Tag Archives: apotheosis

How Man Became God: The Story of Progressive Humanism

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In the two previous essays we considered the phenomenon of Christian people who adopt a progressive humanist framework to guide their moral actions but continue to use Christian words to express their progressive views. Old words, lifted from their original scriptural matrix and placed in a new setting, acquire alien meanings. Scripture texts are quoted selectively and are reinterpreted by clever exegetes to conform to progressive values. And they believe this sterile hybrid is true Christianity. This essay is the first of two in which I dig down to the foundations of these two moral visions to show at what point they diverge and how much they differ.

God and Human Aspirations

Everyone by nature desires good things. No one can be satisfied with good when they can have better; and who can be happy with better when the best is available? Why be satisfied with little when you can have much? Though we know we can’t have it all, we still want it all.

In the history of religion, people always attribute to God (or gods) the maximum of wealth and power and life conceivable. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) articulates this principle in a memorable way:

For on this principle it is that He is called Deus (God). For the sound of those two syllables in itself conveys no true knowledge of His nature; but yet all who know the Latin tongue are led, when that sound reaches their ears, to think of a nature supreme in excellence and eternal in existence… For when the one supreme God of gods is thought of, even by those who believe that there are other gods, and who call them by that name, and worship them as gods, their thought takes the form of an endeavor to reach the conception of a nature, than which nothing more excellent or more exalted exists… All, however, strive emulously to exalt the excellence of God: nor could anyone be found to believe that any being to whom there exists a superior is God. And so all concur in believing that God is that which excels in dignity all other objects (Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 1. 6-7).

Augustine reminds us that human beings think of God as the perfect being who actually possesses everything we desire and is everything we wish to be. Your view of God determines your view of humanity and vice versa. The history of theology is simultaneously the history of human ideals and aspirations.

How Man Became God—A History

Two Views of God

During the high Middle Ages (1000-1250) a debate ensued among theologians in the newly established universities in Europe (Paris and Oxford) about the nature of God. Should God be understood primarily as an infinite Mind that produces the natural world logically and by necessity? This view of God and creation enables theologians and philosophers to know something of the mind of God, natural law, and the good by contemplating nature and reflecting on their own minds. On the other hand, some thinkers argued that we should view God primarily as an all-powerful Will who creates nature freely and always retains freedom to change the order of nature in anyway God chooses. This view protects the freedom of God and makes God inaccessible to the human mind apart from his free choice to reveal his will. The first view is designated intellectualism and the second is called voluntarism. Many thoughtful students of the history of theology consider both of these views extreme. Surely we should think of God as both mind and will in perfect harmony even if we cannot harmonize them perfectly in thought.

Two Views of Human Nature

Because human beings always view God as the perfect being and the goal of human aspirations, the two views of God (intellectualism and voluntarism) generate two views of human nature and human aspirations. In the late middle ages and Reformation era (1300 to 1600), voluntarism became a powerful theological and cultural force. God was conceived primarily as an all-powerful, absolutely free, and self-determining Will. God is free not only from nature and natural law but from his own past actions. And in this theological environment, human aspirations were directed toward maximum freedom from external determination, aimed at dominating nature, and focused on expressing one’s arbitrary will in word and deed. To be in the fullest sense of the term is to be nothing but what one wills to be in the same way and to the same extent that God is only what God wills to be.

It would be a great mistake to think that the seventeenth-century Enlightenment signaled a return to intellectualism. The Enlightenment rejected intellectualism and viewed reason as an instrument to uncover the secrets of the physical world that could then be used for human purposes. In other words, the Enlightenment was an expression of the desire of the human will to dominate and recreate nature in our image in imitation of the Creator. What God is eternally, humans beings strive to become in the course of history. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romanticism turned its attention from the will to dominate nature to the self-creative will of the unique individual.

Apotheosis and Utopia

Contemporary progressive culture combines the impulses of the Enlightenment (the will to dominate nature) and the Romantic Movement (the will to recreate oneself as one pleases). After all, they are but different forms of the desire to be like the voluntarist God, to free oneself from all alien structures, laws, and forces. Progressive humanism was constructed by removing God from the picture and transferring the divine qualities of unlimited will and absolute freedom from God to human beings. Without God in the picture, nothing remains to remind us of our limits, the order of nature becomes plastic subject to no law but human will, and absolute freedom from every restriction becomes the aspiration toward which we strive. God’s eclipse from human consciousness made it possible to deceive ourselves with the illusion that human beings could take their destiny into their own hands and achieve individual apotheosis (transformation into a god) and social utopia.

Creative Destruction

The LGBTQ+ liberation movement is but the latest chapter in the story of progressive humanism’s quest to overcome all limits and achieve individual apotheosis and social utopia. It will not be the last. The destructive impulse at the heart of progressivism will not have reached its goal until every boundary has been erased, every limit has been transgressed, and every rule has been abolished. Progressivism cannot acknowledge a principle of limitation and order without destroying itself. The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) envisioned pre-political humanity living in a “state of nature” marked by social chaos, without rules, where everyone has a right to everything, and human life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes devised a plan to escape the undesirable state of nature into a condition of order and peace. In contrast, contemporary progressives work to create a world where “there are no rules and everyone has a right to everything.” And they call it “progress.”

To be continued…

A God to Envy: God and the Modern Self (Part 5)

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Many of our contemporaries have been convinced that freedom is doing what you please, that dignity is indexed to autonomy and that happiness depends on pursuing unique desires and designing an identity that pleases you. How do such people react when hear that God is the creator and lord of all, that he is omnipotent, knows all and is present everywhere and that his laws must be obeyed? In earlier posts we explored three common reactions to God: defiance, subservience and indifference. In this post I want to reconstruct the image of God that exists in the mind of the modern self, so that we can see why it reacts so negatively to the thought of God.

 It may surprise us to discover that the image of God that evokes such a negative reaction in the modern self is an exact replica of the modern self’s image of itself. The modern self thinks its freedom, dignity and happiness depend on accomplishing its will, and it doesn’t readily tolerate competitors and limits. Put a bit more philosophically, the modern self understands its essential nature as pure, arbitrary will whose essential activity is to expand itself without limits. It does not want to be limited by nature or law or lack of power; that is to say, the modern self wants to be as much like God as possible.

The modern self sees God’s nature also as arbitrary will whose essential activity is to expand without limits. In the mind of the modern self, God and human beings have the same essential nature. Each is a will that desires to expand itself to encompass all things. And this understanding of the divine and human selves creates conditions that cause the modern self to react in defiance, subservience or indifference. Both God and human beings enjoy freedom, dignity and happiness only as they do their own will because it is their own will. But there can be only one being who always does his own will because it is his own will, and that is God.

For this reason, whether the modern self believes or not, defies, submits or tries to ignore, it sees God as a threat to its freedom, an insult to its dignity and a limit to its happiness. When the modern self hears that God is all-powerful it thinks, “So that’s it: God can do as he pleases and I cannot.” Thinking of God’s omniscience and omnipresence, the modern self feels vulnerable and naked: “Don’t I get some time alone. Can’t I keep any secrets?” Considering God’s other attributes, it complains, “How can I feel my worth when I am constantly told that God is Lord and I am not, that I am dependent, sinful, finite, and mortal and that I owe God my life and my obedience?” For the modern self, God occupies all the space and sucks up all the air. The conclusion is obvious: if only God can be God, only God can be happy! What a miserable conclusion!

Even if we admit that only God can be God and give up all hope of becoming God, we cannot give up the desire to be happy.  Hence we will nurse envy of God’s power and prerogatives and resent his position. In its heart the modern self asks, “Why is God, God? Why not me?” Its (false) understanding of divine and human nature as arbitrary will generates the modern self’s aspiration to become God and provokes its envy of God. And this understanding is the source of the three attitudes the modern self adopts toward God: defiance, subservience and indifference.

Note: This post can serve as a companion to Chapter 5 of God, Freedom & Human Dignity (“The God of the Modern Self”)

 Questions for Discussion

 1. How are the modern self’s understandings of human and divine nature connected? How does the concept of “pure, arbitrary will” apply to each?

2. How does defining human and divine nature as pure, arbitrary will guarantee that the modern self will view God as a threat to its freedom, dignity and hope of happiness?

3. Have you or does anyone you know resented God’s omnipotence? In what ways?

4. How does contemplating God’s complete knowledge of you make you feel? Have you or anyone you’ve known ever felt resentful or at least discomfort with the thought that God knows completely what you’ve done, what you have thought and are thinking?

5. Explore the ways the modern self’s image of God simultaneously provokes envy and resentment.

6. Discuss how each of the modern self’s three attitudes can be generated by its false image of God and humanity. Defiance? Subservience? Indifference?

 Note: Next we will examine in detail the “secret ambitions of the modern self,” that is, the specific ways in which it seeks unlimited freedom and absolute dignity.