Vikiho Kiba
As algorithms learn, machines mimic, and humanity increasingly entrusts its destiny to code, a quiet but radical question stirs beneath the surface of our technological optimism: Are we trying to redeem ourselves through technology? The aspiration to overcome death, perfect intelligence, and master creation reflects more than human ingenuity, it gestures toward an ancient temptation, what theologians have long called self-deification, the human desire to become as gods.
The Ancient Dream Repackaged
The modern world often celebrates technology as the pure expression of human creativity and progress. Yet, within the language of innovation and disruption lies a metaphysical ambition. Transhumanist thinkers envision a future where humans merge with machines, upload consciousness into digital eternity, and reengineer evolution itself. Such aspirations may appear novel, yet their theological genealogy stretches back to Eden. When the serpent promised, “You will be like God” (Gen. 3:5), the seed of autonomy from divine dependence was sown. The human desire to transcend finitude, to define one’s own essence, remains the heart of the Edenic temptation.
Classical Christian thought distinguishes sharply between deification by grace, theosis and self-deification. The former, as articulated by the Church Fathers, is humanity’s participation in the divine life through Christ, not by nature but by communion. The latter, by contrast, is a Promethean grasping, an attempt to seize divinity rather than receive it. St. Augustine saw this hubris as the root of pride: humanity’s attempt to love itself above God. In our time, this ancient vice finds its new medium not in mythic towers but in algorithms, neural networks, and bioengineering labs.
Technological Transcendence and the New Eschatology
Modern technology does not merely extend human capability; it reshapes our understanding of what it means to be human. The notion of technological transcendence, the belief that humanity can surpass the limits of biology through innovation, functions as a kind of secular eschatology. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs speak of “curing death” and “upgrading humanity,” echoing the salvific language once reserved for religion. The horizon of human hope has shifted from heaven to hardware, from divine promise to digital progress.
The theological problem, however, is not technology itself. Christian tradition has long affirmed human creativity as a reflection of the imago Dei, the divine image through which humans participate in God’s creative work. The problem arises when creation becomes self-referential, when humanity’s technological prowess displaces rather than reflects divine purpose. As C. S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man, “Man’s conquest of Nature” ultimately becomes “Nature’s conquest of Man.” The instruments designed to liberate us risk enslaving us to the illusion of control.
The Gospel According to the Algorithm
Transhumanist manifestos often read like secular gospels. They promise salvation through data, immortality through upload, and omniscience through computation. Death becomes a technical malfunction; sin, a design flaw. Yet, beneath this optimism lies a profound theological inversion. Salvation, in this narrative, is not received but engineered. Redemption becomes a human project rather than a divine gift. The cross gives way to the circuit.
This inversion exposes a deeper anthropological crisis. When humanity defines itself through its technological power, personhood risks reduction to information. The human being becomes, in Yuval Noah Harari’s words, “an algorithmic animal.” But Christian theology insists that human worth is not quantifiable. The dignity of the person arises not from functional capacity or computational ability but from the sheer givenness of being created and loved by God.
Theologian Jürgen Moltmann once wrote that “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but hubris.” The modern myth of technological salvation exemplifies that hubris, the faith that humanity can rescue itself from finitude through its own devices. Yet, history repeatedly reveals that every attempt to build heaven on earth ends by deepening the abyss. The technological Tower of Babel, no less than its biblical predecessor, risks collapsing under the weight of its own ambition.
Reclaiming the Meaning of Redemption
In the Christian vision, redemption is not self-construction but divine re-creation. It is not the perfection of the human through code, but the transformation of the human through grace. The resurrection of Christ stands as the ultimate contradiction to technological utopianism: the defeat of death not by human ingenuity but by divine love. The resurrection proclaims that immortality is not an achievement to be coded but a gift to be received.
From this perspective, the call of theology is not to reject technology but to reorient it. The tools of innovation must serve the ends of life rather than the illusion of godhood. Technology, rightly ordered, can be a form of stewardship, a participation in God’s creative mandate to cultivate and care for the world. But when technology becomes an idol, promising what only grace can give, it transforms from tool to tyrant.
The Future as Gift, Not Project
A renewed theological imagination invites us to see the future not as a product of human design but as a gift. The eschatological hope of Christianity, the resurrection of the body, the new creation, the communion of saints cannot be programmed or engineered. It arrives from beyond, from the God who “makes all things new” (Rev. 21:5). In that vision, transcendence is not an escape from the body but its glorification; not an upload into digital eternity but a resurrection into redeemed creation.
As the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “Only the obedient believe.” To live faithfully in the technological age is to resist the temptation of self-deification and to remember that true transcendence lies not in human ascent but in divine descent, in the Word made flesh, who dignified the human condition by entering it.
Conclusion: The Code and the Cross
The question “Can we be redeemed by code?” exposes more than a technological curiosity; it unveils the spiritual fault line of our age. Technology has granted humanity unprecedented power, but power without transcendence risks self-destruction. The code cannot save us because the human heart cannot program its own salvation.
Classical Christian theology preserves a vital corrective: that the destiny of humanity is not to become God, but to behold God, to be conformed, not in autonomy, but in love. The final hope of the human story does not lie in the perfection of machines but in the promise of grace. Our future, in the end, is not to be engineered but to be received as gift, fulfilled in the vision where “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).
