Some authors take aim at very small subjects with the precision of a sniper. Others use shotguns that spray large areas in hope of hitting something. The Toffler’s are the latter type of shooter. If you are looking for tightly developed arguments and reasoning this book is not for you. However, if you don’t mind most pellets missing the target but a few landing with lethal force then you might value this book. For all its faults, the Toffler’s book hits the target in identifying changes in American culture..

 The first sentence in chapter 1 gives the book’s thesis:

 This book is about the future of wealth, visible and invisible—a revolutionary form of wealth that will redesign our lives, our companies and the world in the years now speeding toward us. (p. 3)

 Don’t be mistaken into thinking that the Toffler’s are talking about wealth as money (hard cash, credit cards, bank statements). Their definition is quite broad:

  …we can roughly define wealth as any possession, shared or not, that has what economists call “utility”—it provides us with some form of well-being or can be traded for some other form of wealth that does. (p. 14)

 Under this definition wealth is physical things (cars, boats, desks, books), digital things (web pages, MP3 files of music, videos), and even knowledge and ideas.

They advocate a three-tiered evolutionary view of wealth development. First with the agrarian society, second with the industrial revolution and mass production, and last with the knowledge economy. (Nothing new here—others have advocated the same for years).

It is with their discussion of the knowledge economy that some unusual insights emerge. They coined the terms “prosumerism” and “prosumers” in 1980 and continue to use the term in the book:

…we therefore invented the word prosumer for those of us who create goods, services or experiences for our own use or satisfaction, rather than for sale or exchanges. When, as individuals or groups, we both produce and consume our own output, we are “prosuming…” Today, given the shrinkage of the world because of advances in transportation, communications and I. T., the notion of prosuming can include unpaid work to create value to share with strangers half a world away. (p. 153)

Examples of this prosumerism abound on the Internet: the Trinity Blog, Wikipedia (a free on-line encyclopedia), and open source software. This concept is well developed in the book and it explains many trends in our society. It is well worth reading this portion of the book for the insights they develop.

In essence (and this is the point the Tofflers miss) prosumerism finds its greatest expression in Christian charity. The Tofflers recognize prosumerism has existed for centuries, but they don’t acknowledge the Christian legacy that gives rise to the term. The founding of 95% of the world’s hospitals, the establishment of numerous universities and charities, even the recent aid for Katrina victims all form part of the Christian legacy that is unrecognized in the book. Most unfortunate, therefore, is that the book contains several attacks upon Christianity.

The first attack is the swipe they take at “inerrantists:” 

…those who insist that, even after two thousand years of problematic interpretations and mistranslations, the Bible is error-free, and that, moreover, its every word must be understood in its most literal sense. (p. 25)

 The statement reveals the Tofflers unfortunate mischaracterization of biblical inerrancy. Here are standard orthodox statements about biblical inerrancy:

 “God’s truth is inerrantly expressed directly only in the autographs (original writings) and indirectly in the apographs (copies of the original works)” John R. Higgins “God’s Inspired Word in Stanley M. Horton, editor, Systematic Theology, revised edition (Springfield: Gospel Publishing House, 2000), 104.

.... 

“Since God has nowhere promised an inerrant transmission of Scripture, it is necessary to affirm that only the autographic text of the original documents was inspired and to maintain the need of textual criticism as a means of detecting any slips that may have crept into the text in the course of its transmission.  The verdict of this science, however, is that the Hebrew and Greek text appear to be amazingly well preserved, so that we are amply justified in affirming, with the Westminster Confession, a singular providence of God in this matter and in declaring that the authority of Scripture is in now way jeopardized by the fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error-free.”  The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy as quoted in James Montgomery Boice, Standing on the Rock (Wheaton: Living Students, TyndaleHouse Publishers, Inc., 1984), 137.

Notice that neither statement insists on error free transmission but the statements do agree on error free inspiration and autographs.

Part 5 of the book also does not portray Christianity in a good light. This section of the book digresses to a discussion of knowledge and truth. Since the Tofflers define knowledge as a form of wealth it follows that they must then define good and effective knowledge vs. harmful knowledge. The section advocates science as the only truth-test criteria that “depends on rigorous testing.”

Comments by Terry B. Ewell (August 2006)