Toward a Language of Creation: AI and the Dominion Mandate (Part 1)

Part 1 – A Theology of Work

Few problems in recent memory have beset the Academy more swiftly than the infiltrating onslaught of bots infecting student learning. To be sure, cheating and plagiarism have always been problems threatening to undermine the educational enterprise. But in the last few years, as we are all aware, LLMs have allowed students to summarize, analyze, and synthesize—all without thinking. In seconds, they can reflexively revise, recombine, and regenerate sentences, then cover their tracks with humanizers, giving the illusion of thought. We in the professorial class have responded by expending futile hours of investigating student work product; resorting to more traditional, in-class assessments; and frenetically beefing up our academic integrity standards. It will be several years or more, I believe, before colleges and universities are prepared to offer robust guidelines, complete with technological detection and institutional discipline, that can successfully deter students from AI-based plagiarism. Progressing forward into this brave new world, I wonder if we might be better served—both educators and our pupils—by reframing the discussion away from cheating and toward a vision of learning informed by a biblical imagination.

Prior to the Fall, humanity was given the impulse to name, to cultivate, to generate, and to regenerate. Creation, we might say, began with God but continued with man and woman, and its aim was exponential growth and the flourishing of the natural world. The animals were bestowed with identity, and the generations after them would have found expression as new species developed in an ever-expanding kingdom. The same would be true of the produce of the Garden, as Adam and Eve grafted new trees and discovered new fruits. The seams of gold and resin crossing the land (Gen. 2:12) could have been used for new tools and metalworking to create art and technologies, perhaps even unimaginable by our own standards.¹ Their children would have contributed even more discoveries as the world grew in population, in biological complexity, and in geographic change.

After announcing that they had been uniquely made in his image, God gives humanity authority over all creation: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground’” (Gen 1:28). This authority—or we might call it the dominion mandate²—continues even after the Fall, but instead of witnessing the effects of a divine imprimatur on Adam and Eve’s creative activity, we are treated to God’s repentance over ever increasing levels of human dysfunction. The abundance of Genesis 1 and 2 is aborted with the separation from God in Genesis 3, the separation from each other in Genesis 4, and the compounding separation from the environment and society in Genesis 5, 6, and following. One can feel the demonic influence corrupting man and woman with each passing chapter, even after the purgative effects of the flood. The theme of our collective origin story is that humanity’s ability to create in cooperation with nature is frustrated by infertile soil, fragmented community, and every evil desire to dominate.

As it stands today, the dominion mandate appears impossibly arduous and frightfully unfulfilling—so much so that Satan, the prince of the power of the air (Eph. 2:2), offers the kingdoms of the world to Jesus in an attempt that the Christ might gain the human beings he loves without the conduit of the cross. As Matthew narrates it, “the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me’” (Matt. 4:8). As a man, Jesus would have been a natural inheritor of the dominion mandate, yet he, too, experienced the consequences of the Fall in the alienation from creation. In this moment, Jesus has a chance to cheat, to skip the process of suffering, to circumvent the Father’s will by wresting dominion from Satan in an idolatrous act of submission. Because he refuses the temptation and defeats Satan, he begins to unwind the effects of Adam’s sin and slowly restores creation to its original blueprint through miracles and moral teaching, giving glimpses of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.³

Unfortunately, despite the victory of Christ, we mortal beings don’t always exercise dominion well. We over-produce and exploit due to envy, or we neglect our labor through sloth. I not infrequently remind my students with the occasional grin that counterfeiters (read, plagiarists) can be found crawling the ground, wasting away from horrific diseases in the tenth bolgia of the eighth circle of hell (Inferno 29.43-84). To work well—hard, excellently, and honestly—is to fulfill our birthright and reclaim our dominion.

A brief sampling of Western thought confirms the mandate. The political theorist Ptolemy of Lucca states in On the Government of Rulers, “Thus, it pertains to the regal majesty to use and to have an abundance of all these things, and to the degree that it exercises lordship over them, its rule is similar to that of the first lord, since all things were deputed to human use at the beginning of creation” (2.6.1). In the Summa, St. Thomas Aquinas asserts that man’s reason makes him competent for dominion over creation (1:96:2). So, too, John Locke claims in the Second Treatise on Government that “God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience” (Ch. 5, §26). Voltaire, though perhaps never accused of Christian orthodoxy, sums up the philosophy of Candide with the surprisingly biblical metaphor of cultivating our gardens (Ch. 30).

It is this metaphor of cultivating gardens in the co-labor of creation that can be the most fruitful in describing our relationship to work. Many theologians and Christian thinkers have picked up this theme, including the late Tim Keller.⁴ Through this lens, the Eden story becomes a paradigm through which we view our labor. All tasks—from Keller’s preaching to Rembrandt’s painting to Brother Lawrence’s dishwashing—are given divine purpose (Col. 3:17), including and especially when we engage in the most menial work of service (Matt. 10:42, 25:40). For those of us in the Academy, this includes delivering well-worn lectures as if we had never given them before, serving on endless committees and wading through department meetings, and filling office hours encouraging undeserving students who may only appreciate our investments with them many years later—if at all. Whatever most easily frustrates us about our work is likely what is most needed, the places where glory has not brightened dark corners and where acclaim is hidden beneath the soil. In a fallen world, dominion means caring for the crops long before the celebration of harvest.

But what, to our immediate purpose, does the dominion mandate mean in an age of AI? At first blush, it would seem to increase our ability to work the garden. Sean O’Callaghan and Paul A. Hoffman stress that, stripped of its mystery and complexity, AI is essentially about decision-making.⁵ By simplifying massive data sets into discrete variables, AI can present us with the best of all possible worlds (to mime Gottfried Leibniz). Combining all available knowledge into one digestible location, we can be more informed and make wise decisions. In its best usage, AI helps us make prudential judgments, like Solomon dividing a baby.

While the STEM researchers enthusiastically highlight the possibilities, this is often the moment in the faculty meeting where those of us in the humanities tend to gnash our teeth. We resist the ethical claims AI purports to offer without a transparent ethical standpoint from its programmers. We caution against opinions fostered by computer analyses that may omit certain data. We are not wrong to raise our hands skeptically and ask about the implications for knowledge-sourcing. For AI is not just another technology; it challenges the core understanding of what it means to be human. Invisible algorithms answer questions in moments that the brightest minds took decades to find the answers, and they have the potential to rewrite long-discovered and accepted truths. AI often works silently in the background and quiet infrastructure of our lives, operating the levers that control society, and we are unaware that we are no longer seeing reality as we thought.⁶ At its worst, AI discerns the path and takes it for us, especially in AI’s agentic mode. If we are seduced by a vision of slothful ease and remove ourselves from the demands of decision-making, we have abdicated our God-given throne.

Yet we have always seen through a glass darkly, and the Enlightenment-era promises of mastery over nature presupposed a disinterested Deity encouraging us to build our own imperial Babels. We are slow to remember that the next generation is always the undisciplined recipient of the previous generation’s hard-won efforts. As far back as the Phaedrus, Plato was concerned that over-reliance on the technology of writing would dull our memories (275a-b). Pythagoras may have pondered his theorem for years when a middle-schooler can recite the formula as the high schooler breezily punches numbers into his calculator app. We must not overlook the nuance embedded in this, or any, technological dilemma. To the extent that AI can speed up laborious tasks and make connections between thoughts, it is merely one more tool in our box. To the extent that it substitutes our garden labors or replaces our mental efforts entirely, the AI skeptic is right to observe that the tool becomes a demon.

The question becomes, then, how might we restore dominion over our classrooms and institutions so that the demons, when they arise, become subject to us as we are subject to Christ?

1. I am grateful for this insight from Makoto Fujimura, Art + Faith: A Theology of Making (Yale University Press, 2020), 98. It has deepened my appreciation for the possibilities of meaning layered into the biblical account of creation and a potential vision of the Edenic paradise. ↩︎
2. Calvin refers to the dominion mandate—or creation mandate—in which we are called “God’s viceregent in the government of the world,” Commentary on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, vol. 1, (Logos Bible Software, 2010), 94. Abraham Kuyper is known for popularizing the term cultural mandate, which is how it is often referred to today. ↩︎
3. For John Milton, the Curse begins its reversal in the Second Adam’s refusal to give into temptation (Paradise Regained 4.606-08). ↩︎
4. Every Good Endeavor (Penguin, 2014), 48. ↩︎
5. AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep: Leading and Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Baker Academic, 2025), 31. ↩︎
6. Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI and Our Human Future (Little, Brown, 2021), 19. ↩︎