Eschatology and the Technologies of Human Enhancement

Introduction

We live in a time of rapidly accelerating technological development, and everywhere today people are awakening to the reality of our new situation. Technology can touch and transform nearly every dimension of the natural world around us. With recent advances in areas such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology (to pick just two profoundly significant but little-understood areas), we find ourselves already living in an era in which the very stuff of nature is subject to human modification through technology.

How can anyone keep up? Advances occur too quickly for most of us to comprehend the full significance of what is going on. Before we understand one advance, we find that it has already triggered the development of other breakthroughs. To be honest, we feel overwhelmed, all the more so when we recognize that the pace of technological development is accelerating. We wonder if it will ever stop. There is no reason to think it will. It seems more accurate to think that we are only at the beginning of this new age, far enough along to see what is happening but not to see where it is going.

What is most sobering about our particular technological era is that we are using technology to change ourselves directly. Technology has always changed human beings, but mostly in indirect ways. For instance, stone tools and cooking fires provided more food to nourish bigger brains. Today, if we want to become smarter, we take a more direct approach. Good nutrition takes us only so far. We want something more direct, fast, and effective, something like “smart genes” or “smart pills” or perhaps an implanted computer. Some have even suggested that only “cognitively enhanced” human beings will be able to cope with the world we are creating. Others think that machines will win in the end, no matter how clever we become.

That scenario, at least, is a few decades away. Right now, however, we can change the very nature of things by synthesizing and creating novel materials and organisms. We can modify everything around us and about us. We are our own lab experiments, and we ourselves have become our own projects for making and re-making. As these powers of our technologies grow unabated, their transformative possibilities increase. The scope of their reach extends from the scale of single atoms to distant asteroids.

Like it or not, this is the context in which we must live as Christians today. We may wonder about the providence of a God who puts technology in human hands. But here we are, our hands holding powers our minds cannot comprehend. As in every age, our calling is to live faithfully and think creatively, daring to allow our theological imagination to keep up with what God is doing in our moment. We might wish for a simpler time, but we are not called to ministries of nostalgia or withdrawal. With humility and with the grace that creates in us the faith that seeks understanding, we seek today to understand our technological moment theologically, by referring all things to God. How is the triune God in us and with us in this present moment, in this unprecedented, perilous, and bewildering age in which we find ourselves? How do we understand the future we are creating in light of the coming glorious rule of God?

Before turning to these questions, however, it is necessary to take account of where we are. How do we read the signs of our times?

Human Enhancement through Technology

Human beings have long dreamed of enhanced powers and capacities, including immortality. Religious faiths have nourished these dreams and given them specific content. Christians, for example, are defined by hope that in Jesus Christ, we will be made one with Christ in endless glory. Over the millennia, this vision has inspired not only spiritual devotion and theological elaboration but also great works of art and engineering. Seven centuries ago, for example, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) described human transformation by inventing a new word—trasumanar in Italian—telling us that to go beyond the human is something that not even a poet can describe in words. ¹ Dante’s word, trasumanar, has reentered our vocabulary as “transhumanism,” the view that human beings should develop and use technology to transcend the biological limits of humanity.

Implants and Genetic Enhancement

A wide range of other technologies, ranging from brain stimulation to implanted devices that interact directly with the brain or other organs, effectively turn humans into cyborgs. Meanwhile, advances in genetics and in the technologies of gene and cell modification are bringing us closer to the day when human enhancement may be achievable, not just for one person at a time, but in a way that might be inherited by future generations. Scientists and bioethicists refer to this as “human germline modification,” while the media tends to speak of it more provocatively as “designer genes” or “designer babies.”

Applied to an inherited disease, the concept of gene therapy is as simple as it is attractive; it could free a couple from the risk of giving birth to a child with a dreaded genetic disease, and free that child from even being a carrier for the disease. Applied to enhancement, however, the concept is a bit more complex. If we knew which genes make someone more athletic, attractive, or smart, should we try to add them at the time of conception? Doing so would mean that these genes would be in every cell in the child’s body, including sperm or eggs, thereby passing them on through the “germline” to all future generations. ⁵ For many people, this is a step too far, mainly because of the limits of human ability to predict consequences. But if human germline enhancement ever occurs, we human beings will be on the way toward creating something that could become a new species. While this seems highly unlikely to happen in the next decade or so, the possibility should not be ruled out if we stretch our horizon to a hundred years or more.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). “The Vitruvian Man.” Pen, ink, and wash on paper. Da Vinci rendered the symmetry of the human body within a circle and square according to geometric proportions given by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, a first-century BCE Roman architect, engineer, and author. Gallerie dell’Academia.

Some, of course, do not think human beings will be around for much longer, not because we will have destroyed ourselves, but because we are building our own replacement, a smarter-than-human machine that does not need us any longer. Those who advocate building super-human intelligence seem to believe such machines will treat us well. Others are less sanguine and wonder why we would take such a risk. Still others wonder who this “we” is that decides for all humanity. Perhaps no one—no person, no ideology or blueprint, no government, and no global plebiscite—should have such control or decision-making power. We may have entered an era in which individual actions can have global if not cosmic consequences.

Perhaps some cognitively enhanced kids will decide for us all. Should we give them oxytocin first? If not oxytocin, can anything save us?

Now and Then: The Relevance of Christian Eschatology

Technology promises to enhance human intelligence, athleticism, moral predispositions, mystical experience, and lifespan. Technological science seems bent on merging us with machines. Taking stock of our situation, secular critics might conclude that Christian eschatological hope is no longer coherent, relevant, or needed for anything we cannot achieve ourselves. Centuries ago, the idea of God may have been useful in awakening our hopes. But once awakened, hopes give rise to inventions. Our longings are fulfilled by technologies, not deities. Some go so far as to argue that waiting in hope for God is just a stalling tactic whose only effect is a God-dependent lethargy that freezes us in our evolutionary tracks. Secular critics of religion are only too happy to remind us that hoping in God confines us more than it comforts us.

What answer can Christians give? Is Christian eschatology still relevant to our times? Too often, Christians give answers like these: Trust God, not technology. Technology will fail. Or if it succeeds, in the end it will “bite back” when all our dazzling humanistic dreams turn into dehumanizing nightmares. Besides that, technology upsets the social and economic status quo and feeds the injustices that divide us. And if that is not enough reason for Christians to object to technology, some will play the “heresy card” by claiming that technology tempts us to imagine a future wholly constructed by human effort, as if it were some latter-day technological Pelagianism designed to seduce us into relying on something other than grace. One way or another, these responses all come to the same thing: Be afraid.

In a way, of course, all these worries have some truth to them. It is good to be wary of technology. On that score, Christians should make common cause with all people of good will and good sense who see that technology can make us giddy, nerdy to the point of being nutty, sometimes even down-right dangerous. A healthy dose of Christian realism about human fallibility is always in order. But for Christian theology, a more profound engagement with technology is needed, one that rises above mere neglect and negativity. The church is to be “the true and credible eschatological community of salvation,” something it cannot do “by being the resentful, ineffectual and fearful host of those who deny themselves the greatness” of the challenge of our moment. ⁶ So writes Karl Rahner, S.J. (1904–1984), one of very few twentieth-century theologians to explore the meaning of eschatology in response to technological futurism.

It is not enough for theology to be cautious about future outcomes. Our concern is to preserve the vibrancy of eschatological faithfulness in our time. Specific technologies and outcome scenarios may concern us. To be honest, some technologically driven scenarios should keep us up more nights than they do. But our focus is on our hopes, not our fears. Our hope is in God, the One who was and is and is to come, the living One, the holy One from whom and through whom and to whom are all things. Our challenge is to see the connection between ultimate hope and imminent change.

How, then, are we to think eschatologically about technology? What is the relationship between the next things and the last things, between the future of this creation and its consummation in the new creation? Thanks to technology, the intramundane future (i.e., the future that will occur within this world) now stretches before us as a vast expanse of unexplored possibilities. Early Christians may have seen their intramundane future as a brief period of trial that would last a few decades. Their descriptions of the future often included traumatic social and political developments. In the transition to the next age, there might be disturbances to nature if not wholesale cosmic conflagration. But no one then could have imagined that humans would transform nature or that they would be given thousands of years to do so. No one guessed that earlier forms of humanity once existed or that future forms might come to exist. Today we are creating a future that early Christians simply could not have imagined.

The intramundane future is not what it used to be. Because of technology, we live in a world that has been “set in motion. It has become possible to plan and shape it.” ⁷ Today’s church must not abandon or soften its eschatological consciousness. On the contrary, precisely because of the unique features of our context, the church of today must recover its sense of being “the eschatological community of salvation.” ⁸ To do this, we must start with eschatology’s most basic claim.

The Distinctiveness of the Last Things

We may live in a situation radically different from that of Christians in earlier ages, but the distinctive character of “the last things” endures as a clear and consistent feature of any truly Christian eschatology. How should we understand the distinction between the next things and the last things or between the creation’s intramundane future (“proximate future”) and the final consummation of all things with Christ in God (“absolute future”)? The difference between these futures is not based on their coming at a different place in the temporal order or in the sequence of coming events. It is not that the last things come just after everything else. The difference is ontological and theological, not sequential or historical. For this reason the difference between next things and last things could not be more profound or fundamental. And for the same reason, the relationship between them could not be more intimate.

The distinction between the absolute future and the proximate future is rooted in the distinction between God and the creation. The absolute future is the destiny of the creation in God. It is not some final situation or resting state that happens to be the last event in time. Nor is it a final stage or set of things that happen to come at the end of the line, like the last frame in a movie. The last things include all things in their consummation in God. They are not new things added on, but all things made new and added up together at last into unity with each other in God.

A brief hint of this final consummation and fulfillment of creation is found in Ephesians: “With all wisdom and insight [God] has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:8b–10). Similarly we read in Colossians that through Christ, “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1:20). As creation comes from God in Christ, so through the power of the Spirit all creation is gathered, reconciled, and brought to its glorious fulfillment in Christ. Or as we read in Romans, “For from him [i.e., God] and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen” (Rom 11:36). None of these texts suggests that in the end God will create another set of things to come after everything else. They clearly say that all created things coming from God are also going to God and are included in the eschatological consummation.

What makes the eschatological future absolute is that it includes all things, and no ordinary thing can do this. It is only in their being made one with God that all things are made one in the glorification and unity of the new creation. According to Rahner, eschatology “is a specification of the world as a whole, comprehending the whole of reality and determining where its consummation is to be achieved. To this extent it has a transcendental character. Properly speaking, therefore, it cannot be planned or brought about by man either, because as the total consummation of reality as a whole it cannot per definitionem be brought about by any one particular element within this reality.” ⁹

This leads directly to two consequences. First, because of Christian theology’s conviction about the faithfulness of God’s plan to unite all things in Christ, it is suspicious of any claim for the ultimacy or perfection of any future state of creation. No ideologically defined or technologically attained perfection is possible. In response to mid-nineteenth-century Marxist pretensions, Rahner rejected any effort to define a final or perfect state. Of course there is a world of difference between mid-nineteenth-century Marxism and today’s transhumanists, who cannot be accused of having an ideology of perfection or of defending the claim that some future state will be so complete that it will be the final state of nature. But as we think about transhumanism, Rahner’s criticism is a helpful reminder. Theology’s insistence that the last things cannot be identified with any set of future things reminds us to sit lightly with any claims of improvement or progress, much less claims of perfection. Even if we succeed in improving or enhancing ourselves, we cannot perfect ourselves or make ourselves infinite beyond all limits. Transhumanists may exchange one set of limits for another, but not for limitlessness or infinity. Limitlessness is only found in the final consummation.

What applies to secular ideologies or to transhumanist visions applies equally to Christian programs for the future. Christianity offers no plan, no blueprint, no definition of perfection, regardless of the means of its attainment. Christianity offers “no intramundane utopian view of the future. It leaves all objective planning of the future free and rejects only—but radically—every ideological utopian view of the future in which the absolute future is confused with an intramundane and categorizable future and in which the ultimate future of man is seen to consist in something less than the unspeakable, sacred mystery of the absolute God who out of sheer grace communicates himself to man. . . .” ¹⁰ Christians do not place their hope in some social or political utopia precisely because our hope is in God alone.

A second consequence also flows from the belief that all things are destined for consummation in Christ. Because this is true, we see everything in a different light. Each creature, each person, and each state of affairs must be seen as on its way toward unification with all other things. Nothing is merely what it is. Everything is also even now on its way toward its everlasting fulfillment in Christ with God. As Paul put it, even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, from now on “we regard no one from a human point of view” or according to the flesh, for in Christ already now there is “new creation” (2 Cor 5:16–17). No human is merely human, and no creature is merely a creature. Just as each creature exists as an expression of the creative love of God, so each creature is on its way, comprehended, gathered up, and already defined by its inevitable consummation, which begins even now. Eschatology requires us to see each creature, ourselves included, as on its way to its unity and glorification in Christ.

Putting these two points together, we can agree with Rahner that Christian theology is not entirely neutral on the question of the future. It has no utopian plan or technological program. But that does not mean Christians are neutral about the intramundane future of this creation. Precisely because we see all things not from a human point of view but with an awareness of their eschatological destiny in Christ, we openly welcome the changes that lie ahead. Our openness is not based on the misguided view that some future state—least of all some engineered future—is the consummation. Rather, with confidence in that consummation and in the open-endedness it implies for all creation, we are open to what comes next. According to Rahner, Christianity “does not remain merely neutral with regard to any sensible planning of the future in this world but takes up a positive attitude towards it.” ¹¹ Nowhere is this more true and yet more sobering than when we consider the future of humanity at the hands of technology. What does it mean for Christian theology to adopt a “positive attitude” toward human technological modification?

Transforming Humanity

Human enhancement technology can have two broad outcomes. First, it can change individuals to free them from at least some biological limits. Some transhumanists today hope for this possibility. They expect life-extending technologies will give them extra decades, allowing time for other technological advances to offer further enhancements. This technology does not yet exist, but already it is far enough along in its development that some are already experimenting with it in hopes that it will extend their days and enhance their capacities. At the level of the individual, the effect could be profound. Transhumanists hope that some people already born may be able to modify themselves so significantly in their lifetime that they will watch themselves become something trans- or post-human.

The second outcome would be the transformation of the human species into a new form of humanity. At the level of the human species, this outcome is impossible to overstate. But because the transformation would occur over a number of generations, the technology used would work more slowly than what is needed to change a human individual into a transhuman. In Rahner’s era, only this second outcome is addressed at any length. Julian Huxley, for example, wrote this much-quoted passage in 1957, reintroducing the word “transhumanism” into the modern discussion. According to Huxley:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.

“I believe in transhumanism”: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny. ¹²

What Huxley identifies here as “Peking man” is known to us today as Homo erectus, part of our genus but by all accounts so significantly different from us today as to be a different species.

Less than a decade after Huxley, Karl Rahner used similar language to describe even more concretely the species transformation that might lie ahead. The emerging technological program of human transformation “is not concerned with this or that man but with man, with mankind”; it sees humanity as an engineering project, and it aims “coolly to sketch, design and calculate a new, different man and then to produce him technologically in accordance with this plan.” ¹³ What Huxley and Rahner both saw as so new—the transformation of the species through technology—stood in sharp contrast for them with all prior attempts at human transformation, limited as they were to such classic self-improvement methods as exercise, education, or spiritual discipline.

Technology has rendered human beings “operable,” Rahner says, but this fact does not seem to trouble him. Christianity has long seen humans as malleable. “Man is fundamentally ‘operable’ and legitimately so.” ¹⁴ The general truth of human malleability long precedes its technical possibility. “According to Christian anthropology man really is the being who manipulates himself.” ¹⁵ And yet, according to Rahner, there is something significantly new here: “What is new in this issue is therefore not that man is faber sui ipsius [i.e., maker of himself], but that this fundamental constitution of man is manifested historically today in a totally new way. Today for the first time man’s possibility of transcendental self-manipulation irreversibly takes on a clear and historically categorical form.” ¹⁶ For this reason, “theology is faced anew with the question of man’s essence.” ¹⁷

Our challenge today is even more urgent and complex than it was in Rahner’s time. In addition to the possibility of a future form of humanity, we must contend with the growing possibility that through technology, some individuals may live for extra decades, maybe even longer, and that they will have their cognitive abilities or other capacities enhanced far above the normal range. This prospect raises profound social, psychological, and economic issues, some of which are already being explored in the debate about transhumanism, and all of which have been explored at length in the secular bioethics literature on human enhancement. It also raises theological questions. How should a person who is enhanced interpret one’s life, in all its various stages and transformations, as a new kind of Christian life being lived out before God? Is it even possible to do so? These theological and pastoral questions are already on the horizon.

The Gathering of All Things in Christ

The focus here, however, is on how to nourish the hope for the consummation of all things in Christ. We must learn to make sense of that claim while living in an age of technology. The future we face lies largely hidden before us, and as much as we plan or try to predict it, we have learned to expect the unexpected.

One option, of course, is to abandon eschatology altogether and leave the whole perplexing business of the future up to the engineers and the planners. No doubt some in our churches will be tempted to exchange the God of the future for the God of the past, renouncing the One who makes all things new for an idol that keeps all things the same. Nowhere is this more tempting than when it comes to technology, especially technologies of human enhancement. Eschatologically mindful Christianity refuses to do this. It rejects the thought that there is any affinity whatsoever between the God who makes all things new and the obligation to keep all things the same.

The opposite approach is to think that Christian faith offers some special foreknowledge of future events. This view was widespread when the threat of nuclear catastrophe hung heavily over human civilization. Such anxieties fueled intense interest among some Christians in apocalyptic scenarios for the future. End-time predictions often involved Israel, the anti-Christ, and the rapture of the faithful. ¹⁸ Today, the focus of public anxiety has shifted to climate change, but it is unclear yet whether this will trigger any kind of response in popular Christian thought. If we dismiss these options, how then should eschatologically-mindful Christians regard human enhancement? What general attitude or stance should we take? Of course all human beings share prudent concerns for safety and for the just distribution of risks and benefits. Eschatological faith goes further. It accepts the invitation to see all creation as open to a transformation rooted in its future in God. Seeing creation this way, as open to transformation, Christian theology is intrinsically predisposed to accept the idea that even now, while still on their way toward final transformation, all creatures are inherently open to smaller transformations. Eschatological faith is open to the prospect of the technological modification of the natural world, including human individuals and the human species. Here, indeed, is perhaps the practical test of the true radicalism of eschatological faith. Christian faith and hope that are truly open to the ultimate future as final consummation should also be open to the proximate future as intramundane change. To see each thing as already on its way toward its consummation is to see it as held open even now to change.

This is even more compelling when we consider that our precise form of humanity has not always been here. There were humans before Homo sapiens, and there may very well be humans after us, descendants modified in part by technology. All these are surely redeemed in Jesus Christ. If we follow the guidance of classic incarnational theology in trying to make sense of these things, what other conclusion can we draw? In the incarnation the eternal Logos becomes human. In the concrete and historical particularity of Jesus of Nazareth, God takes up our humanity—all of us in our present diversity and in all our past, present, or future forms—and unites the whole of humanity to Christ and in Christ. No matter how different we are from the people of the time of Jesus, we believe that we are included in the scope of the incarnation. No matter how different future forms of humanity might be, we do not limit the incarnation. Nor do we imagine a partial Christ who stops redeeming when technology starts modifying. God’s plan is to gather up all things in Christ.

In every age, Christians live in the confidence that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come . . . will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38–39; emphasis added). We face a future that we cannot predict but that we need not fear. On the contrary, we can embrace this unknown future, certain that it is already embraced by God. Indeed, we can also take our place among those who plan such a future. As Rahner urges, our confidence in “the absolute future which is God neither diminishes nor eliminates the responsibility it entails for a ‘this worldly’ future, but rather imparts a radical dimension to it.” We live in a “state of readiness” because we “adopt an attitude, at once positive and critical, of responsibility and active engagement leading to the achievement of an ever fresh future within this world.” ¹⁹ Only the eschatological-mindful Christian can live today in this world with this confidence.

Far from fearing technology or complaining about its scope and power, today’s Christian can step up to new maturity that is at once bold and humble, cautious and yet ever hopeful. We can live, as Rahner puts it with his theologically-grounded confidence, as “a pilgrim on this earth, advancing into the uncertain and going out to venture in brotherly union with all those who plan the future of this world.” ²⁰ Confident in God, we can be truly and profoundly hopeful about the future. Joined with Jesus Christ, we can live boldly into the full meaning of the future of humanity embraced in the incarnation. Guided by the Holy Spirit in all things, even in matters of technology and the future, we may “quite legitimately feel proud of being that creature who plans himself,” a community of sisters and brothers in Christ in whom creation not only attains an “exalted clarity but also begins to steer itself.” ²¹