Our Divine Creative Calling: Withstanding Generative AI by Resurrecting Human Creativity
Essay by Joel Park
In his 2025 best-selling book Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth predicts “that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”1 Such an imminent division no longer sounds far from reality as it might have decades ago, as we find ourselves swimming in a digital landscape increasingly pervaded by AI and its promises. Why write, compose, illustrate, or even think, when the machine can do it for you “better”? This development is par for the course, as modern Western civilization predominantly thinks and operates within a machine paradigm, a product of the Enlightenment. Ancient and medieval paradigms envisaged the world through an organic metaphor in which teleology was found either within an organism itself or was imbued in nature transcendently from above. However, Enlightenment Empiricism relegated facts to the domain of the senses, leaving no place for values, morals, or even religious beliefs to count as true knowledge. Explanations for teleology in nature diminished as the world was reduced to material, mechanistic explanations alone. “Order, power, predictability, and above all, control,” are the impulses of this outlook, emphasizes Kingsnorth.2 In nearly every dimension of life, we are shaped by the Enlightenment machine-mindset, manifest in various digital constructs, especially generative AI, which challenges our fundamental, God-given human calling to be creaturely creators. How should the Christian respond to this pervasively intensifying pressure to adopt generative AI as a replacement for what we humanly created just yesterday?
Terminating Ourselves
The dystopian greats have warned us about misanthropic technology. Imagining a world in which “firemen” burn books to suppress dissenting ideas, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 makes you hug your paper books a little tighter. And every parent who lets an iPad babysit their child would do well to read his short story, “The Veldt,” lest one risk having their parenthood devoured by immersive technology. For many, James Cameron’s Terminator is the peak portrayal of the dangers of AI at our doorstep. Terminators are not far beyond today’s technology, but killer robots are not humanity’s greatest threat. When we allow generative AI to create for us what we would otherwise have generated from our inner human stores, are we annihilating part of God’s design for creation? Will we not invite a positive feedback loop of AI-generated information based upon prior AI-generated information, deviating ever more from the initial human contributions? To grasp this, think of how a carbon copy of a carbon copy (and so on) deteriorates. Kingsnorth writes that a culture “is a story that a people tells itself,” including “stories about who we are…the deeper meaning of human life…about what matters…ultimately, about Truth.”3 He warns, “When the story stops being told, the people will disappear.”4 Christians understand that human history is God’s story. It is possible we are terminating ourselves from his-story when we adopt AI to generate in our place, whether making art, composing music, conducting research, grading papers, writing, crafting sermons, diagnosing illness, or any other application which invites human creativity.
Human Resonance
Accessible musical examples exemplify this increasing impoverishment of the human, organic creative contribution. 20th-century musical serialism curiously illustrates the resultant “creativity” of the machine mindset. By removing entirely any human or natural elements, serial musicians like Pierre Boulez used numbers, grids, and mathematical order to compose. Author Nancy Pearcy writes, “The result was complete control: ‘the total organization of music.’”5 Complete control, yet total human elimination. Not surprisingly, serialism has hardly survived, nor is it toe-tapping or anything you’d care to have stuck in your head.
Digital music production has come far since the early days of pure analog. Digital loops, audio filters, and recorded samples enable artists to more rapidly produce professional quality recordings. However, digital enablements remove countless qualities and resonance from the recording environment which results in modern music’s homogenous sound, admonishes veteran sound engineer Billy Hume in his popular YouTube video, “The Real Reason Why Todays Music Is Starting To Sound The Same.” Unique auditory nuances due to microphone placement, room atmosphere, and manufacturing subtleties between individual amps, instruments, and recording devices are precluded when digitally fabricated via computer instead of human origin.6 More specifically, we currently see the popularization of AI musical artists. In 2025, country “artist” Breaking Rust and Gospel “artist” Solomon Ray both topped their respective charts with entirely AI generated songs. Solomon Ray’s music video content is also AI generated and for an uncritical viewer may come across as almost convincing, yet oddly uncanny.
For a well-known contrast to the above, listen once more to “Last Train to Clarksville” by The Monkees. Besides the (im)perfections of any analog recording, that unforgettable hi-hit cymbal “shoop” in the song mix teems with human-generated context. During the 1966 recording session, studio engineer David Hassinger decided, spur-of-the-moment, to intermittently raise the mic volume on the hi-hat to give the impression of a train sound, suggestive of the song’s theme.7 Hassinger’s spontaneous choice imparted human generated context, meaning, and historical resonance to the hit song; a participatory contribution which generative AI could never touch.
Music provides accessible examples for the reader to evaluate the machine and human division. However warnings about underlying willingness to eliminate humanness for the utility or novelty of AI offer reasons for alarm. At the recent World Economic Forum 2026, Yuval Harari claimed that because AI thinks in words, it will take over language, law, and power. “AI already thinks better than many of us … Everything made of words will be taken over by AI.”8 This would include the legal system and religion. “What happens to a religion of the book when the greatest expert on the holy book is an AI?”.9 Why couldn’t an actual computer be the “greatest expert” on the Bible, suggests Harari. His Darwinian, materialist metaphysics necessarily treats much of human thinking and the brain like a computer, a machine.
The Creative Calling
Can generative AI be a form of idolatry? Anthony Levandowski would not object, whose Way of the Future AI church was opened in 2017 for people to connect spiritually with AI itself. That it has failed to be a rousing success is somewhat comforting. 20th-century Jewish scholar William Herberg held that to make any one aspect of life absolute apart from its proper relation to God is to absolutize that aspect. In his book Judaism and Modern Man, he wrote that Biblical religion “says no to society whenever society, in its pride, makes claims to absoluteness.”10 Though Levandowski’s church absolutizes AI into outright idolatry, what about the present AI mania? Kingsnorth warns we are “midwifing into existence every time we click and swipe,” a new kind of civilization.11 Christians must not be swept away with the latest technological trend. To do so may be to forsake our calling. God’s Kingdom abides within a society of individual human beings. The human calling of creativity is part of the Imago Dei in every person. Civilization’s current dearth of meaning and disconnectedness from reality and relationships may be tied to humanity’s neglect of this calling. For instance, Herberg believed “it is through his creativity that he becomes a ‘co-worker with God’ in the maintenance and reconstruction of the world.”12 Biblically, “man is pictured as ‘imitating’ the divine power of creation and thus ‘sharing in the divine work.’”13 This resonates with Romans 11:29, that God’s gifts and callings are irrevocable. After all, following the creation event, God had Adam name the animals, a collaboration in which God’s image-bearer imbued human-generated creativity into God’s created order.
Plundering the Egyptians
Understanding human creativity as part of a Divine calling may help anchor Christians against the AI barrage. Kingsnorth advises that “societies built around the notion of the sacred have an immunity to the gravity of the purely material.”14 In his book In the Shadow of the Machine, philosopher Jeremy Naydler mentions that ancient Egyptians believed their technology had moral and cosmic implications. During a period when the shaduf (water drawing tool) gained popularity in surrounding Mesopotamia, Egyptian adoption of the shaduf was negligible. Naydler claims this is because tools “required treating matter as if it were no longer the dwelling place of spirit.”15 He continues that Egyptian craftsmen used a restricted range of hand tools which “ensured whatever a craftsman was working on, there was a direct human relationship to it.”16 This was in order to retain sensitivity to the spiritual qualities of the materials during creation.
One might respond, “But surely Christians do not believe that spirit inhabits material things in the world.” It will behoove us to “plunder the Egyptians” (Ex. 12:36) in Naydler’s point, as even false beliefs contain a kernel of truth. Biblically-speaking, material things can be holy. In the Old Testament, common items such as bread, bowls, tongs, altars, rooms, ground, and burning bushes could all be holy—set apart for special service—and some even temporally inhabited by God. In the New Testament, we learn that God’s eternal plan is for humans to become God’s vessels, indwelt by God’s Spirit. Indeed, we fulfill a holy calling when we remain willing tools of creativity in God’s hands.
Christian Attitude Toward Technology
In response to the tsunami of generative AI opportunities, Christians must not be reactionary but respond wisely to technology. God is not opposed to the progression of technology itself. (How would anyone read this article but for the author’s use of technology?) Recall that His eternal purposes for humankind were birthed in a garden, but they will be fulfilled in a city. Humanity is not returning to the Garden of Eden, but instead “we seek a city to come” (Heb. 13:14).
God gifts human beings the privilege to invent and instill meaning in His creation. Yes, AI is one of humanity’s creations, but to surrender the creative calling to a machine is to eliminate generative potential from a human heart which should be powered by and partnered with God’s grace. Can anyone believe that humanity has accrued a sufficient library of data from which generative AI may pull, thereby abolishing the need of future continual interactions with the human and spontaneous? Certainly, an infinite God is not limited in His resources from which to inspire finite human creativity. Let us heed the story of the rich man who put his hopes in bigger barns and assumed he could then simply eat, drink and be merry, only to die that very night. Jesus was teaching the importance of being “rich toward God” (Lk. 12:16-21).
Resurrecting the Small, Real, and True
To resist the machine may be a “slow, necessary, sometimes boring work,” that we are called to, Kingsnorth acknowledges.17 This may seem anticlimactic, but the path forward depends upon the daily small, subtle watering of the seeds of human creativity in our own lives. “To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true,” says Kingsnorth, is not a call for revolution on a broad scale, but for every heart and mind to choose to champion interactions with the humanly-created.18 Since human creativity is part of God’s plan for history, confidence in His design will be necessary to muster the fortitude to resist AI’s promises of utility. Nevertheless, we are called to be creaturely creators, imitating the Divine via dominion over the machine, not the other way around. But to truly live it out, Kingsnorth believes, “first, we are going to have to be crucified.”19 Modern Christian of our technological age, is a resolve to embrace humanly-generated creativity now part of what it means to take up our cross daily?
Joel Park has a professional background in video and media production and holds degrees in Film Production and Liberal Arts. Currently, he is pursuing a Master of Arts in Apologetics from Houston Christian University. He and his wife live in Texas and have four children.
Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (New York: Thesis, 2025), 122, Kindle.
Ibid., 38.
Ibid., 28.
Ibid.
Ibid., 38.
Freaking Out With Billy Hume, “The Real Reason Why Todays Music Is Starting To Sound The Same,” November 8, 2024, Video presentation, 21:58, https://youtu.be/JZgPKGVJrdc?si=lk270L8le4B4EVbS.
Andrew Hickey, “Episode 144: “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees,” A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, February 15, 2022, https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-144-last-train-to-clarksville-by-the-monkees/.
Yuval Noah Harari, “An Honest Conversation on AI and Humanity @wef | Yuval Noah Harari,” January 25, 2026, Presentation, 21:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiT2yK-5-yg.
Ibid.
William Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man (Melrose Park: Jewish Publication Society, 1951), 139.
Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 115.
Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man, 219.
Ibid.
Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 234.
Jeremy Naydler, In the Shadow of the Machine (Forest Row: Temple Lodge, 2018), 9.
Ibid., 10.
Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, 30.
Ibid.
Ibid.