As we grapple with the tsunami of change wrought by artificial intelligence, we are faced with existential questions about our identity and the purpose of work.
What makes us valuable? Our strength? Our intellect? Our compassion? Our ability to contribute economically?
As a follower of Jesus, I will draw upon my faith tradition in hopes of offering hopeful answers to these vexing questions. In particular, I will show how, starting from Genesis and through the New Testament, the Bible offers an alternate anthropology to the prevailing world view. To do this I will structure the essay from the inside out, looking first at Faith + Work, then examining how Intelligence intersects with Faith + Work, and finally looking at Artificial forms of Intelligence through earlier lenses:
(Artificial (Intelligence (Faith + Work)))
All the words in the above equation have multiple shades of meaning, some informal and others quite formal. I am using broad definitions in hope of providing scaffolding for fruitful discussions around the intersection of all four words.
(Faith + Work)
There is a broad strand of thinking in our culture that views work negatively.
In some ways, one can trace a line all the way back to one of the first written stories we have. The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of gods creating man to serve them. Man’s purpose in life is to labor for the gods and their representative, the king. The Ancient Greeks also viewed work askance. Sustaining oneself without working was a very high virtue. As Aristotle wrote, “all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.”1 In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church generally taught that work was a distraction, that the vita activa was in direct conflict with the vita contemplativa, (notwithstanding the stories of mystics such as Brother Lawrence and Teresa of Avila who noted that “God walks among the pots and pans.”2).
This negative view of work carried forward into the 20th century. As a child I grew up on tall tales of John Henry fighting against the Industrial Revolution that threatened his livelihood, replacing his strength with a machine. Could he hammer his way through the mountain faster than the steam-powered contraption? Yes! But at the cost of his life as he dies from exhaustion having just crossed the finish line.
Soon enough the ability to replace man’s labor with machines tipped the balance in the capitalist equation:
Labor + Capital = Productivity
Capital equipment doesn’t sleep so investment in capital outpaced investment in labor. Human labor was objectified on the shop floor as exemplified in this quote from the father of modern management, Frederick Taylor:
“All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department, leaving the foremen and gang bosses to work strictly executive in its nature.”3
Later in the century, as the Information Age rolled in, the teachings of the Japanese engineer Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, pushed back on this objectification. Seeing the importance that knowledge and human intelligence brings to industry, he noted that “People don’t go to Toyota to ‘work,’ they go there to ‘think’”.4 As it was later put to me by a Toyota Way consultant, Ohno essentially amended the traditional equation to:
Labor + Capital + Knowledge = Productivity
Yet today, we might tell Tall Tales about Mary, the software engineering whiz, or Mohan, the administrative genius, fighting against the encroaching intelligence revolution that threatens to replace them.
What do we make of all this? Should Mary and Mohan give in to the inevitable? What happens when knowledge work goes the way of physical labor? Will the average person still be relevant to the economy? If work is so bad, why does this seem like such a bad idea? But what if work is not the problem? Something to be avoided. What if work was part of the solution?
In stark contrast to the story of Gilgamesh, the Hebrew scriptures, written at roughly the same time, introduce a different narrative. In this story, people are created as image bearers of God, called to steward and bring order to creation. The first man and woman were told to multiply image bearers so as to increasingly reflect God’s glory on earth, His temple.
We first hear of work in Genesis 2:5–15 where it is read that God waited to bring about vegetables because there was no man to work and take care of the ground. In the story, this happens before the curse, so there is no reason to see work as punishment. On the contrary, this was an opportunity to work with the Creator!
In fact, in the Torah, the Hebrew word, avodah (עֲבוֹדָה) , can express a continuum of meanings: from work, as in work the fields, to serve, as in slavery in Egypt, to the service of priestly worship. Later, after the destruction of the temple, prayer was said to be “avodah of the heart.”
And so we see that work, as originally envisioned by our creator, can be viewed as a form of worship. It’s a way to work together with God. The curse disrupts our connection to God and changes the dynamic of work, making it more difficult, but it does not change the ultimate intent.
All work has dignity, and all kinds of work has dignity.
This brings us back to our original questions about what imbues value to a person. Can we overcome the curse and once again work alongside God as image bearers?
As I write this, we are coming upon the celebration of Christ’s resurrection, and I am reminded loudly that the answer is Yes! He is risen! The curse is broken! The new creation has begun! And we are once again invited to work alongside the creator, now with the added mission of ambassadors of reconciliation5.
In his book Work in the Spirit, theologian Miroslav Volf expands on this theme, describing work as a privilege we have to use the gifts given to us by the Holy Spirit. Work done according to God’s will is cooperation with God in the preservation and transformation of the world.6
When work is seen more broadly as part of a whole continuum, from physical to mental to spiritual service alongside the Creator, all in the service of new creation, it is possible to answer our questions about the source of meaning more definitively: every person has the capacity to contribute to what is meaningful by drawing on their unique God-given capabilities. Only some of us have economically valuable capabilities, but we all may contribute our unique worshipful form of work to help bring about new creation, the only thing to ultimately last7.
And so with a perspective of work informed by a new perspective of the full range of meaning of work and of our role working alongside the Creator, let’s look at the role intelligence plays in work.
(Intelligence (Faith + Work))
How then does intelligence fit into our role as image bearers?
First, it is important to say something about what we mean by intelligence in this context. There is a long tradition that considers intelligence to be tightly coupled with consciousness and uniquely human, divinely bestowed to us as image bearers. I find this to be problematic. It monopolizes a word that is commonly applied much more broadly in general usage and ties it closely to another word, consciousness, which to date defies concrete explanation much less definition. When we see an octopus exhibit the ability to solve difficult problems, it is hard to come up with another common word to describe this ability other than intelligence. Some would also say the octopus is conscious, and so at least preserve this connection, but what about the single-celled cellular slime mold, Dictyostelium discoideum? When food gets scarce these brainless organisms band together to form structures that help them move, and if that fails to find food, 20% of the cells sacrifice themselves to form into a stalk that lifts the remaining cells above the soil to be dispersed into the air in hopes of landing somewhere with food and the chance to propagate the species8. Conscious? I don’t think so. Intelligent? At least for the purpose of this essay I will say, yes.
So without denying that image bearing is a unique calling with a unique relationship to the Creator, I think there is value in distinguishing this divine spark from intelligence. For the purpose of this essay, I will go in the opposite direction and ask you to accept a broad definition of intelligence as: any strategy used to deal with the complexity and unpredictability inherent to the world. As noted above, this describes a large class of capabilities that can manifest in myriad ways, from mundane to fantastically beautiful. Looked at through this lens, intelligence shows up everywhere we look. Embodied within life, you could say intelligence is the sum of strategies employed to survive.
There is something unique about the intelligence humans possess. The human brain, the seat though not the entirety of our intelligence, is the most complex thing in the universe, and it is reasonable to think that intelligence is highly correlated with the complexity of the brain.
In the context of our expanded definition of work, we can see how many different types of intelligence can be employed accomplishing the work at hand, be it labor, service or worship. In the New Testament, a similar sentiment is expressed as the church is described as the body of Christ and admonished to give honor to every part of the body equally, especially the weaker and seemingly less honorable parts.9
So there are many types of intelligence, and the question in focus here, then, is how might we support our calling to bring about New Creation by using artificial intelligence to amplify our God-given intellects?
(Artificial (Intelligence (Faith + Work)))
Humans are known for our tool making. It sets us apart. Over the millenia we have developed increasingly complicated machines. More recently, we have honed the ability to create machines so sophisticated they can emulate various aspects of our intelligence, from pattern recognition, to logical reasoning, to more recently high facility with language and visual imaging. As with industrial machines before us, these new machines far exceed our capabilities in narrow ways.
A significant difference with artificial intelligence is the nature of the capability it emulates as it relates to our identity and the questions we are asking. In “The Life We’re Looking For”10 Andy Crouch offers a helpful framing for how to think about any technology, but especially artificial intelligence in the context of work. He describes how technologies generally fall on a continuum from serving as a device to serving as an instrument.
A device offsets our work in some way, our labor, providing us significant boosts in efficiency, but always at the expense of a loss of agency. The example he gives is flying in a jet. The jet is a powerful device that we submit to. We strap into the seat, remain still for most of some hours, and in exchange it takes us at phenomenal speeds we would never be capable of without such a device.
On the opposite extreme, is what Crouch describes as an instrument. Something that amplifies our capabilities without the loss of freedom and control. The example given is how Steve Jobs described the first Apple Macintosh Computer. Jobs described a study which measured the ability of animals to convert energy into motion. Humans were about a third of the way down the list while the California Condor topped the list with its ability to soar great distances riding thermals. Then some enterprising scientists decided to repeat the study with a person using a bicycle which turned out to blow away even the condor in terms of efficiency with relatively little loss of freedom and control. And so, Jobs explained, one should look at the Macintosh like a bicycle for the mind.
Harkening back to the story of John Henry, the steam engine was a device, and while it threatened the livelihood of many, a century later most of us would gladly make the trade of losing control in exchange for a sound body unbroken by day after day of hard manual labor. When a device replaces our physical strength we are generally OK with that. In fact, we’ve ordered our economies largely around machines. Over time, we have insisted on the right to have safety equipment and such, but in general, our culture still looks at work and labor relative to capital and machines much as the gods of Gilgamesh did: People are there to make sure the machines can work.
On the other hand, giving up freedom and control of our intelligence is a wholly different matter! We have worried about this from the time of Plato and his warning, voiced through Socrates, that the written word threatens to dull the minds of people,11 and the Information Age has only accelerated the temptation to center our economies around machines.
But now that we have machines that not only convey our written words but even emulates our ability to write, to make decisions based on complex variables, automate whole workflows, and even operate factories with no human supervision. … Where will it end?
Which brings us to a decision point. Even if it were possible to automate every form of economically viable labor, is that what we want to do? From a purely materialistic point of view there are arguments for and against this, but from the perspective of working with God to bring about New Creation, the answer becomes clearer: humans are uniquely called to a vocation. This is what brings us meaning.
This is not a call to stop using AI or any machine for that matter to help us do work. On the contrary, we live in a truly amazing time with an unprecedented ability to amplify our intelligence. Yet if we continue to organize our economies to center around machines, we will eventually extinguish our ability to derive meaning in life. It is incumbent on us to push back against attempts to organize our intelligence around machines, and instead to organize these intelligent machines around us to amplify our ability to work together with each other and with God.
References
- Politics, Book 8, Part II, Aristotle
- St. Teresa of Avila, mystic and multitasker, October 9, 2015 by The Leaven
- Frederick Winslow Taylor, M.E., Sc.D., Shop Management, 1919, pp. 98–99.
- van Vliet, V. (2017) Taiichi Ohno. Retrieved March 31, 2026 from Toolshero
- 2 Corinthians, 5:16–21
- Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work, Miroslav Volf, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1991, pp. 98–99
- I am painfully aware how naive this all can sound in the face of reality. I do not write this as a proposal for a panacea. And yet, our inability to imagine how we might get from here to there will never be resolved if we don’t establish clearly where we want to go. We need to look up to look down.
- Wikipedia, Dictyostelium discoideum
- 1 Corinthians, 12:12–27
- The Life We’re Looking For, Andy Crouch, Convergent Books, 2022
- Plato, Phaedrus, 274c–275b [/efn_note]
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
