We speak in code, in algorithms, in the vocabulary of enhancement and optimisation and human flourishing. But the underlying grammar is the same. A unified global civilisation, sharing tools and platforms and ambitions, is engaged in a coordinated attempt to build its way out of creaturely existence. The tower has many names, artificial general intelligence, radical life extension, genetic self-redesign, digital consciousness, the technological singularity. What unites them all is the same ancient conviction that the limits of creaturehood are not gifts to be received but obstacles to be overcome.

At the end of the Cornhill year we run short sessions called Hot Topics. This is where the students can propose topics, questions or subjects they would like to think about. The students then vote on which of the posed questions most sparks their interest. The range is phenomenal, it can be anything from ‘How do you maintain friendships in ministry?’ or ‘Is bi-vocational possible without just doing two full time jobs?’ to more practical issues like, ‘Can you offer some sane counsel on divorce and remarriage in the church?’

This year we had the question, ‘What are the big theological debates coming over the horizon?’ This is something I have been thinking about a lot and here is an expanded version of my attempt to answer. This is less prophetic as this wave is already lapping, but has not yet concretised into the rogue wave it is swelling to be.

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” C.S. Lewis

If you asked what the biggest theological issue of the first thousand years of Christianity was, most would answer, Who is Jesus Christ? The early Church spent centuries wrestling with that question, not as an abstract exercise, but because everything depended on it. Who exactly is the one we worship? The issue was Christology.

Then, from roughly the Reformation onwards, the question shifted. Not, ‘Who is Christ?’ but, ‘How are we saved?’ Grace, faith, works, justification, the great theological controversies of those five hundred years were concentrated on Soteriology.

Today, the dominant question has shifted again. We live in an age preoccupied with What is a human being? Every major controversy of our time circles back to theological anthropology, the self, the body, freedom, identity, sex, consciousness, dignity, race, the relationship between biology and personhood. Much of contemporary culture is engaged in a massive argument about what it means to be human, whether it realises it or not.

But here is the question that interests me more, What comes next?

I think there are good reasons to believe the next great theological debate will not be about Christ, salvation, or even humanity. It will be about something more fundamental still.

It will be about “creature-hood”.

For most of Christian history, human limitation was simply a fact. You were born finite, embodied, mortal. Your intelligence was largely given, so was your body, your lifespan, your place in the world. Everyone understood themselves, at some basic level, as a creature, dependent, received, bounded. These were not conditions to be solved. They were the conditions under which human life was unavoidably lived.

Something unprecedented is now happening. For the first time in history, humanity is acquiring powers that previous generations would have associated with the gods. Altering genes, redesigning embryos, creating systems that imitate thought, potentially extending lifespan indefinitely, generating synthetic realities. Whether these technologies fully succeed is almost beside the point. What matters is that they are changing our self-understanding at the root.

The old assumption was, I am given. The emerging assumption is, I am constructed. The old question was, Who am I? The new question is, Who do I want to become? And eventually, with an audacity previous ages would have found unthinkable, Why should there be any limits at all?

It is worth pausing to notice that Hollywood has been working through these questions for decades. Filmmakers, it turns out, have been far more alert to what is coming than most theologians. While the Church has often been reactive, reaching for responses only after the questions have already reshaped the culture, screenwriters and directors have been doing anticipatory theology without calling it that. They have been asking, in the dark of the cinema, exactly the questions the Church should have been raising in the light.

Christianity has never opposed technology as such. The Church embraced books, universities, medicine, and scientific inquiry, not always instantly but eventually. The question of our age is not principally technological, it is theological.

What parts of human life are gifts to be received, and what parts are raw materials to be redesigned?

That question touches everything, ageing, disability, intelligence, reproduction, death, and eventually the definition of the human species itself. It is a question our tradition has never had to answer at this scale.

Consider artificial intelligence. The biggest theological question about AI is not whether it becomes conscious, that is a distraction. It is what AI reveals about us.

For centuries, many assumed that what made humans unique was intelligence, reason, language, problem-solving. Now machines perform many of those functions better than any and all of us. Whether they truly understand is almost irrelevant, because the fact that they can imitate these capacities so convincingly forces a deeper question, Was intelligence ever really the ground of personhood? And if not, what is?

Is personhood self-awareness? Memory? Embodiment? Relationship? A soul? Being known and named by God?

Ex Machina put this question on screen with surgical precision. Its AI, Ava, is indistinguishable from a person in every observable way. The film’s disturbing conclusion is not that she might be human. It is that we cannot say with any confidence what the difference would be. It refuses to answer the question. It simply refuses to let us avoid it any longer.

AI does not answer these questions either. But it forces us to notice that we were never quite sure of the answers in the first place.

Or consider death. For most of history, mortality was unavoidable. Today many treat ageing as a technical problem awaiting a solution, and there are serious efforts to extend life dramatically. At the wilder edge lie dreams of digital immortality, uploading consciousness, preserving minds, escaping biology altogether.

Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie played this out with an almost naive directness. At the end of the film, Deon (Dev Patel) is dying and in desperation he uploads his mind into a robot body and runs away excitedly with Chappie. Problem solved. What the film cannot quite contain, and to its credit seems to sense, is the question it has just opened, Is that the same person?

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