The evolution of "Redemption"

McHale, channeling Weber, locates redemption's engine in the "world image" — you can only be redeemed *from* and *for* something your cosmology makes legible, which means redemption is always a map problem before it's a salvation problem. Rosenzweig (via Lilla) splits the concept into two heresies: leave redemption to God and you go passive, claim it for human action and you get utopian tyranny — a trap he tries to escape by having Judaism and Christianity model complementary ways of waiting. Vonnegut inverts the entire apparatus: in the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, claiming you've been redeemed is the one unforgivable act, because it implies God noticed you, and three billion adherents will punish you for the arrogance. Then Liu Cixin performs the strangest mutation — the Redemptionists of the ETO want to redeem not humanity but their alien *Lord*, and their method is solving the three-body problem, a task they know is mathematically impossible but continue as "religious ritual." Redemption has traveled from ethical action (the prophets) to world-image (Weber/McHale) to anti-claim (Vonnegut) to impossible devotional mathematics (Liu), and at each stage the question isn't whether redemption is real but whether the redeemer has correctly identified who — or what — needs saving.