Secular Eschatologies Need To Grapple With Sin

The argument between scarcity and abundance is as old as political economy itself. From the gloomy warnings of Thomas Malthus—whose 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population” predicted famine and disaster as population outstripped food supply—to the sobering ecological pessimism of William Ophuls in Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977), Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over (2003) or Jason Hickel’s Less Is More (2020), thinkers have wrestled with a fundamental question: Is there enough to go around?

Against this backdrop, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance confidently stakes its claim on the optimistic side of the ledger. It belongs to the newer wave of techno-optimists such as Alec Ross (The Raging 2020s, 2021) and Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable, 2016), who argue that innovation, regulation, and political will can solve the supply-side problems of housing, energy, and infrastructure.

Scarcity, Klein and Thompson argue, isn’t an iron law of nature but a product of human decisions, institutional inertia, and regulatory roadblocks.

The book reads at times as a manifesto against what Klein, New York Times opinion columnist, and Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, call “chosen scarcities.” America’s supply-side failures in housing, energy, infrastructure, and medicine, the authors contend, stem not from lack of capacity but from an inertia that grows out of “a kind of ideological conspiracy at the heart of our politics” (5). That alleged conspiracy has allowed both the political left and right to become complacent in the face of crumbling capacity and rising prices. The take-home message: Scarcity is a choice, not a destiny.

Utopian Vision

After finishing Abundance, I reread Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace (1996) and was struck by a deep contrast. Juxtaposed with Volf’s gritty reality, Klein and Thompson’s vision began to feel hollow, suburban, and a little like a Thomas Kinkade painting. Volf’s diagnosis cuts deeper: “Instead of reflecting on the kind of society we ought to create in order to accommodate individual or communal heterogeneity, I will explore what kind of selves we need to be in order to live in harmony with others.”

Volf exposes the unspoken absence at the heart of Klein and Thompson’s techno-utopia; beneath the comfortably manipulable surface of social arrangements lies the much less tractable problem of social agents.

It’s not that abundance is unthinkable, or even unreachable, but if it’s the only note played, then the melody rings flat and inauthentic. Volf—and all Christians with him—composes on a broader stave, letting the melody rise and fall through the octaves of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, and encompassing moments of both scarcity and abundance in a wider rhythm of human rebellion and divine rescue. The Bible paints a picture neither of the bleak inevitability of resource depletion nor the polished confidence of technological fixes. Instead, it’s a theologically textured story of original abundance frustrated by human sin and spectacularly fulfilled only in Christ, through whose poverty we become rich (2 Cor. 8:9).

The Bible paints a picture neither of the bleak inevitability of resource depletion nor the polished confidence of technological fixes.

Nowhere does Abundance’s eerie imbalance show more clearly than in the opening chapter’s portrayal of 2050. The authors’ future glides along seemingly without friction; like a rosy 1950s science-fiction series, there’s plenty of energy, housing, clean water, food produced in zero-gravity factories, and even drones delivering “star pills” that extend human life.

But the book’s tone isn’t hopeful in the biblical sense; it’s uncanny, almost creepy, as if the whole population carries a sickly grin induced by the mood-altering soma drug ubiquitous in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Klein and Thompson wax lyrical about their utopian vision of the future:

Outside, the air is clean and humming with the purr of electric machines all around you. Electric cars and trucks glide down the road, quiet as a light breeze and mostly self-driving. Children and adult commuters follow on electric bikes and scooters, some personally owned and some belonging to subscription networks run by the city. Another last-mile delivery drone descends from canopy level, pauses over a neighbor’s yard like a hummingbird, and drops off a package. These e-bots now deliver a sizable chunk of online orders, reducing the drudgery of much human delivery work. (2–3)

The human drama is gone. The authors elide both the inevitable irregularities of life caused by human finitude and the unnatural distortions due to human sin.

Secular Eschatology

Reading Abundance feels like being offered a perfectly arranged Lego set to substitute for the complex, lived messiness of real life. In the authors’ hands, political obstacles and societal complexities are treated as glitches that can be politely overridden by good design and sufficient political courage. However, as Volf warns, and as real history insists, the elephant of human sin isn’t so easily steered by well-meaning riders politely indicating which way it should turn.

Klein and Thompson’s analysis of housing regulation, energy gridlock, and institutional dysfunction is astute, and their call for an “abundance agenda” will resonate with many Christians concerned for the common good. Yet the book fails to recognize that scarcity isn’t merely a problem of policy or supply chains. The reality that the authors can’t—perhaps won’t—engage with is that our hearts, Klein’s and Thompson’s included, are the problem, and compared to the oceanic depths of that issue, fixing society through policy feels like paddling in the shallows.

But perhaps this is the book’s great value, after all. Volumes like Abundance remind us of both the virtue and the limits of politics. It’s better, much better, for people to have houses than not, clean energy than not, and jobs than not. But those are penultimate concerns. Politics can redistribute or reallocate, but it can’t ultimately redeem. This is no direct criticism of Klein and Thompson, of course. They weren’t setting out to write that deeper book. But it’s a caution to their readers to remember what book has been written and what it must leave unsaid.

Politics can redistribute or reallocate, but it can’t ultimately redeem.

In the end, Abundance is important not because it provides the answers but because it shows so clearly the limits of political imagination when cut off from Scripture’s deeper diagnosis. Its luminous future lacks shadows. It bypasses the essential anthropology of Genesis 3 and Romans 7, which reveal we’re creatures with a propensity to sabotage even the best gifts and the most abundant futures. Our most basic social contract is fragile not primarily because we don’t have the right sort of government but because we can’t resolve the core tensions of human self-interest.

Christians sympathetic to Klein and Thompson’s politics may welcome the book’s call to build boldly and tackle the stasis of undersupply. But we must do so soberly aware that politics, policy, and even technology are ultimately insufficient. Abundance is a secular eschatology without a doctrine of sin. It thus functions as a reminder for believers: We don’t place our deepest hope in supply-side economics but in substitutionary atonement, where the abundance of grace meets the scarcity of human righteousness in the ultimate act of provision.