Balancing Stewardship and Expansion: Avoiding Hubris
A Simple Truth at the Edge of the Solar System
If the Garden-City vision of Revelation shows us the goal, then our next question is how to get there without losing our way. For all the grandeur of rockets, habitats, and planetary conquest, history warns us: human ambition can outrun humility. The same hands that plant gardens can build towers of Babel.
Expansion is not automatically good just because it is possible. The ability to terraform Mars, mine asteroids, or construct Dyson swarms does not grant moral permission to do so recklessly. The opening pages of Scripture remind us that we are stewards, not owners. Dominion is a trust, not a license for domination. Stewardship asks, “How can I care for what belongs to God?” Hubris asks, “How far can I push what I can do?”
On Mars, where survival depends on precision, cooperation, and respect for limits, that difference could mean life or death. For the Church, it could mean the difference between embodying Christ’s reign and repeating the mistakes of empires past.
Theological and Historical Anchors
Stewardship as the Core of Dominion
The Cultural Mandate (Gen. 1:28) grants humanity the role of cultivating and governing creation under God’s authority. This role is not about raw control but about reflecting the Creator’s own justice and care. Scripture never portrays dominion as exploitative. Even in Eden, Adam’s work was to “tend and keep”, words of nurture and protection.
Spacefaring stewardship means considering the environmental, social, and spiritual consequences of every step. Whether altering a Martian landscape or managing a self-sustaining habitat, our call is to make creation more fruitful and life-giving, not to exhaust it for short-term gain.
The New Testament reframes this mandate under Christ’s lordship (Matt. 28:18-20), so that the multiplication of human presence is coupled with the multiplication of disciples. Mars, then, is not simply a new environment to master but a new trust to manage in service of God’s glory.
The Shadow Side of Expansion
History gives sobering examples. When exploration was driven by greed, domination, or cultural superiority, it often led to exploitation, of land, resources, and people. Colonial ventures frequently began with bold visions and ended with entrenched injustice.
In the cosmic context, hubris could take subtler forms:
- Technological Arrogance. Assuming that advanced tools guarantee control over complex environments.
- Economic Reductionism. Valuing new worlds only for their resource yields.
- Anthropocentric Pride. Forgetting that the heavens declare God’s glory (Ps. 19:1), not ours.
These dangers are not hypothetical. A Mars settlement built without ethical and theological grounding could mirror the very injustices we hope to leave behind. Without humility, the “first Martian constitution” could enshrine self-interest over service, and corporate competition could eclipse communal care.
Eschatology as a Guardrail
Chapter 7 showed us the Garden-City as the end of the story. That vision acts as a guardrail: reminding us that our work, however advanced, is provisional. The New Jerusalem is not built by human hands alone; it is the gift of God. This frees us from utopian illusions and from despair. We labor faithfully, knowing that our efforts are part of something greater, but not ultimate.
Romans 8 reminds us that creation’s redemption is God’s work. We participate, but we do not control the timetable or the outcome. This posture should temper both our timelines for expansion and our methods of governance, encouraging patience, justice, and worship in the process.
Lessons from Missiology: Multiplication Without Exploitation
The Church’s mission experience offers practical wisdom for avoiding hubris. Global Church Planting Movements thrive not through centralized control, but through empowering local leadership, keeping methods simple, and emphasizing obedience over prestige. Applied to Mars, this suggests:
- Avoiding top-heavy power structures that alienate settlers from decision-making.
- Prioritizing community-driven problem-solving over imported solutions.
- Integrating worship, work, and governance so that the colony’s culture grows around Christ’s values from the start.
In other words, the same principles that protect a movement from “mission drift” can protect a settlement from moral drift.
Walking Humbly in the Final Frontier
Hold Technology in Service to Theology
The tools we develop, from closed-loop life support to asteroid mining platforms, are not ends in themselves. They are means of fulfilling our call to steward creation and make disciples. This requires a discipline of asking, before every innovation: Does this serve God’s purposes for creation and community, or just our ambition?
Institutionalize Humility
Humility doesn’t happen by accident. Early Martian governance should include structures that ensure accountability, ethical review boards, shared ownership of resources, and covenants that acknowledge God’s ownership of the planet. These are not “religious add-ons,” but safeguards against the tendency of power to concentrate and corrupt.
Train Stewards, Not Just Settlers
Mission agencies, churches, and educational institutions must prepare future spacefarers with both technical skills and spiritual formation. Imagine an astronaut-engineer who can repair a greenhouse and also lead a Bible study on Psalm 8. Skills and soul must travel together.
Plant Churches Alongside Colonies
As Chapter 5 argued, the first wave of settlement should carry both blueprints and Bibles. Churches provide not only spiritual nourishment but also ethical ballast, communal support, and a vision of service over self. A colony without a church risks being technically brilliant but spiritually bankrupt.
Measure Success in Worship, Not Just in Watts
In a Dyson swarm era, when energy capture could be measured in quintillions of watts, the true measure of success will still be whether God’s glory fills the colony, whether worship rises from domes and greenhouses, whether justice marks the laws, whether the stranger is welcomed.
The First Martian Psalm
Picture it: A hundred years from now, under the faint sunlight of a Martian afternoon, a group gathers in a small chapel dome. Outside, hydroponic gardens hum with life. Inside, a child recites, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” The congregation smiles. They know that “sky” now includes a salmon-colored horizon and a pale blue Earth hanging in the distance.
This is expansion without hubris: a people who remember that the world they build is not theirs alone, that their strength is borrowed, and their purpose is worship. They are not just surviving on Mars; they are stewarding it, awaiting the day when the Garden-City descends, and every world is home.