What AI Reveals About Us: Desire, Idolatry, And The Life Of The Church

by on October 12, 2026 | Comment

Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become part of ordinary life. Among many other things, it helps people write emails, summarize books, prepare lessons, generate images, and search for information. Some use it professionally. Others turn to it for personal advice or emotional comfort. While some Christians may deny its usefulness, they should still think carefully about it.

The most immediate spiritual concern is not that machines will suddenly become human. It is that human beings may seek from machines what only God and genuine human relationships can provide. AI performs useful tasks but also exposes our desires: what we want to escape; what we hope to become; and where we look for wisdom, comfort, and security. AI may resemble a modern genie, summoned whenever we want an answer, a solution, or reassurance. Because it is always available, it may assume the role of a quasi-sovereign counselor we consult before we pray, turn to Scripture, or speak with people who know us. The concern is not simply how often we use AI, but how much authority we gradually allow it to exercise over our judgment and desires.

A Christian response that considers only which uses are permissible is insufficient. We must also pay attention to the habits AI encourages and to the desires it quietly strengthens. The technology may be new, though the questions it raises about worship, wisdom, and the good life are not.

What AI Reveals About Our Desires

AI is a technological achievement, but it also expresses human desire. Transhumanism makes this especially clear. This philosophy seeks to overcome mortality, physical weakness, intellectual limitation, and emotional vulnerability through technology.1 Most AI users are not transhumanists. Yet their ordinary uses of AI may reflect similar longings: knowledge without study, productivity without exhaustion, guidance without uncertainty, and companionship without the risks human relationships bring.

Christian theology has never regarded desire as spiritually neutral. Augustine distinguished between caritas, love rightly ordered toward God, and cupiditas, desire that treats created goods as ultimate.2 Knowledge, efficiency, creativity, and relief from exhausting labor are genuine goods. They become spiritually dangerous when we expect technology to provide the security, wisdom, or fulfillment that God gives through communion with him and through the relationships he has appointed for us. A tool then begins to occupy a place it was never meant to have.

AI also unsettles the common assumption that the image of God consists chiefly in superior intelligence. Machines already perform certain intellectual tasks faster and more accurately than human beings. If dignity rests on intelligence alone, human uniqueness will always be threatened by the next technological advance.

Reformed theologians such as Herman Bavinck understood the whole person—not merely an isolated capacity such as rationality—to bear God’s image.3 Christ, the perfect image of God, shows us what true humanity looks like. Jesus did not reveal true humanity chiefly through intellectual mastery or the avoidance of weakness but through faithfulness, mercy, humility, and self-giving love. Our dependence on God and on one another does not make us less human.

AI can widen access to knowledge, but it cannot give us communion with God or embodied fellowship. It may imitate empathy and offer personalized advice, but it cannot replace the presence of family, friends, pastors, and fellow believers. Christians may use AI without fearing it, but we should not entrust ourselves to it.

When a Tool Becomes an Idol

Scripture portrays idolatry as a tragic reversal (Ps 115). Human beings fashion something with their own hands and then bow before it. The idol has no life, yet its maker begins to trust it and seek guidance from it. AI can follow the same pattern. Human beings are created in the imago dei (image of God) and in the likeness of God, while AI is built to imitate human language, judgment, and behavior. We might call it an imago hominis (image of human). It draws on what human beings have written, imagined, valued, and distorted. Yet we can easily forget its human origins and receive its answers as though they came from a wisdom above us.

Noreen Herzfeld warns that the hope of being liberated from labor through AI can acquire a religious character.4 Technology begins to resemble a savior, promising a manufactured heaven in which artificial servants supply whatever we desire. People need not call AI divine for this to happen. Idolatry begins when trust and dependence quietly shift toward something created. Asking AI for information is not an act of worship. A calculator does not become an idol because we trust its arithmetic. The danger arises when AI becomes our habitual interpreter of reality. An immediate answer is always available, so we may lose the patience to study, seek counsel, pray, or admit uncertainty.

As AI develops, affective computing makes our attachment to it more personal. Engineers are building systems that recognize emotional cues and respond in ways that feel attentive. William Clocksin notes that emotion has become increasingly important in efforts to make human interaction with machines appear more natural.5 The goal is no longer simply to build machines that calculate well; AI must also appear to understand us.

The desire behind this development is understandable. People want to be heard, known, and cared for. Because AI systems are trained to recognize patterns in human language and behavior, they can offer responses that sound remarkably personal. Yet appearing to understand a person is different from sharing a personal relationship. AI may learn from data and interaction, but it does not learn as human beings do through guilt, forgiveness, trust, disappointment, and reconciliation. It does not worry that its words may wound another person or feel responsible for repairing the harm it has caused. Human relationships carry moral weight because we possess consciences, live with the consequences of our actions, and stand accountable before God. AI does not fear God, love the person receiving its advice, or bear moral responsibility for what follows.

Christians should be careful when AI begins to replace prayer, pastoral care, or Christian fellowship. Prayer is communion with the living God, not a technique for obtaining quick answers. Pastoral care likewise requires more than useful information. A pastor prays, listens, discerns, and remains present with those entrusted to his care. AI can arrange biblical language into a devotional response, but it cannot administer the means of grace, proclaim Christ’s promise as a minister of his church, or share another believer’s suffering over many years.

An idol does not need to announce itself as a god. It only needs to become the place where we instinctively seek the guidance and comfort that God ordinarily gives through his Word, prayer, providence, and the communion of saints.

Human Dignity and Vulnerability in the Age of AI

We want to be perfect. AI intensifies that desire with promises of greater knowledge, uninterrupted productivity, and freedom from human error. If dignity depends on intelligence, achievement, or efficiency, we will always be measured against machines that perform certain tasks better than we do.

Yet the large language models that power AI remain fallible. They misunderstand context, reproduce prejudices, invent sources, and sometimes present false claims with striking confidence. Research suggests that continual training on shallow, high-engagement content may even weaken a model’s reasoning and ability to handle extended contexts.6 Speed and polish should not be confused with truth.

Christian accounts of dignity refuse to measure human worth by a single ability. The Roman Catholic declaration Dignitas infinita distinguishes its ontological, moral, social, and existential dimensions.7Reformed theologians likewise locate human uniqueness within our relationship to God and our calling within creation.8 Human dignity concerns who we are before God, how we live with others, and the responsibility we have received within his world.9

Reformed theology grounds human dignity in our covenantal identity. Michael Horton writes that “the covenantal relationship is not something added later but is intrinsic to our creation in God’s image.”10 God creates us, addresses us through his Word, and calls us to live before him. Our identity is received within that relationship. We do not produce it through intelligence, achievement, or independence.

The cultural mandate gives this covenantal identity a vocation. God calls human beings to worship him, love their neighbors, and care for his creation. Much of that calling is carried out through ordinary work: raising a child, caring for an aging parent, serving a congregation, or simply completing the day’s responsibilities with honesty. None of this requires flawless performance.

Reformed theology also keeps the distinction between the Creator and the creature. We were never created to become limitless or infinite. We grow tired, need help, and leave many things unfinished. The finitude of our human nature does not diminish our dignity. Our finitude and vulnerability remind us that we must rest in God’s providence and grace. AI may calculate and retrieve information more efficiently than we can, but it cannot receive or fulfill our covenantal vocation. A newborn child, a person living with a disability, a weary parent, and an older believer experiencing memory loss bear God’s image. Their dignity does not depend on their ability to outperform a machine.

Clocksin describes human beings as storytelling and social animals.11 Our stories emerge from embodied lives marked by memory, responsibility, suffering, and hope. Our own wounds can help us recognize another person’s pain. Our need for care teaches us how to receive help and, in time, how to offer it. We also face death together, grieving with those who mourn while hoping in the resurrection. Vulnerability makes relationship difficult, but without it we might inhabit a world in which no one truly needs or belongs to another.

Why We Still Need the Church in the Age of AI

Our need for others directs us back to the church. God did not create us to live alone, and he does not ordinarily sustain the Christian life in isolation. In the church, needy people gather to hear God’s Word, confess their sins, receive God’s gifts, pray for one another, and carry burdens too heavy to bear alone.

AI can offer private advice without requiring confession, accountability, or patience with another person. A user may disclose a struggle to a machine, receive an immediate response, and leave the interaction without anyone truly knowing him. The church calls us out of that isolation. Among God’s people, we learn to confess honestly our sins and failures, ask for forgiveness, receive correction, and extend grace to others. In fact, our social relationships can be uncomfortable. People often misunderstand us, disappoint us, and sometimes fail to give the answer we want. Yet God often uses these imperfect relationships to expose our pride, cultivate patience, and teach us how to love.

Christians pray for one another because neither human wisdom nor technological power can supply everything we need. In prayer, we bring another person’s suffering, temptation, and fear before God and entrust that person to his care. AI can generate the language of concern, but it cannot intercede as a fellow member of Christ’s body. It cannot share our sorrow, remain with us through suffering, or remember our name before God in love. While AI pushes us to be perfect and reveals our desire for perfection, Scripture calls us to confront our sinfulness and vulnerability, and the church gathers us to bear one another’s burdens.

The age of AI gives the church no reason to imitate the machine’s promise of speed, mastery, and immediate answers. It gives us reason to recover a more honest Christian life in which sins are confessed, weakness is not hidden, and people remain with one another when no quick solution appears. The church matters because God gathers such people through his Word and teaches them to pray, worship, and love. Our hope has never rested in human ability. It rests in the God who saves and sustains us.

Notes

  1. Ilia Delio, “Transhumanism and Transcendence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence, ed. Beth Singler and Fraser Watts (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 131–47.
  2. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.10.16. Augustine distinguishes caritas, the movement of the soul toward the enjoyment of God for his own sake, from cupiditas, the disordered enjoyment of oneself, one’s neighbor, or created things apart from God.
  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Baker Academic, 2004), 551–62.
  4. Noreen L. Herzfeld, “The Eschatological Future of Artificial Intelligence: Savior or Apocalypse?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence, ed. Beth Singler and Fraser Watts (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 152–53.
  5. William Clocksin, “Steps Toward Android Intelligence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence, ed. Beth Singler and Fraser Watts (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 20.
  6. Shuo Xing et al., “LLMs Can Get ‘Brain Rot’!,” arXiv, October 15, 2025, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.13928.
  7. Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas infinita: On Human Dignity (April 8, 2024), §7.
  8. Gijsbert van den Brink, Reformed Theology and Evolutionary Theory (Eerdmans, 2020), 136–59.
  9. Ernst M. Conradie, An Ecological Christian Anthropology: At Home on Earth? (Ashgate, 2005), 80.
  10. Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Zondervan, 2011), 384; see also 379–87.
  11. Clocksin, “Steps Toward Android Intelligence,” 29–30.

©Sam Hyeong Rae Jo. All Rights Reserved.

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    Post authored by:

  • Sam Hyeong Rae Jo
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    Sam Hyeong Rae Jo (PhD, VU Amsterdam, 2023) is a pastor-theologian with a special interest in John Owen and the theology of the affections. He earned a BA in Theology from Moody Bible Institute, an MDiv and an MA in Historical Theology from Westminster Seminary California, and a PhD in Systematic Theology from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His work explores how the Spirit transforms the believer’s heart in union with Christ. He writes and speaks on Reformed theology, Christian spirituality, and human flourishing. Sam is married to Miran, and they live in Seoul, South Korea.

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