When I was a kid, there were long periods when we didn’t have television. Bored senseless, I read all the books on my shelf. When I was finished with those, all that was left was the Bible. So, naturally, I picked it up and began my quest to read it cover to cover. I think I only made it to Leviticus, but the exercise did leave me with one lasting impression, or rather question: Why was the God of the Old Testament so different from the God of the New? Why was I finding here this God of wrath and domination, where in school I’d been taught to pray to Abba, Father, with an affectionate familiarity? In my ten-year-old mind, I smoothed out the contradiction: We all must have a little bit of God in us, and when we die, we join God, and He grows according to how much humanity has grown.
In the Enlightenment and the century that followed, it was common for thinkers to imagine that a child’s development retraced the history of humanity in miniature. They would not be so surprised, then, to see that my childish questions and answers belonged to much older debates about the relationship between God and man. But as faith in progress, once associated with the left, has migrated uneasily to the right, these questions have acquired strange new political significance. When I read God saying, in Genesis, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil,” was this a transgression or a responsibility? Was I—are we—to wait to become divine in heaven, or make it real on earth? Should humanity continue to expand its powers, or learn to fear them?
“In humanity and our history, Spirit comes to know itself.”
Years later, when I encountered Hegel for the first time, and then Marx, the answer seemed obvious. Hegel appeared to echo my childhood resolution: In humanity and our history, Spirit comes to know itself; we are moments in the unfolding of Spirit in the world. But Carl Sagan’s sci-fi tinged secular-cosmic register spoke more to me: “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.” Matter comes to know itself, to think itself, through the human being. Marx’s inversion seemed to offer an exciting double meaning that hinted at where we were headed: “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth,” he wrote, “here we ascend from earth to heaven.”
It was through Marxism that I encountered Prometheanism, and with it the exhilarating realization that both man and the world are unfinished projects. We could master nature and democratize abundance and freedom through technological innovation. And anyway, I thought, we were already doing it, even as the walls of our economic system pressed up against our ambitions. But I found that I was oddly alone in my excitement. At every rally and protest, allegedly among comrades, I found people recoiling at this decidedly Western and “anthropocentric” view of the world. No, instead we needed to de-grow, to pull back, to recognize limits, and accept once and for all that the human hand on history was a destructive one, at least in the West, and that we needed to look elsewhere for inspiration on how to do politics and how to live.
And so today, we are witnessing a strange political realignment. The backward pull, the ideal of limits, has found a home on the left, while modernism and the hubristic impulse to push forward have turned up in unlikely pockets of the right. It is often there, in rhetoric oddly tinged with religiosity, that we must rummage if we want to find that old Promethean confidence once attributed to Marx, that we can build, discover, master necessity, enlarge freedom, and become something that we are not yet. It is figures like billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel who hopefully declare “the forces of chaos and nature can and will be mastered,” so that “the tyranny of chance will give way to the Providence of God.” Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance is telling summits that “we should embrace the future head-on.”
Perhaps Thiel is right that the “movement from chaos to order begins in Genesis,” and that Christianity preserves a confidence in humanity that the secular world has lost. But if Christianity has found itself keeping alive the Promethean flame, it doesn’t follow that it knows what to do with it nor that it fully realizes where it leads. If becoming more like God is to be less a burden and punishment than a responsibility, we must have the courage to follow wherever that “becoming” takes us.