Christian Futurism: Principles and Arguments

"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have.... The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible." 

— Sir. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis

To be a Christian is to live by the Alpha and Omega: the God who establishes and sustains the cosmos and brings its story to fruition.^[1] The God who plants the garden in Genesis is the God who inaugurates the New Heaven and the New Earth in Revelation. The God of creation is the God of the eschaton.

What is today called “futurism” was first espoused by 19th and early 20th century Christian theologians as an outworking of Christian eschatology.^[2] “Futurism” could be described as an active, technological, and optimistic vision of humanity’s role in the cosmos.

Christian futurists do not seek to accommodate Christianity to modern expressions of secular futurism, which we view as—at best—a well-intentioned but shallow imitation of Christian eschatology. Instead, we seek to subordinate futurism to Christianity and the future to Christ and His church.

We foresee and work towards a future in which the Great Commission is fully realized and all of humanity is collected into the Body of Christ: the Church. This future will entail the perfect unity of God and Man that is prefigured in Christ and prophesied, in its fullness, in Revelation 21-22. The eschaton will be realized when God’s condescension to humanity converges with humanity’s ascension, unified as one Body, towards our divinely-ordained potential.

As Christian Futurists, we affirm:

I. Mankind has been given a dominion mandate that encompasses the whole of the cosmos;

II. Technology, rightly-ordered towards the flourishing of the Imago Dei, refracts the glory of God and does not obscure it;

III. Our duty to direct all of human life towards Christ requires our technological duty to subdue and orient matter and the cosmos towards the flourishing of life;

IV. This calling can only be fulfilled through, and is the necessary outworking of, the Kingdom established by Christ through his church;

V. All Christians must reject the modern innovations of pietistic and quietistic eschatology, which de-emphasize the role and agency of the institutional church in the plan of salvation and re-creation;

VI. Futurism is originally and inherently Christian. Optimistic futurism cannot sustain itself if unmoored from its Christian origins;

VII. The ongoing unfolding of human history along broadly futurist and theistic lines is a prediction and a confirmation of the ultimate truth of Christianity.

I. “Mankind has been given a dominion mandate that encompasses the whole of the cosmos.”

• God has given human beings a dominion mandate and thereby invited us to co-participate with Him in the drama of creation. The Psalmist wrote of his awe that God, who created all the “stars” in the cosmos, should make mankind “a little lower than the angels… You have given him dominion over the works of your hands.”^[1]
• Our duty to conquer evil is cosmic, not merely global, in scale. The cosmos is the setting of the story that God is creating with us. Not just humanity or Earth, but all of “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”^[2]
  • God will not merely create a new planet Earth, but a “New Heaven and a New Earth”—a new and redeemed totality of all things.
  • Revelation 21-22 describes the setting of a vast epic, celestial in scope, and points to a new revelation, a new story, and a new adventure on a far greater scale than we can now imagine. God promises us more than eternal life: “Behold, I am making all things new.”
  • Christianity’s very symbolism points to an active and universal messianism. In G.K. Chesterton’s words, the cross, “though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape.”^[3]
• Techno-skeptical Christians urge that no part of the Bible is specifically focused on describing extraterrestrial space or commanding us to explore it. We respond that no part of the Bible specifically discusses the New World. Yet the cosmos, no less than the Americas, falls within the universal scope of the biblical story and the Kingdom mandate. If it is wrong to colonize Mars, then it was wrong to travel beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

II. “Technology, rightly-ordered towards the flourishing of the Imago Dei, refracts the glory of God and does not obscure it.”

• Christian futurists affirm that humans are created in the Image of God. While the natural evil afflicting humans is the enemy of all mankind, humanity as such is something to aspire to and not to transcend.
  • Unlike secular transhumanists, the futurist theologian Teilhard de Chardin did not exalt humanity’s potential to recreate ourselves into whatever form we might choose. An illustration of this distinction can be found in Teilhard’s exalted view of biological sex. Teilhard does not view the complementarity of the sexes as an accident which humans might freely choose to discard or rearrange. Instead, he sees sex as a reality ordained by God intended to reflect His metaphysical nature.
• We are incarnational, pro-human, and human-centric. While we support the responsible creation of non-human intelligences, we reject posthumanism’s devaluation of corporeality and humanity.
  • Physical embodiment and homo sapiens, not simply intelligence in the abstract or unconscious “entropy,” are objective axes of value.
• Artificial general intelligence (“AGI”) and robotics have, depending on how we respond to their development, the potential to promote or devastate human flourishing. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”^[1]
  • Unless accompanied by a new economic order, technology that eliminates most cognitive employment could conceivably usher in a caste system based on subsistence-oriented de facto serfdom. This could plausibly occur if even the highly competent poor cannot generate meaningful economic value, causing wealth to flow singularly from a person’s hereditary ownership of compute.
  • Our duty to serve humanity requires that we wield a “rod of iron” against injustice.^[2] Christians must fight relentlessly to ensure that any future AGI-based socioeconomic order is oriented towards human flourishing.
  • The imprisonment of the human race in a subsistence-oriented socioeconomic order must be prevented by any means necessary. Likewise, Christians must work and fight relentlessly to ensure that AGI serves the ends of human flourishing and the ultimate conquest of the cosmos by the Imago Dei.
  • We affirm the long Christian tradition of thinking rationally about the possibility of non-human minds as represented in biblical angelology and the works of thinkers like Augustine and C.S. Lewis. We unapologetically affirm the reality of spiritual warfare and the demonic while repudiating the recent tendency of some Christians to assert that any non-human mind we may encounter in the future will be ipso facto a demon.
    • Augustine, in discussing the biblical flood, entertained the possibility of “monstrous races” and of “antipodes”—people who live on the southern hemisphere of the earth. While Augustine was skeptical of both monstrous races and antipodes, he did not assert—as some modern Christians might—that all sentient beings that exist are cataloged in the Bible.^[3] Likewise, Augustine nowhere suggested that monstrous races or antipodes, if they exist, would be ipso facto demons.
    • God, in His Word, never promises or even suggests that the only minds that exist, or will exist, in His universe are human minds. The assertion that sentient AGI cannot be possible because it is not mentioned in the Bible therefore—ironically—has no support within the Bible.
    • Just as this does not mean we minimize the reality of the demonic, it also does not mean that we minimize the dangers posed by AGI.

III. “Our duty to direct all of human life towards Christ requires our technological duty to subdue and orient matter and the cosmos towards the flourishing of life.”

• Christians have been at the forefront of biomedical progress from Hildegard von Bingen to Louis Pasteur. Christian innovators are driven by the conviction that “What you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.”^[1] This statement, as Simone Weil observed, could be called the foundation of all Christian ethics. When a researcher cures a disease, he obeys this commandment and furthers the divinely-sanctioned conquest of the universe.
  • Our duty to conquer the universe is itself an eschatological outworking of our duty to protect the least of these from natural evil, whether that evil is Alzheimer’s disease, the future immolation of the Earth by the sun, or the heat death of the universe.
  • Christ taught that sickness exists in the world as an enemy to be conquered. Victory over natural evil is won not merely by Christ Himself, but by Christ through His Body—His people. “It was not that this man [born blind] sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me.”^[2]
  • Teilhard de Chardin wrote that God has offered us the world “unfinished, so that [we] may draw sustenance from the intense satisfaction of, in some small way, giving You to Yourself.”
  • Christ himself also stated that his followers would do “greater works” than him.^[3] This statement may not be explicable in terms of individual piety, but it is perfectly sensible as a description of the future activity of the Body of Christ in the World. Christ germinated a Kingdom that will “work the works of [the Father]” upon matter and the cosmos.
• In Christian history, heresies often come in pairs of opposites. The heresy of Monophysitism began as an overreaction to Nestorianism. Arianism, one of Christianity’s most famous heresies, was essentially the inverse of Docetism, one of its earliest.
  • Today, some Christians react to the religious challenge of transhumanism by lapsing into a form of death-worship—exalting sickness, degenerative aging, and death as intrinsic goods which give life meaning.^[4] For these Christians, medicine will eventually reach some arbitrary point at which scientists must stop combatting ill-health and other forms of natural suffering.
  • These Christians are unlikely to specify when exactly this arbitrary point will arrive, probably because they have not yet settled that question themselves.
  • Death-worshippers are perhaps a kind of “conservative,” but what they are conserving is something like 19th century romanticism, not biblical Christianity. In the Bible, sickness and death are never described as positive in any inherent sense. Death is The Last Enemy to be Destroyed, destined to be cast into the lake of fire with the devil.^[5] In Proverbs 8, Wisdom—personified as a woman—concludes her monologue with the condemnation: “All who hate me love death.”

IV. “This calling can only be fulfilled through and within, and is the necessary outworking of, the Kingdom established by Christ through his church.”

• Christ’s church cannot serve its eschatological goals by accommodating itself to the world, for Christ came not to accommodate but to divide the world. A faith without the vitality to sustain itself cannot transform the cosmos. “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out, and to be trodden under foot of men.”^[1]
  • The entire pattern of Jesus’ rhetoric is oriented towards a fierce exclusivity. He regularly rebuked people for compromising and diluting their core principles.^[2] Jesus’ rhetoric seems calculated to spit in the eye of the kind of cosmopolitanism that was imposed by Judah’s cultural enemies from the period of the judges to the Maccabees.
• Secular futurists have long speculated on the nature of forces that will drive the proliferation of intelligence into the universe. We affirm that, while other coordination mechanisms may play a part, the triumph of the church, understood in its consummate form to represent the collective whole of mankind, united in vision and purpose, is a necessary prerequisite to the idealized vision that futurists imagine.
  • We understand that the church embodies the “new man” that Paul refers to when he says that Christ has “broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” between the diverse people groups of mankind so that he can reconcile all of us “to God in one body through the cross.”^[3]
  • Christian futurist Nikoalai Fyodorov believed that “the problem of God's transcendence or immanence will only be solved when humans in their togetherness become an instrument of universal resuscitation, when the divine word becomes our divine action.”^[4]
• Humanity’s ultimate unification within the church requires the reunification of the church itself, which must be reconceptualized as both an institutional and universal manifestation of Christ’s Body.

V. “All Christians must reject the modern innovations of pietistic and quietistic eschatology, which de-emphasize the role and agency of the institutional church in the plan of salvation and re-creation.”

• God’s people do not merely look on meekly and pray as God acts.^[1] Instead, they give of themselves by fighting to combat suffering and evil, to subdue the cosmos, and to cooperate with and draw closer into union with God.
  • In Daniel 2, a stone, representing God’s kingdom, is shown to grow, to fill the world, and to “break in pieces all these kingdoms [or world-spanning empires] and bring them to an end [replacing them with the one Kingdom].”
  • The cliché that Christians must “not immanentize the eschaton” was popularized by two secular men, Eric Voegelin and William F. Buckley. The fatal weakness in Voegelin can be seen in the fact that, in New Science of Politics, he condemns the English Puritans as Gnostics simply because they believed in physically fighting their enemies on the battlefield.
  • In other words, Voegelin ended by condemning Puritans because they believed what Christians from Ambrose of Milan through nine crusades have always believed: that it is our duty to physically combat evil in the world. ^[2]
  • We reject “don’t immanentize the eschaton” as incoherent on its face. Christians have always believed that the eschaton is a future epoch of real time and will therefore be immanent when it arrives. In contrast, Voegelin saw the eschaton as, by its nature, a sentimental abstraction and hence not something that would ever arrive in the real future. No Christian can logically agree with this position.

VI. “Futurism is originally and inherently Christian. Optimistic futurism cannot sustain itself if unmoored from its Christian origins.”

• Writing about Christian futurist thinker Teilhard de Chardin, secular futurist philosopher Eric Steinhart has written that many secular futurists “work within the conceptual architecture of Teilhard’s [futurism] without being aware of its [Christian] origins.”
• Although some secular futurists wrote down their ideas before Teilhard, his Eastern Orthodox precursor, Fyodorov, prefigured them all, advocating space colonization from 1864 until his death in 1903. 
  Fyodorov—known today as the founder of Russian Cosmism—taught that God calls upon humanity to extend itself through “all the uninhabited worlds” in the universe and regulate the forces of the cosmos. In the 1870s, before Teilhard’s birth, Fyodorov personally mentored Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who would one day be known as the father of rocketry.
• Futurism did not emerge from a theologically liberal strain of Christian thought. Fyodorov was a faithful Christian, branded during his own lifetime as a reactionary and a theocratic Tsarist.
• The progress of science and development of technology is leading an increasing number of secular people to rethink the possibility that a transcendent mind created the cosmos and shaped it to bring us into being.
  • Sam Altman, for example, has remarked that “I think it’s interesting how much the Silicon Valley religion of the simulation has gotten close to Brahman and how little space there is between them.” ^[1]

VII. “The ongoing unfolding of human history along broadly futurist and theistic lines is a prediction and a confirmation of the ultimate truth of Christianity.”

• The West was once the heart of Christendom: a social system devoted to an Intelligence who created the universe and ordered its laws. Now, as the West nears the creation of new intelligences, we are witnessing a new reflection of the First Intelligence from which the West once turned its face.
  • Sam Altman has argued that the neural structure of large language models suggests that intelligence is a property of physics.^[1] For other teleological reasons, Freeman Dyson once said that the finely-tuned initial conditions of our universe suggest the “universe knew we were coming.”  ^[2]
  • From the pre-Socratic philosophers to Betrand Russell, the central claim of Western naturalism was its repudiation of mind and purpose, which it rejected as relics of religion, and their demotion to an illusory, accidental role in the cosmos.
  • The advent of cosmic theogony—including the simulation hypothesis of Moravec and Bostrom, the many demiurge hypotheses that have followed Fred Hoyle, and the Participatory Anthropic Principle of J.A. Wheeler—therefore represents the Western intellect shedding its atheism and rediscovering the fundamental premises of traditional religion. ^[3]
• No phenomenon in the social history of religion is so miraculous as the spread of the monotheistic God of Jacob throughout the world.
  • When the prophets of the Bible were writing, no one on Earth practiced genuine monotheism except theologically conservative Jews. Yet these authors foretold that the Jews were a "nation of priests" who would call the nations of the world to worship the God of Jacob.^[4]
  • Today, more than four billion people—over half of the world’s population of under 8 billion—profess a belief in the God of Jacob and thereby acknowledge the Jews as an ordained nation of priests.
  • The prior probability that prophecies of messianic global monotheism would be fulfilled, supposing these prophets lacked genuine prophetic knowledge, is minimal. If the prior probability of any form of theism is substantially higher, even if still modest, then we should conclude that the biblical prophets were given genuine prophetic knowledge.
• Where major competing descriptions of the universe have fundamentally disagreed with the monotheistic tradition, the experimental evidence has vindicated the God of Jacob.
  • The West entertained the idea of an uncreated, past-eternal universe as a viable cosmological model from the premodern Aristotelians until Fred Hoyle’s Steady State Model, which Hoyle affirmed in order to avoid the theological implications of an absolute beginning. Yet the monotheistic tradition of a past-finite, created universe has been repeatedly vindicated by the experimental evidence.
  • Aristotelian cosmology maintained, well into early modernity, that the heavenly bodies of the cosmos were perfect and unchanging. In contrast, the Christian tradition has always promised that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the Children of God.” ^[5]
• Progress towards AGI is a prediction and a confirmation of the existence of God. If God created the universe in order to germinate intelligence, then the creation of AGI is more probable than if our own intelligence arose accidentally from indifferent naturalistic laws.
  • Architects and proponents of secular cosmic theogonies, including Frank Tipler, James Gardner, and Paul Davies, likewise predict that our universe is coded with a “cosmic imperative” to create life and mind. These “Omega point” theorists have accordingly claimed that their theories predict the existence of extraterrestrial life, the discovery of an alternative form of microbial life on Earth, convergent evolution towards sentience in non-primate species, and the eventual creation of artificial general intelligence. At the time of this writing, the latter possibility looks increasingly inevitable.

Patron Saints of Christian Futurism

• John the Apostle 
• Gregory of Nyssa
• Ambrose of Milan
• Hildegard von Bingen
• Roger Bacon
• Ramon Llull
• Francis Bacon
• Johannes Kepler
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Jonathan Edwards
• Benjamin Franklin
• Louis Pasteur
• Nikolai Fedorovich Fyoderov
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• Salvador Dali
• Frank Tipler

Credal Affirmations

The following affirmations are taken from the Christian Builders Discord channel. They have been compiled as an expression of the orthodox Christian beliefs that guide the thinking of those who call themselves Christian futurists.

The Christian futurist:

• Believes in the innate gift of each human being to learn, to grow in wisdom and strength, and to bring one's created potential to fruition in his journey of sanctification.^[1]
• Believes in a duty to glorify God through the work of his hands.^[2]
• Believes in a responsibility to serve the least of these, our brothers: to defend, to heal, and to renew all who are in need.^[3]
• Believes that there is one body with many parts. The complementarity of the two sexes, of groups of people, and of individuals embodies the complementarity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ^[4]
• Believes that Christ's Church is a unity extended through space and time and, guided by the tradition embodied in the ecumenical creeds, seeks to walk in the wisdom of the saints who have come before him.^[5]
• Believes in the forgiveness, renewal, and reconciliation of all who repent. ^[6]
• Believes in the sanctification and ultimate theosis of mankind through Christ's Body.^[7]
• Believes in a triumphant, active, and unbounded mandate to conquer and renew the cosmos in cooperation with Christ.^[8]
• Believes it is right, and our duty, to preserve the flame of the Imago Dei now and in every age to come.^[9]

Our Heavenly Father, who orders all things by Your providence and ordained mankind to have dominion over all the earth, we humbly beseech Your mercy and grace upon those who serve to advance technology for the common good. Grant them the wisdom to be faithful servants of Your eternal law, so that technology may lead to human flourishing and greater intimacy with Your Son, Jesus Christ. 

Per Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum Fílium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti, Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen