Prometheus’s Three Challenges to Christian Theology According to Jan Milíč Lochman

By W. Travis McMaken - March 30, 2025

One of the recurrent points of discussion during the 20th century conversations between Marxists and Christians in German-speaking Europe had to do with the character of Prometheus – the titan from Greek mythology who stole fire from Zeus and the Olympian gods in order to give it to humanity. Within Marxist thought, Prometheus came to represent the Marxist criticism of religion and the conviction that humanity must reject religious authority and deity since it served only to keep humanity in servitude. Prometheus became the hero of human actualization and freedom.

It isn’t hard to see how Prometheus would become a focal point when Marxist and Christian theologians got together to chat.

Jan Milíč Lochman was a Czech theologian who, after 1968, taught at the University of Basel. He was active in the late heady days of Marxist/Christian dialogue in the 1960s. The engagement was driven, in no small part, by interpersonal and intellectual encounter in Czechoslovakia, which came to an abrupt halt when Warsaw Pact troops invaded in August 1968 to abort the Prague Spring. Much like Helmut Gollwitzer with reference to the Marxist criticism of religion in general, Lochman believed that Christians—and Christian theology—had something to learn from the Marxist Prometheus.

I intend to get further into Lochman directly in time, but I’m drawing here on the excellent work of James Bentley in Between Marx and Christ: The Dialogue in German-Speaking Europe, 1870–1970 (London: Version and NLB, 1982). In the following passage from Bentley, quotes are from Lochman, italics are in the original, and bold is mine:

[Lochman] insisted that Christian theology could not simply note the pace of Prometheus and leave it at that. “In the mirror the Marxist holds in front of us, we see repeatedly that the Promethean elements—better, the dynamic aspects of our own radical inheritance—have been continually pushed aside and rejected.” Even though the great theological pioneers of our century (Barth, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, and Hromadka, as listed by Lochman) had brought to light neglected parts of this legacy, Prometheus remained a challenge to Christians. Lochman cited three such challenges. First, Prometheus challenged authoritarian notions of God, the idea that God is “an inhuman structure imposed upon mankind,” rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is also Father of Jesus Christ. In the sight of the true God, Lochman argued, there is a place for Prometheus, for this God is not affronted by man’s emancipation; it is part of his own revealed concern. Second, Prometheus challenged the doctrine that sees sin simply as an act of hubris. “In the light of Christ,” Lochman wrote, “sin is revealed not only in the ‘eritis sicut deus’ … but also in the opposite temptation, the denial of the liberating engagement of God in history and the refusal to co-operate in the liberation. Inactivity is as basic a form of sin as hubris. Third, Prometheus challenged an inadequate understanding of grace and justification. The doctrine of grace is suspect in Marxism, since it readily degenerates into an ideology of quietism, leading to the notion that one’s own work and actions are not important. Lochman argued that in the biblical understanding of grace, human activity is neither excluded nor devalued, for the effect of grace is to open new and unexpected possibilities of action in human history; grace mobilizes man’s creative powers; it may even be said to stimulate human beings to “Promethean existence.”