The Rival Gospel of Transhumanism

Why Michael Horton is right to call it an eschatology, not merely a technology

(Image: Detail of Creation of Adam, Michelangelo)

The Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore

https://substack.com/

March 28, 2026

Michael Horton, in his article at Modern Reformation, has done the Church a service by naming something that too many still treat as morally neutral. Transhumanism is not merely a set of technological ambitions. It is not simply a matter of better tools, longer life spans, enhanced cognition, or mechanical progress. At its heart, it is a rival eschatology. It is a competing doctrine of man, salvation, and the future.

That is the real battlefield.

Christians often make the mistake of arguing with modern technological ideologies only at the level of ethics. We ask whether this or that development is wise, safe, regulated, humane, or socially beneficial. Those are necessary questions, but they are not the deepest questions. The deepest question is this: what kind of salvation is being promised, and by whom?

The transhumanist answer is clear enough. Man is flawed, but not fallen in the biblical sense. His problem is not sin, but limitation. His body is not a created good now subjected to corruption, but an outdated platform. Death is not the wages of sin, nor the final enemy to be destroyed by Christ, but a technical failure awaiting solution. In this vision, redemption comes not from above, but from within. Not by grace, but by innovation. Not through the incarnation, cross, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, but through data, code, surgery, chemistry, machinery, and eventually the fusion of mind and machine.

That is not merely bad theology. It is anti-Christian theology.

Horton is right to say that transhumanism is theological even when it pretends to be secular. Modern man has not ceased to be religious. He has simply transferred his worship. He still longs for immortality. He still seeks transcendence. He still wants to overcome weakness, suffering, ignorance, and death. He still dreams of glory. What has changed is that he now seeks these things apart from God, and increasingly against God. The ancient lie has not disappeared. It has merely learned to speak in digital language: “You shall be as gods.”

That is why the transhumanist project is so seductive. It flatters man in the name of compassion. It presents rebellion as benevolence. It tells us that our refusal to accept creaturely limits is actually a noble moral duty. Why should we not conquer aging? Why should we not improve humanity? Why should we not transcend biological weakness? Why should we not build a better species?

Because man is not a machine in need of upgrading. He is a creature in need of redemption.

That distinction is everything.

Christianity does not teach that the body is the prison of the soul. It does not teach that matter is the problem, nor that history is an embarrassing prelude to spiritual escape. The Christian faith is not Gnosticism baptized. God created the world and called it good. He created man in His image, body and soul together, as an embodied being. Sin did not make us embodied; sin corrupted our embodied life. Death is not natural in the sense of being desirable or proper. It is an intruder, an enemy, a judgment. Yet even in the face of death, Christianity does not offer escape from the body, but the resurrection of the body.

That is where the glory of the gospel stands over against every counterfeit.

The Christian hope is not that we will upload ourselves into a machine, dissolve into cosmic consciousness, or become post-human beings through our own technical mastery. The Christian hope is that Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, has conquered death in His own flesh and will raise us also. The future of the believer is not disembodied existence, but glorified humanity. The end is not less human, but more truly human. Not the annihilation of creatureliness, but its perfection. Not absorption into divinity, but communion with the Triune God through Christ by the Spirit.

That is why Horton’s emphasis on deification, rightly understood, matters so much.

Modern ears hear words like deification and immediately become uneasy, as though the Church were flirting with paganism. But classical Christian theology has long taught that salvation means more than acquittal. We are not only pardoned; we are transformed. We are brought into union with Christ. We are made partakers of the divine nature, not by essence, but by grace. We do not become gods by nature, nor are we absorbed into God. Rather, being united to Christ, we are made like Him in holiness, immortality, and glory as far as creatures can bear.

That is not self-exaltation. It is gift.

Transhumanism offers a parody of this. It mimics glorification while denying grace. It offers ascension without repentance, immortality without resurrection, exaltation without worship, power without holiness, and eternity without Christ. It is Babel with better funding. It is the old rebellion wearing a lab coat.

And here the Church must be very careful.

There is nothing wrong with medicine. There is nothing wrong with tools. There is nothing wrong with technological development as such. Christians should not speak as though every advance in science were a threat to the faith. Historically, that would be foolish as well as false. The Christian doctrine of creation helped make real science possible by distinguishing God from nature and affirming the created order as lawful, intelligible, and worthy of study. Yet the fact that tools are good does not mean they are ultimate. A scalpel can heal, but it cannot save. A machine may extend life, but it cannot redeem it. Information may be processed, but wisdom is not the same thing as computation. Intelligence is not holiness. Efficiency is not glory.

The modern world repeatedly confuses capability with authority. Because we can do a thing, we imagine we may do it. Because we may do it, we imagine we ought to do it. Because we ought to do it, we imagine it will save us.

That is not science. That is liturgy. It is the ritual life of a new religion.

And this religion has its own priesthood, its own dogmas, its own saints, and its own eschaton. Its priesthood consists of technologists, futurists, and engineers who increasingly speak of humanity as raw material. Its dogmas include the belief that consciousness is transferable, identity is editable, embodiment is optional, and mortality is a design problem. Its saints are the innovators and visionaries who promise deliverance. Its eschaton is the emergence of a post-human future in which man remakes himself.

It is not hard to see why such a vision appeals to a civilization that has lost confidence in transcendence but still cannot stop longing for eternity.

Yet the Christian must answer plainly: man does not need to become post-human. He needs to become holy.

That holiness will not be engineered into us. It comes by the Spirit of God. It is grounded in the finished work of Christ. It begins now in sanctification and will be brought to completion in glorification. The final answer to death is not artificial extension, but resurrection. The final answer to corruption is not enhancement, but redemption. The final answer to creaturely weakness is not the abolition of creatureliness, but its union with the risen Christ.

This also means that the Church must recover a stronger doctrine of the body, the sacraments, and the new creation. We cannot answer transhumanism adequately if we have already reduced Christianity to private feelings, moral uplift, and vague promises about going to heaven when we die. A thin gospel cannot withstand a thick heresy. If Christians themselves speak as though salvation were mainly inward, disembodied, and therapeutic, then they should not be surprised when the world offers a more ambitious imitation.

The answer is to preach the whole Christ.

Preach the Christ who took flesh, not as a temporary costume, but forever. Preach the Christ who rose bodily from the tomb. Preach the Christ who ascended in our humanity. Preach the Christ who gives Himself to His people in Word and Sacrament. Preach the Christ who will come again to judge the living and the dead. Preach the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.

Only that Christ can answer the false promises of the machine age.

In the end, this is not a contest between old religion and new technology. It is a contest between two gospels. One says that man, through knowledge and power, will save himself. The other says that man cannot save himself, and therefore God has come down to save him. One ends in pride, because it begins in pride. The other ends in glory, because it begins in grace.

Michael Horton is right. The issue before us is eschatological. Transhumanism is not merely tinkering with the future. It is preaching one.

The Church must answer with a better one.

Because our hope is not in silicon, code, enhancement, or engineered immortality.

Our hope is in Jesus Christ, who was dead and is alive forevermore.

And that is not a metaphor. It is the future of the world.