After working on the forefront of Christ and culture for more than two decades, I wonder what Christ will mean to my children's children, and to the 22nd century....

A preoccupation with millennialism used to shape this religious discourse.... Unfortunately, millenarianism has become just another "fringe" notion in American culture. Bible prophecy is as strange and pliable as the predictions of Nostradamus, the existence of UFOs or machinations about the Illuminati. It's time to take another look at the man from Galilee, apart from pop culture or conspiracy theories.

Recently I've begun to approach this issue of Jesus and our future from a different starting point, by actually looking at how Jesus framed the future for his own contemporaries. Rather than take a retrospective view from the heights of systematic theology, I've begun to take a ground-level look at the historical world that Jesus faced, and ask, How did he approach his future as a leader?

Jesus' Three Futures

When Jesus left his carpenter's bench circa A.D. 27, how would he have seen his own future related to the future of his society? I propose he saw the future as a dynamic of three paths: Conventional, Counter and Creative.

The Conventional future was the mainstream future. This lower line future had 1,500 years of Moses, or ancestral law, behind it. It had 250 years of Alexander the Great, or Greek culture, defining it. It had 100 years of Caesar, or Roman rule, enforcing it. This was the official world of "Second Temple Judaism," ruled by the Herodians and Sadducees. In other words, the Conventional future for Jesus was the present state of Roman occupation projected into the future.

The Counter future opposed this official future. This future was largely defined by the Pharisees, the loyal opposition to Jewish collaboration with the Roman Empire. The Essenes, and later the Zealots, also shaped this popular resistance to occupation. The Counter future claimed that it, rather than Herod, represented Moses. This future rallied people behind 200 years of Jewish nationalism, represented in the Maccabean revolution of B.C.167.

Jesus saw these two futures, Roman imperialism and Jewish nationalism, on a collision course in his generation if left unchecked. Josephus, the Jewish historian writing sixty years after Jesus, traced the roots of the "zealot" revolution, or Counter future, back to the death of Herod of Great. At the time of Jesus' birth you didn't need to be a prophet to realize that trouble was on the horizon. Left to its own, society was facing an impending collapse.

Jesus weighed these two lower-line futures and found them wanting. In view of the "clash of civilizations," he began to develop a third way, a Creative future that would make all things new.

In contrast with a mainstream or side stream future, this path was an upstream future. Jesus saw this high road transcending the lower lines. It would lead to the ideal, the kingdom of God. It would include the ancient covenant made to Israel, but raise it from a one-nation to a many-nation covenant.

But Jesus' Creative future called for faith. He and his contemporaries would have to die to the old order before its external collapse. If they did, they would survive the "end of the age."

Let's walk through this first-century foresight model in more detail. Keep in mind that our quest is to see Jesus in relation to his future. These three futures are the architecture, the landscape out of which he crafted his gospel. For me, this illuminates the "Jesus I Never Knew," as well as the "Old, Old Story of Jesus and His Love."