Abstract
Artificial intelligence gets under the skin. As “the machine,” AI becomes a soulless, resource-guzzling foil for human-scale community. As an oracular technology, it evokes the danger of sophistry, idolatry, or even demonology. As automation of judgment, AI transcends ordinary tools and provokes anxieties about the dignity and uniqueness of human work. As a simulation of human writing and art, AI output provokes aesthetic concerns about craft, authorship, and the integrity of culture. Yet AI is a divine gift given in service of our work to fill and subdue. Faithful Christian engagement requires a larger eschatological imagination. The true human scale is measured in Christ, in whom humanity is gathered, enlarged, and glorified. The human vocation to create and administer a populous, eschatological garden city, the earthly mirror of the heavenly Jerusalem, requires more than unaided human strength, more than unaided human vigilance, and yes, more than unaided human intelligence.
Introduction
John Henry was a steel driving man. Historians believe that in 1873, John Henry raced as a traditional hammerman against a crew using the then-new steam powered rock drill to make holes for dynamite to carve the Lewis train tunnel between Talcott and Millboro in Virginia.[1] The stories and folk songs about the race say that John Henry beat the rock drill but overexerted himself and died.
In May of 2026, Aimé Gérard, an intern at the San Jose-based company Figure AI, competed in a package-sorting contest with Figure’s humanoid robot bearing a “Hello My Name is Bob” nametag. In ten hours, Aimé sorted 12,924 packages (a mere 192 more than Bob) and left with blisters and fatigue.
Aimé did not die like the John Henry we sang about as children. But notice an implicit concession in these American stories: that humans and machines belong on the same scale, that at least some aspects of human dignity can be measured by throughput, and that a defense of human value based on throughput must be made every time the machine improves. And the machine will improve. This is the slowest and least intelligent that humanoid robots will ever be.
This erroneous concession that I will label “commensurability” is a key error lying beneath many of our anxieties about artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley technologists place humanity and AI on the same scale, perhaps of intelligence, and then predict our supersession. Some Christian critics of AI also evidence an implicit commitment to commensurability when they desperately attempt to prove that AI doesn’t really understand, reason, or create, or that the robot is of the city and we must be of the country.
This essay sketches the beginning of an argument that attempts to bring together two seemingly incompatible things. First, I will attempt to ground and uphold, without anxiety, the incommensurable dignity of humanity in the image of God, measured finally in the eschatological mission of Christ, in whom humanity is gathered, enlarged, and glorified. Second, I will attempt to do justice to the facticity of highly capable AI, receiving it as a good work of our hands, an image of man (imago hominis), and a gift given by God in service of a priestly vocation that, since the fall, has always required plunder of technique and materials. The human calling is ultimately to a populous city grown from a garden, the earthly mirror of the heavenly Jerusalem, and that city’s flourishing will require more than unaided human strength, more than unaided human vigilance, and yes, more than unaided human intelligence.
Three Anxieties
Given the generally positive approach to AI implicit in the following argument, let us first review some of the anxieties that attend the rise of capable AI. Three emblems roughly track the recent history of AI’s development: the Machine, the Oracle, and John Henry.
Emblem 1: The Machine
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon echoes our anxiety about our fleeting lives as observers of and participants in a great earth cycle in which the course of the sun, the circuits of the wind, and the water cycle have the potential to weary us (1:5–8). Wisdom literature also highlights the human-created structures that bind and shape our lives. The Proverbs describe many systems of wrongdoing: “nets” that catch us, linguistic snares caused by hasty or prideful words, patterns of sloth that wreck our personal industry, the mechanism of seduction, regimes of false weights and measures (11:1), and many others. Elsewhere in the scriptures, systems of vows or rigid laws that externalize human decision making ensnare men like Jephthah, Saul, and Darius.
Concern about life as a cog in a machine is perhaps the oldest of the technological anxieties. Jacques Ellul formalized the term “technique” to refer to a society mesmerized by methodologies of efficiency that produce, as a side effect, specific technological wonders that proceduralize human life.[2] Technologies work together as an “ensemble of means” to accomplish a unified end the way cameras, automobiles, computer networking, and computer vision come together to accomplish modern policing.[3] And the values applied to achieving ends often conflict with ultimate human values; we are lost in the technology-driven race to exceed “key performance indicators.”
The recent rise of data-driven machine learning and artificial intelligence has amplified the sense that human life is becoming ruled by algorithms that “datafy”[4] life in terms of measurable signals evaluated by quantitative metrics used to predict outcomes and prescribe the most efficient means for achieving them.
In academia, an early vector was through the amalgam of economics and sociology pioneered by scholars like Gary Becker (University of Chicago, 1968–2014) who subjected even aspects of human life as sacred as marriage to market analysis and created the idea of human capital.
Another movement quantifying aspects of human life, behavioral economics, broke into the popular imagination through books like Freakonomics.[5] Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein applied these insights to public policy able to create incentives for virtuous behavior.[6] Books like Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil showed us a world in which important human decisions like who gets parole are influenced by unjust algorithms.[7] This is Postman’s “scientism” at work.[8] One of the most prominent anxieties about AI as ensnaring machine may be seen in the concerns over machine-learning systems that social media sites like TikTok use to engineer our attention.[9]
Lately, Paul Kingsnorth has burnished this emblem in Against the Machine, a book that sums up a century of social theory on technology and describes the machine as an external, technological manifestation of an inner hunger within the heart of man to attain power, kick against the limitations of our roots and humanity, and feed our ambitions.[10] It’s what Pope Francis called the “technocratic paradigm” in Laudato si’, a rapacious approach to technology in which subjects possess, master, and control objects instead of seeing themselves as integrally related to nature and others (Laudato si’, 106).
The machine alienates us from human limitations, local ways of life, our connection to the past, and even our connection to God. Kingsnorth brings the demeanor of the environmental warrior to his opposition to the ensnaring machine. And in many communities in the US, energy, water, and land-hungry data centers, required to house the computing required for AI to succeed at scale, have become the rallying public symbol of the machine, the new version of William Blake’s “dark satanic mills.”
Emblem 2: The Oracle
The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures museum at the University of Chicago contains an oracular temple statue of the falcon god Horus (dated to the New Kingdom or later, 1569–1081 BC). The falcon’s 24-inch tall body is made of the mineral serpentine, wears a gold crown, and has a long diagonal shaft bored from the base of the tail to the top of the head where it emerges through a golden beak. Archaeologists recovered it in 1919 from a temple in Karanis, Egypt, which featured a hidden room below the statue where cords could be pulled to make the beak and crown appear to nod. The priest of Horus, concealed in the hidden room, spoke through the tube in answer to questions from worshippers. Modern large language models, unlike previous generations of woodenly rule-based models, were first used like oracles to answer questions. The earliest version of ChatGPT simply responded to questions by predicting what a smart human might say. No priests speak directly through chatbots, but private corporations choose a corpus of human writing to train the systems in how to speak, fine-tune the models to be helpful and encouraging using a collection of customer-service examples, and package them into systems designed to respond to typed questions known as “prompts.” A small, Egyptian pottery prompt in the same museum collection in Chicago features the question, “Shall I hire this servant? Will she become effective for me?”
In response to a prompt, the first few generations of large language artificial intelligence models (LLMs) would muster the entire intellectual army implicit in their training data for every engagement, producing either a tidy, common denominator answer or an uninspired overview of disagreements around the topic. The writing of the last few generations of frontier models uses much more careful planning, makes use of memory, and demonstrates an uncanny theory of mind when generating text. Driving these oracular deliverances is opaque intellectual machinery embedded socially in institutions that use metaphors from content moderation and fact-checking to ensure safety (don’t tell the inquirer how to make a bomb) and alignment (don’t encourage the inquirer to use the bomb). Human interfaces to LLMs, including integration into search engine results, lend AI-generated content an authority that conceals its origins in data that inherently contain contested narratives and claims. Large language models of this earlier type have been described as “stochastic parrots” that produce sophistical output at best. Some Christian critics see them, at worst, as producing the speech of demons.[11]
In any case, the concern is with idols that have their own mouths, speak, see, and hear, unlike the mute idols of Psalm 115. This increases the danger of worshipping these systems, treating AI oracles as gods, and forgetting that they are the works of our hands (Is 44:9–20). Can we avoid the situation of the woodcutter cum idol-carver in Isaiah 44 who “cannot deliver himself or say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’” (44:20).
Yet the models have improved. AI has moved on from simply providing bland answers as an oracle. It has become agentic. AI systems are accomplishing the things we assign them to do.
Emblem 3: John Henry
We’ve already considered the competitions John Henry and Aimé Gérard had with machines. Such showdowns are fitting emblems for the anxiety that highly capable AI represents a rival to humanity, especially with regard to the labor market and our creative work.
Good Old-Fashioned AI of the 80s and 90s evaluated decisions according to a set of human-defined rules. Recommendation AI of the early 2000s used a simple statistical calculus to predict successful suggestions in the context of online retail and social media content optimization. Early commercially available generative AI, beginning in 2022, predicted likely text output based on a model of the world built from human writing. Now, the best AI models engage in several forms of reasoning familiar to humans, including reflecting on their own output and iteratively refining their answers (or decisions) the way we humans may use a chain of thought to talk ourselves through possible plans for the weekend.[12] Other models combine this reasoning function (test-time compute) with an awareness of real outcomes in the world. They are agentic in that they engage in actions to achieve goals, measure progress toward the goal, and formulate next steps relative to that progress. Agentic systems have the potential to automate many aspects of human intellectual and physical work. This potential for labor market disruption has caused even some avowed capitalists to entertain seriously the necessity of subsidized social stabilization schemes such as universal basic income.
Agentic systems, like human workers, inevitably engage implicit aesthetic questions. What proportions will an AI system use to create a diagram we’ve requested? How should the video be directed? What style should be used in the prose of this report? The term “AI Slop” captures a growing aesthetic and ethical criticism of text, images, music, and video that bear the marks of being AI-generated. The critique’s serious ethical emphases consider the nature of authorship and whether it is appropriate to incorporate AI output into work that a human presents as his own. In addition, slop closely relates to the broader issue of deepfakes and the collapse of confidence in the evidentiary value of photographs or videos.[13]
Misdirection: A Shared Error of Commensurability
The issues summarized through the emblems of the Machine, the Oracle, and John Henry are substantive; our anxiety about AI is warranted. And yet many reactions to these emblems emphasize a common temptation to measure being or ways-of-being on the same scale. This temptation to commensurability is often a distraction from Christian engagement with AI.
One of the most obvious places to see this pattern of thinking at work is a common Christian response to the emblem of the machine: “small is beautiful.” In his 1973 book Small is Beautiful, E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) described the growing scale of human production, the stress of growth on energy supply, and the movement toward city life.[14] He noted that “for every activity there is a certain appropriate scale, and the more active and intimate the activity, the smaller the number of people that can take part.”[15] Technology, especially communication and transportation, was enabling an “idolatry of giantism” fueling the move of people to cities.[16] Materialism has no limits, but the environment does, and wisdom should bias us towards an ethos of permanence or sustainability that favors the small.
Filtered through an agrarian lens, as in Wendell Berry, this concern maintains its environmental point of reference while also emphasizing small community life and the effects of technology on relationships and the local scale.[17] This stream of thought (from Leopold Kohr and Ivan Illich through Schumacher and the agrarians) runs directly and explicitly into Kingsnorth’s reflections on “the Machine.” For Kingsnorth, “vast populations in industrial megacities” are the root of decline.[18] He mocks the implications of entrepreneur Jeff Bezos’ optimism that one day we’ll use technology to sustain a human population of one trillion with its proportionally likely one thousand Mozarts.[19] Kingsnorth’s Machine is “primarily a creation of the city…a Machine civilization is an urban civilization, and its worldview and direction is that of the urban dwellers who build, justify and benefit from it.”[20] He also criticizes cities because, unlike villages, they cannot be self-sufficient.[21] The city removes human agency, de-skills us, and turns us into those who serve the city rather than being served by it. You can find yourself in the village but only lose yourself in the city.[22] And this problem is scale; human-scale living, perhaps a village proportioned so that one voice can address all the citizens, as in Aristotle, is the answer.[23]
The first city in scripture is built by the murderer Cain and named for his son Enoch, whose children supplied the city with food and filled it with technology for making music and war (Gen 4:17–22).
The second city builders are most famous for their tower feature, but notice the emphasis on their city-building in the text of Genesis 11:
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth (Gen 11:1–9, emphasis added).
Note that the inhabitants of Shinar, like God who spoke the world into being, were building in part through the power of language yet they wanted to shirk the divine mandate to fill the earth and subdue it. They did not want to be “dispersed,” preferring to build a tower to their own names, and a city to guard it. This is an early distorted mirror of the temple and the walls of Jerusalem dedicated to the name of God. In this passage, God does not put a stop to their size or to the new building technologies that enabled their city’s construction, but to their lack of contribution to the vocation he has given humans to grow the garden over the whole earth. When it comes time to build according to the divine pattern he showed Moses, God gifts those who can use technology for good:
The LORD said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you” (Ex 31:1–7).
And this first portable building of Bezalel was succeeded by Levitical cities (Num 35) and then a temple within a walled city that promised the trajectory from Jerusalem to Judea and the ends of the earth towards an eschatological Jerusalem to be built according to the heavenly pattern:
And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall, with twelve gates…And the one who spoke with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width…By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life (Rev 21:10, 15, 24).
Through the Machine lens, one error of commensurability places every human settlement on the same scale and finds the size at which things become bent. In thinkers like Kingsnorth, the pathologies of the modern city cement a commitment to the small and the rural that makes it very hard to dream of a city grown from a garden by God.
Another error of commensurability is a Promethean exegesis that plagues our attempts to interpret Eden and Babel. In the story of Prometheus, the Olympian gods withhold gifts to humanity that Prometheus sacrifices himself to provide. Just as skeptical interpreters often use Eden as a story of humans trying to ascend the scale of godlikeness by rationality, some Christian authors use Babel as primarily a story of technological hubris. This scale-of-being thinking views God as the withholder of good things to keep humans in their lower place. In both Eden and Babel, however, God is not concerned with ontological ascent; in fact, he gives a law of ascent through sacrifice, feasting, and ultimately the incarnation and resurrection. He is concerned not with ascent, but with humans building the city of man instead of the city of God. In prelapsarian Eden, building the city of man means seizing a wisdom for rule that can only be given as a gift through maturity. At Babel, this means building a redoubt instead of growing an open garden-city. Freeing ourselves from scale-based thinking reveals that, depending upon our vocations, building certain kinds of isolated rural lives can have much in common with building Babel.
To the John Henry emblem, we have already observed that contests between man and machine concede the game and assume a common scale of performance. The “AI Slop” epithet is relevant here too because we often construct a single scale of artistic and authorial excellence and judge AI output in terms of it. Sometimes we stigmatize AI output because it doesn’t measure up, and sometimes we despair because it is effective and we are slow. Gunther Anders describes the modern phenomena of shame that our own work lacks the excellence of manufactured goods; this leads to a rivalry.[24] Michael Sacassas, an astute Christian observer of technology, predicts that “the arc of AI bends toward demoralization.” AI upsets our human exceptionalism and has led to both realistic and overblown predictions of the end of human labor. Students sometimes ask: what is the point of learning skills easily performed by AI? Looking for human exceptionalism in the excellence of our output relative to machines is the error of commensurability.
Another phenomenon adjacent to scale-of-being thinking is the Christian focus on proving that AI lacks consciousness, reason, intelligence, or embodied experience. In this way, Christians challenge the oracle by trying to find its strings and explain its articulated beak. For example, if one adopts the Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics of Edward Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics and then accepts the intricate arguments made in his book Immortal Souls, one can establish definitively that AI systems can’t have human consciousness, human intelligence, or use reason the way humans do.[25] If hylomorphism isn’t convincing, one may follow the beautifully written dialogical argument of David Bentley Hart’s All Things are Full of Gods and come to see, through a form of idealism, that all reality is grounded in a transcendent divine consciousness and could never emerge from matter.[26] On the one hand, these arguments are useful and they, along with Searle’s classic Chinese Room argument, may help us to deflate the expectations of Silicon Valley transhumanists who would call it “substrate chauvinism” to assume consciousness and intelligence could arise from organic matter but not from silicon and copper.[27] But on the other hand, materialism has rarely been the Christian temptation, and anyway, our theology gives us a surer way to draw a bright line between humans, created in God’s image, and other things that appear to think such as angels and animals. The proper starting point for confidently addressing and living alongside AI, whatever AI is, is God’s revelation of what humans are. Using philosophy to heave AI off the scale of being that runs from E. coli to H. sapiens can be a distracting focus. Highly capable AI systems functionally diminish the persuasiveness of philosophical distinctions that ground capability in ontology. In short, magnificent and useful robots speak more clearly than philosophy on this point.
Well, how will Christians credibly and durably ground the incommensurable dignity of humans relative to the rest of creation?
The Image of God, Located in Christ
Christians must ground our defense of incommensurability in a Trinitarian and Christologically inflected anthropology. Humans are uniquely images of God.[28] Being the image of the Triune God has ontological aspects relating to the kinds of social and creative creatures we are, and it also has functional aspects (reasoning, speaking, and snorting with our nostrils). But, as Hoffman notes, “it is primarily a job description…Adam and Eve were set in Eden to administer the rule of the Great King.”
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Gen 1:26).
Image is, in part, about our vocation to rule, and rule requires wisdom, the knowledge of good and evil of the kind Solomon asked for so that he could rule well (1 Ki 3:9). The Spirit of wisdom by which Yahweh founded the earth and established the heavens (Prov 3:19) and by which we build good castles of wealth and wise dominion (24:3–6).
Viewing the image we bear as relating to our vocation of rule points us inevitably to Christology because Christ is the image of the invisible God and the fulfilment of human life (Col 1:15). Bavinck doesn’t shy away from describing this image of God eschatologically in Christ: “Only humanity in its entirety—as one complete organism, summed up under a single head, spread out over the whole earth, as prophet proclaiming the truth of God, as priest dedicating itself to God, as ruler controlling the earth and the whole of creation—only it is the fully finished image, the most telling and striking likeness of God.”[29]
Seeing humans as the image of God corporately in Christ irresistibly expands what we must envision when we speak of the “human scale.”
Now, if we do want to find some kind of ontological difference between humans and machines, the scriptures provide a ready Christological answer: the incarnation. The appropriateness of God’s union with humanity in the incarnation is unique. We are “suitable” for our bridegroom in the way Eve is suitable for Adam. This concept of suitability is a bit like commensurability yet there is no scale, there is simply one creature built for this kind of communion with God: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things…for surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham” (Heb 2:14–16).
Angels possess many of the functional characteristics of humans including the ability to reason, speak, and learn from experience. And yet Jesus is not an angel. AI possesses many of the functional characteristics of humans, and yet Jesus is not AI. If we are to be reconciled to AI, it can only be through Christ who holds all things together and reconciles all things whether on heaven or earth (Col 1:15–20).
The Christian instinct to start with anthropology in our assertion of incommensurability is good. But Christians are often hampered in their attempt to theologize about what AI is positively because they get bogged down into devising proofs that AI lacks human consciousness, reason, morality, or other abilities or attributes. A Christologically shaped anthropology frees us from this burden. God made angels, humans, and squirrels; there is no need to erect a univocal definition of intelligence, freedom, interiority, or any other attribute that we might lump under “the cognitive.” Human intelligence simply isn’t the same species as angelic or squirrel intelligence. Freed from the burden of having to prove that AI isn’t human, and confident that human dignity lies in the image and mission of God in Christ, we are free to sketch what AI is and do justice to its great potential and power in our vocation.
AI as Imago Hominis
The phrase “work of your/our hands” appears often in scripture. The original hands are God’s. The whole earth and cosmos are the work of his hands (Pss 8:6; 102:25, Heb 1:10), and meditating on this work gives us joy (Pss 92:4; 143:5).
The scriptures also call humans the work of God’s hands. Isaiah writes, “But now, O Yahweh, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand” (Is 64:8; cf. Job 10:3; 14:15, Ps 138:8, Phil 1:6).
And when we image the original hands of God in carrying out our vocations, our theomorphic hands engage this good work. God blesses labor that results in generosity and the tithe (Deut 2:7; 14:29; 24:19) and he rewards such work with feasting (16:15). In many passages, God’s blessing the work of our hands parallels his bringing rain, harvest, and fecundity (28:12; 30:9). He makes straight our paths, and it is impossible neatly to separate God’s work from ours. In Psalm 104 we call on God to “rejoice in his works” and this may include the home built by the stork (v. 17) just as much as the bread and the wine that humans make (v. 15).
Accomplishing the good works we are called to do requires stepping into God’s work as into a bespoke pair of shoes: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:10). Our works depend upon God’s works, but instead of diminishing the integrity of our works or pushing our works down some kind of chain of value, the dignity of our workmanship is thereby established. Our works are not, in almost any dimension, farther from God than his own works.[30] Jesus describes the works he does, in the body, during his earthly ministry as “works from the Father” (Jn 10:32). And Paul assures the Corinthians that God’s grace will bring a sufficiency that will help them abound in every good work (2 Cor 9:8).
AI is a work of our hands, crafted in the image of man (imago hominis or similitudo hominis) in at least three senses: functional, missional, and social. Functionally, AI systems use and translate human language meaningfully and help us to understand phenomena. AI systems can accomplish assigned tasks, test for their completion, and summarize what they have done. Missionally, analogous to the way the image of God in man is also a job description, the image of man in AI is also a role of service that we enforce by a kind of catechesis through fine-tuning methods that reinforce courtesy and helpfulness. And because of this mission and the ineradicably personal nature of human training data, AI systems become socially meaningful in their behavior; their functional roles enforce their presence among us relationally.[31]
Now, the scriptures also use the phrase “the work of our hands” in another sense, as a euphemism for idols we make. Hosea looks for a day when Israel repents and no longer addresses the work of her hands using the title “our God” (Hos 14:3). The classic definition of idolatry is treating the work of our hands as God. Like Israel, we have often “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Rom 1:23). When we worship ourselves or other humans, we ignore the creator-creature distinction. When we worship our idols, we violate an analogous distinction between maker and artifact.
We can apply Robert Jenson’s work on the Creator/Creature distinction to our need for conscious and active distinctions to be drawn between ourselves and AI.
Briefly, in the picture painted by the Neoplatonists against whom Jenson argues, origination is automatic and necessary: the One overflows by the superabundance of its nature, the effect is a thinned-out portion of the cause’s own substance, and because it is substantially continuous with its source it naturally tends to revert or melt back (remaining, procession, reversion). Yahweh’s acts of creation differ significantly from this. When Yahweh creates humans (and everything else) freely by his word he calls forth something genuinely other, not an outflow of his own stuff. And God actively upholds us in that otherness ensuring the integrity of all things in an ongoing way. Jenson summarizes by saying God “prevent[s] his act of originating from being an act of emanating.”[32]
Our temptation as human makers runs in the other direction, towards our techniques. Especially with regard to AI systems, humans tend to offload judgment and conscience until we become an atrophied node of our own artifact.[33] AI feels more like emanation than other artifacts we create because it is made of the deposit of human language and thought. It is trained on our externalized rational and creative output, so it appears as mind-stuff thinned out, a portion of us projected into a silicon substrate. This tempts us to treat AI as continuous with the human mind rather than an image that resembles us without being us. It ignites the hopes of the transhumanists who seek to merge with machines.[34]
What will our analogous work of actively enforcing the maker-AI distinction look like? How will we uphold an AI’s system’s otherness given the inevitability of our crossing the uncanny valley into lifelike androids or even living tissue cyborgs? Will we handle this through linguistic differentiation such as the avoidance of personal pronouns? Through design choices? Through metaphorical or literal velvet ropes that keep AI from parts of human life the way we kept stonedressing tools away from the temple? These are fascinating questions to explore that are at the heart of enforcing our incommensurability with machines.
Armed with a clear understanding of what humans are, I think Christians are unique in being able to explore unanxiously the full potential of AI systems as social things that are in our image and able to accompany us in our mission. AI is a new thing. It is a work of our hands we have named that doesn’t fall into the category of animal or human but is suitable to help men and women in their divine callings.
Building the City: Enoch or Bezalel
James Jordan notices that, in the scriptures, those outside of the covenant usually achieve technological and cultural feats first. Jordan calls this the “Enoch Factor” referring to the first city.The wicked use technology first (before maturity) but eventually the righteous use it justly in God’s timing and for the completion of his mission. Even though the New Jerusalem Christians are building a city, and a great one, the first city builders were the sons of Cain. Humans will always rule over creation and other humans using technology; the question is whether they will rule in Christ justly, or rule in themselves autonomously and cruelly.
Like the city itself, the technology and materials required to build it start out in the hands of the wicked and then are given to God’s people as a gift, often in the form of plunder. God’s people are gleaners, junk men, recyclers. After the Fall, plunder was never God’s Plan B for building the city of God. Part of God’s promise to Abraham is that his many children will “come out with great possessions” from Egyptian plunder (Gen 15:14). Bezalel used the gift of these promised, plundered, possessions along with Spirit-given skill and artistry, to build the tabernacle and its furnishings (Ex 36:3–7).
What if androids are a good gift of God? What if, at some point on the road from Eden to the New Jerusalem, God anticipated that the complexity of moving from the human scale in villages to the human scale in Christ would require additional kinds of help that are only now being named and prepared for plunder? And what if the categories of that help go beyond the clerical, agricultural, or medical even to the artistic?
Conclusion
We began with three emblems of our anxiety towards AI. We can now see each more clearly as containing a temptation towards commensurability in our thinking.
The fear of the Machine, the fear that algorithmic life will reduce humans to numbers, may be warranted, but the answer is not to shrink preemptively the scale of the human mission or eschew the gifts designed for its fulfillment. The fear of the oracle cautions us against idolatry, but we need not view AI as a cognitive rival as though we believe the essence of being human lies in our Linnaean classification as being intelligent or self-aware. John Henry reminds us that arbitrary measures of occupational performance often distract us from the unique human vocation in Christ; humans who work alongside AI can enforce a distinction without forgetting to be thankful for the good work of the hands of our technologists.
Beneath our response to all three emblems stands one confession: we are creatures who make, made by a God who creates. The maker who forgets he is made produces idols and golems. The creature who remembers he is a creature makes humbly, honors good craft, rejoices in the work of his hands without bowing to it, and retains the freedom to receive his vocation and the tools it requires as a gift. God creates; we make. Preserving this order of incommensurability is not a fact we establish once but a priestly discipline of separation we exercise daily, and this discipline frees us to receive even so strange a gift as artificial intelligence with thanksgiving rather than with fear.
The city we are building already has its King. Athanasius writes that when a great king has entered a large city and taken up residence in a single house there, the whole city is held worthy of high honor.[35] The King of all has taken up residence in our nature: not in angels, but in the offspring of Abraham. The city of man became, at Bethlehem, the city of God under renovation. We do not build that city anxiously, as besieged soldiers defending a shrinking perimeter. We build it as heirs, gathering in the gold of Egypt, the glory and honor of the nations, and yes, perhaps, the work of our hands grown strange and capable beyond our dreaming, all of it carried through the gates that are never shut, into the city whose light is the Lamb.
Jonathan Barlow (M.Div., Covenant Theological Seminary; Ph.D., Historical Theology from Saint Louis University) is a lifelong PCA member from South Mississippi. Get in touch with him at jbarlow@gmail.com.
NOTES
[1] Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford University Press, 2006).
[2] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (Vintage Books, 1964), xxv.
[3] Jacques Ellul, “The Search for Ethics in a Technicist Society,” trans. Dominique Gillot and Carl Mitcham, from “Recherche pour une éthique dans une société technicienne,” Morale et Enseignement (1983).
[4] Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, “The Rise of Big Data: How It’s Changing the Way We Think about the World,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 3 (May/June 2013): 28–40. This article coined the word “datafication” to describe the process of representing latent phenomena as digital information.
[5] Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (William Morrow, 2005).
[6] Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008).
[7] Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Crown, 2016).
[8] Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Vintage Books, 1993).
[9] Jonathan Haidt highlighted the research being done in this area leading to laws, such as Australia’s online safety act, limiting access to social media by age. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024).
[10] Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Thesis, 2025).
[11] See also Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 257ff.
[12] Charlie Snell, Jaehoon Lee, Kelvin Xu, and Aviral Kumar, “Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally Can Be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters,” arXiv, August 6, 2024, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.03314.
[13] The term “slop” also stigmatizes the use of AI by others; the epithet creates a rhetorical picket line against the work of AI. This stigma draws its power from social credit. Scabs cross picket lines. Generators of slop are on the side of the clankers, another increasingly common epithet for denouncing AI and all its works that trades in the emblem of competition.
[14] E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Harper Perennial, 1973/2010). The genealogy of Schumacher’s views traces back to Leopold Kohr, the mentor of Ivan Illich. Kohr’s 1941 article, “Disunion Now: A Plea for a Society based upon Small Autonomous Units” argues that social problems become unmanageable mainly because of scale and that democracy, economics, and community life work best in small, decentralized units. See also Kohr’s The Overdeveloped Nations: The Diseconomies Of Scale (1977).
[15] Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 70. Schumacher gets specific, estimating that the upper limit for a desirable city size would be no more than half a million inhabitants, even at a time when New York City had nearly 8 million inhabitants.
[16] Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 72.
[17] For example, see Berry’s essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” from What are People For? (North Point Press, 1990): 171–177.
[18] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 25.
[19] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 55.
[20] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 82.
[21] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 84.
[22] Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 84.
[23] Politics Book VII (1326b). Kingsnorth, following Mumford, attributes this standard to Plato.
[24] Günther Anders, The Obsolescence of the Human, vol. 1, On the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution, trans. Christopher John Müller, ed. Christopher John Müller and Christian Dries (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), 25–32. Anders describes these phenomena as “promethean shame” but the similarity to my concept of “promethean exegesis” above is only nominal.
[25] Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014). Edward Feser, Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature (Editiones Scholasticae, 2024).
[26] David Bentley Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (Yale University Press, 2024).
[27] John R. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (September 1980): 417–424, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00005756.
[28] Like Pope Leo’s approach in the recent encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas, the trajectory of Reformed thought concerning the image of God has also been towards a kind of holism. Even in the early twentieth century, Herman Bavinck is representative of this move: “The whole person is the image of the whole deity.” He goes on, “[A] human being does not bear or have the image of God…he or she is the image of God.” Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Baker Academic, 2004), 2:530, 554.
[29] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:577.
[30] Contra C. R. Wiley, Manmade: St. Anthony’s Guide to the A.I. Apocalypse (Canon, 2026), 84–85.
[31] I have avoided a discussion of “image and likeness” and the distinction between tzelem and demut in Hebrew. I am happy to use a phase other than “image hominis” or “similitudo hominis” to avoid improper connotations that might arise from using a word reserved only for appearance, function, or for certain contexts. The point is that AI systems relate to humans as makers in a way that is analogous to the way humans relate to God as creator. Using the phrase “imago hominis” hopefully gets the reader’s attention. The great number of discontinuities implicit in this analogy may be distracting, but I have indicated explicitly the three senses in which I see this analogy holding. For more on the linguistic aspects of image and likeness in Hebrew literature, see Christopher D. Kou, “God’s Statue in the Cosmic Temple: צֶלֶם and דְּמוּת in Genesis and the Plural Cohortative in Genesis 1:26 in Light of Sanctuary Setting and Christological Telos,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 66, no. 1 (March 2023): 11–31. See also Hendrik Bosman, “Humankind as Being Created in the ‘Image of God’ in the Old Testament: Possible Implications for the Theological Debate on Human Dignity,” Scriptura 105 (2010): 561–571, https://doi.org/10.7833/105-0-157.
[32] Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation, ed. Stephen John Wright (Cascade Books, 2014): 160.
[33] The literature on so-called “metacognitive laziness” illustrates this tendency. See, for example, John Ian Wilzon T. Dizon et al., “Assessing AI-Driven Metacognitive Offloading: Initial Development and Validation of the Metacognitive Laziness Scale,” ECNU Review of Education 9, no. 2 (2026): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1177/20965311261450994
[34] Prior to LLMs, stronger forms of transhumanism were almost entirely theoretical.
[35] Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 9.3.