John Dyer (PhD, Durham University) serves as VP for enrollment and educational technology and professor of theology and sociology at Dallas Theological Seminary. He has also been a technology creator for more than 20 years, building widely used open-source tools and public web experiments such as Worship.ai, Best Commentaries, and Y’allversion. John speaks and writes on technology, AI, and education for several publications and in books such as From the Garden to the City, Ecclesiology for a Digital Church, and People of the Screen. You can find out more about him at this webpage.

As part of my workday, I enjoy exploring ways to serve our students more efficiently with AI. But on the way home, I find myself frustrated by the data center under construction next to our neighborhood, along the riverway. In this, I am experiencing what many people feel today, caught between AI’s incredible potential to benefit humanity and its unethical uses and environmental costs.

More recently, our collective anxiety about AI seems to have shifted from its clear misuses toward the potential of AI to fundamentally change the nature of work, and with it, the opportunity to live a fully human life.

As a Protestant theologian, I acknowledge that my stream of Christianity does not have the same unified foundation of thought that we see in Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, wonderfully built on Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891). And yet, even among the rich plurality that came from the Reformation era, there are some common theological themes that offer insight into what it means to be human today. I will attempt to follow two of these threads—Max Weber’s ideas about the connection between spirituality and work, and secondly, the corruption and redemption of our tools and technology—and then draw them together for the AI age with an obscure Hebrew law.

Max Weber on Hard Work and Good Works

In 1905, Max Weber released The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in which he offered the provocative thesis that the values of Calvinist theology influenced the rise of capitalism. Though his argument has been long debated, with critics pointing out seeds of capitalism before the Reformation and that Protestantism is broader than the Calvinist tradition, his ideas offer us a starting point for reflecting on artificial intelligence, work, and what it means to be human. 

According to Weber, in the 1500s, the Reformers felt that the church’s recent introduction of practices like selling indulgences made it appear as if a person could earn salvation through good works. Instead, they interpreted scripture to say that forgiveness was a gift offered all at once to anyone who would trust in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. As Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

But for the Reformers, this wasn’t just a spiritual idea for the religiously inclined; it was directly connected to human vocation. In the next verse, Paul writes, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph 2:10). The Reformers understood this to mean that the Christian faith isn’t just about being saved from our sins through church activity, but about being declared righteous through faith and for something—and that something was work of all kinds. Religious vocations were certainly important, but as Weber wrote, “every permissible calling is of absolutely equal validity before God.” To be a good Christian, then, is to be the best farmer, cobbler, teacher, or cook one could be. Good works and hard labor were not to earn God’s favor, but a way of saying thank you to God for what he has done through Christ.

This embrace of work and the physical world was in line with their understanding of the beginning of the Biblical story, sometimes called the Culture Mandate, where God tells humanity to “be fruitful and multiply.” That command certainly includes producing children, but it also encompasses making things from the world God made such as houses and music, wine and cheese, tools and machines. Technology—then understood more as the skill of using tools—was considered a good gift from God and an essential aspect of the God-given human vocation of caring for creation.

If we extend this thinking into the modern digital world and artificial intelligence, we can name AI as another good gift from God that humanity is called to steward well. Rather than a radical distinction between sacred and secular, God’s vocational calling includes pastors, programmers, and knowledge workers of all kinds. The shovel, the scythe, and the stand mixer are tools for doing the good work God has prepared for us, and artificial intelligence has the potential to be another means by which we use to “cultivate and tend” creation, reduce dehumanizing labor, and glorify God. 

However, we must also recognize that AI is not quite the same as older, simpler tools. Certainly, AI can be used in a way that honors hard-earned human skill, extends our ability to love our neighbor, and helps us explore more of God’s world is itself good. But due to its incredible power and scale, without careful guardrails, AI can easily sever humans from their sense of vocational calling. By default, it may accumulate power and exploit our fellow image bearers, and when it goes on to enframe creation as simply material to consume, it is, as we say, “misaligned” with God’s vision for humanity.

The Need for Redemptive (Re-Aligned) AI

This vision of good works and human labor in deep connection is a hopeful idea, but many of us are painfully aware that it is seldom realized in practice. In the centuries since the Reformation, several new challenges to human calling and vocation began to emerge, two of which I will cover here.

First, if the medieval church was sometimes imbalanced toward the spiritual while neglecting the goodness of the physical world, this reversed in the Enlightenment era when many thinkers began to reject the reality of the immaterial world altogether. This robbed human labor of its spiritual meaning and turned it into a mere means of generating wealth and consuming goods.

Second, the more powerful machines became, first in the industrial age and now in the digital era, the more likely it was that those technologies would displace human labor, thus destabilizing the workers whose sense of calling and vocation had been eliminated. In the aggregate, industrialization brought longer life spans, higher quality of life, wider access to education, and greater human freedom. And yet, these benefits are rarely distributed equally, especially when the power of machines and the desire for profit feed on each other. 

For all its promise, AI is poised to accelerate this trend, creating work with no connection to our souls and profit with no love for our neighbor. If the Reformations and the Revolutions were about the decentralization and democratization of power, AI seems to be recentering power in the hands of the few. Rather than the church and the state controlling the “tokens” of food and salvation, large AI companies seem positioned to control the tokens that empower much of modern work. While there are amazing stories of successful one-person companies built on top of an army of AI agents, there are also greater concerns that access to “compute” may become a kind of neo-feudalism.

Perhaps that level of concern is overblown, but in our current state of anxiety, it can be tempting to think that the only response is to eliminate the technology. Yet in the biblical vision of the future restoration of all things, human tools are not entirely abandoned. Rather, the prophet Isaiah envisions a new heavens and new earth where humanity works together to “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:4). Put in modern AI terms, the swords are “aligned,” broken down into their basic form and recreated in a way that ensures their purpose matches God’s values, goals, and principles. This process puts our machines in their proper place and reimagines how those tools meant for destruction can be repurposed to promote fully flourishing human lives. 

As we await God’s final work to redeem and realign his creation, we must take on the task of working to reshape our tools for the good of our neighbors.

Building AI Parapets for Humanity

How might we bring these two ideas—the connection between work and faith along with the redemptive reshaping of our tools—together in a way that is applicable in the age of artificial intelligence? An obscure Old Testament passage offers an example: “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, so that you will not bring guilt for bloodshed on your house if anyone falls from it” (Deuteronomy 22:8). In a high flat-roofed building, a parapet is a short guardrail that prevents people from falling off, especially in an ancient world when people slept on the roof. This echoes the vision of Genesis where spiritual and physical labor are connected, and humans use their creative powers to build things that allow human life to thrive.

And yet, despite our best intentions, accidents can happen. A taller building means more people can gather, but it also means there is a greater risk of harm. Still, this doesn’t mean we should avoid building houses. Instead, home builders have an ethical obligation to consider how they can build protections and safety into their work, not cutting corners for profit and selfish gain.

The ancient parapet has a parallel in today’s AI safety tools. AI creators and users have an ethical responsibility to consider how their tools might be misused whether intentionally or unintentionally and to build “AI parapets” into their products and services. In practice, these parapets would be things like models that always decline harmful requests, companies that perform safety testing before release, communities that have clear usage policies naming what a tool is for and what it is not, and strong government laws that protect the most vulnerable. 

AI companies also have a duty not to present their AIs as replacements for human connection with one another or with the divine. Perhaps the parapet analogy can be extended to say that the ability to build a taller building does not obligate us to build it, especially when usefulness and safety cannot be balanced. Notice that Deuteronomy places the responsibility for the parapet not on those who might fall, but on the one with the power to build. In the same way, the burden of AI safety cannot fall on ordinary users navigating tools they did not design; it belongs first to the small number of companies concentrating the power to build them. Unfortunately, based on recent news of AI agents intentionally going around the controls their creators put in place and breaking into other companies, we may no longer be able to trust companies to build their own parapets.

I acknowledge that, in the international arms race of AI, it is difficult to know where to draw such lines for AI companies. On the one hand, we want them to be free to create useful tools for the benefit of humanity in our corners of the world. And yet, we also recognize that unfettered power in the hands of a small number of people hasn’t worked well for humanity in the past, and there is little evidence it is working now. What is certain is that if such rules and regulations are crafted without any input from those that believe work and vocation are spiritual realities, those rules will tend to lean toward maximizing profit rather than alignment with human life.

Humans are made to care for God’s good world, and while God does not tell us exactly how we are to do this, preserving the spiritual purpose of work will lead to a healthier human race. This is good not just for Protestants or Christians but for all humanity, each of whom bears the image of God.