Something unprecedented is happening, and the church is largely silent.
Not silent in the way we’re sometimes silent before mystery, that pregnant, worshipful hush that precedes genuine encounter with the Holy. No, this is a different kind of silence. It’s the silence of confusion. Of overwhelm. Of a community uncertain how to speak a theological word into a moment that feels both utterly new and strangely ancient.
Artificial intelligence is now woven into the fabric of daily existence. It curates the news we read, shapes the diagnoses our physicians consider, determines who receives loans and who is flagged as a security risk, and writes code, poetry, and legal briefs. Large language models can now pass professional licensing examinations, engage in nuanced philosophical debate, and generate images of such verisimilitude that the distinction between captured reality and synthesised fiction has become functionally meaningless for most observers. Autonomous systems make decisions with consequences that ripple across economies, ecosystems, and individual lives.
And here we stand, followers of the One who spoke the cosmos into being, who breathed life into dust, who took on flesh and dwelt among us, uncertain whether we have anything distinctive to say.
We do. We must.
The Temptation of Technological Totalism
The dominant narrative around artificial intelligence oscillates between breathless utopianism and apocalyptic dread. On one side, prophets of technological salvation promise that superintelligent machines will solve climate change, cure cancer, eliminate poverty, and usher humanity into a post-scarcity paradise. On the other hand, doomsayers warn of existential catastrophe, systems that escape human control, economic displacement on a civilisation-ending scale, and the reduction of human beings to obsolete relics of biological history.
Both narratives share a common feature that should immediately alert the theologically attentive: they’re fundamentally eschatological. They traffic in ultimacy. They position artificial intelligence as either saviour or destroyer, as the hinge upon which the human story will turn. They invite us to place our hope, or our fear, in machines.
“The threat isn’t that AI will replace us. The threat is that we’ll forget who we are.”
This is the old temptation in new garments. The tower of Babel was also a technology project, an attempt to secure human destiny through human ingenuity, to build a structure that would reach the heavens and make a name for its builders. The golden calf was a technology, a manufactured object onto which ultimate trust was transferred. The empires that have risen and fallen throughout history have each believed themselves to be the culmination of progress, the final word.
The Christian tradition has always known that technologies, like all created things, are neither neutral nor ultimate. They aren’t neutral because they shape us even as we shape them. The medium is never merely instrumental; it forms habits of attention, patterns of relationship, assumptions about what matters and what is possible.[1] And they aren’t ultimate because the arc of history bends not toward algorithmic optimisation. Still, toward the reconciliation of all things in Christ, a hope that no machine can deliver and no machine can thwart.
Our first theological task, then, is to name this moment rightly: neither to baptise the hype nor to succumb to the panic. We’re witnessing a genuinely significant technological transition, one that will reshape labour, communication, creativity, and warfare in ways we can’t yet fully anticipate. But we aren’t witnessing the arrival of a new god. We aren’t standing at the edge of redemption or annihilation by silicon. We’re living through a chapter in the ongoing human story, a story that remains, as it has always been, under the sovereign care of the One who was and is and is to come.
Image-Bearers in an Age of Intelligent Machines
The question of what it means to be human has never been more urgent.
For centuries, theologians and philosophers have defined human distinctiveness in terms of capacities: reason, language, creativity, moral agency, and consciousness. We’re the beings who think, who speak, who create, who choose, who are aware of ourselves being aware. These capacities were understood as reflections of the divine image, marks of the Creator’s imprint upon creatures uniquely formed for relationship with the Holy One.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t simply challenge this framework; it renders it philosophically precarious. Large language models generate text that is grammatically coherent, contextually appropriate, and at times genuinely insightful. Image generators produce art that evokes an emotional response. Game-playing systems develop strategies no human has conceived. If human distinctiveness rests on these functional capacities, what happens when machines replicate them?
Some will respond by moving the goalposts, insisting that machines don’t really understand, don’t really create, don’t really feel. There is something to this response. The computational processes that generate large language model outputs aren’t phenomenologically equivalent to human thought. There is no evidence of subjective experience in these systems, no inner theatre of meaning-making. They’re, in a technical sense, very sophisticated pattern-matching engines.
But this defence, while not without merit, misses the deeper theological point. The Christian tradition has never finally grounded human dignity in capacities, not in reason, not in language, not in creativity, not in consciousness. It has grounded human dignity in relationship. We’re made in the image of God, and this imaging isn’t primarily about what we can do but about whom we’re made for. We’re the creatures addressed by name, called into covenant, invited into communion.[2] Our capacities don’t earn our dignity; it’s bestowed by the One who knew us before we were formed in the womb.
“The image of God is a relationship to be received and enjoyed.”
This is liberating news. It means that human beings who can’t reason at high levels, infants, those with profound cognitive disabilities, and people at the end stages of dementia are no less image-bearers than those at the peak of intellectual capacity. And it means that machines, however sophisticated their outputs, don’t become image-bearers by mimicking human functions. The image of God isn’t a feature to be replicated; it’s a relationship to be received.
Yet we must be careful not to become triumphalist here. The fact that machines can’t become image-bearers doesn’t mean their development poses no challenge to human flourishing. The opposite may be true. If we reduce ourselves to our functional capacities, if we allow economic systems, social structures, and cultural narratives to define human worth by productivity and cognitive performance, then we’ll have already surrendered the very understanding of humanity that protects us. The threat isn’t that AI will replace us. The danger is that we’ll forget who we are.
The Attention Economy and the Formation of Souls
Here’s where the pastoral dimension becomes urgent.
Long before large language models captured public imagination, machine learning systems were already reshaping human consciousness through social media algorithms, recommendation engines, and targeted advertising. These systems are optimised to capture and hold attention, and they’re extraordinarily effective. The average person now spends multiple hours daily in digitally mediated environments designed by some of the most sophisticated engineering teams in history to maximise engagement.
“Attention is the currency of the soul. What we attend to, we become, and what or Who we worship, we reflect.”
The consequences for spiritual formation are profound. Attention isn’t a neutral resource to be allocated; it’s the currency of the soul. What we attend to, we become.[3]The spiritual masters of every tradition have known this: that prayer is fundamentally a discipline of attention, that contemplation is learning to see, that the distracted mind is incapable of deep formation. When our attention is constantly fragmented, pulled toward novelty, controversy, and superficial stimulation, we become fragmented people, anxious, reactive, unable to sustain the patient presence that love requires.
The church has always understood that formation happens through practice. We become who we are through what we do repeatedly. The liturgical rhythms of worship, the disciplines of prayer and fasting, the habits of hospitality and service, these aren’t arbitrary religious requirements but the very means by which Christ is formed in us. When algorithmic systems train us in different habits, the habit of scrolling, of outrage, of curated self-presentation, of constant comparison, they’re forming us into different kinds of people.
This isn’t a call to technological withdrawal. The Amish option isn’t available to most of us, nor is it necessarily faithful. We’re called to be present to our moment, to engage the world as it is, to bear witness in the midst of whatever cultural currents we find ourselves navigating. But engagement mustn’t mean capitulation. The church needs to develop robust practices of digital wisdom, not as a set of rules about screen time but as a spirituality of attention in an age of distraction.
What might this look like? It might look like recovering the practice of Sabbath, not merely as a day off but as a countercultural declaration that our lives aren’t defined by productivity, that we aren’t always available, that the world can turn without us for twenty-four hours. It might look like learning to pray with our phones in another room, reclaiming the silent spaces where the still small voice can be heard. It might look like building communities where we encounter one another in the full complexity of embodied presence rather than through the flattening lens of social media profiles.
Justice and the Algorithmic Order
But personal spiritual practices, vital as they are, can’t be the whole of our response. The God of Scripture is a God of justice, and the prophetic tradition demands that we attend not only to the formation of individual souls but to the shape of social structures. Here, too, artificial intelligence poses challenges that require theological engagement.
Consider the question of algorithmic bias. Machine learning systems are trained on historical data, which reflects historical injustices. When these systems are deployed to make consequential decisions about hiring, lending, medical treatment, and criminal sentencing, they can perpetuate and amplify existing inequities. Studies have documented that facial recognition systems perform significantly worse on darker-skinned faces; that recidivism prediction algorithms reinforce racialised patterns in the criminal justice system; and that hiring algorithms replicate the demographic imbalances of past workforces.[4]
The technical response to these problems is essential: better data, more diverse training sets, algorithmic audits, and fairness constraints. But the theological question cuts deeper. These systems encode particular assumptions about what counts as risk, qualification, and success. They operationalise definitions of human flourishing that may be radically at odds with the kingdom of God. When an algorithm defines the ideal job candidate by reference to the characteristics of past successful employees, it enshrines as objective truth what may be the accumulated prejudice of human gatekeepers.
The prophetic tradition teaches us to be suspicious of systems that claim neutrality while reinforcing the advantage of the already-advantaged. It teaches us to ask: Who benefits from this arrangement? Whose voices were not included in its design? What assumptions about human worth and social ordering are embedded in its logic? These aren’t merely technical questions to be resolved by engineers. They’re questions of justice that demand the engagement of communities formed by the memory of liberation, by the story of a God who hears the cry of the oppressed.
The church has work to do here, not primarily as technology experts (though some of us may be) but as bearers of a different imagination. We have a story to tell about human dignity that isn’t reducible to algorithmic inputs and outputs. We have practices of discernment that attend to the stranger, the marginal, the easily overlooked. We have a prophetic mandate to speak truth to power, even when power speaks in the neutral-seeming language of optimisation and efficiency.
Truth, Trust, and the Epistemological Crisis
We’re living through an epistemological crisis, a crisis of knowing and believing.
The capacity to generate synthetic media, images, audio, and video that appear authentic but are entirely fabricated represents a qualitative shift in the information environment. We’re approaching a threshold beyond which seeing will no longer be believing, where any piece of evidence can be plausibly claimed to be fake, where the default posture toward information becomes suspicion. The implications for democratic discourse, for journalism, for the possibility of shared truth are severe.
But the crisis of truth isn’t primarily technological. It’s spiritual. Long before deepfakes, we had become a people for whom truth was instrumental, a tool to be deployed in service of other ends rather than a good to be sought for its own sake. Post-truth culture did not begin with AI; it started with the slow erosion of practices and communities oriented toward truth-telling.
The Christian tradition has resources here. We follow one who declared, “I’m the way, the truth, and the life.” Truth, in this proclamation, isn’t merely propositional; it’s personal. It’s encountered in a relationship. And this suggests that the restoration of truth-telling can’t be accomplished by technological fixes alone, better fact-checking algorithms, or more reliable authentication systems, critical as these may be. It requires the recovery of communities oriented toward truthfulness as a way of life.
The church, at its best, is such a community. It’s a place where confession is practised, where we name our failures honestly rather than constructing flattering narratives. It’s a place where we commit ourselves to speaking the truth in love, even when truth is costly. It’s a place where we learn to trust one another through long fidelity, through the slow work of keeping promises over time. These practices won’t solve the deepfake problem. But they may cultivate in us the kind of truthful character that can navigate an age of epistemic uncertainty without descending into nihilism or paranoia.
Work, Vocation, and the Coming Disruption
The economic implications of artificial intelligence are impossible to predict with precision. Some analysts project massive displacement as automation extends beyond routine manual tasks into cognitive and creative domains. Others anticipate new forms of work emerging, as they have in previous technological transitions. Both outcomes may prove true in different sectors and at different speeds.
What is clear is that the meaning of human work is at stake. For many people, work isn’t merely a source of income; it’s a source of identity, dignity, social connection, and purpose. The Protestant tradition elevated work to a vocation, a calling through which we participate in God’s creative and sustaining activity in the world.[5] When that vocation is threatened or eliminated, the wound isn’t only economic but existential.
The Christian response can’t be to baptise the coming disruption as progress or to resist it as demonic. It must involve deeper theological reflection on the relationship between human dignity and human work. The Sabbath command reminds us that our productivity doesn’t define us, that rest, not labour, is the goal toward which creation moves. The feeding of the five thousand and the vision of manna in the wilderness suggest a God who provides abundantly, outside the calculus of merit and exchange. These texts don’t offer an economic programme. But they de-centre work from the place of ultimate significance, creating space for a more expansive understanding of human flourishing.
If significant displacement does occur, the church will need to be a place where people can find belonging and purpose outside the structures of paid employment. This isn’t a new challenge; the church has always ministered to those at the margins of economic systems. But the scale may be new, and our imagination will need to expand accordingly.
Witness in the Age of Intelligent Machines
What, finally, is the posture of Christian witness in this moment?
It’s a posture of engaged hope. Not optimism, optimism is cheap, and the challenges ahead are real. But hope: the conviction that history isn’t careening toward meaningless chaos or algorithmic control but is held in the hands of a faithful God who is making all things new. This hope doesn’t make us passive. It frees us to engage without desperation, to act without the illusion that everything depends on us, to work for justice and wisdom, knowing that the final word has already been spoken.
It’s a posture of humble wisdom. We don’t have all the answers. The technical complexities are real, the ethical dilemmas are genuine, and the future is uncertain. But we have a tradition of moral reflection, a community of discernment. This story teaches us to attend to the vulnerable and to be suspicious of the claims of the powerful. We bring these resources to the conversation not as experts in machine learning but as participants in the long human struggle to live faithfully before God.
It’s a posture of embodied presence. In an age of increasing virtualisation, the church continues to gather people in physical space, to share bread and wine, to lay hands on the sick and dying, to baptise with water, to embrace the grieving. This embodied practice isn’t a quaint relic; it’s a prophetic witness to the incarnational heart of Christian faith. God did not send an algorithm. God became flesh. And the communities that bear witness to this scandalous particularity have something essential to offer a world increasingly mediated by screens.
It’s a posture of patient formation. Quick fixes or clever strategies won’t meet the challenges of this moment. They require the slow cultivation of wisdom, the long obedience in the same direction, and the daily practices of attention, prayer, and love that shape us into people capable of faithful discernment. The church has been forming people for two thousand years. This work continues.
We aren’t the first generation to face disorienting technological change, and we won’t be the last. But we’re the generation called to bear witness in this particular moment, to name the idolatries of our age, to protect the dignity of those whom economic systems would discard, to tell the truth when lies proliferate, to gather communities of formation when attention fragments, to hold open the space of hope when despair beckons.
“The breath came before the algorithm. The Word was spoken before the code was written.”
The breath came before the algorithm. The Word was spoken before the code was written. And when all the systems have run their course, when the servers cool and the data centres fall silent, the love that called the cosmos into being will still be singing over creation, making all things new.
This is our hope. This is our witness. This is the word we have to speak.
Bibliography
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics III/2. Translated by G. W. Bromiley et al. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960.
Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 77–91.
Kelsey, David. Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology. 2 vols. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009.
Volf, Miroslav. Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper & Row, 1951.
References
[1] This insight is indebted to McLuhan, Understanding Media.
[2] For theological anthropology grounding the imago Dei in relationality rather than capacities, see Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2; and more recently, Kelsey, Eccentric Existence.
[3] On attention and spiritual formation, see Weil, Waiting for God; and Smith, Desiring the Kingdom.
[4] See Buolamwini and Gebru, “Gender Shades”; and Noble, Algorithms of Oppression.
[5] On vocation and work, see especially Volf, Work in the Spirit.
