Robert W. Jenson on the priority of the future

“The order of a good story is an ordering by the outcome of the narrated events; its animating spirit ... is the power of a self-determinate future to liberate each specious present from mere predictabilities, from being the mere consequence of what has gone before.... The great metaphysical question on the border between the gospel and our culture’s antecedent theology is whether this ordering may be regarded as its own kind of causality” – i.e., a causality that moves backwards from the future!

—Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 159.