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03 October 2026
This was originally written to be posted on Substack.
Here on Substack recently, one thread is "eternal conscious torment vs. universalism". I think of eternal conscious torment (ECT) as a clear expression of what I call "the old theocentrism", while universalism is an expression of what I call "humanism". The old theocentrism consists of a perfect God without needs, who is angry with us when we sin perhaps because we violate his honor, or who behaves toward us with an alien and perfect justice. God does not exist for us, we exist for God. God is not familiar to us, God is Other. God is the I AM -- thus, we think, he is self-existent, self-asserting, a perfect living standard from outside us. This God, with his alien wrath and alien psychology finds it reasonable for some of us (or most of us?) to burn in agony for all eternity ("eternal conscious torment"), or perhaps to stumble in a mediocre darkness ("eternal conscious suffering"?).
(I'm aware that "theocentric" can have specific, other meanings, but here I use it just as "God is the center".)
Humanism reverses that. Yes, God is the I AM, the self-existing source, but not of judgment, alien justice, wrath, and untouchability, but rather of love (like that described in 1 Corinthians 13), generosity, warmth, care (distant though he can seem to be), the fruit of the Spirit, perhaps occasionally some anger, but a being completely understandable from a human perspective (not that we understand the details of God, but that emotionally we find him understandable, find him acceptable from a human perspective). God is not the Other -- maybe he is a little bit, but mostly he's familiar to us. God does not exist for himself. God is selfless. God exists for us, always puts us first. God lives for us, serves us, provides for us, and blesses us. This God could hardly ever condemn a single one of us to hell. Certainly not one of ECT. And, because the God of humanism is just as powerful as the God of the old theocentrism, God will get exactly what he wants, all of us in heaven in the end. The logical conclusion of humanism is universalism.
These are cultures. A certain kind of person gravitates toward the old theocentrism, while another kind of person gravitates toward humanism. Perhaps some are drawn to both. People act sort of like the God they admire. Certainly there are churches (particularly conservative ones) that uphold the old theocentrism, others (more liberal ones) that go all-in on humanism, and others (certain evangelicals, perhaps) who mix the two. Sometimes churches of one sort deliberately avoid being of the other.
Churches try to be biblical (even liberal ones quote the Bible). Does the Bible say which one is best? The Bible is ambiguous, maybe not completely ambiguous (maybe one side, or a particular mixture of the two, really does have more weight to it than the others -- I haven't looked at this in depth in a long time), but still ambiguous enough that people can find each of the two, and their mixture, somewhere in it. Perhaps a certain amount of theology (additional reasoning not found explicitly in the Bible) is needed to explain how the Bible fits a particular view.
What if someone disliked both the old theocentrism and humanism? What options would they have? One would be to leave Christianity. Another would be to live in cognitive dissonance, remaining in cultures downstream of these two principles or their mixture and in some sense not being at home in them. However, what if there was a new way of seeing Christianity? (Or of seeing theism, since one could see some "old theocentrism" in Judaism and Islam, and potentially in novel theisms yet to be devised, and similarly with "humanism".) What I have to offer is a "new theocentrism".
In this new theocentrism, God is very powerful, knows very much or even all there is to know, and yet is profoundly limited. Like with humanism, he cares for all of us, but he is powerless to make our free will be other than we make it to be. He can influence us, but we are ultimately sovereign in our tiny kingdoms, where we rule over our hearts. We are little gods ruling over him. Because he loves us, and we often don't love him, we, not he, have the power in our relationship with him. He can't help be committed to us, but we have the power to reject him, and we often do. Our hearts are not in line with his, and though we were originally his children, we are strangers to his heart. He feels our rejection, and watches us condemn ourselves through the misapplication of our free will, is frustrated, not exactly despairing, but not living a happy, beatific life.
God knows everything that can be known (although perhaps not the future that has not been made yet through our free decisions), so he knows exactly what it's like to experience what we do, he experiences all experiences firsthand. Therefore, God feels all unbearable pain that any being feels. He's stuck in reality, as a God of truth. Because God is limited, he can't endure us forever if our existence torments him. What is unbearable to him must cease to exist. We can come into tune with him fully (cease to cause him unbearable pain; notably, cease to be the kind of people who sin) -- or not, and if not, we must cease to exist. If that happens, God loses us, a father who has lost his child forever. (Annihilationism, a middle road between ECT and universalism which I suppose can lean old theocentric or humanistic, naturally fits the new theocentrism.)
What makes "the new theocentrism" theocentric is that when we understand God's situation, out of compassion, pity, and an awakened maturity, we come to put God first, the same way the humanists think God puts us first, seeing our wretchedness. The old theocentrists perhaps see our wretchedness and see something to be disciplined, something worthy of destruction. The humanists see our wretchedness as calling forth the most intense and selfless love from God. But the new theocentrists, I suppose, see that both God and humans are wretched, and to the extent that we are gods, if we understand God's wretchedness, we too will use our "divine powers" to care for God, not exactly to save him, but to put him and his well-being first.
Could this view be biblical? It's there in the cloud of Scripture (the ambiguity of Scripture). God seems to struggle to relate to Israel. They are "stiff-necked". Somehow they had the power to not be reformed by the might of God. God alternates between tenderness and wrath. (Some see him fitting the type of the abusive husband in this, but I see a frustration with people who refuse to love him, whose hearts are hard toward him, and I think my interpretation is closer to what the Bible wants to say.) God being less than the God of perfection (without saying he's not morally perfect) can be seen in his (apparent?) regret of creation leading him to flood the earth, and his (apparent?) regret of making Saul king. If God regrets, God can make mistakes. Verses that support humanism may turn into verses supporting the new theocentrism if we see God as suffering and limited in his ability to save us. There are verses that make God seem like the old theocentrism instead, I assume, or else old theocentrists would quit being old theocentrists. Perhaps a frustrated God (who really is the moral standard) lashes out at his people in wrath. But it's because they have a power over him that he can't escape. And a God who is limited presents himself as almighty because that's what we took seriously back in the day, and often still do. (Similarly God answers the prayers of many of us in the guise of the God of humanism.) He presented the most accurate version of himself that we would trust, and gave us hints of his true situation if we cared to follow them.
Soteriology: An old question in Christianity is "the sovereignty of God vs. the free will of man". I feel like there are three options here: assume God is sovereign, and follow that out logically to its conclusion (the Calvinists may do this best, and certainly predestination is part of this); hold "God is sovereign" and "humans have free will with respect to their salvation" "in tension", or simply don't apply reason consistently in that area; or assume humans have free will and follow that out logically to its conclusion, and the new theocentrism is an example of that. If humans have free will, they have sovereignty over God (they have a kind of inviolable right to be themselves), and that helps explain why the world does not look the way God would want it to. (I'm not aware of any theologies that exist that are other examples of taking human free will to its logical conclusion, but I guess there could be liberal theologies that do from a humanist perspective.)
Politics: "Old theocentrism" and "humanism" may not map 100% onto "Republican" and "Democrat", respectively, but there is some correlation. "New theocentrism" might imply a new political movement, or a realignment of the two parties. The new theocentrism might be a new political centrism, as it could be seen as a "synthesis" of the "thesis" of old theocentrism and the "antithesis" of humanism. It would have a different tonality than secular liberal centrism. The motor of progressivism is care, and so the most progressive position may end up being some form of the new theocentrism.
(Maybe there is a less US-centric set of examples that someone who knew more than me could draw on, but probably there is something like this possible in other countries.)
Development of culture: At this moment in history, I see three directions: 1) business as usual, more or less directionless, drifting; 2) have a vision (of expansion, perhaps endless); 3) have another vision (of settling in to sustainability). Do we think that there's an infinite supply of "love" (money, political power, cultural standing) to which we are entitled? Then we'll act like it. I feel like deep down the Republicans and Democrats both feel like they can get what they want out of life and be happy, if only those obstacles in the other party would get out of the way -- and thus they fight each other, sometimes bitterly. But in a finite world, even at best we don't get what we want. Not even God gets what he wants, and that's actually a bad thing. The old theocentrism and humanism posit a God (a parental figure), who can supply everything we need and want, can take care of us and discipline us. Perhaps one is like an old-school father, the other like a contemporary mother (or somewhat feminized father?), and the two together form a set of parents, who create the space in which we can be children. The new theocentrism says that we need to be adults, we are adult children of God. Adults come to recognize limitations. And so the endless expansion vision is not so far from humanism, from universalism -- but what if that vision is not reality? How can we escape from that fantasy? Must we go back to the old theocentrism? Maybe better to go to the new theocentrism, which may be the theology that best supports having a vision of sustainability.
Economics: Old theocentrism has a kind of connection with obedience (to the point of self-punishment) and austerity. The Desert Fathers had an old theocentric streak. Perhaps the Soviets were in league with old theocentrism with their command economy, their world of obedience and austerity, despite doing so for ostensibly humanistic reasons. A new theocentric approach to the economy might emphasize the adulthood of consumers and producers. Adulthood, perhaps, is freedom in a limited world. In that case, a new theocentric economy would be free market (not centrally planned), and yet instead of promoting endless growth (the direction of profit into the accumulation of capital and then to innovation), it would have to have a mechanism whereby economies freely limit their own growth. (Adolescence, perhaps, is freedom in an unlimited world.)
We must have capitalism because it enables us to compete with our enemies. Our enemies, perhaps, are horrified by our adolescence in the West. If we want them to stop being so illiberal, do they have to become like us? Or perhaps there is a worldview which both of us can adopt, which is neither of us -- something like the new theocentrism. (I don't see Islam easily adopting all of the new theocentric view given in this post, but maybe something of the same tonality would help.)
Avoiding dystopia: 1984 (old theocentrism or a modernized fellow traveler) vs. Brave New World (a hedonism born out of consumerism, a semi-inevitable perversion of humanism). Which dystopia will we risk more, to avoid the other more surely? Maybe it's possible that the new theocentrism avoids both, perhaps there is no dystopia native to it and so it can be pursued fully. Perhaps it is vulnerable to some kind of dystopia, but not those.
History: The new theocentrism could be seen as part of the Enlightenment, in the sense that the Enlightenment sought to make Western people adults, to "dare to know". To my eyes, the Renaissance and Enlightenment were adolescent, the adolescent beginnings of adulthood. But the new theocentrism to me seems like the end, or the beginning of the end, of that adolescence.
Perhaps it is appropriate that at this point in history, we are so unstable, insane, by sheer luck so far escaping self-annihilation, are of many minds, our own development leading toward our destruction -- very much like the life of those in adolescence (up to age 19?) or extended adolescence (up to age 35?). Perhaps the dynamism of our society is like the dynamism of extended adolescence, and relative peace, and relative stasis, awaits us if we survive.
What about the future of Christianity?: If you're a universalist, do you need to spread the gospel? Everyone will end up in heaven in the end. Sure, it's nice if people live nicer lives on earth, and Christianity can help with that. But people can live fairly nice lives on earth without Christianity. So Christianity in this life goes from being something necessary to being something nice. It makes sense that such a Christianity would be in decline. The nicest, most humanistic churches, the mainline Protestants, are declining more quickly than those that partake more in the old theocentrism. It's like theocentrism is a fountain that provides urgency, the necessity of God. Living a nice life is not enough -- it needs to offer something secular humanism can't offer. The old theocentric churches are based in asserting an alien God and an alien theology, against natural reason, and thus they tend to be unhealthy and not make sense. People awaken to this, start to see with natural eyes, and leave, often with a sense of trauma and divorce. Then they may end up in a humanistic church. Others leave Christianity entirely. Christianity might benefit if it found a replacement for this story, process, ecosystem. It would need to ground itself in natural reason rather than asserted belief, and yet not end up with the Christianized secular humanism of liberal, humanistic Christianity. And it would need to offer a theocentrism which was not the old theocentrism.
"Humanism" is an ethical orientation toward humans, their well-being and significance. This is often what we mean by "humanism". We could say that "theism" is an ethical orientation toward God, his well-being and significance. "Theism" already means "believing that God exists, or a particular God exists". So I would say "ethical theism", to distinguish from the "epistemic theism" which is what we usually mean when we say "theism".
I've been working on a writing project since 2013, one that I feel like is "finished" (if anything is), but which I must promote. As a writer, I've tried to develop a natural theology (called "MSL"), a soteriology/eschatology (called "voluntary millennial holiness"), and ethical theism, all of which work together (for instance, according to voluntary millennial holiness, there is a long, finite time after this life for us to complete the process of coming into tune with God). I feel like ethical theism is the topic I've developed least of the three. Right now, I feel somewhat limited as a writer (tired). Someday I may try to write a book where I write a commentary on the Bible from an ethically-theistic perspective, to spell out how God might have felt and thought at various points in the Bible. (Or someone else could write that book.)
Also relevant to this post, I have written about the process of civilization sorting out what it should believe, the problem of evil (which is always easier to deal with if you believe that God is limited in some way), and even provide an attempt (I am not an economist) at a mechanism for a free-market, but not capital-accumulating, or less-capital-accumulating, economy. These can be found at my old blog Formulalessness.
It occurs to me that Eastern Orthodoxy (and maybe some of the more obscure Christian groups, like the Anabaptists), which I don't know as well as I might, may not fit neatly into my version of "old theocentrism vs. humanism". It may not simply be a mixture of "old theocentrism" and "humanism". Perhaps if you don't like "old theocentrism" and "humanism", you might become Orthodox -- maybe that's exactly part of its appeal. I don't know enough to do a good comparison between Orthodox theology ("Eastern theocentrism"?) and "new theocentrism". I did mention Islam and Judaism briefly, which I also don't know enough to say much about.