The fifth session of Doyt’s 12-part Bible study on AI and human identity focused entirely on the theology of the body—what it means to be embodied creatures in a world increasingly populated by disembodied intelligences. “If you remember nothing else,” Doyt emphasized, “humanity is begotten and we are uniquely begotten. We are not built.” This single distinction forms the bright line between humans and any artificial intelligence. Three profound truths emerged about our embodied nature.
Dust and Breath: The Sacred Materials of Humanity
The Genesis 2 creation story reveals something fundamental about human composition. God forms the first human (adama—an early gender-neutral term meaning “earth being”) from dirt, then breathes divine breath (ruach, nefesh) into this form. We are literally made of two things: dust and breath, matter and spirit, the temporal and the eternal.
Science confirms the dust part spectacularly. We are indeed made of organic material, protons, neutrons, electrons—the same stuff dirt is made of. This isn’t poetic metaphor; it’s biochemical reality. When people worry about cremation preventing bodily resurrection, they’re missing the point: “God can do that. God’s done it once. You don’t think God can make your body again from whatever material? It’s completely possible.”
But we’re not just animated dirt. Psalm 139 describes the profound intimacy of our creation: “You formed my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” This is begottenness—God’s personal investment in bringing each unique person into existence at a particular time, in a particular place, with a particular purpose.
The word “fearfully” here connects to our image-bearing nature. Just as the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” being “fearfully made” reflects that we share something of God’s power. “Humans are the scariest creatures on the planet, far and away,” the session noted—not because we should be feared, but because we possess tremendous capacity for both creation and destruction. Like God, we can choose to employ love instead of fear, though many still use fear to control others.
This dual nature—dust intimately connected to all creation, breath directly from God—explains why we’re called to reconciliation. We must reconcile with God first (acknowledging and entering relationship with our Creator) and with all humanity (recognizing our fundamental interconnection through our common material and divine origin). You cannot be reconciled to God without recognizing God exists, and you cannot claim to love God while exploiting your dust-and-breath neighbors.
The Body as Temple: Embodied Vocation
Paul’s radical reimagining of temple theology transforms how we understand our bodies. In Jerusalem, God dwelt in the Holy of Holies behind the curtain. But Jesus declared, “Tear down this temple, and in three days I will rebuild it”—referring to his body. At Pentecost, God moved from the Jerusalem temple into a new dwelling: human bodies.
Paul picks up this theology powerfully: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?” This isn’t merely metaphor—it’s a complete reorientation of where sacred action happens. The temple receives offerings, houses God’s presence, and serves as the meeting place between divine and human. Your body does all of this.
This leads to Paul’s instruction to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Unlike the animal sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple, we offer our living, breathing, acting bodies in ongoing service. The body becomes the site where divine work happens in the world.
“Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether in life or death,” Paul writes. Even Paul’s physical frailty—his poor eyesight, his need for assistance—didn’t diminish this truth. The body’s weakness doesn’t negate its sacred function; it can even highlight how God works through our limitations.
Critically, Paul doesn’t embrace the Platonic dualism popular in his time—the idea that bodies are bad prisons from which souls need escape. Paul believed in complete embodiment: soul and body and person as one integrated reality. Yes, temptation lives in the body, but that’s because freedom lives in the body. We can create habits—good or bad—precisely because we’re embodied beings with agency.
Training the Temple: Spiritual Disciplines of the Body
If our bodies are temples, they require formation and maintenance. This is where spiritual disciplines focused on the body become crucial—not to punish or diminish the body, but to train it toward holiness (wholeness, fullness, health, righteousness).
Fasting pushes back against the tyranny of the body. It’s telling your body, “I know you’re hungry. You’ll be OK. God is good. I’m in charge. You’ll be fine.” The discipline is remarkably accessible—anyone can stop eating—yet deeply challenging. Interestingly, we can often go long periods without thinking about food, but the moment we decide to fast, we’re suddenly starving. That’s the body’s tyranny at work.
Fasting creates a “heightened elevation of spirit” where, after cresting the body’s complaints, you find stillness conducive to prayer. But there’s a trap: fasting can become self-aggrandizing, about control and power rather than spiritual openness. Like any bodily discipline (working out, cold plunging), it can serve either spiritual cleansing or personal idolatry.
Chastity (broadened beyond sexual purity to include all ordering of desire) honors others as ends rather than means. It’s fundamentally anti-transactional. A transactional person views everyone through the lens of “what’s in it for me?”—they see resources, not souls. They create categories of winners and losers, useful and expendable.
Chastity recognizes the full humanity and soul of every person encountered. The waiter, the hairdresser, the colleague—all are souls to be honored, not cogs serving your needs. This doesn’t mean economic exchange is wrong, but that the exchange shouldn’t blind you to the person’s inherent worth beyond their utility to you.
A completely transactional person operates from a material-only worldview, categorizing people based on usefulness. A chaste person (in this broader sense) sees souls everywhere and orients toward their good rather than personal gain. Outcomes might look similar, but motivation differs radically—and that difference determines whether you’re trustworthy long-term.
Mercy represents “the power to do something and the tenderness not to do it.” It’s strength united with compassion, the choice to cut slack when you could demand justice. We pray “have mercy on us” constantly because God continually employs mercy toward us. Looking at our own lives reveals how frequently God chooses tenderness over the punishment we might deserve.
Thomas Aquinas wrote, “The body participates in the soul’s virtues.” Bodily disciplines—fasting, chastity, mercy—constitute “training for holiness.” The goal isn’t perfection but transformation: “He will transform our lowly bodies to be glorious like his.” Jesus expects we can actually live like him—not performing miracles to aggrandize ourselves, but embodying love so consistently that people want to follow not because we’re spectacular but because we reveal God’s kingdom.
Why This Matters Against AI
The embodied nature of humanity creates the fundamental distinction from artificial intelligence:
AI is built; humans are begotten. We are providentially called into existence by God at specific times and places for specific purposes. AI is manufactured, assembled, programmed—fundamentally different ontological categories.
AI has no temple. It cannot house God’s presence, cannot offer living sacrifice, cannot participate in the soul’s virtues through bodily discipline. It has no body to train, no appetites to order, no mercy to extend.
AI cannot be reconciled. It wasn’t made from dust connecting it to all creation, has no divine breath making it accountable to God, faces no tension between material limitations and eternal purposes that requires reconciliation.
AI operates transactionally by design. It processes inputs and generates outputs based on optimization functions. It cannot see souls, only data. It cannot honor persons as ends, only as means toward programmed objectives.
The session’s most important insight: “Humanity is begotten and we are uniquely begotten. We are not built. And at the end of the day, that is what makes us different.” No matter how sophisticated AI becomes at simulating human responses, it remains fundamentally built rather than begotten—a tool rather than a temple, an assembly rather than a calling.
As we navigate an AI-saturated world, remembering our begotten, embodied, temple nature grounds us in what makes us irreducibly human. We are dust that will return to dust, animated by God’s breath for a purpose, called to train these temporary temples toward eternal wholeness, all while recognizing the sacred embodiment of every person we encounter.