About The Prodigal Species
The Prodigal Species website ushers in a movement that practices a new kind of progressive evangelism, conceptualizing life and salvation in a new light: collective responsibility for the consequences of human actions and legacies, as they propagate, interact, and amplify through the transmission medium of human civilization. The stakes couldn’t be higher: the future trajectory of all life on earth, the kind of civilization we bequeath to all future generations, and the nature, character, and quality of the only gift that we can give God — and the only one He could want from us — as His greatest tool for vanquishing evil from all His creation: our civilization itself.
God set human civilization in motion 88 million years ago when the asteroid impact that annihilated the dinosaurs changed the incentive structure on earth to allow first the clever, and much later the responsible, to leapfrog over the strong. Human civilization is just an embryo on that timescale, having appeared only a few thousand years ago.
New features are appearing in our era, just within a period of centuries, decades and even years, like an embryo stirring and coalescing. Human civilization is at an inflection point in its history.
Science and technology now give humanity the power to obliterate or profoundly transform God’s kingdom on earth, depending on our free will, expressed collectively as a civilization. The Trinity that early Christians envisioned as a dance, a “perichoresis”, of Father | Son | and Holy Spirit, has become a Quaternary that adds humanity’s final irreversible step at the end of the sequence, either to hijack or guide the future trajectory of civilization. With our sudden increase in communication bandwidth, we have exceeded the design capacities and outpaced the guardrails of our civilization that had always been laid down haphazardly through one-on-one person-to-person interactions that “sleepwalked through history”. The result of that random walk through civilizational design was to embed countless design flaws in it — which now threaten to induce civilizational birth defects and leave our civilization badly hobbled if we do not understand the embryonic process and respond appropriately to it.
The only way forward is through co-creative partnership with God. He commands us now to design and build the body of Christ in His image — emulating the human body, but augmented by the tools of democracy and technology — as the foundation for human civilization, informed by a new awareness of how the Holy Spirit works in our era, as the interdependent web of existence. God provides the template for carrying out this miracle on a civilizational scale — the miraculous rite of passage that every person experiences to begin life — embryogenesis.
A science of spirituality now melds the ancient understanding of the Trinity in terms of past | present | and future and the Quaternary of adult organisms and coalescing civilizations in terms of past | present | future | irreversibility. Those three respective steps of early embryogenesis involve the three germ layers, mesoderm | endoderm | and ectoderm, which are fated to become musculoskeletal system and internal organs | gut | and skin and central nervous system. In our embryonic civilization, those embryogenic roles go respectively to 1. minorities | 2. progressives | and 3. conservatives, corresponding to 1. the supportive role for minorities who come into the picture late but then dominate the overall structure | 2. a nurturant role that progressives envision for the gut | and 3. conservatives who aspire to steer the organism after it’s born.
We can see soteriology, the theology of salvation, in a new light in our era. In ancient times, it was critical to assemble believers in a critical mass to protect, preserve, and grow the seeds of monotheism that now allow us to see our civilization emulating a single multicellular superorganism. In our era, God has placed different challenges that impose collective responsibilities: to curb our destructiveness | create a nurturant civilization | to steer it wisely | and make it His tool for vanquishing evil.
Conservatives and fundamentalists have badly disappointed God in our era. Acting on aspects of scriptures that no longer describe how the Holy Spirit works in our era and missing Jesus’s crucial warnings against the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, they have given the keys to God’s kingdom to a cabal of dictators who would hijack our civilization | ignore the critical dynamics of pressing crises | divert the trajectory of civilization to their own nefarious ends | and leave our future civilization with severe birth defects in their own depraved images. Fundamentalists’ manufactured doctrine prohibiting abortion, their idolatry of guns, and their false worship of small government to put it at the mercy of corporate exploitation is the antithesis of designing the body of Christ in God’s image. And by putting those false values above the future of God’s kingdom, they have attracted the ultimate swindler to take control of it — Donald Trump.
But all is not lost — if we act now, if we act in concert, if we act wisely, if we dedicate ourselves to succeed. We stand at the threshold of a new, transformed era, modeled after the way our bodies work | the way they promote thought | the way they allow us to build a civilization — this time at a higher level, the one that God will use for His purposes. Working together, minorities, progressives, and conservatives all have stunningly fulfilling roles to play in concert to make our civilization, our world, and God’s kingdom function in the ways they’ve always been intended, as a spectacular harmony of awareness, compassion, and wisdom!