This is an adaptation of the second talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.
We have opened the last two chapters imagining the past; let’s look forward and imagine the future.
George Jetson was born July 31, 2022 — so the future is closer than you think.
Some of you are wondering who George Jetson is. He is a cartoon character from the past, who lived in the future — a future with flying cars and technology. Like smart watches. Zoom calls. Robot vacuums. Touchscreen remotes for controlling your smart house. They got some things right.
There are some more serious future predictions from the past landing soon too. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 quality of life would improve between four and eight times:
“All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is.”
John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
We would be working fifteen hours a week — only because we would find the “old Adam,” the worker in the garden, hard to shake:
“For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented… Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.”
Keynes
This 2015 Atlantic article, ‘A World Without Work’ imagined automation and smart computers delivering this future. This is the promise of technology that many are working towards.
In a 2016 World Economic Forum paper, Justine Cassell predicted what computers would be able to do by 2030. She said computers would keep spreading, not just in our devices and appliances:
“We still have an image of computers as being rectangular objects either on a desk, or these days in our pockets; but computers are in our cars, they’re in our thermostats, they’re in our refrigerators.”
Justine Cassell, By 2030 This Is What Computers Will Do
But by 2030 we would see more biological computing. Not just seeing our bodies as computers, and our DNA like software, but merging our biological computers with real ones:
“You can think of biological computing as a way of computing RNA or DNA and understanding biotechnology as a kind of computer.”
Cassell
Smart, powerful computers will be everywhere — linking us to the machine so that ads can respond in real time to our emotions as we look at them, and robots will be making other robots as we become like robots:
“Everything from the information and entertainment sectors, that can imagine ads that understand your emotions when you look at them using machine learning; to manufacturing, where the robots on a production line can learn in real time as a function of what they perceive.”
Cassell
Sounds great.
More present future predictions come from organisations like Humanity Plus, who are elevating the human condition using science and technology to secure a better future. There are organisations working with genetic engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology to hack the human; using machines, or merging us with machines, to make us more than human. Humanity Plus is a transhumanist organisation; part of a movement that wants to use technology to eliminate aging, and to enhance our intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
“The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”
Humanity+
“The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.”
An Australian academic working on this, Dr Elise Bohan, wrote a book called Future Superhuman where she calls transhumanism:
“A project of technological transcendence that aims to make us more than human.”
Dr Natasha Vita-More has been articulating a manifesto for transhumanism since 1983. She sees aging as a disease, with augmentation and enhancement of the body and brain as the cure:
“The Transhumanist Manifesto challenges the human condition. This condition asserts that aging is a disease, augmentation and enhancement to the human body and brain are essential to prevail, and that well-being is essential to prosper within safe and healthy environments.”
Natasha Vita-More, Transhumanist Manifesto
Her manifesto declares our individual right to genetic liberty — to be free from disease and death — because we should own our own body, shape who we are, and live our own lives:
“Each person deserves the right of genetic liberty. People have a fundamental right to own their body, shape who they are, and live their lives.”
Natasha Vita-More, Transhumanist Manifesto
This is a culmination of what we have unpacked over the last two weeks.
The idea is built on the assumption that we create ourselves.
That I am the architect of my existence, the author of my life. That my life should reflect my values — whether that is in the body or not; conveying the essence of my being, challenging all limits:
“I am the architect of my existence. My life reflects my vision and represents my values. It conveys the very essence of my being—coalescing imagination and reason, challenging all limits.”
Natasha Vita-More, Transhumanist Manifesto
It is pretty clear in this model that our being is not limited to our bodies. There is some other essential bit of you or me that makes me me, and you you.
And to cap it all off — this will spread:
“Our unique ingenuity will spread far out into the capillaries of society. We are active participants in our own evolution. We are shaping the image of whom we are becoming.”
Natasha Vita-More, Transhumanist Manifesto
Not made in God’s image, but re-making ourselves in our own image.
We will be gods.
This push to become the image of ourselves, as we imagine ourselves, is what happens when we are not living as the image of God anymore. When we no longer see our bodies as gifts from God.
This is not just a weird sci-fi tech thing at the fringes. You might not have encountered this thinking, but you are living in a world shaped by the tech. And it is not just tech — this thinking is happening in high fashion. So it will be in Kmart in a few years.
This Gucci fashion show called Cyborg in 2018 was called a parable about the possibility of being liberated from the confines of the natural condition we are born into.
It was a show celebrating the idea that our identity is liquid, and we can hack it with technology and the clothes we wear.
The show was set in an apocalyptic surgery, where transhuman creatures walked the runway wearing clothing and technology that displayed a transhuman future.
Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele said his show demonstrates:
“We are all the Dr. Frankenstein of our lives. Inventing, assembling, experimenting with identity as expressed through clothes, which can accompany you while you develop an idea of yourself.”
Alessandro Michele
And he concluded:
“We are in a post-human era, for sure; it is under way. Now, we have to decide what we want to be.”
Alessandro Michele
Now, there is plenty that is good about this sort of liberation — like we saw back in week one. We do not want to be imprisoned in bad and destructive pictures of humanity. Freedom to pursue what is true and good for us as humans, and to try it on, is good. Aging and death are also bad.
But this “new humanity” is also a product of the breakup with God; our need to define ourselves because we believe we belong to ourselves in a world closed off to God.
And our big tech gurus, who make the products you love, are all working towards a future with a picture of what it means to be human.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is investing in rockets because his vision is trillions of people colonising space. His company Blue Origin wants to open up the limitless resources of space to preserve earth:
“Blue Origin envisions a time when people can tap into the limitless resources of space and enable the movement of damaging industries into space to preserve Earth, humanity’s blue origin.”
Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin
He has also invested in Altos, a biotechnology company fighting aging through cellular rejuvenation.
Mark Zuckerberg is investing in virtual reality — the metaverse — so you can put on a headset and go virtual fishing with family members across the planet, or maybe the galaxy.
This virtual reality is what he sees as the next logical step in technological evolution — from text, to photo, to video, to full immersion in the metaverse:
“You go from text, to photos, to video, the next logical step beyond that is having a medium where you can just be immersed in it, and feel like you’re right there with other people. That’s really the essence of what the metaverse is all about.”
Mark Zuckerberg
He believes it will feel real, and that we will want to hang out there. And maybe one day we will just plug in to virtual reality, digitise our consciousness, escape our bodies, and stay there forever — or at least until there is a power failure.
Elon Musk believes we are already living in that future, we just cannot tell. And if we are not, he has invested in breakthrough technology for the brain with his company Neuralink. Maybe that is how you win the simulation. He is developing an injectable mesh that will merge our brains with digital intelligence so we will control it, rather than having machines take over the world:
“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.”
David Porush, a techno-philosopher, describes this goal — to create a “magic technology” that will let us merge our brains with cyberspace:
“…a magic technology that will create a complete sensorium or virtual reality on a cybernetic platform; cyberspace, an accessible, self-referential, genre-destroying hyperspace, a soaring sensorium that will imitate, model, and link to its mirror image, the human brain.”
David Porush, Voyage to Eudoxia: The Emergence of a Post-Rational Epistemology in Literature and Science
…where we can live as immortal people who work and play in this new, clean, virtual Eden — where we are all going to flee when the physical world becomes an unlivable eco-disaster:
“We will become immortal there. It will enable us to combine work and play in a new way. Even the music will be better there. Cyberspace will be the new, clean, virtual Eden to which we will all emigrate when this physical world becomes an unlivable ecodisaster.”
David Porush
Sounds like heaven, right? Or something straight out of The Matrix — just without our fleshy bodies needing to be plugged in.
Much of this is built on a philosophy that sees the body as a “meat sack” to be overcome in order to push beyond our bodily limits. Hans Moravec is one of the early thinkers on this. He argues that we are not our machinery, but the processes that happen in our heads — the rest is “mere jelly”:
“Pattern-identity… defines the essence of a person, say myself, as the pattern and the process going on in my head and body, not the machinery supporting that process. If the process is preserved, I am preserved. The rest is jelly.”
Hans Moravec, cited in Why Transhumanism Won’t Work
But is that all our bodies are? Meat. Jelly.
Predicting the future is tricky, but our visions of the future are built from what we think it means to be human — meat and consciousness, body and soul — and where we think God fits.
These ideas about generating a new humanity through technology — whether you love them or find them terrifying — are disconnected from the idea that to be human is to reflect the image of God (Genesis 1:27). We are left constructing our own image. And yet, at the same time, many of the desires behind these technologies are fundamentally Christian — they are Christian heresies, rather than secular ones.
They are attempts — like Babel — to step into God’s role to bring heaven on earth: a world with no more death, or aging, or sickness — on our terms, using our technology — rather than seeing heaven as something built for humans, along with a new earth, by God (Revelation 21:3–4).
They are built on other Christian heresies — failures to hold furious opposites — particularly around what it means to be human (anthropology) and about the future (eschatology).
Mary Harrington coined a phrase I like to describe what is going on in this drive to transcend our human limitations — even our bodies — using technology. She reflects on the way that so many of us adopted new technological practices in digital spaces during COVID — lockdowns, Zoom meetings — that made it a little easier to imagine a “self,” or others, existing without a physical body. She says this dream of being free from bodily limitations is not new:
“If this is your normal, it’s not a big step to imagine a ‘self’ that has nothing to do with a physical body… But the dream of freeing human consciousness from the human body isn’t an internet-age invention.”
Mary Harrington
It is the ancient heresy called Gnosticism, which emerged when early Greek Christians fused the New Testament with Plato. In Gnosticism the material world and the body were dirty things to escape — to transcend to a higher, spiritual ideal via secret knowledge:
“One such was the body of thought that came to be known as ‘Gnosticism’, from gnosis or ‘knowledge’. What survives of their thinking suggests that for Gnostics, the material world was intrinsically evil and the task of humanity was to escape it.”
Mary Harrington
Harrington was reflecting on the economic inequality revealed in the pandemic — where many of us could escape to safety and work from behind screens, while those on the margins — think security guards or aged care workers — were forced by their circumstances to take up more risky shift work. She returned to the idea of a world without work, and a thinker back in 2018 — Aaron Bastani — who believed automation would create super-abundance and a machine-led revolution he called Fully Automated Luxury Communism, where robots would serve our every desire (like in Wall-E).
But she argues our new dream of freedom is freedom not just from work, but from our bodies — “Fully Automated Luxury Gnosticism.”
We are facing a bunch of new technologies geared at grabbing our attention, addicting us, and pulling us away from face-to-face, body-to-body interactions — where machines (like drones or robots), or perhaps a low-paid human controlled by an app, will deliver whatever we want almost immediately.
And the thing is, you do not need to want to escape your body into a computer to buy this gnostic vision of the human — one that disintegrates us. We have a version of this in the church, where we think of heaven as a disembodied liberation of the soul into some sort of cloudy, bodiless realm, or when we think that our bodies are not fundamentally part of our humanity — that the “real us” is our soul, or inner self.
Some aspects of transhumanism — some of its technologies — are expressions of us co-creating with God; joining with God in anticipation of the renewal of all things; using technology to change our bodies and make them more like the heavenly bodies we read about in 1 Corinthians. Most of us will not blink at fighting cancer or illness with technology, or having surgery. And the New Testament expects our bodies — our humanity — to be transformed. And yet, other aspects of transhumanism are an idolatrous attempt to rewrite ourselves and escape creatureliness and our human limits to become like God on our own steam. We have to work out how to hold our creatureliness and our transformation in tension — as we also hold our spiritual and physical nature in tension. I believe it is tricky — and one of the keys to doing this with wisdom is keeping these poles live and part of the conversation when we are assessing technologies, and having our humanity — body and soul — shaped by the story we are inhabiting as followers of Jesus.
Our bodies are not simply jelly or meat that we should mould as we construct our own identity according to some spiritual or psychological self — it is not that simple. Our bodies are a vocation. Stewarding them as gifts from God is part of our created calling as embodied bearers of God’s image.
In Genesis God forms a man by forming a body, then breathes life — the breath of life — into him. In the Greek Old Testament, he breathes the psyche — the word for “soul” — into the body. The human is not human without both (Genesis 2:7).
Now, obviously, the Fall impacts this — sin, death, curse, frustration. Our bodies now break and die and are not so clearly and neatly realised, even when it comes to biological sex. This frustration impacts our psychology, not just our physiology — and even these are deeply integrated, so that experiences in the body, like trauma, impact our well-being and rewire our brains. There may be a disconnect between our psychology and our physiology. But our vocation remains the same: to receive our bodies as a gift — even with these disconnects — and carry them in the world in ways that reflect God’s breath and life and love in the world, inhabiting his story.
In the Gospel — as Paul puts it in Romans — we are re-created when God breathes not just his breath, but his Spirit into our bodies, so the Spirit lives in us (Romans 8:11). We are united in Jesus, so his story becomes ours, and our story becomes his. The way the Father and Spirit raised Jesus — bodily — from death shapes our expectations for our own mortal bodies.
We are now stewarding our bodies towards glorious, transcendent life — the redemption of our bodies — groaning, and waiting eagerly and patiently for this future (Romans 8:23–25). Modern, tech-fuelled visions of the future are often impatient expressions of the grasping human impulse there in Eden — where we want to become like God without waiting for God.
Part of being human without being disintegrated is cultivating patience — which might mean embracing our embodied limits, and the failures that come through age and disability while waiting to be made whole, as a testimony to our belief that it is God who will redeem our bodies. But we might also see that redemption coming through human making — image-bearing — as an expression of being like God. This will require wisdom, integrity, and knowing what our bodies are for — or rather — who our bodies are for. Paul says our bodies are meant for the Lord, and the Lord for the body (1 Corinthians 6:13). Living with this truth will deliver the fullest sense of being human, and an actual transcendent future for our bodies — not by post-human technology, but through Jesus, by the Spirit, as we become united to Jesus, brought into the life of the God who is love (1 Corinthians 6:14–15), and as we become temples of the Spirit — bought at a price — not our own — the implication is we honour God — not our inner selves — with our bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).
It is striking how directly the transhuman hope competes with the Christian hope. If you want transcendent, immortal humanity and a sense of yourself, you are being invited to choose between your inner self becoming the machine, or the God who is love, who invites you into the divine life at the heart of reality. In 1 Corinthians 15 we get a thread that runs from creation to new creation. God gives everything that has a body its own body, as he has determined — our push for self-determination risks playing God if we are not asking about God’s view of our bodies, and their purpose as essential to our humanity (1 Corinthians 15:38). We cannot raise our bodies from death, or defeat death — that is God’s job as the creator and sustainer of life (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). He is the one who can take our bodies that are sown perishable — in the grave — and raise them imperishable; in glory and power; not as “natural” bodies but “spiritual” ones. Paul is doing something interesting with these words. As he contrasts two humanities — first, from the first man, Adam, with humanity from Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:45).
Where he talks about the “spiritual” and the “natural” (1 Corinthians 15:46), there is — I think — a theological pun. It is the Greek words for Spirit — pneuma — and soul — psyche — with a particular word ending (-ikon) that sounds like the Greek word for “image” — eikon — which he uses in verse 49, as he talks about our move from representing Adam — the “souled image” — to representing Jesus — the “spirited image.”
There is a strange past-and-future thing here. We were like Adam, but we are becoming — by the Spirit — and will fully become — the Spirit-image, when we receive a resurrected body like his. We do not have it yet. We hope for it.
It is not going to be our clothing choices that liberate us as truly human. It will be God who clothes us; God who changes us; God who rewrites the physical code of our bodies, replacing perishable with imperishable and mortality with immortality to demonstrate that death has been defeated — and not by science (1 Corinthians 15:52–54).
The Gospel is a story not of technological transcendence, but of divine transcendence that makes us more human. Pushing for a disembodied future will disintegrate us, because our future is embodied. As Jesus, not technology, gives us victory over death (1 Corinthians 15:56–57).
For now, we live in bodies that perish — bit by bit, as we age, and head towards being planted in the ground. But our bodies also house the Spirit, who guarantees our resurrected life and reassures us of God’s love for our bodies, and his desire that we might use them — male and female — to represent him in the world as we are swept up into the Trinitarian life of love, and engage our bodies in singleness, in marriage, and in church community (1 Corinthians 15:42–44).
We live in bodies like Adam’s — and yet bodies that are already temples of the Holy Spirit; bodies that will be redeemed and raised as heavenly, so that we bear the image of the resurrected heavenly man. We live in our bodies knowing where they are going. Our vocation — tied to God’s gift to us in creation, and in redemption — is not just representing his life and love with our bodies; it is also testifying that they will be raised and redeemed (1 Corinthians 15:49).
Our bodies are good gifts — even as they age, and break, and experience the frustration we feel outside of Eden — both from curse, and from good God-given limits. I do not want to be ableist here. There is a goodness to our bodies — that sustain life, can create life, and can give and receive love — even when we do not see it. This goodness is reflected in our lives as individuals, and in community, and it is not tied to our capacity to function according to metrics we choose. The goodness is connected to the Giver. Our bodies are good, even if frustrated, and we receive them anticipating they will be made gloriously better.
For Paul this means we — in our bodies now — give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord because we know that our work is not wasted. We know death does not have the last word. It is not a post-work future, but a vocation to live with our bodies, doing the work of the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58).
In his follow-up letter to the Corinthians, Paul talks about how — by the Spirit — we are being transformed into the image of Jesus with ever-increasing glory — in our bodies (2 Corinthians 3:18). This transformation comes, in part, through our embodied work — our worship — offering ourselves as living sacrifices. Or, as he puts it, carrying the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus might be made known in our mortal bodies (2 Corinthians 4:10–11). This will mean carrying our bodies towards death, rather than avoiding it, because we know death leads to resurrection; giving ourselves to God’s work, with this hope for resurrection and redemption; not working to not work, or to escape our bodies into machines.
Being human means living with our bodies as part of our being, not as something to be transcended, but as part of us that is becoming transcendent. This is one of our furious opposites to hold when imagining a human future, even as we ponder where technology fits. Another is that we are creatures — created with limits — but we are also made to represent God, and to become like him, through the work of his Spirit as we are conformed into the image of Jesus. Technology-making will be part of doing this, because it is part of how we work in the world to fight the impact of sin and death and curse while we wait for God to renew all things.
Our world risks embracing Luxury Automated Gnosticism — or the opposite idea that this body is all we have, so we should live well by maximising embodied pleasure and satisfying our desires. These are disintegrating forces. Our challenge is to see our bodies as good gifts anticipating glory, and to use them to inhabit this world, and this story, as we wait for its renewal.
Not living towards a “world without work,” but as those called to the work of the Lord. One way we can do this is by valuing the body in our work, in a world that does not — not just our own bodies, but all bodies that are given less dignity in the disincarnating world of screens and Luxury Automated Gnosticism. This will have implications for those of us who, for various reasons, are inclined to hate our bodies and seek to overcome or escape the “meat jelly.” Your body is a gift from God, not spam.
Mary Harrington noticed that while the rich disconnect from our bodies via screens, the poor cannot be, and they will bear the cost:
“Meanwhile, for those whose jobs by definition can’t be unmoored from their bodies, the push for disembodied life has still more unsettling implications.”
She says no matter the promise of luxury through this automation, there will still be people taking out the bins, stacking the dishes, and caring for those who cannot care for themselves — the jobs hit hardest by the pandemic.
Maybe the work of the Lord — testifying to the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus as an act of embodied love, restoration, and revolution — will be taking up those jobs that testify to our embodiment, or caring for those taking up those jobs. Maybe greet your garbo with a coffee this week, thanking them for their work. Maybe we should encourage our kids to work in these areas, while the world around them aims for a post-work, post-body future that marginalises groups of people.
The early church bore witness to the dignity of the body by conducting funerals and burials for any human. In a world where only the rich were seen as worth remembering, they honoured and buried even the poorest of the poor, because our bodies have dignity.
And when it comes to plans to elevate the human condition with technology? We should tread carefully — recognising that sin and curse and disease and death are not the ideal, or the future — while also recognising that Jesus, not tech, is the path to true transcendence and becoming more human.
And you might be thinking this transhuman stuff is all nonsense that is either far in the future, or has nothing to do with you. Michael Burdett, a theologian who thinks about the “post-human,” believes we are not shaped so much by thinking, but by action — and we have already got post-human habits and technologies and stories embedded in our lives:
“Because our practices shape us, form us and define us they are not benign when it comes to enacting the posthuman. We may not assent to posthuman ideology and yet live posthuman lives.”
He argues we have already embraced technology that has become an extension of our bodies and brains, connecting us to the machine — making us a bit post-human.
Burdett often collaborates with Victoria Lorrimar, a theologian formerly based in Brisbane. She notes how machines are not great at feeling their way into stories. They read facts, but struggle with narratives — because they do not have bodies that feel. Inhabiting stories is a way not to be robotic:
“Processing facts is very different to comprehending stories, a distinction that robotics researchers are now recognising and allowing to drive their development of embodied robots.”
This is true for what we believe about being human. Our bodies actually generate our beliefs as we live in stories, so our embodied life in the world teaches us the truth about the world, ourselves, and God. She says:
“Religious belief cannot be disentangled from our bodily experiences.”
So part of living differently — resisting the machine and Fully Automated Luxury Gnosticism — means cultivating practices that incarnate us where our technology might disincarnate us; practices that connect us to a story.
Burdett believes Communion is one of the best practices to teach us about our bodies — a practice that reminds us that Jesus taking on a body, and giving it as a gift, is at the heart of the Gospel. He calls it a counter-practice to those that teach us to be disembodied and autonomous and to perform post-human life with our technology:
“[Communion is] …a counter-practice or corrective to disembodied and autonomous posthuman performance… [that] unites a gathered community in real space.”
Not virtual space, but real space, in our bodies.
And when we gather in the flesh — as the body of Christ — and are invited to discern the body of Christ in us, as we remember being re-created by his body being given for us, we are invited to think about our vocation of giving our bodies to God, to each other, and to the world as gifts of love that are valuable because our bodies — like the body of Jesus — are profoundly valuable.
One of the ways Communion works is that it is embodied: we eat, we drink. As we take the bread as the body of Jesus we are remembering that he has become part of us, and we him, in communion. As we remember the Gospel it sustains our soul, and as we eat and drink — and perhaps this is why we should do it as a meal — it sustains our body. It teaches us that we are body and soul, and that our hope, in life and in death, is in Jesus.
Communion is not a magic thing; but it is an embodied practice that teaches us that our bodies matter, that we have died and are raised with Jesus, and have received his Spirit — a taste of transcendence. It is an invitation to feast on Jesus, and to live as his body in the world, testifying to a world that wants to avoid aging and death that, in him, we have the answer. Whatever the future holds, it is in Jesus’s hands, not ours.
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