I dislike the notion of the death of man and any project conceived as an anti-humanist post-humanism. The fact is that the coming era will be more human than we are; currently we are barely human. Our humanity only appears in flickers, in extreme moments, in crises, in tenderness. When Haelegen is born, these moments will be the rule, not the exception. This is the meaning of apocalyptic humanism. Civilization will discard that which is not human; not the other way around.
I am particularly interested in connecting this moment to the second coming of Jesus Christ. I am inclined to support the most hard-core version of Christian faith: that Jesus Christ was a real individual who also was God, and that after dying on the cross, his body was resurrected; after his individual body ascended into heaven, it became the task of enlightened humans to collectively carry on his body. I agree with Chesterton that this story has the strange and unique character that only real events have; if it were a metaphor or a myth, it would make more sense, be more allegorical, it would be less monstrous. The fact that it doesn’t really make sense suggests, oddly, that the story is true rather than metaphorical.
One of the strangest and surely most mistaken books I have ever read is Badiou’s short text devoted to St. Paul. The thesis of the book is that the resurrection of Christ is the paradigmatic “event”, but that it so happens that this one event in particular was not a real event at all. We must commit to the much more reasonable declaration that the event of Christ’s resurrection is an ur-event from which all other events stem (which is surely what Badiou must really mean, and what he would have said were he not deferring to the atheistic trend of his milieu.).
The messiah, then, when he returns, will be all of us. Having discarded the form of the Christian Church, the Ark Work has taken over the body of Christ as a utopian project combining experimentation with disciplined coordination in the name of the kingdom of heaven. When it succeeds, we will all be one unique, fragile, beautiful, gently suffering human being.