as made in the image of God is correct.
The main arena of this theological confrontation is economics. The invasion of the algorithms and the robots is taking place because of economic factors. The algorithms and the robots cost less to implement in certain areas of the economy than it costs to hire labor. As the costs of the algorithms and the robots decline, the replacement of repetitive human labor is going to accelerate. Another potentially crucial arena of confrontation is military. Digital developments in warfare are potentially life-and-death developments. But the driving force of the digitalization of life is economic, not military.
This is another reason why Christian economics offers a far more comforting scenario than humanistic economics does. Humanistic economics rejects the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of providence. In doing so, it leaves man alone in the universe. But now, thanks to digital advances, man may not be alone for much longer. There is, in the vernacular, a new sheriff in town. Christian theology denies this. Christian economics denies this. But Christian theology and Christian economics are not acceptable to humanists in general and humanistic economists specifically.
Of all of the limits to growth, time is the one that humanists do not regard as a threat. They have a vision of something approaching unlimited time. The heat death of the universe may be as close as 2.8 billion years, but they really do not worry about this. They see mankind’s evolutionary process in terms of tens of thousands of years. The possibility of an imminent end to time is low on their priorities. It could come through a devastating nuclear war, but even in a war, there would be millions of survivors outside the war zones. So, humanists focus on limits imposed by depleted natural resources, low-cost living space for mankind, and the possible replacement of mankind by robots.
For those people who hold to the six-day creation, time is the obvious limit to growth. They see mankind’s future in terms of as few as a thousand years, and probably no more than a few thousand years. “Here today. Gone the day after tomorrow.” As the acceleration of economic development continues, they become more aware of the temporal limits to growth. They are not afraid of these limits. On the contrary, they rejoice in them. They imply a temporal limit on the reign of sin. For those Christians who believe that sin will not be steadily rolled back through a worldwide revival, meaning amillennialists, their motto is this: “the sooner the end of history comes, the better.” Premillennialists believe that Christ will return to set up an earthly kingdom, meaning an enormous judicial hierarchy. They are unconcerned about issues of economic theory, political theory, and other matters that pertain to a world without the Son of God as the final court of appeal, possibly with the Supreme Court set up in Jerusalem. They do not talk about Exodus 18, in which Moses was being worn out by the long lines of people seeking justice. That was in a society with a total population of about 2.4 million people. Think of the length of the lines in a population of nine billion people. However swift that justice will be at the top, it will not be swift enough to get those lines shorter. Jesus will have to delegate a great deal of authority to his subordinates. That was the advice that Jethro gave to Moses, and it was good advice (Exodus 18). [North, Exodus, ch. 19]
It is obvious that the world will soon be filled to its capacity with people if the rate of population growth does not slow. It is safe to say that it will slow. Even with a rate of population growth of under 1% per annum, it will not take a thousand years to fill the earth to its support capacity. So, the correct focus of interest has to be on changes wrought by technologies, especially digital technologies. These are the proper hope for avoiding food shortages, fresh water shortages, pollution problems, and other resource shortages that will inevitably come as a result of bringing subsistence farmers in small villages into the world economy by way of the World Wide Web and low-cost smartphones. By the middle of the twenty-first century, there will be no more life-threatening poverty anywhere in the world. This has never happened in recorded history. Social institutions have not yet adjusted to this revolutionary transformation. But they will. They always do.
The biggest social change will be life extension. When this takes place, it will affect almost all human relationships. There are futurists who are highly optimistic about a major breakthrough in this area. The problem is, nobody has a cogent idea of what to do if retired people live for an extra three decades or five decades. Obviously, all of the government-funded retirement programs will be revised. But it will not take an increase in life expectancy to achieve this. The unfunded liabilities of existing old-age health care programs are already in the hundreds of trillions of dollars in the United States. People who want to work longer, or are forced to work longer by economic necessity, are going to be facing a market in which algorithms and robotics are taking away jobs requiring simple repetitive labor. They may be taking away jobs that require fairly complex repetitive intellectual labor. No one has a solution for this yet. The issue of employment is going to be the most pressing social issue in the second half of the twenty-first century, and possibly sooner.
This is why the issue of the calling is going to become more important. If people can earn most of what they need to live comfortably, what are they going to do with their spare time? Even if people have to work long hours in face-to-face service jobs to earn a living, they will still have to decide what their callings are. Will their callings be their face-to-face jobs? Will their callings be whatever it takes to earn a living? This was what the calling was for the vast majority of humans up until the Industrial Revolution. We are going to have to rediscover what was lost. When men had few alternatives for employment, their jobs were their callings. The most important thing they could do in which they would be most difficult to replace was their job. If they were the heads of households, they had to keep their jobs, which were mostly agricultural jobs. These were low division of labor jobs. What we will be facing soon is a society in which people will have to have flexible jobs that involve a high level of creativity, meaning a level of creativity not provided by an algorithm. But most people in history have not demonstrated a capacity for such creativity. What will most people do to earn a living? We will have to find out, and do so fairly soon. As Paul wrote, we see in a mirror darkly (I Corinthians 13:12). The mirror tells us a little about the past. We cannot see the future well.
In 1975, the pressing climatic issue among well-educated intellectuals was supposedly a coming ice age. The pressing economic issue was supposedly widespread starvation by the year 2000. (The Population Bomb, 1968; “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1968). The long-term economic problem was supposedly a shortage of raw materials, including a shortage of low-pollution environments. Also on the list was excessive population growth. Today, the pressing climatic issue among well-educated intellectuals is climate change, by which they mean global warming. The pressing economic issue is inequality. Yet there is little evidence that economic inequality is much greater today than it was in the late 1890's, when the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that about 20% of Western Europe’s citizens owned about 80% of the wealth. The great unknown today is the pace of the invasion into the labor markets by algorithms and robots. What will this do to unemployment rates? What will this do to the kinds of jobs available? Concerns about pollution have diminished due to successful anti-pollution policies. Concerns about population growth are diminishing due to falling birth rates.
Why do I mention these chronologically narrow concerns in a general treatise? Because every generation needs to be reminded that the concerns of its generation will probably not be the concerns of the next generation and certainly not three generations down the line. (I am not talking about the three generations between John Tyler and his two grandsons: from 1790 until at least 2020.) No matter how sophisticated our data-collection techniques are, and no matter how sophisticated our computer-generated projections are, we scarcely know what is coming two decades away, except in the area of demographics. No one in 1990 recognized what Tim Berners-Lee had done when he posted the first World Wide Web website. A decade later, worldwide communications had begun to change. Less than two decades later, most of what had seemed revolutionary in 2000 seems archaic. Yet most people in 2020 have never heard of Tim Berners-Lee.
I end this chapter with a quotation from an article written by my mentor, Robert Nisbet. It was published in 1968 in Commentary: “The Year 2000 and All That.” It is as relevant today as it was then. It will be as relevant in a century as it is today. The article was a survey of general predictions about the future since the French Revolution (1790). He ended with this assessment. “It is very different with studies of change in human society. Here the Random Event, the Maniac, the Prophet, and the Genius have to be reckoned with. We have absolutely no way of escaping them. The future-predictors don’t suggest that we can avoid or escape them— or ever be able to predict or forecast them. What the future-predictors, the change-analysts, and trend-tenders say in effect is that with the aid of institute resources, computers, linear programming, etc. they will deal with the kinds of change that are not the consequence of the Random Event, the Genius, the Maniac, and the Prophet. To which I can only say: there really aren’t any; not any worth looking at anyhow.”
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