Abundance

“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 Earth

The 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 pride and stratification, inequality generates conflict, conflict generates suffering and collapse. The mechanism is not external punishment. It is the natural consequence of abandoning the covenantal disciplines by which abundance is shared and thereby sustained.

Scarcity as a Solvable Problem

What the prophetic tradition names as a moral failure, technology increasingly names as an engineering problem⁠—and the two diagnoses are not in competition. They are addressing the same reality from different angles.

Energy is the master resource. Nearly every form of material scarcity is, at some level of analysis, a function of energy availability: food production, water purification, manufacturing, transportation. Solar energy costs have followed an exponential reduction curve for decades. The long-term implication⁠—energy approaching near-zero marginal cost at scale⁠—would cascade across the entire material economy in ways that are difficult to overstate. Scarcity of food, clean water, and manufactured goods is substantially an energy problem, and energy is becoming abundant.

Nanotechnology extends the horizon further. The promise of productive nanosystems⁠—the capacity to construct arbitrarily complex structures from raw materials with molecular precision⁠—represents a transition from manufacturing as a labor- and energy-intensive process to manufacturing as essentially an information problem. Eric Drexler’s vision of the “universal assembler” remains aspirational, but the intermediate stages⁠—precision nanoscale fabrication, lab-on-a-chip diagnostics, engineered nanocoatings and nanostructures⁠—are already delivering. The long-term direction is toward a world in which the difference between “designed” and “built” progressively collapses, and in which material abundance becomes, like information, essentially non-rivalrous.

Information itself is already there. Unlike physical goods, information is not consumed by sharing. The digital economy has demonstrated non-rivalrous abundance at scale: text, music, genomic data, software, and now artificial intelligence-generated expertise can be reproduced and distributed at near-zero marginal cost. The practical implication is an effective abundance of knowledge and cognitive assistance previously constrained by the scarcity of trained human attention⁠—with direct consequences for medicine, education, law, science, and virtually every domain in which expertise has historically been a bottleneck.

Cellular agriculture, precision fermentation, and vertically farmed food production are decoupling nutrition from land, climate, and conventional supply chains. Gene editing is accelerating crop optimization. Lab-grown meat and microbially synthesized proteins are converging on food systems in which caloric scarcity is not an irreducible feature of the human condition but a legacy problem of pre-biotechnological agriculture.

On the longest timescales, space colonization and asteroid mining expand the accessible resource base by orders of magnitude. A civilization capable of harvesting the material and energy resources of the solar system has, in practical terms, escaped the closed-system constraints under which all of human history to date has been conducted.

The Awful Monster at the Boundary

There is, however, a form of scarcity that material abundance alone cannot address, because it is not a scarcity of goods but a scarcity of time. Death is the ultimate constraint⁠—the absolute limitation on what a person can experience, contribute, love, and become. No amount of food abundance, energy abundance, or manufactured abundance compensates for a life that ends before its potential is approached.

Mormon theology takes this seriously in a way that distinguishes it from most Christian traditions. The resurrection is not a spiritualization of the body but its transformation and glorification: flesh and bone, embodied, tangible, real (D&C 130:22; Luke 24:39). Godhood itself is a physical state⁠—“a glorified immortal body”⁠—not an escape from materiality but its fullest expression. Moses 1:39 frames God’s entire work and glory as making humanity “immortal” in “eternal life”: not the management of mortality but its overcoming.

The vision of a Millennial Earth that the Mormon Transhumanist tradition returns to repeatedly is, in this light, a vision of abundance so complete that it includes the abolition of involuntary death⁠—and, still more strikingly, the resurrection of those who came before. As Brigham Young taught, and as Mormon Transhumanists have elaborated, the work of resurrection is not a unilateral divine intervention but a collaborative achievement in which the living participate on behalf of the dead. “Saviors shall come up upon Mount Zion” (Obadiah 1:21)⁠—a plurality, doing the work of redemption for those who cannot do it themselves.

This is not merely eschatological speculation. It is the most demanding possible form of the abundance ethic: not only that the living shall have enough but that the dead shall be raised to share in it. The practical question it poses is urgent: what does it mean to work, with all available moral seriousness and technical creativity, toward a world from which no one is permanently excluded?

Abundance and the New God Argument

The New God Argument, as developed in the Mormon Transhumanist tradition, provides a structural foundation for understanding why abundance and Godhood are inseparable rather than contingently associated. The argument holds that a superhumanity of sufficient intelligence and compassion would, among other things, create conditions for the thriving of those within its care⁠—including, potentially, those who preceded it. Godhood is not distinguished from humanity merely by power but by the moral use of power: by the degree to which that power is directed toward the abundance and flourishing of others rather than hoarded for the benefit of the powerful few.

This is a direct challenge to any theology that frames divine omnipotence as self-contained and self-sufficient. A God who withholds abundance that could be shared is not, in Mormon theological terms, a very good God. The trajectory of intelligence toward Godhood is, on this account, a trajectory toward greater compassion and greater generosity⁠—toward an abundance that expands as it is shared, because the sharing is itself the mechanism of its generation.

The Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation captures the practical consequence: the ethical use of science and technology to extend human abilities is not parallel to God’s work but continuous with it. The tools by which abundance is created⁠—biotechnology, nanotechnology, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, space exploration⁠—are, in this framework, among the means by which humanity participates in the divine project of making all things new.

A Direction, Not a Destination

Abundance, in the end, is not a state to be arrived at and enjoyed passively. The parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-33), a recurring touchstone in Mormon Transhumanist reflection, suggests a different model: something small, almost overlooked, that grows by its own internal logic into something that shelters and sustains. The grain of mustard seed does not become a great tree by waiting; it becomes one by growing⁠—by doing what it is, persistently and without apology, in the conditions it actually inhabits.

The abundance the tradition envisions⁠—material, biological, cognitive, relational, ultimately cosmic⁠—is of this kind. It grows by the work of those who take the vision seriously enough to act on it. It is not attained by optimism alone, nor by technology alone, nor by covenantal discipline alone, but by all three working together: the rigorous honesty to name present scarcity for what it is, the creative courage to build what could overcome it, and the moral commitment to ensure that what is built is shared.

When Jesus tells his followers to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and raise the dead, he is not issuing metaphors. He is describing a direction. Abundance is that direction, followed all the way to the end.

See also: Zion, Resurrection, Consecration, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology, Longevity, New God Argument, Theosis, Millennial Earth, Creation.