Not a Machine: Faith, Work, and Human Dignity in a Technological Age

Artificial intelligence is certainly new. But predictions about its impact are actually quite old.

In 1977, the first true book on Artificial Intelligence was published by British polymath Margaret Boden. In it she raised questions that feel startlingly current today; self-driving cars, medical chatbots, major disruptions in labor and education, and the impending boom in leisure were all in her crosshairs. What she saw 49 years ago is the perfect example of futurist Roy Amara’s famous dictum: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Likewise, C.S. Lewis, in his masterful book The Abolition of Man, foresaw the present crisis with uncomfortable precision, warning that “what appears to be humanity’s power over nature is in reality, the power of some men over other men, with nature as the instrument.”

The central question confronting Christians today is not whether artificial intelligence will eliminate certain jobs (it will). It is whether the civilization being built around technological innovation will retain any coherent account of why human beings matter, and what labor really means.

The answer to that question is not primarily economic. It is theological. Martin Luther’s doctrine of vocation and Abraham Kuyper’s concepts of sphere sovereignty and common grace, offer compelling resources for meeting this moment with both historical seriousness and religious wisdom.

The starting point is the nature of the human person. Created in the image of God, humans are individually unique, rational, the subject of moral agency, and co-creators, who accordingly possess intrinsic value and dignity, implying certain rights and duties for both them and other persons. This is not a marginal theological footnote to economic theory. It is the foundation on which all legitimate economic life must be built. Once it is abandoned, the worker simply becomes a cost variable to be optimized, and the question of whether a machine can do the job more cheaply becomes the only question worth asking.

Against this reduction, the Lutheran doctrine of vocation insists that work is not primarily an economic transaction but a sacred calling. God himself, Luther taught, works through the ordinary labor of farmers, craftsmen, teachers, and tradespeople to care for his creation. The neighbor is fed, clothed, healed, and educated not through miraculous intervention but through the daily callings of men and women who are, in their work, instruments of divine love. This means that the worth of the person who works is never merely derived from productivity. It is prior to productivity, grounded in the image of God and confirmed by the calling of God, neither of which can be automated away or rendered obsolete by a more efficient algorithm.

This is precisely the crisis that technological acceleration now poses. What historian David Nye called America’s civil religion of technological progress has, in the present generation, achieved a kind of certainty that resists challenge. The fourth industrial revolution, with its fusion of physical, digital, and biological systems, is reshaping economic life with a velocity and scope that previous industrial transformations did not possess. The core spiritual danger of this “technological spirit” is confusing the vast possibilities of technology with divine power itself, elevating mechanical production above all other forms of human activity and measuring human worth by the criterion of efficiency alone. A civilization that worships its own tools will eventually sacrifice its people on that altar.

Abraham Kuyper’s doctrine of sphere sovereignty provides a structural theological response to this danger. For Kuyper, the created order is a rich plurality of distinct spheres, each with its own God-ordained dignity and authority. The family, the church, the state, the world of commerce, the academy, the arts: each sphere has its own inner logic and proper boundaries, and no one may claim sovereignty over the others. His famous declaration that “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” is not a call for ecclesiastical dominance over economic life. It is a claim against the idolatry of any single sphere. When the logic of technological efficiency colonizes the family, reducing parenthood to optimization, or when it colonizes education, reducing learning to job preparation, or when it reduces the human worker to a unit of measurable output, sphere sovereignty has been violated. One domain has claimed an authority it was never given.

The Kuyperian tradition frames this concern in terms of the relationship between liberty and virtue. A free market that operates without a virtuous culture to govern it does not serve human flourishing; it eventually consumes it. The purpose of economic life is inseparable from the person who participates in it, and we are made for something higher than economic activity alone. This moral sense and goal must be woven through market transactions. Markets, in other words, display the virtues and vices of the people who inhabit them. Without theology, commercial culture has no answer for why any of it ultimately matters.

Work itself is a good that is part of God’s original design and therefore contributes to human flourishing. We were created to work, just as our Creator works, and that work will be part of the new heaven and the new earth. But the modern age has progressively stripped work of this theological grounding. Christians once understood work as a calling from God, but over time that vision faded and work became simply what you do to earn a living. When automation threatens to take that away, people lose not just income but identity, because nothing has replaced the older, deeper answer to why their work mattered in the first place.

Kuyper’s doctrine of Common Grace makes clear that the human drive to do good work is no accident. God’s grace sustains the human drive to build, create, and contribute even in people who do not acknowledge him. The engineer, the entrepreneur, the artist who has never set foot in a church is still, in Kuyper’s view, participating in God’s design for creation. This matters enormously for how Christians think about economic life. Wealth is not a fixed pie to be divided but something genuinely created when human beings bring their God-given ingenuity to bear on the world. That vision dignifies work across the board and gives Christians a reason for hope rather than panic when technology disrupts the economy.

As Lewis foresaw over 80 years ago, The Fourth industrial revolution concentrates that power in remarkably few hands, and the theological traditions assembled here offer a principled resistance to its worst tendencies. Not a resistance rooted in nostalgia or fear of technology as such, but one rooted in an affirmation that the human person, as image-bearer, co-creator, and neighbor, occupies a dignity that no market logic, no efficiency calculus, and no technological capability can revoke.

The Christian task in this moment is clear: to remind workers that their worth was never in their output, and that no algorithm can touch what God has declared. Christians in business, policy, and education must resist the creeping assumption that economic logic should govern every corner of life. The tradition running from Luther through Kuyper gives us the resources to do exactly that. Markets should serve people. Technology should serve communities. And all of it stands under the claim of the one who looks out over every square inch of creation and declares, ‘Mine.’

Dan Churchwell serves as Director of Programs & Education at the Acton Institute, where he leads conferences and educational initiatives exploring the intersection of faith, economics, and culture.