# Abundance

A substantial quantity of something, in LDS scripture the term usually connotes one of two things:

“That They Might Have Life, and Have It More Abundantly”The word “abundance” does not enter scripture quietly. When Jesus declares in the Gospel of John that he came so that humanity “might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10), the statement resists spiritualization. Nothing in the surrounding text restricts the promise to inner states or metaphorical fullness. Life more abundant is, by the plain grammar of the claim, more life—richer, longer, more capacious, less constrained by the grinding arithmetic of scarcity and mortality. The same gospel that records this declaration also records the feeding of five thousand from five loaves and two fish, with twelve baskets of fragments left over. The excess is not incidental. It is the signature of a different kind of economy, one in which genuine sharing does not merely redistribute a fixed pool but generates more than was present before the sharing began.This is the seed from which the Mormon Transhumanist understanding of abundance grows: not a passive promise to be received but an active grammar to be learned and practiced, an economy of life that humanity is invited to approximate through its own most serious and compassionate work.The Covenant Economy of the EarthThe Hebrew scriptures establish abundance within the frame of covenant. The land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:8) is not poetic decoration; it is a concrete pledge, conditioned on collective fidelity, that material sufficiency is the intended background condition of a covenant people’s life. The Psalms celebrate a God who “opens his hand and satisfies the desires of every living thing” (Psalm 145:16). The prophets—Amos, Isaiah, Micah—read material scarcity not as divinely appointed education but as diagnostic evidence of covenantal failure. When the powerful concentrate what the covenant requires to be shared, the earth withholds its increase. The relationship between moral order and material abundance, in the prophetic tradition, is not metaphorical; it is causal.Mormon scripture inherits and sharpens this logic. The Enoch narrative in Moses 7 presents the highest social achievement of a covenant community as the condition in which “there was no poor among them”—not a description of uniform mediocrity but of a people whose abundance was real enough, and whose covenant commitment deep enough, that no member of the community suffered want. The Doctrine and Covenants frames the same ideal economically: “every man seeking the interest of his neighbor, and doing all things with an eye single to the glory of God” (D&C 82:19). The United Order and the Law of Consecration are institutional attempts to embody this principle—imperfect, historical, but pointing toward a genuine distributive ideal that Mormon theology has never abandoned.The prophetic indictment persists into the present. The Book of Mormon’s Nephite decline narratives follow a nearly mechanical pattern: righteousness produces prosperity, prosperity breeds pri