Agency and the Hope of Futurity
Adapted from Agency, by Terryl Givens, in the Maxwell Institute’s Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series.
We are creatures of time. We inherit its fruits, both sweet and bitter. We have the advantages our forebears have bequeathed us, from aspirin to the forty-hour work week, to whatever political and religious freedoms we enjoy. Examples like those enhance our modern possibilities for meaningful, freely chosen action. However, we are also the inheritors of cultural concepts, conceptual frameworks, prejudices, and moral failings that can limit the range of our thinking. We progress toward maturity as individuals, but as societies as well. Scientific knowledge builds upon the achievements and expanded horizons of predecessors. Copernicus was a brilliant scientist, but we cannot expect him to have pioneered nuclear fusion. The universe of Galileo was static—so an evolutionary history of animal life could not really have occurred to him. And before microscopes, the smartest thinkers of the age could not establish an understanding of microbes as carriers of diseases.
The same is true to some extent in the moral world. No matter how good an individual Aristotle was, he was not nurtured in a society where he could even imagine slavery as wrong, or women as equal to men. Christians thought it was great progress two hundred years ago to limit the hours children could labor in the mines and factories—not rescue them from such exploitation altogether. Truly, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”1 We are, in other words, socialized into intellectual and moral universes that profoundly shape the range of what is not just doable, but thinkable.
One lesson we might learn from his observation is a particular kind of humility. For which of our blind spots will our posterity be most incredulous and disappointed? What are we doing, and not doing, that will disappoint our grandchildren? We have not reached the end of history. As a people and as individuals, we have much to learn, and much moral growth to experience. “Ye cannot bear all things now; ye must grow in grace and in the knowledge of the truth,” the Lord counsels the early Saints (D&C 50:40).
Agency is about responsibility as much as humility. Recognizing our place in the midst of a historical arc, our immersion in ways of thinking and acting that obscure the full picture, can make us act with more care, more caution. Ezekiel writes with potent imagery of the responsibility we bear to depict God and his gospel in ways that invite rather than repel, that celebrate rather than pollute our inheritance. “And as for my flock,” he hears the Lord say, “they eat that which ye have trodden with your feet; and they drink that which ye have fouled with your feet” (Ezekiel 34:19). History is a river, and our descendants and neighbors live downstream.
In one of many scriptures fine tuning the directive to be agents and righteous actors, we are counseled to “act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity” (D&C 101:78, my emphasis). That’s the majesty and terror of agency: The world will never be the same because of the infinite reverberations of the words we chose to speak, the acts we chose to perform or leave undone. But a few years before Joseph penned that revelation, a writer used the expression about futurity to reverse the direction of influence bound up with agency. She urged “a careful and earnest attention to the things pertaining to futurity, namely, the discovery of the infinite importance of that future to our present existence.”2
How can a future that has not happened exert its influence on us in the present? The novelty of that thought reveals how unaccustomed we are to actually living a faith-filled life. We are invited to repose confidence in a future in light of which the present acquires new meaning and significance, which can bear on our lives and our dispositions now. The eternal perspective, in other words, may require not just seeing the future consequences of our present actions, but seeing our present predicament in the context of a futurity in which we believe and trust.
To put it another way, most of us live our lives in a way consistent with, parallel to, the arrow of time; we see events as unfolding and moving into a future yet to be determined. We sense the fragility and precariousness of our place in that unfolding; we are anxious and uncertain. Building Zion in this world often feels like erecting a sandcastle against a rising tide, and at times we and those within our circle of love lose ground. But as regards “futurity,” much is known. Timothy Radcliffe reminds us, “Even if we seem to get nowhere, still the future victory shines its light on our world.” That’s an apt image, and one that seems particularly relevant to the verse quoted above.
The final act of an Easter drama will assuredly unfold; Zion above will meet Zion below, “we shall fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks;” we will experience that coming “day of mercy and love—a day when broken hearts are healed, when tears of grief are replaced with tears of gratitude, when all will be made right.” And then we move on to the next curriculum in our eternal education. That future is not in doubt, and we are bidden to live in the light of those coming realities that are, like Christ’s atonement to King Benjamin’s audience, as impactful “as though” they were already in our past (Mosiah 3:13).
Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel and The God Who Weeps and All Things New.
Art by Leslie Graff.
Martin Luther famously employed that phrase, though it has been traced to an 1853 sermon by Theodore Parker. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/15/arc-of-universe
Cora, “Death by Lightning,” Ladies’ Gazette and Literary Magazine 4, no. 10 (October 1830): 446.