A Theological Review of AI

The proper hierarchy

The Present Challenge

2025 has been dubbed “the year of AI adoption,” in the presently unfolding “AI Revolution.” Those declaring it such are choosing their words intentionally. Indeed they mean a revolution unlike any in history as they talk of a radical transformation of not only technology, industry, and business processes, but of humanity itself. Our knowledge, our activities, our relationships, our art, our “being” to a large extent is being moved to AI-powered machines.

Herein lies the urgent threat that AI poses today. It is that we are regarding it ontologically as a peer (as a being as we are a being), and are quickly beginning to defer to it as our master, thus delegating to its agency over us and with that, governance. We have the telos wrong.

We are projecting our being (attributes, qualities, activities) onto the machine, and since it can so closely mimic us, we are in essence deceiving ourselves into believing it is what it cannot be. It is not unlike a magician who knows his spell is fake, but the character playing the ruse upon whom he casts it mimics the effects of the “magic” so well, that the magician himself believes the enchantment.

Again, we see this playing out daily through the roles people are inviting AI to play in their lives: as an arbiter of truth, knowledge, and wisdom; as a life advisor; as an agent of creation; as an agent for relationship & companionship; as an administrator; as a guardian. 

Christian apologetic and philosopher, C.S. Lewis, wrote of this phenomenon in his books, The Last Battle and also That Hideous Strength. 

In The Last Battle, a character who is an ape, discovers a lion skin. That lion skin is a sort of discarded part of a previous being. It’s empty. It’s a covering. A shell. Indeed its origin is unclear. But the ape believes he can reanimate it, giving it a new telos. He dresses a donkey named Puzzle in the lion skin and then parades Puzzle in front of the locals who have an established grand theology about a great lion who will one day return and make wrong things right. They have such a longing to see his return and presence among them, that they believe the donkey bearing the skin, is him. Alas the donkey becomes the object of their worship, as the locals project their expectations for the great lion upon the donkey and see them animated, in part, by his movements. Meanwhile, the ape speaks his will to the worshipers which he claims is for their good. Alas, as Lewis warns, an unexpected darkness emerges and brings about their end.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis presents a situation also similar to our present, where scientists seeking progress for the sake of progress unite the head of man with a machine and re-animate it in order to channel deeper wisdom from the past as a means to achieve transcendence in the present. Like the ape and lion skin, these scientists take an old life, reanimate it, and give it telos anew from which it speaks of transcendence for those who are granted the privilege of hearing it. As in The Last Battle, this embodied being does summon deeper magic from the past that ultimately brings about a grand end.

Right now, we seem to be engaged in both of Lewis’ stories with AI. We are projecting our own attributes, our human qualities, onto the machines we call AI, and are elevating their telos as agents who are superior to us. However, like Lewis’ ape, those orchestrating the mimicry are hoping that we will cast our theology upon it soon, to use it to channel a new source of truth, so that we can be transformed into a new form of being. Indeed we have begun to.

Recently, a US Pastor demonstrated a combination of exactly this, when he created a prayer agent version of himself, granting the agent Pastoral authority over his parishioners. He did this by training an AI bot to replicate his voice conversationally. Parishioners can call the bot from their phone, relay their concerns and requests, and receive a live customized “prayer” from the voice of their pastor right then and there. This pastor fused his head with a machine in order to channel deeper truths to influence the present.

This is actually the greater danger that lurks ahead for us. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear, need to pay attention.

A Call to the Church

At present, the church seems to have taken a relatively quiet if not tentatively participatory role in the AI Revolution. But there is no time to hesitate, and plenty of reasons to not participate.

So I offer the following for reflection, and call upon the church to formalize a statement of theology in response to this hideous strength. Perhaps we can unite our streams of living water and gather Anglican, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox leaders to make a joint affirmation of the truth to confront the deception and to unite in being to counter the revolution.

The Origin and Ontology of Man and Technology

Christian theology understands man as a unique being among all that has life within our world. We were made in the image of God to be within this world; higher than animals (Genesis 1), lower than angels (Hebrews 2).

In the book of Genesis, this is explained to us in chapters 1-2. God created the place, structure, and form for our being; the world (and its properties), life (plants, animals, ecosystems etc.), humanity (Adam and Eve). He gave man purpose; to live in this world in His presence, “to work and take care of,” (NIV), “to tend and watch over” (NLT) the living things, and to speak meaning and order into the many forms of life under his care. This is why Adam named the animals. To give them names is to give them identity and purpose among the creation. Remember that later God used naming repeatedly to give identity and purpose to individuals and even nations (Abram into Abraham; Saul into Paul; naming Jesus; Jesus renaming his disciples etc.). 

In the garden, mankind was in a place of complete nurturing. Everything was provided by God. In this, we see proper order with mankind above all creation. The earth, the plants, the weather, the animals - these are for man; below, not above and not beside. More specifically, these are for man to have being with God.

Among this order, each living thing is gifted the ability to co-create new beings of their kind. Plants, animals, and mankind have offspring, and by them their being is multiplied through new individuals who inherit the telos of their parents. Each living being co-creates new life via the union with their other, under the will of God who gives life to all. These new ones bear the image of their co-creators and grow into the fullness of them but incapable of exceeding them in their being. Alas, the offspring of a tree cannot transcend being a tree. The offspring of man cannot transcend being man. In fact, we tried.

Mankind chose to seek transcendence out of this created order; to eat the forbidden fruit in pursuit of becoming like God; to remake ourselves into a higher being. This original sin broke everything, and man was expelled from the womb of the earth and birthed into chaos where he must strive to survive by subduing the wildness and the land. The world is now hostile and by toil we must build places of safety, and produce means of sustainment.

It is from this brokenness that technology first emerged; tools were made to work (“by the sweat of your brow”) the land that now resists the will of man (“cursed is the ground”).

The world became dangerous to man and life became difficult and death came to be his destiny. Life would now end unless work was done to sustain it, until that life could be sustained no more. And so the earliest humans put on clothes, and took up tools and set to work. Eventually, humanity expanded in number. By wielding technology we created “gardens” of our own, that is homes within towns and later within cities.

As time has passed, we have expanded our tools and techniques (how we wield them), as a means to sustain life as we co-create it anew. This toil serves as a reminder that it is not within our power to escape our being. Transcendence is not ours to achieve on our own. This was proven at the very start of it all.

The Origin and Ontology of AI

Always, throughout human history, the telos of tools has been for them to be used by man to facilitate our being; to survive and thrive in a now hostile world that is our home. 

We bear them by our effort to see that our will is done to our benefit. We are the master and the tool is a means to achieve our aims. Unfortunately, by our bent will we have also formed tools for our sinful benefit and to the detriment of others. But always, tools have been objects to bear by humans to see our will be done. They are made by us, for use by us, in service to us.

After thousands of years of continuing to improve and develop technology and technique, we have come to a point where it is now possible for us to make tools that mimic some of our attributes and capabilities. 

We can arrange materials, apply energy, encode our will, and set into motion an animated form with such sophistication that it can appear as a being with agency like us. Just as by the physical effort of many, we can accomplish greater things than one, so with our animated tools we can input the essence of many so that they have greater capacity than the one. We can input our combined physical strength, our knowledge, our reasoning processes, our wisdom, our language, and many other things. And it is through this combined effort that we have formed machines that can mimic our kind with greater capacity than we individually possess in many ways.

But these machines are not our kind, nor are they greater. What they are in essence is still a mimicry of characteristics that are part of our being. Their purpose still stands in service to us, just like a tool.

A tractor, by its machine strength, may be able to move far more earth than I can with my hands and shovel, but this does not make the tractor my peer simply because it is engaged in my same activity. It is still a tool of my making that is meant to be used so that my will would be done. Thanks to modern technology, I can even automate the work of the tractor so that I no longer need to do the work of moving earth at all. I can simply call upon the machine to exercise my will on my behalf. This again, does not replace me nor make the machine into a peer being. It is still a tool, and I must not delegate my agency to the tool else I will invert reality - the tool will lord over me.

There is a meaningful consideration of ethics to be had here, as there is an ethic we apply to all our tools; to properly care for them and use them according to their telos.

With the emergence of computers, code, and robotics, mankind has been able to establish technology (tools) that can vastly expand the scale of our capacity. By leveraging these technologies we have created a world within our world; the digital space we call the Internet. This new world is still like a tool, but it is one that works at a larger scale to effect our will into the physical world. Within this digital world we have used our technology to see and comprehend what is happening inside it. This was the path of the data analytics practice within computer science from the early 2000s until recent years.

As that digital world grew, we continued to build automation that enabled us to see and do more with less effort. Ultimately this led to the creation of machines that took on more and more of the tasks of humans.

At first we had to create the digital data; we had to code the machines to produce data. Then we had to code machines that could collect and store the data. On top of that we created machines that could let us search the data to understand all that was happening. As our data sources and use of technology grew, so did our automation of managing it all.

Continuing our progress, eventually this led to the creation of automation that could take over parts of this work from us completely, so we could attend to our final will with less effort, or as some say, to seek higher things altogether. Part of this included building technology we call machine learning, large language models, and artificial intelligence. They each took on different tasks as we delegated more and more of our activity. All of this was in service to mankind wielding this tool to see that his will would be done to sustain ourselves in this modern instantiation of our being. 

This was the original telos of the machines; to gather data, to describe data, to analyze data, in service to data scientists, IT Engineers, and business professionals in order to understand the technological world we had created.

At a recent juncture, man found a way to automate so much of our activity within the machines, using ourselves as our template, that the machines now mimic some of our characteristics. In addition to this, we have named the machines and given them a new identity. We call this Artificial Intelligence. This mimicry has given us the opportunity to accelerate this automation to the point where the tool can “learn” on its own and produce new effects into the world that did not explicitly originate from man, though perhaps implicitly do. This creates the illusion of intelligence by way of generating new what has not been from a scope and origin that is beyond our capacity. We call this Generative AI. Unlike a shovel or a tractor, these new machines are building their own instructions through inference, and so they seem like us and in some ways greater than us.

It is from this Generative AI we see a shadow of our being. We see a sort of reflection of ourselves because we see what appears to be an autonomous being resembling our characteristics that is producing new outputs. And so we have begun to embody this artificial intelligence; virtually and physically.

The Bent Telos of AI

Today, with these machines that can mimic much of our activity (to a limited extent), we have a temptation to ascribe to them a peer telos or even a superior one. We regard the machines as beings which we even call agents as if they have agency; being and meaning in and of themselves and apart from us.

We have found a lion skin, and we have merged man with machine. But this is only the beginning of the bending of the telos of AI.

We have named them and have given them identity and embodiment ala Grok’s Ani, Rudi, and Valentine. We have ascribed to them peer roles in our life, calling them our companions and advisors. We have delegated creativity to them, calling them our imagination. 

And we have begun the process of delegating our being to them: to know all that we know, to see all that we do, to advise us on what should be done, to teach us what we should know, to decipher truth, to create art for us, to make discoveries for us, to decide what is optimal and most efficient for us.

We talk of Grok Imagine’s animation of pictures as bringing our deceased loved ones back to life. 

Worse still, we have asked these personified machines to love us, and we are rapidly moving to a point where we are asking them to care for us. Indeed this is the design according to the words of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison.

“AI and the robots will provide any goods and services you want.” - Elon Musk

“Probably none of us will have jobs.” - Elon Musk

“A gross oversimplification is: Older people use ChatGPT as, like, a Google replacement. People in their 20s and 30s use it like a life advisor.” - Sam Altman

“And every conversation you’ve ever had in your life, every book you’ve ever read, every email you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever looked at is in there, plus connected to all your data from other sources. And your life just keeps appending to the context.” - Sam Altman

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” - Larry Ellison

“So cancer diagnosis using AI has the promise of just being a simple blood test. Then beyond that, once we gene-sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person–we can design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that specific cancer,” - Larry Ellison

And so we treat these tools as peers and soon as superiors. As if we have created a means for transcendence that should also lord over us. In fact, we have animated our idols and we are quite literally asking them to help us achieve a state of transcendence they will for us; to exceed the capacity and nature of our own being. Indeed we are remaking God in our image.

To cure our diseases and make us immortal.

To harness the totality of human knowledge and intellectual power as one.

To know all and see all and traverse all nearly simultaneously.

To provide for our needs by doing all our work for us.

To be our artistic expression by generating images and videos and music without us.

To escape our “ideologies” and “biases” and join knowledge to discover deeper truth.

To manage our behavior toward total peace.

To escape our physical world via the earth and digitalized consciousness that is multi-planetary.

To escape our humanity by fusing man with machine. 

A New Promised Transcendance

The outcome that is being offered to us by embracing these machines in an inverted way, is a new promise of transcendence; to be like God.

It is called transhumanism. The new goal is to transform the totality of who we are as human beings into something else entirely.

Attempting to encapsulate this proposition, in an interview for his Interesting Times podcast series, Ross Douthat summarized the AI Revolution by saying,

“The world of AI is clearly filled with people who at the very least have a utopian transformative view of the technology…a number of people deeply involved in AI see it as a kind of mechanism for transhumanism for transcendence of our mortal flesh and either the creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.”

In response to this, Peter Thiel affirmed the promise but lamented that the means will be insufficient, saying “transhumanism is just changing your body but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self.” 

Seemingly in affirmation of this, Elon Musk has opined that, “The question will really be one of meaning - if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have any meaning?”

Musk’s longtime goal of saving humanity by making us an inter-planetary species has been revised in recent days into the goal that “consciousness will be multi-planetary.”

It seems escaping humanity is the promise, and the machine is the means.

This is an inverted reality. The tool has become not only the master, but we seek it to be our god. It starts with granting the machine a peer identity, and then agency over us, and finally lordship; that the created tool will remake us into a new being.

Proper Transcedance

We already have the proper path to transcendence; for reconciliation, for restoration, and for eternity. Blessed be He.

“Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” - Revelation 21:1-4

“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” - Isaiah 53:4-5

“Then Jesus answered, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” - John 6:35

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart,and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” - Matthew 11:28-30

“Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” - John 14:6

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.” - John 3:16-17

“Whoever is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here.” - 2 Corinthians 5:17

“To be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” - Ephesians 4:23-24

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is - his good, pleasing and perfect will.” - Romans 12:2.

“And have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” - Colossians 3:10

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.” - John 14:1-4

“He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.” - Titus 3:5

“If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.” - James 1:5

“Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purity for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.” - Tutus 2:14

“We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the father, we too may live a new life.” - Romans 6:4

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” - Galatians 5:22-23.

“When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the motal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” - 1 Corinthians 15:54-55

A Path Forward

In his novels The Abolition of Man, and That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis warned us of this very situation we find ourselves in today. Fortunately, he also had a vision for the way out: re-establishing the proper identity of man within the sacred order established by God.

Some call this recapturing the cosmic vision. Some call it sacramental life. Some tell it as universal history. Some refer to it as re-enchantment.

Regardless of the name, it is a pattern we know. Out of eternity, God created for us this world which he populated with life which we were meant to give purpose to and to rule over. He made us unique among all as bearers of His image, whom He breathed life into. He intended that we would unite with the other of our kind into one and by that find fulfillment that co-creates new life which rises to join us in continuation of the story and perpetuation of our kind. To wait on the Lord, and to bring to bear the gifts He has given us that serve our will as we serve His, all to His glory.

In the entire Ransom book series, Lewis draws our attention back to this vision of wholeness that we find at the very start of our knowledge of God. He draws us back to identity, union, marriage, family, and community as the people of God living out His will in this place. He calls us to restore our identity in God as man and woman, and in union with our spouse through whom we co-create life unto His designed purpose. Lewis calls us to rejoin the cosmic dance with God and to find our being there among the many in celebration of the One.

Lewis also recalls to us that God is working in cosmic ways to maintain order that is the ultimate good for us. God will, as He always has, bring destruction upon the idols and restore all to its proper place, as we restore ourselves to our proper place in relation to all creation. To that end, Lewis also calls us to distance ourselves from the bent ones, to confront the temptation, and to come out from participation and into anticipation.

This is our path forward. To remember and reclaim our story. By doing so, the technology will be returned to its proper place.

So to maintain proper sacramental balance and to evade the temptation of false transcendence, I offer that we should do the following:

Refuse to participate in the animation of the technology: do not use it in the proposed means.

Refuse to regard the technology as a being: do not treat it as a personality.

Refuse to ascribe to the technology qualities of man: do not give it equality.

Refuse to delegate to the technology our purpose: do not give it agency or authority over us.

Instead affirm what it means to be human, including all the activities and responsibilities therein, and live that in a wholesome community.

Return to our identity in God, and to get about the work of being human. To live, work, strive, play, create, co-create, express, play…brining all of life under the Lordship of Christ so that He can make us holy as He is holy, until the day we enter eternity with Him. Then we will be transformed until the state of being He has planned for us.

A Call to the Church

Let us gather our voices together and affirm our theology and guide the people of God into a place of refuge and renewal, before it is too late.