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The power of progress²

Doug Schulz

“Hurtling Toward Oblivion: A Logical Argument For the End of the Age”
Richard A. Swenson, M.D., Navpress, 1999. 140 pp. paper. $9.00 US.

Brace yourself. Where does your hope lie? Do you have millennium medicine?

“We are exploring the end of the age, not the glories of progress,” insists Richard Swenson, a medical doctor with a degree in physics, who is a noted speaker at the US Congress and the Pentagon. Armed with well-chosen statistics depicting the proliferation of population, constructive and destructive products and patterns of communication connecting people with these products, and quoting secular “end times” analysts frequently, this physician-become-futurist declares that humans – though capable of accomplishing great good, are doomed.

Why? Because, while you were reading that last sentence, the burdensome weight of the number of people on this planet choosing to use things of progress for purposes of evil grew mathematically more lethal. We are destined to be victims of the “fallenness factor”. Unlike God, we are unable to make or do anything “purely good”. Since more of us are less devoted to God’s planetary health standards, there is no cure intensive enough to protect the earth from being destroyed by the “macrobad” and “megasuicide” tendencies inherent in humans at the end of the 20th century. Forget asteroids. The globe will disintegrate on its own. Take cover for “someone gave fallenness a gun”.

Swenson fires bullets into New Age optimism with its shallow self-as-saviour ideologies that fall short of the biblical ideals of compassion and passion for justice in the world. He calls Christians to peace and service, loving relationships and authentic lifestyles. “Our weapons are truth and love. We know forgiveness, we know grace, we know hope. What a privilege to be picked to live today!”

However, there is a strain of self-righteousness in Swenson’s “last hurrah” martyrdom vision. The reader senses the familiar American refrain: “Bad guys want to get us so badly they’d gladly wreck everything in the process.” Is the writer guilty – in spite of his sincere, dire message – of fear-mongering? This way of thinking can create paranoid believers with a militant fascination with power. Eventually, faith fuelled by fear begs the Bomb, believing in a grim Jesus salvaging the pieces.

The book is an attempt at a brief geo-political prediction, not a complete theological text. In his quick spiritual prescription, Swenson neglects the one cure the world must count on. Jesus promises that there is a kingdom of perpetual possibility growing from a mustard seed of faith in the God who desires to redeem all. Jesus was born for the world that God peopled initially with “very good” beings capable of being renewed by a grace greater than the weight of their failings. Must a cataclysm precede the cleansing? Why would God not apply the touch of healing – not the stroke of damning – to the world?

Swenson accurately charts the symptoms of the sick condition this world is in. His warning is timely, but his theology of salvation is incomplete, and hence, his is not the hope-filled prescription we all need.

Doug Schulz is a chaplain at Delta (B.C.) Hospital and a grief and life transition counsellor in Delta.

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Last modified December 9, 1999.

© 1999 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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