The Collapse of Historicism and the Apocatastatic Opening of, to, and by Humanity: Vindicating Herder After the Epochal Demise of Simulated Ends


Rev. Dr., retd, Douglas Blake Olds

October 25, 2025 [DRAFT]:


Abstract (Shortened Version)

This treatise announces the Christian eschaton and its apocatastatic throughput for the covenant remnant.

It argues that the modern epistemological collapse—exacerbated by AI-driven simulation and technocratic reductionism—can be traced to a profound metaphysical deficiency: the rejection of Johann Gottfried Herder’s ethical historicism. Against the dominant legacies of Kant, Hegel, and Popper, the text vindicates Herder’s theology-inflected metaphysics of conation, voice, and participatory perception as a corrective to Enlightenment rationalism and its Gnostic heirs. Through a Shema-Christological framework, the treatise critiques AI’s necromantic logic and ontological fraudulence, contrasting it with a covenantal poetics of repair. By retrieving Herder’s relational anthropology, the work proposes a post-simulacral, eschatologically awakened humanism grounded in proprioceptive grace, ethical responsibility, and regenerative witness.

This treatise is a  theological-philosophical intervention into modern metaphysics, historical epistemology, and the ethical failure of simulated rationality. It restores Johann Gottfried Herder as a prophetic alternative to Kantian determinism and Popper’s liberal misreadings, offering instead a metaphysics of conation—relational, embodied, and ethically alive. Against the collapsing authority of causal AI and technocratic nihilism, the work articulates a Shema-Christological metaphysic grounded in covenantal poiesis, proprioceptive grace, and apocatastatic hope.

FULL TEXT available at:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KXByByziVw9APj5Q3timfomUbvrvxiwJT0iMC-F5vBY/edit?usp=sharing



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