Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
How Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox thinkers from Ellul and Guardini to Herzfeld and Waters have argued about what machines are for and what humans are.
Machines now do things we once filed under distinctively human: reasoning, conversation, creativity, the appearance of empathy. Technology, as George Grant argued decades ago, is a way of being in the world rather than a neutral tool. I argue that the Christian traditions share three convictions about technology (the uniqueness of the person made in the image of God, the goodness of created matter, and the priority of love over efficiency) while bringing distinct resources to bear, and I show this by following the argument from Genesis through Ellul and Guardini to the fight over transhumanism.
The biblical narrative supplies two poles, and Christian argument has oscillated between them ever since. On one side stands the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28, the command to fill the earth and subdue it, read as authorization for cultivation and invention. Human beings become sub-creators participating in God's ordering of creation, Tolkien's term for literary art applied to technological making. On the other stands Babel in Genesis 11, collective ambition cast as overreach that provokes judgment. Stewardship and hubris: the tension runs through the tradition and has not relaxed.
Jacques Ellul, the French Reformed lay theologian and sociologist, gives the sharpest diagnosis. In The Technological Society and later The Technological Bluff, he argued that modern technology is not a collection of tools but an autonomous system he called technique, defined by the pursuit of efficiency. Technique tends toward totality, absorbing every domain of life into its logic and leaving little room for freedom or transcendence. His response was Barthian: against technique's totalizing claims he set the freedom of God and of the person redeemed in Christ, calling for critical resistance rather than sacralization or flight. The danger, on his account, is not technology as such but our tendency to invest it with the significance that belongs to God alone. The optimization logic he named finds its apotheosis in systems built to maximize an objective function, and his warning that technique escapes control reads now as the alignment problem stated fifty years early.
Romano Guardini makes the Catholic version of the case. Letters from Lake Como and The End of the Modern World describe technology severing people from direct contact with nature, producing a "mass man" who loses the capacity for contemplative attention. Guardini was no reactionary. He accepted that no return to a pre-technological past is available and called instead for a mastery of technology itself, grounded in limits and the priority of the person. Pope Francis wrote his doctoral work on Guardini, and the critique of the "technocratic paradigm" in Laudato Si' carries it.
Protestant responses run plural. In the Reformed tradition, Kuyper's sphere sovereignty and a theology of vocation generate an affirmative posture: the question is not whether Christians should build with AI but how to do it faithfully. Derek Schuurman argues that technology answers a call to cultivate creation, subject to stewardship, justice, and love.
The doctrine of the imago Dei carries the weight elsewhere. Noreen Herzfeld, in In Our Image, traces three models: substantive (rationality), functional (dominion), and relational (the capacity for relationship). She argues for the relational model, associated with Barth, on which the image is constituted in the I-Thou encounter between persons and with God. However sophisticated its outputs, a machine does not participate in that covenantal relationality.
Transhumanism is where the eschatological stakes surface. Ray Kurzweil's vision promises effective immortality, a religious promise in technical dress. Brent Waters reads it as false eschatology, a Pelagian attempt at self-salvation that substitutes technological achievement for the gift of redemption. Against the rejection of embodiment, Waters affirms the goodness of the created human condition including its limits, locating hope in the resurrection of the body rather than escape from it. Christian hope differs in kind from technological hope: one receives redeemed finitude as a gift, the other engineers its way out. Not everyone agrees. Ronald Cole-Turner finds affinities between transformation by grace and the enhancement vision, a real fault line in Protestant thought. What the traditions hold in common is older than the argument between them. Babel with better hardware is still Babel.
The Postmodern Terminal >_