Hope in the Future and Present Totalitarianism

"The eighteenth century transferred the holy city from another world to this. No longer would it be a gift of God from heaven; it would be the final triumph of the science and skill of the enlightened peoples fo the earth."

"If all hope is vested in a future that those now living will not share, and if the nation-state is posited as the guarantee of 'rights' that are in principle infinite, it opens the way for the kind of totalitarian ideologies that use the power of the state to extinguish the rights of the living for the sake of the supposed happiness of those yet unborn. And even when this extreme development does not take place, the vesting of all hope in an earthly future means that the relative positions of the young and the old are reversed."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 28