Prometheanism and the Shape of Pastoral Integrity

Returning to our first love.

The Myth of Prometheus

The Greeks were some of the finest thinkers and storytellers in history. Their significant contributions to understanding human disposition have endured long after their empire. Of these contributions, Greek philosophy and myth stand out.

A myth is a story that elucidates the human condition and defines the world around us. Compared to how you leave the movie theater enlightened to live differently after watching an emotionally transformative film, the Greeks used myths to provoke clarity and purpose in an otherwise disjointed and cluttered world.

One myth, in particular, is poignant regarding pastoral integrity. That is the myth of Prometheus.

As the myth goes, in the initial days of human existence, humans knew the day of their death, or as Eugene Peterson puts it in his retelling of Prometheus’ myth, ‘We knew our limits.’¹ Prometheus, a Greek god, saw that human motivation was reduced to the cognition of mortality. In compassion, he responded by doing three things:

1. Removing the knowledge of the day of death from humans.

2. Placing blind hopes in humans (ambition).

3. Stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans (technology).

By removing the knowledge of the day of death, humans were freed from the shadow of mortality and drifted toward living as if immortal. By embracing blind hopes, humans could strive to reach beyond the boundaries of their humanity. Finally, with the instrument of technology (fire), humans had the means to accomplish anything they set their minds to.

Humans now saw themselves as gods. Yet, the truth of their ontology never changed; they were still humans. They were living in a way (as a god) that was impossible for their existence (as humans).

Zeus, the chief of the Greek gods, retaliated by chaining Prometheus to a rock in a secluded mountain where vultures tore him apart and ate his liver. The myth says the liver grew back each night, so the retribution was fresh daily.

Eugene Peterson writes,

Prometheus: daring, bold, compassionate, intelligent—raising the standard of living, expanding the scope of living, deepening the resources for living. But bound: chained to the rock, showing the consequences of trying to improve the human condition by giving us ambition and tools without at the same time giving us foresight and training us in self-knowledge. It is the story of Western civilization; incredible progress in things, defiantly unmindful of the nature of our humanity, unimaginable suffering in persons.²

Living Like Gods

This myth, as its genre suggests, is a myth. It doesn’t tell us blunt history as it factually happened. However, history is not a direct matter of a myth. The story serves as a reminder of a philosophical error that the human race has fallen into: living like gods. In this way, the story is very relevant to modern America.

This god-like delusion is no better in the Church. In its original state, the Church was known as holy, set apart, or ‘other than.’ The Nicene Creed affirms, ‘We believe in one holy catholic (or universal) and apostolic Church.’ The Apostle’s Creed likewise professes, ‘I believe in the holy catholic (universal) Church.’ Holy is a distinctive of something (or someone) that is not like everything else. For example, God is holy because there is no one like God.

Therefore, the Church holds a harmonious value in the created order that no other institution holds—it is holy.

Yet, the Church is contemporarily reduced to a common institution. There is little distinction between the Church and other temporal organizations or activities. And in this reduction of worth, pastoral integrity has desperately faltered. Pastors who once shaped their vocation through prayer, the sacraments, scripture, and guiding their flock have evolved into business leaders whose success is measured by metrics and expansion.

Congregants are no longer those conscious of their mortality, yet simultaneously aware of an eternal God inviting them to participate in his grand work; they are consumers moved by their desires and cravings. Like in the Prometheus myth, the limits have been removed from the people's minds; they have god-sized ambitions and the technology that promises—emptily—to be the means to achieve these ambitions autonomously. Nevertheless, they, like Prometheus, live with something eating them on the inside. No matter what they do or who they think they will become, the vultures wait for their daily rations in the morning.

The answer to the inner turmoil is clear: restoring humanity to humanity. The problem is that those called to do this work have bartered it away. The people became gods, and many pastors became culpable. Elder boards care more about the number of people attending a service than about the awareness of what God is doing in His church through us mortals. Pastors read more books and listen to more podcasts on leadership than they pray and read the scriptures, because that’s what their people prefer and their boards expect.

People want answers to life's questions and view pastors as those called to provide them. They need to know what God is doing, why God is doing it, when God is doing it, and how God is doing it. They need the means to continue to live as gods, which, as Genesis 3 reminds us, is foundationally ‘understanding.’³

St. Augustine prayed in Confessions, ‘You were within me, but I was outside of me, and there I sought You.’⁴ We live in anxiety, depression, fear, doubt, suspicion, protection, and safety because we have lost sight of the Holy One within. In losing sight of God, we created for ourselves gods—namely, we set ourselves up as gods and demanded that life bow to our desires and needs. But we aren’t gods. Like in Prometheus, having the means to act like a god doesn’t change the fact that we aren’t gods. The danger in endeavoring to live like a god when we are fundamentally human is that we often aspire to live beyond our capacities, thereby experiencing the crushing consequences of failure and a loss of worth.

The End of Pastoral Integrity

This consequence has become the self-fulfilling core of yielding pastoral integrity and shape (I struggle with it on a rolling basis). As humans invited to participate in God's work, pastors live at the intersection of calling and occupation. We bear the urgent divine zeal of the holy; we see a world in need of hope, care, and love, and know the answer is the εὐαγγέλιον (good news). Therefore, we begin our pastoral vocation by bathing our sermons in passion, calling our people up the mountain of discipleship where we can see ‘the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of our Lord and his Messiah.’⁵ We begin with faith and a profound awareness that God is God and will have His way with us and our church.

Initially, rejection and apathy roll off our shoulders, as we attribute them to growing pains. Then, after only a few short years—perhaps even after just a month or so—our zeal for the holy transforms into something more predictable and secure: shopkeeping. We confess that expectations of a rapidly expanding industry threaten our dreams of a life-giving church and a transformed city. The people want quick results and shortcuts that can be neatly marketed as momentum. We find that the fastest way to get people to leave for the church down the street is to commit to long obedience in the same direction. A new building project, ministry, or campaign will do the trick; get the people excited about anything, and you’ll be a successful pastor.

By the way, eradicate those sermons that are ‘too deep’ for the people. They won’t come back if they don’t leave ‘encouraged’ or if the sermon is ‘over their heads.’ Just preach about good plans, good news, everything working out well, everyone growing wealthy and prosperous, and you’ll have a flourishing church marching toward the prize: ‘Mega.’

Side note: In every other sector of society, we praise learning. To learn, you must be introduced to something you do not yet know or understand, be trained to understand it, and thereby learn what you did not know. In short, we value things being initially over our heads in every other part of our lives, except for our relationship with God. If a five-year-old doesn’t grasp multiplication, you don’t discard it and continue teaching 2+2, because that’s what they comprehend; you persist in teaching multiplication until they ‘get’ it. The gospel is over all of our heads until we learn. The process of learning the gospel is discipleship and formation.

Sound familiar?

This is the narrative that pastors often find themselves in, and—in America, at least—none of us are immune. Most of our people have been misled into thinking they are gods, and they live like gods. The expectation of the gods is, ‘Give me what I want.’

Pastors are forced to be what they are not: leaders of organizations labeled as ‘church.’

Research suggests up to 91% of pastors have experienced burnout,⁶ 65% feel lonely,⁷ 70% battle depression,⁸ and nearly half have considered quitting in recent years.⁹

Why has the pastoral vocation grown so weary? Pastors are not business leaders marketing and selling a product better than the business down the street, so that more people will come to their store instead of the others. They are not financial investors expected to create inspirational strategies to cultivate the viability of the business. They are not self-help gurus offering motivational quotes, so people can continue to play god.

They are shepherds of the holy, keepers of the sacred. They invite you beyond Prometheanism into discipleship. They guide you back to your mortality so that you can be liberated to live under God's reign and worship. They are the prophets communicating visions of Eden.

The Church is the only institution in our society that tries so hard to be what it is not. A grocery store is content providing produce, a doctor’s office is happily stewarding people’s health, and a barbershop is satisfied working with hair. Yet the Church is constantly trying to be something other than holy ground.

What are we to do? How do we restore pastoral integrity to finally break away from the American consumer church that annihilates the future of the virtuous manifestation of ‘holy’ in our midst?

Cultivating Self-Awareness

You are not God.

The quicker you concede you are not God, the faster you can be liberated to humanity again. The problem in the Prometheus myth was not what humans were given but what humans were not given. While receiving good things in themselves, they lost the means to use them correctly: mortality and self-awareness.

As those in Christ, we live eternal life—that is, the life of God. Christ liberated us from the dread of our mortality. Yet, we must remember that apart from God, we are mortal. We live in his freedom, through his life, in his finished work. Ephesians 2:9 NLT says, ‘Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.’ We did nothing to earn salvation, so we retain dependence on God to receive salvation.

We have preached salvation without self-awareness. We have made ourselves our saviors rather than those who are the beneficiaries of a work only God could accomplish for us, in love.

We will never have all the answers, and we aren’t supposed to, because we aren't God. We trust that God’s story unfolds in the world and that it ends well, not by our inadequate standards but by God’s sovereign standards.

In modern America, we repeatedly pray to gain understanding and achieve our goals, scrutinize the Bible to support our decisions and lives, preach sermons about our assignments and purpose, and tithe when we feel inclined (usually not at all, and certainly not a whole tithe). Church is a means to an end; the destination is us and our kingdoms.

However, orthodoxically, prayer is an act of remembering that only God is God, so we can live free from the tyranny of playing god. Scripture places us in the story of God spanning time, space, and people groups. Sermons equip us to live the life of the kingdom of God. Tithing reminds us that God is God, and everything we have is from his hands—we are not in control. The Church, therefore, is a community of ordinary saints living out dynamic participation through discipleship to Christ, who calls us to lay down everything and follow Him.

Returning to anthropological and theological orthodoxy, pastoral integrity and shape are restored. We deal with the holy. To deal with something ‘other than’ will require a philosophy ‘other than’ the world around us.

Nevertheless, someone has to light the proverbial match and start the journey home. For pastors, renewal begins with you and is initiated with prayer. Return to your first love and let your life be a magnetic example of coming to your senses and learning to live again.

Jesus repeatedly withdrew to pray, usually in solitude. That is a lousy marketing and engagement strategy, yet many were drawn to him. His ministry didn’t engage the delusional god within the people's cognition; it engaged the human heart. His primary announcement began with ‘repent’ (for the kingdom of heaven is at hand). Μετάνοια (translated repentance) means to change your philosophy (how you think and perceive) so that it produces a new direction. You can’t engage the kingdom of God until you allow a new reasoning to take hold of your faculties.

For the majority of the people Jesus preached to, the philosophy they were turning from was one built by religion and tradition, not necessarily sin.

As pastors, μετάνοια comes through prayer, offering ourselves to the account of God in scripture again, and a liberated conviction that we are not gods; we don’t have to push things to happen beyond the bounds of our humanity, and God is writing the story. Our call is shepherding. To shepherd, we must call our flock out of the toil of playing god with their lives. Will this cause rejection? Indeed. No one willingly gives up power, even if that power is destroying their lives.

Yet, through surrender, even death, comes resurrection life. What if this generation isn’t the end of Christianity in America but the beginning? What if the umbrage in the pastoral vocation is a holy call to return to our first love?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Ethics,¹⁰

Knowing of good and evil in disunion with the origin, man begins to reflect upon himself. His life is now his understanding of himself, whereas at the origin it was his knowledge of God. Self-knowledge is now the measure and the goal of life…

Now anyone who reads the New Testament even superficially cannot but notice the complete absence of this world of disunion, conflict, and ethical problems. Not man’s falling apart from God, from men, from things and from himself, but rather the rediscovered unity, reconciliation, is now the basis of the discussion and the ‘point of decision of the specifically ethical experience.’ The life and activity of men is not at all problematic or tormented or dark: it is self-evident, joyful, sure and clear.

1. Eugene H. Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans, 1987), p. 27.

2. Peterson, Working the Angles, p. 29.

3. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

4. Augustine, Confessions, Book X, Chapter 27.

5. Revelation 11:15.

6. Bill Gaultiere, ‘Pastors Under Stress: Statistics and Advice,’ Soul Shepherding, accessed May 1, 2025, https://www.soulshepherding.org/pastors-under-stress.

7. Barna Group, ‘The State of Pastor Support Systems,’ Barna, April 2022, https://www.barna.com/research/pastor-support-systems.

8. Bill Gaultiere, ‘Pastors Under Stress: Statistics and Advice,’ Soul Shepherding, accessed May 1, 2025, https://www.soulshepherding.org/pastors-under-stress.

9. David Crary, ‘Pastors Struggle to Lead Flocks Divided by Politics, Pandemic,’ Associated Press, February 21, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/24ee46327438ff46b074d234ffe2f58c.

10. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Touchstone, 1995), pp. 29-30.