Transcendence as Self-Annihilation
My career in technology started in the early 2,000s, a time of heady optimism about the future of technology. And I’ve seen the Internet create almost incalculable value for corporations and unprecedented freedom of location for employees. But over the last decade, my enthusiasm for my work has fluctuated. This is, in part, due to middle age shifting my perspective from glowing screens and networks toward human relationships, but a deeper shift is under way that goes against my Christian values, and I’ll do my best to unpack it here.
Technology is a tool that allows us to transcend established boundaries and assert human sovereignty over new domains. On its own, the push toward technical transcendence is certainly not an irredeemable drive. In fact, it is likely because we are made in the image of God that we emulate His dominion in our sphere of responsibility. But as technologists, we simply do not know when to stop. And technology, as an insatiable machine we all empower with our innovation, will continue to exert control over nature until it remakes even humanity itself, unmoderated by a cultural belief in accountability to God.
When I was in my teens living at the very edge of civilization in a Northern Ontario mining town, I could see the progress of technology pushing roads into the forest as NASA launched rockets into space. Since I was also an aspiring songwriter, I wrote a short verse that describes what motivates some technologists to erases limits wherever they find them.
The reason man is driven to conquer the skies is, by reason, to conquer a God he denies.
Our desire to conquer nature through technology is not surprising. Mankind, as a whole, is bent toward self-centeredness and separated from God.[1] There is nothing we can do to heal ourselves. But many, perhaps most, technologists have a quasi-religious drive to redeem the world one problem at a time, whether they believe in God or not. No matter how deep the technologist’s convictions, however, their optimism and skill cannot rectify social ills as readily as technology tames nature. Fundamental worldview disagreements produce widely divergent assessments of problems and specifications for their solutions. In truth, there may be nothing human beings can do to save themselves. We need outside help.
The Bible tells us we are created, not by accident, but for a purpose, for our Creator. It says he knew exactly what to do about our predicament. He sent His Son into our world, to take our humanity onto Himself. Jesus Christ was born more than 2,000 years ago, to a young Israelite woman named Mary. Until He was 30 years old, He worked with His hands as a carpenter in relative obscurity.
Unlike everyone else, He was not bent in on Himself. He lived with truth and love and never sinned against others or against God.
After a short ministry in which Jesus preached the imminent Kingdom of God, healed people, cast out demons, and taught deep wisdom through stories, He was considered too politically dangerous for the leaders of Israel, and so was put to death by the most brutal means imaginable: crucifixion.
On His death, He was placed in a tomb donated by a wealthy patron, and everyone thought it was the end. Then, on the third day, everything changed. Breath returned to His body and Jesus got up. Then, He carefully folded the cloth that had been wrapped around His head and left death behind in that empty tomb, forever.
According to the Scriptures, whoever trusts Jesus to free them from sin and give them an eternal God-focused life, will be utterly transformed, just as Jesus went from death to life at his resurrection.
God chose a human body twice—at His incarnation, and at His resurrection. The Gospel story has been told so many times that we may miss that most obvious fact. Having lived and died as a man, Jesus also rose from the dead as a man. The glorified human body of Jesus Christ, a prototype for all who will follow Him in resurrection, has no distance whatsoever from anything that is good.
This should come as no surprise, because on the creation of Adam and Eve, God said they were good and affirmed all Creation. Our technical world of machine dominating nature is radically different from the idyllic Garden of Eden they worked by hand. Radical technologists seek to remove social, moral and physical boundaries, but often lack vision for what will result from the new freedom they unleash. As college graduates enter the workforce, they want to change the world, but they are rarely sure what that changed world should be. The words of a pastor or priest pointing the way toward hope ring hollow when our culture sees appeals to God and authority as taboo. So, the prevailing sentiment is that we should erase every trace of the old world in the hope that something better will emerge.
Ancient architecture is razed to be replaced with concrete, timber, glass, and steel—building materials comparatively lacking beauty and less durable than the ancient brick and stone they replace. The new materials enable us to build faster, bigger, higher—as if those things were ends in themselves. Buildings only matter when they hold a life worth living within them, but builders continue building long after the God-oriented human soul has left the building.
Like modern building materials, the structure of our modern society leaves our core hollow, politics reactionary, relationships shallow, and our families fractured. Political and intellectual leaders often reject all religion, and God Himself, unaware that their social engineering will fail to nurture a healthy community. We inhabit a shallow, conflict-ridden existence because our cultural structure leaves us exposed and unprotected from our own capricious impulses. And the shallowing and fracturing began at the Enlightenment, when John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and other revolutionaries elevated reason and self-reliance and banished God from the public sphere.[2] Now, freed from dependence on God by Enlightenment ideas, the modern man must fend for himself. And the necessity of self-reliance seems to have infected even the modern Christians who most staunchly resist the Enlightenment’s ideals with a self-determining drive. At the sixteenth-century European Reformation, Luther was excommunicated by the Catholic Church from which he had learned to believe.[3] Though he did not intend to do so, he created a new church in its place, and political leaders like Zwingli immediately, considering themselves the final measure of the truth, began to splinter it into many new churches. The Protestant legacy today includes many believers who proclaim a dogmatic “my-Bible-and-me” faith. And as a result of individualistic dogmatism, the church is splintered into small sects, often featuring reactionary, shallow doctrine. Onlooking unbelievers are not wrong to wonder what Christianity really is.
Socially, we have rejected the boundaries of traditional morality, redefined family, and placed radical individualism and self-created identity above any labels given to us by society. Even our binary sexuality is a label to shed. Human beings are still born male and female, but we reject even these common-sense God-given biological distinctions as mere societal labels—despising even our embodied duality as a boundary to transcend.
And the last boundary to transcend is humanity itself. I cannot pretend to understand gender dysphoria and the immense existential suffering it causes, but I know it’s real. I lost one of my best childhood friends to suicide, and I suspect this was part of the cause. Yet the profound reality of gender dysphoria seems to be amplified by our society in unprecedented ways. An immense medical infrastructure exists to serve its needs, and perhaps the business bottom line is at play. What may have been dealt with via family and church conversations in the past is now medical, psychiatric, and fodder for social media. Each domain agitates the problem and offers its own solution. The impetus toward seeing biological distinctions as boundaries to remove is moving beyond sexuality. Human embodiment is a boundary to be overcome with technology rather than resurrection, so tech leaders are building eternal life via a tech utopia. Religious tech leaders like Martine Rothblatt seek a society of disembodied, or other-bodied minds inhabiting an AI-driven virtual world in a nearly perfect state of harmony.
Are there any other boundaries to remove? What began as an effort at self-redemption seems to have morphed into almost complete self-annihilation. Yet in the center of our history stands the Gospel story. Many have tried to refute it without success, and it stands in judgment on our desire for ultimate freedom from embodiment. God took on human flesh, affirming its intrinsic worth, and at his resurrection transformed it, deified it, and gave us the hope of sharing in that resurrection.
Yes, this world is broken, but for those who trust in Jesus it is a transitional state to a glorious embodied human existence we can only begin to imagine here.
Is the human body good? Yes, but for a Christian, it is not what it will become.
“The first destruction of man, was the love of himself. For if he had not loved himself, if he had preferred God to himself, he would have been willing to be ever subject unto God; and would not have been turned to the neglect of His will, and the doing his own will. For this is to love one’s self, to wish to do one’s own will. Prefer to this God’s will; learn to love thyself by not loving thyself.” — Augustine of Hippo. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. VI: Augustine - Sermon on the Mount, Harmony of the Gospels, Homilies. 396, accessed February 27, 2026, https://reader.ignaria.com/read/npnf1-06?passage=1641. ↩︎
“… the late Professor Hutcheson, of Glasgow … is so far from grounding virtue on either the fear or the love of God, that he quite shuts God out of the question; not scrupling to declare, in express terms, that a regard to God is inconsistent with virtue; insomuch that, if in doing a beneficent action you expect God to reward it, the virtue of the action is lost: It is then not a virtuous but a selfish action.” — John Wesley. The Sermons of John Wesley - Volume I. 1760, accessed February 27, 2026, https://reader.ignaria.com/read/wesley-sermons-vol1?passage=2015. ↩︎
“If the reformed churches place the beginning of the defection at the true point, then their separation from the modern church of Rome is not a secession from the church of Christ, but it is the termination and completion of a separation formerly made, and merely a return and conversion to the true and pure faith, and to the sincere worship of God–that is, a return to God and Christ, and to the primitive and truly apostolical church, nay to the ancient church of Rome itself: But, on the other hand, if the beginning of the defection be correctly placed by the papists, then the reformed churches have really made a secession from the Romish church, and indeed from that church which still continues in the purity of the Christian religion. But the difference consists principally in this, that the Romish church is said to have added falsehoods to the truth …” — Jacobus Arminius. The Works of James Arminius - Volume 1. 1609, accessed February 27, 2026, https://reader.ignaria.com/read/arminius-works-vol1?passage=916. ↩︎
