The Only Story Big Enough for the Machine Age?

Engage with the transformative power of ancient myths and archetypes to deepen your understanding of AI and human consciousness.

By Charles Bivens ThM 
| Mythchief Maker | Writer of Tales | 

Introduction

Humanity has always told stories to make sense of itself. From the first fireside myths to the sweeping epics of civilizations, our tales have never been mere entertainment; they have been containers of meaning, coherence, and direction. Yet in our own time, we are facing a crisis. We have built machines that outpace our capacity to narrate them. Artificial intelligence advances with breathtaking speed, but the stories we have are too small to hold its implications.

You made Humans a little less than God. You crowned Humanity with honor and majesty. (Royal language)~ The Crisis of Narrative

The Enlightenment gave us science, but it also divided knowledge into silos: medicine for the body, psychology for the mind, and religion for the soul. Each field achieved brilliance, yet its fragmentation left us with no integrated story. The result? A society where technology runs ahead, policy lags behind, and human beings are reduced to consumers or data points.

The Spiritual Core of Humanity

If, as Teilhard de Chardin (1979) wrote, we are spiritual beings having a human experience, then spirituality is not an accessory to health — it is its essence. To neglect it is to misdiagnose humanity itself. Mental health collapses into mere symptom management, education into skill production, and technology into machinery without a moral compass. Meaning is the oxygen of the psyche, and spirituality remains our most inexhaustible well of meaning.

Carl Jung reached a similar conclusion from a different angle: religion is not illusion but psychic necessity. Archetypes and symbols rise from the depths of the unconscious to orient us toward wholeness (Jung, 1959/1981). For Jung, the story of Christ was not just history but an archetype — the image of integration itself (Jung, 1953/1966).

We have built machines that outpace our capacity to narrate them. Artificial intelligence advances with breathtaking speed, but the stories we have are too small to hold its implications.

Teilhard and Jung never met, yet their insights echo: human beings cannot be reduced to anything alone. We are drawn — by evolution, by psyche, by Spirit — toward something more.

The Limits of Our Smaller Stories

We have always sensed this “more,” but often in fragments. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein warned of reanimation without reverence. Pinocchio and The Velveteen Rabbit dramatized our longing for the inanimate to awaken into love. Myths have personified the sun and the moon, stars and stones, whispering that life is larger than materialism allows.

These stories matter, but they are partial. They offer glimpses without providing an integrated horizon. What we face now with AI — machines mimicking human thought, creativity, and even care — requires more than fragments. It requires a story that can embrace the full scope of creation, consciousness, and meaning.

The Jesus Story as Integrative Narrative

This is where the Jesus Story, understood not as institutional dogma but as literary and theological truth, stands apart. Genesis 1:26 & 27 introduces humanity as Imago Dei—bearers of divine image or reflections. This was revolutionary: unlike neighboring cultures that restricted divine likeness to kings, Genesis democratized it for all humanity (Middleton, 2005).

The rest of Scripture reveals this insight through various genres—law, prophecy, wisdom, and apocalyptic writing. Paul’s letters explore the implications of Genesis 1:26-27 for both Jews and Gentiles. John’s Gospel announces the Logos made flesh. Revelation dares to depict a restored cosmos where the Tree of Life is accessible to all nations. The overall story of the Hebrew bible is not disjointed but unified. It converges on a human or humans whom God rules and reigns through—a human like Adam. God's plan, according to the Hebrews, is to rule and reign in and through humans. It is Plan A, and there is no Plan B. 

A Spirit-Anointed, Royal Human would govern on planet Earth.

The poetry of the Psalms, a communal songbook for an ancient people, says as much. I have italicized the poem's phrases at the start and end, as they mirror each other. Think If the first verse and the last verse serve as bookends, then the very middle verse in Hebrew poetry of this type is the essential part of the message the poet wants to show. I imagine the poet-prophet walking on a starry night, and suddenly he is overcome with how vast everything is, and begins to consider humanity's place in creation. His mind goes to Genesis 1-2, which he has memorized.

It can actually be seen as a chiasm in structure. 

Psalm 8 (NET Bible)

1 For the music director, according to the gittith style; a psalm of David.

   O Lord, our Lord, how magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth! You reveal             your majesty in the heavens above.

       2 From the mouths of children and nursing babies, you have ordained praise on                      account of your adversaries, so that you might put an end to the vindictive enemy.

           3 When I look up at the heavens, which your fingers made, and see the                                    moon and the stars, which you set in place,

                  4 Of what importance is the human race, that you should notice them? Of                               what importance is mankind that you should pay attention to them?

                          5  You made them a little less than the heavenly beings. (Status                                               of the Imago Dei) You crowned mankind with honor and majesty.                                            (Royal language)

                   6 You appoint them to rule over your creation; (The Task) you have                                    placed everything under their authority,

          7, including all the sheep and cattle, as well as the wild animals,

       8 the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, and everything that moves through the             currents of the seas.

9 O Lord, our Lord, how magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth!

This Psalm encapsulates God's plan, which will revolve around the personage of Christ, whose followers believed was the perfect Image embodying and magnifying what Genesis states: humanity is created in God’s image. His early followers believed He was the Messiah, a Spirit-anointed Royal Human, and therefore, if the scriptures were true, then by extension, all of humanity had been created for this purpose as well. You. Your sister. Your client. The junkie on the street who is asking for change.

For Teilhard, Christ is the Omega Point — the telos toward which all creation moves (Teilhard de Chardin, 2008). For Jung, Christ is the archetype of the Self — symbol of integration and wholeness (Jung, 1959/1981). Whether one sees Him as cosmic fulfillment or psychic necessity, He remains the story’s hinge.

 
Imago Machina

Why No Other Story is Big Enough
Please do not misunderstand. I am not attempting to "convert" anyone to Christianity. What I am trying to do is to get us to see the reality that this story has played in the development of the West.

I, like many others, believe that it is upon the shoulders of the words of Jesus of Nazareth that Western Civilizations have been built. Our worldview. Culture. Our art. Law. Even Science. No other single individual and their story has had the impact Jesus has had on the entire planet. Globally, we measure time itself as pre-Jesus and post-Jesus. Every time you date something, you recognize Him. 

I speak now as an integrated academic. A theologian, yes, but also an anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist, and lay scientist. When it comes to story, however, I am an expert. And so are you. We understand ALL of reality in narrative form. We understand everything through story. We are storied people. 

Evolution alone cannot carry the weight of all that is, the what and the why; it explains change but not purpose (Haught, 2010). Enlightenment philosophy cannot hold it; it prizes reason but cannot account for transcendence. Secular mythologies — from Frankenstein to Marvel superheroes — dramatize our anxieties but cannot provide coherence.

Only the biblical narrative has proven capacious enough to integrate philosophy, science, psychology, and technology into a single horizon of meaning. The early Jesus Communities knew this: The Jesus Story was compelling not because it erased other traditions, but because it wove their fragments into a greater pattern (McGrath, 2012). Plato’s forms, Israel’s law, Rome’s longing for order — all found coherence in the Logos.

Today, we lack an integrative principle, and we need that integrative power again. Without it, we face AI with nothing but fragmented myths and reactive policies.

Toward Re-Humanization

To reclaim this narrative is not to retreat into literalism, dogmatism, or sectarianism. It is to recognize not the literal but the literary truth of what came to be called Christianity as the archetype of all archetypes, the warp and woof of reality itself. The story of the Imago Dei — magnified in Christ, fulfilled in Omega — offers the only framework large enough to guide humanity through the age of the machine. How do I know this? How can I confidently make such a bold claim? Because this is the only story to have achieved exactly that. 

Our task is not merely critique but integration. Healthcare must attend to the soul, not just the symptom. Education must cultivate wisdom, not just productivity. Technology must be developed with reverence for human dignity, not just profit. In short, we must re-humanize.

The Invitation from The Being Human

Over the next several months, the Being Human Projects aims to release several in-depth, intensive 4-week courses on these very topics. We invite you to register and go deeper, to really understand what is happening right now.

These are tentatively the first three courses and the titles under which they will be released:

Teilhard de Chardin: Spiritual Beings in an Evolving Cosmos — exploring evolution, Omega, and the cosmic Christ.
Teilhard & Jung in Dialogue — staging a conversation between teleology of cosmos and psyche, between Omega and the Self.
The Making of an Elohim: AI, Idolatry, and Narrative Collapse — confronting the reality that no story but the biblical one is large enough to contain AI.
 

Together they ask the central question: What does it mean to be human — a spiritual being — in the age of the machine?

References

Haught, J. F. (2010). Making sense of evolution: Darwin, God, and the drama of life. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Jung, C. G. (1953/1966). Two essays on analytical psychology (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 2nd ed., Vol. 7). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1959/1981). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 2nd ed., Vol. 9, Part 1). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1963/1995). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.). New York, NY: Vintage.

McGrath, A. E. (2012). Christianity and the history of science: Conflict, harmony, and integration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Middleton, J. R. (2005). The liberating image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.

Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1979). The heart of matter. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Teilhard de Chardin, P. (2008). The phenomenon of man (B. Wall, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Thought. (Original work published 1959).

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