The Paralysis of a Blocked Future

Theological Causes of a Blocked Future

In 1959, psychiatrist Dr. Henri Ellenberger made an important observation based on his work with patients suffering from various serious mental conditions. Quoted at length by Dr. Rushdoony in God’s Plan for Victory,1 Dr. Ellenberger observed:

Wherever the future becomes empty, as with manic and certain psychopaths, life is a perpetual gamble and the advantage of the present minute is taken into consideration; wherever the future is inaccessible or blocked, as with the depressed, hope necessarily disappears and life loses all meaning.2

A blocked future is a future that is perceived to be “empty” or “inaccessible” for various reasons. This leads to paralysis and inactivity. Dr. North writes:

If people believe that they are doomed as individuals, they find it difficult to survive in a life-threatening crisis. This is also true about civilizations. Self-confidence rests heavily on an optimistic view of the future. The vision of time that a society shares is very important for understanding how it operates. If you think you are running out of time, you will do certain things; if you think you have all the time in the world, you will do different things. Your vision of the future influences your activities in the present.3

An open future is the opposite: a future perceived to be ripe with purpose, redemption, clarity, and dependability. Dr. Rushdoony, in God’s Plan for Victory and Faith & Action,4 dives into Dr. Ellenberger’s comments and shows in detail how premillennial and amillennial eschatologies lead to a blocked future for the Christian, so we’ll not duplicate his efforts here. Instead, we’ll look at several additional theological approaches which lead to a blocked future and paralysis in life and decisionmaking.5

First, when a man rejects God as the starting point of all understanding, he necessarily replaces meaning with meaninglessness. Chance governs his universe, and thus no matter how hard he works, he will always be operating in a meaningless void that he vainly seeks to attribute meaning and purpose to. The non-Christian has full knowledge of this, too, since he “hold[s] the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18). His future is empty because he has gutted his reality.

Second, when a man rejects God as the predestinating Lord of history Who is both transcendent and immanent, he must live as though either man or Satan is in charge of history. In either case, however, man ends up seeing history as controlled and predestined by conspiracy, by the elites. History becomes a manifestation of the will of this or that secret group, and no action that can be taken is strong enough to counter these powerful elites. Moreover, if God is not sovereign and predestinating, then there is no meaning to events that have happened to him, personally. In his mind, God does not cause “all things to work together for good to those who love God” (Rom. 8:28, NASB). If God is not sovereignly working things together for his good and guiding him through life, then chance occurrences (or the unstoppable elites) are all that propels man forward and there is nothing to learn or glean or draw encouragement from.

Third, when a man rejects the law of God as normative for every area of life, ethics devolve into subjectivity and pragmatism. No clear path forward is seen because God’s ordained path has been blocked off: “No Entry.” It has been blocked off because God’s law requires responsibility and making hard decisions, and fallen man would prefer to find an easier road. Now every possible course of action is on the table, and ironically this glut of options leads to overwhelm and stagnation of decisionmaking. This is especially so in society, church, and state, where competing ethics result in gridlock and destruction. Dr. Rushdoony writes:

God has a plan for the conquest of all things by His covenant people. That plan is His law. It leaves no area of life and activity untouched, and it predestines victory. To deny the law is to deny God and His plan for victory.6

Fourth, when a man rejects the blessings and curses of God in history, he casts a question mark over the results of anything he does. Meredith Kline denied that God brings sanctions based on ethical conformity to God’s law, writing that “prosperity and adversity [must be] experienced in a manner largely unpredictable because of the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will that dispenses them in mysterious ways.”7 Thus, if one takes Dr. Kline’s slot-machine approach, man begins to either obsess over whether he’s doing exactly the right thing, making exactly the right decision, because he is left alone at the wheel—or else he spins out, knowing there’s no point to anything he does. He has no confidence that anything he does will receive God’s blessing.

The Paralysis of a Blocked Future

The paralysis resulting from a blocked future is widespread.

First, a blocked future leads directly to a reluctance to “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Gen. 1:28). Why have children if by bringing them into the world we cause them to become victims of the certain doom we’ll face in our lifetime? An email arrived in my inbox the other day written by a highly successful Christian entrepreneur and businesswoman. She wrote that until she had a sound eschatology of victory, specifically postmillennialism, she was certain the rapture, the Antichrist, and economic doom were around the corner. She couldn’t bring herself to be so cruel as to usher in children to this world. Her future was blocked. It was only a recognition and acceptance of sound eschatology that caused her to want to have children. She now has an open future—and a large dominion-oriented family that is unusually productive for the Kingdom.

Second, when it comes to entrepreneurship, work, and dominion, Dr. Rushdoony notes that “We are not motivated to action unless we know the purpose for our action.”8 A blocked future leads one to not “subdue [the earth]: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). There is no motivation to steward the earth, multiply its resources, and invest our talents (Matt. 25:14–30). Dr. Rushdoony elaborates:

Work gives no dominion in the world of humanism, and vacationing is an attempt to escape from the fact of frustration and castration. Man without dominion is a eunuch, and humanistic man, lacking true dominion, runs from work into a frenetic sexuality, trying to prove a false potency, because he knows in his heart he is an impotent man insofar as true dominion is concerned.9

Man without dominion purpose stemming from a Christian-theistic view of the world runs from work into addictions of all kinds: endless scrolling on social media, pornography, drugs, consumerism, and more.

Third, a blocked future results from the repudiation of God’s law as the normative ethic. This is most visible and has the sharpest consequences when it comes to ignoring God’s law in matters of justice and oppression. Man, having replaced God’s law with man’s law, is now left with no clear path for pursuing justice in cases of abuse and oppression. This results in competing approaches regarding whether or not to heed the cry of an oppressed person based on their gender or church membership status, different opinions on how or whether to assess the truthfulness of a victim’s claims, disparate standards for accepting evidence and witnesses, and fundamentally incompatible positions on sentencing. Evil is called good and good is called evil (Isa. 5:20), deceptive oppressors manipulate others into considering them bountiful (Isa. 32:5), smoking flaxes are quenched and bruised reeds are broken (Isa. 42:3)—all because man, having chucked God’s law since “there is no light in them,” does not go “to the law and to the testimony” (Isa. 8:20). The result of all this? Justice grinds to a halt, and the victim is crushed in the gears. The victim herself now has a blocked future: there is no justice and therefore, according to Isaiah 51:5 and Zechariah 9:9, there can be no healing.10 That lack of justice and judgment results in a blocked future, as Dr. Ellenberger pointed out in 1959. “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life” (Prov. 13:12).

Fourth, a blocked future results in no compelling reason to seek for the unity, reconciliation, and strengthening of the church, with the endpoint being, as St. Paul sets forth, “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). If a Christian only sees this as a fruitless endeavor due to overriding eschatological concerns (i.e., premillennialism or amillennialism), then he will abandon ship when it comes to this. As Dr. Rushdoony notes:

Not work but waiting was the new emphasis, waiting for the rapture, for premillennialists, and waiting grimly for the tribulation and end, for amillennialists.11

But God calls us to “seek peace, and pursue it” (Ps. 34:14b).

Fifth, a blocked future leads to a lack of motivation when it comes to growing in self-government due to lack of clarity. God designed the brain to be able to assess whether a plan or goal is attainable or not (i.e., the likelihood of reward) based on what it already knows and emits chemicals to drive motivation toward achieving that goal. Once progress is made toward the goal, this progress—a “reward”—is perceived by the brain and further dopamine is released, prompting further motivation. The process repeats. This mechanism is part of how God created man to pursue dominion, justice, and righteousness. But when a man’s future is blocked, when he sees something as unattainable or meaningless despite knowing he should do it, the brain will assess the likelihood of a reward—in this case, an ultimately unattainable or meaningless exercise would not be considered a reward—and withhold the motivating chemicals, leaving the man with no motivation. Thus a man facing a blocked future will struggle with discipline, personal development, and self-government. It’s important to note that man is not a product of chemicals, and the root of this chain can be found in a belief. These difficulties do not ultimately stem from chemicals but from faith and ethics.

In all this, we must pursue St. Paul’s words, “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). For “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and ultimately have a truly open future.

1. R. J. Rushdoony, God’s Plan for Victory: The Meaning of Postmillennialism, third edition (Vallecito, CA: Chalcedon / Ross House Books, [1997] 2022), p. 13.

2. Henri F. Ellenberger, “A Clinical Introduction to Psychiatric Phenomenology and Existential Analysis,” in Rollo May, Ernest Angel, Henri F. Ellenberger, eds., Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1959), pp. 106-107 (referenced in God’s Plan for Victory, p. 13).

3. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory
(Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), p. 335.

4. R. J. Rushdoony, Faith & Action (Vallecito, CA: Chalcedon/Ross House Books, 2019), vol. 3,
pp. 1234–1241.

5. There are additional causes for a blocked future that find their roots in various mental conditions, but these mental conditions are often brought about by trauma or abuse unaccompanied by the requisite justice on the perpetrator required by God’s law, which is a consequence we’ll look at later in this article.

6. God’s Plan for Victory, p. 43.

7. Meredith G. Kline, “Comments on an Old-New Error,” Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978), p. 184, quoted in Millennialism and Social Theory, p. 43.

8. God’s Plan for Victory, p. xv.

9. Ibid., p. 29.

10. This is beyond the scope of the present article, but as Martin Selbrede points out, Isaiah 51:5 and Zechariah 9:9 indicate a chronology: justice is a prerequisite for healing. See Selbrede, “Domestic Abuse & The Church: Lecture 3,” ChalcedonTV, filmed April 27, 2019, video of lecture, 58:14, youtube.com/watch?v=z4y-5-I7RYE.

11. God’s Plan for Victory, p. 17.