Lecture 4-1: The Cultural Mandate and a Theology of Technology

Genesis 1:28 (World English Bible): "God blessed them. God said to them, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'"

Genesis 2:15 (WEB): "Yahweh God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it."

Exodus 31:3-4 (WEB): "and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all kinds of workmanship, to devise skillful works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass."

3.1 A mandate given before the fall

It matters enormously, theologically, that Genesis 1:28 comes before Genesis 3. The command to "be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it" and to "have dominion" is issued to unfallen human beings, in an unfallen world, by a God who has just pronounced everything he made "very good." Whatever dominion means here, it cannot be read as a concession to a broken world, the way, say, permission for divorce is read elsewhere in Scripture as an accommodation to hardness of heart. It is part of the original design, part of what it means to be human made in the image of God at all.

This is important for a course on artificial intelligence because it forecloses one tempting but mistaken move: treating all sufficiently advanced technology as inherently a symptom of the fall, a mark of human overreach that a more innocent humanity would not have needed. That instinct has real biblical texture — Genesis 4 associates the line of Cain with the first city and the first forged tools, and chapter 5 of this course will examine Babel as a case of technological ambition gone wrong. But the baseline, established here in Genesis 1 and reinforced in Genesis 2, is that making things, exercising skilled power over the material world, and extending human reach are not themselves the problem. They were commanded before there was a problem to have.

3.2 Dominion is cultivation, not extraction

The word "subdue" (Hebrew kabash) and "have dominion" (radah) in Genesis 1:28 have taken real abuse in the history of interpretation. Read in isolation, and especially read through the lens of an industrial-era confidence that nature exists to be used up, these words have been marshaled to justify practices — environmental and otherwise — that look far more like conquest than care. This course does not defend that reading, and Genesis 2:15 is the reason why.

Genesis 2:15 gives the content of dominion a second, narrower telling: "Yahweh God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it" (WEB). Two verbs matter here. "Cultivate" (abad, literally "to serve" or "to work") casts the human relationship to creation as laboring for its flourishing, not merely upon its substance. "Keep" (shamar) is the same verb used elsewhere in the Pentateuch for guarding, protecting, watching over — the word used of priests guarding the sanctuary. Read Genesis 1:28's dominion through Genesis 2:15's cultivate-and-keep, and the exploitative reading becomes very hard to sustain. Dominion, on this reading, is delegated stewardship exercised for the good of what is ruled, not license extended for the ruler's private benefit.

This has a direct bearing on AI. Building a technology is an act of dominion in exactly this sense — reshaping raw material (silicon, electricity, mathematics, and vast quantities of human-generated text and images) into something with new capacities. The cultural mandate says this kind of reshaping is not, in itself, trespass on ground reserved for God. But it also says the standard for judging any particular act of technological dominion is not "can it be done" or even "does it produce value," but whether it cultivates and keeps — whether it serves the flourishing of what and whom it touches, including the people whose data trained it, the people whose jobs it changes, and the people who will use it. This standard will recur across the whole of Part II of this course.

3.3 A biblical instance of positive technical skill

If Genesis 1 and 2 establish the mandate in principle, Exodus 31:3-4 supplies a striking concrete instance. In the account of the tabernacle's construction, God names Bezalel and describes him as filled "with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all kinds of workmanship, to devise skillful works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass" (WEB). This is not a poetic flourish. It is a specific theological claim: that technical craftsmanship — the capacity to design and fabricate — can be a Spirit-given gift, exercised in direct service of the worship of God.

This matters for this course because it rules out, at the outset, the reflexive equation of "technical" with "secular" or "spiritually neutral at best." The most sophisticated engineering project described in the Pentateuch — the tabernacle, with its worked metals, woven fabrics, and precise measurements — is depicted as an act of worship carried out through Spirit-empowered technical skill. An AI researcher's technical competence is not, by that fact alone, spiritually suspect or spiritually irrelevant; it is, on this text's own logic, a candidate for exactly the same kind of Spirit-given service that Bezalel's was, contingent on what it is put toward and how.

3.4 The counterweight: Jacques Ellul on technique

A chapter that stopped here would be one-sided, and it would also be unprepared for the genuinely hard cases the rest of this course raises. Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society (1964), offered one of the twentieth century's most serious theological and sociological critiques of modern technology — not of any particular tool, but of what he called "technique": the totalizing pursuit of the most efficient method in every domain of life, a pursuit that Ellul argued tends to become autonomous, self-justifying, and resistant to being subordinated to any external value, including the intentions of the very people using it.

Ellul's claim is not that any individual engineer is malicious. It is structural: once a society organizes itself around the maximization of efficiency as an end in itself, technique escapes the control of the people deploying it — it generates its own momentum, its own criteria of success, and quietly reshapes the goals it was supposedly serving to fit what it can efficiently deliver. Applied to artificial intelligence, Ellul's warning is not "AI is evil" but something more unsettling: that the industry's own internal logic — optimize the metric, ship the faster model, capture the market before a competitor does — can operate with genuine momentum independent of anyone's stated values, Christian or otherwise, and even independent of any single actor's ability to slow it down.

This lecture does not adopt Ellul's fuller thesis wholesale — Ellul has been criticized, fairly, for painting technique's autonomy in terms so totalizing that human agency nearly disappears from the picture, which would make the cultural mandate's confidence in human vocation hard to sustain. But his caution belongs here, at the foundation of the chapter, precisely because Genesis 1:28 and 2:15 are so easily heard as an uncomplicated green light. They are not. "Keep," in Genesis 2:15, already implies that cultivation can fail to keep — that dominion can be exercised in ways that damage what it was meant to serve. Ellul supplies the twentieth-century vocabulary for one specific way that failure happens at civilizational scale: not through any one person's bad intent, but through a system of incentives no one fully controls.

3.5 Where this leaves the chapter

The cultural mandate, then, gives this chapter — and this course — a starting point that is neither naive optimism nor reflexive suspicion. Human beings are mandated to exercise a certain kind of power over the created order: cultivating, keeping, and, per Exodus 31, sometimes building with Spirit-given skill in direct service of worship. That mandate is real, and it means the mere fact that AI is a powerful new technology is not, by itself, grounds for theological alarm. But the mandate's own content — cultivate and keep — plus Ellul's sober account of how technique tends to escape its makers' intentions, means the mandate is not a blank check either. Lecture 4-2 will take up the specific and more contested question of how far human technological agency can be described as participation in God's own creative work before that language starts to erase a distinction Scripture never allows to be erased.