The sixth session of Doyt’s 12-part Bible study on AI and human identity explored one of Christianity’s most profound concepts: the Great Inversion. By examining the resurrection through the lens of what it means to be human, this session revealed how understanding our nature—dust and breath, body and soul—illuminates both eternal life and how we should live now. Three crucial insights emerged about salvation, resurrection, and what it means to be truly alive.
Salvation as a Pattern, Not a Point
Rather than a one-time event (“I’m saved, head back to the bar!”), salvation operates as an ongoing cycle—a pattern we live into repeatedly. The session outlined this pattern in five movements:
Grace flows from God as the outpouring of love. God made “more love than it needed within itself” and created humanity as the “secondary market” for this overflow. We exist because love generates love, and God had love to spare. This is the foundation—we are here because of abundant divine love.
Mercy keeps us going despite ourselves. The rainbow after Noah’s flood symbolizes God’s promise: “I will continue to have mercy irrespective of who you are and what you do.” God is “more optimistic than my dad” (who is apparently very optimistic), perpetually believing in humanity even when we give every reason not to. Mercy is God cutting us slack, over and over.
Hope emerges when we recognize these first two realities. At some point—through training, revelation, or simply wondering if there’s something bigger—we have insight into grace and mercy. We realize we’re still here despite being undeserving, and we wonder why. This recognition of hope changes everything.
Atonement follows because we inevitably go out of order again. Sin means putting something—anything—ahead of God. We screw up constantly not because we’re fundamentally bad but because God gave us bodies, and bodies create egocentric perspectives. “Every perspective comes from right here. It’s all about me.” Paul captured this tension: “I’m always doing the thing that needs not to be done.” We have inherent structural challenges to keeping God first.
Faith completes the cycle—and faith isn’t a feeling, insight, or belief. Faith is a decision. “I don’t have any faith? Well, you decided not to have any faith. Why don’t you just have some faith? Make a decision.” We decide that God has grace, decide God extends mercy, decide God has hope in us. We enter the pattern and do it again. Each repetition strengthens what becomes a “faith muscle,” building habits that feel less like choices over time.
This is “Pascal’s wager broken down”—how salvation actually plays out in embodied existence. Even if we’re uncertain about ultimate truth, this pattern creates a better world. We keep choosing God first, deciding faith, returning to the cycle. It happens in the body through repeated decisions that become spiritual disciplines that transform into habits of holiness.
The Great Inversion: Soul-First Existence
The resurrection reveals something stunning about human nature. Right now, in incarnational life, we are made of two things: dust (body) and breath (soul). Our primary presentation is dust—we lead with our bodies. We eat, sleep, work, engage physically with the world. The metaphysical aspects (heart and soul) remain peripheral, requiring intention to access through prayer, worship, and spiritual practices.
But resurrection inverts this order. When Jesus returns from death, something’s different—people don’t recognize him. He appears as the gardener to Mary Magdalene, walks unrecognized on the road to Emmaus. Why? Because his leading edge changed.
In incarnational life: dust first, breath second. In resurrected life: breath (soul) first, dust second.
Jesus still has a body—he eats fish, shows his wounds, invites Thomas to touch them. But his primary presentation shifted. His soul leads. This is why Mary can’t hold onto him—souls are “like eels, very slippery.” This is why the disciples on the road to Emmaus don’t recognize him until they break bread together, soul to soul. Once they see him soul-first, they get it.
The Great Inversion means that in the present world, we focus on body, mind, and neighbor (the material, measurable, visible). The heart and soul remain peripheral, things we touch and trust through practice and faith decisions. But in the eternal world after death, heart and soul become central, primary. The metaphysical and immeasurable present first.
This explains Jesus’s response to the Sadducees’ trick question about the woman with seven husbands. In the resurrection, it doesn’t matter because the body isn’t primary anymore—the soul is. “God is the God of the living”—and to be alive to God means having a soul. The soul is what God attaches to in incarnational life and in eternal life. God doesn’t see death because the soul doesn’t change.
Living Resurrected Now: Soul-First Practice
Here’s the radical part: Paul talks about us being “resurrected people” now. He doesn’t mean we’ve died and come back. He means we can live inverted lives in the present—soul-first people in body-first world.
When we put the soul first, who do we put first? God. Every time. Being soul-first means seeing every person primarily as a soul rather than a body, role, or resource. It means recognizing divine breath in everyone encountered. “That’s why we have all the martyrs”—people so soul-first that their bodies became secondary, expendable for greater purposes.
This is why worship is the primary spiritual exercise of the soul. Liturgy coordinates all five aspects of humanity (Luke 10:27—heart, mind, strength, soul, neighbor) to reveal and touch the soul:
- Heart/Spirit: The decision to set your alarm, lay out clothes, get up and come
- Mind: Engaged through sermon, liturgy, memorized words, bulletin
- Body: Standing, sitting, kneeling, turning pages, breathing together
- Neighbor: The uncurated community of whoever shows up
- Soul: Released and revealed through coordinated action, culminating in communion
Communion is “soul food”—literally. One wafer and a sip of wine won’t sustain your body if you’re starving. But it feeds something bigger, acknowledging that God nourishes beyond the physical. “The work of the people is to touch and reveal the soul.”
Breath meditation provides another soul-connection practice. The nefesh (God’s breath, the soul) can be accessed through focused breathing, though it takes time—”at least half an hour to break the barrier” even after years of practice.
The challenge? “Everything around us is a countervailing influence that pulls us into a different framework which is me first.” Our bodies inherently create egocentric perspectives. Living soul-first in a body-first world requires constant practice, repeated decisions, communal reinforcement. It’s “impossible to stay there really without the practice.”
But when we do—even for glimpses—we see people differently. “You might just get a glimpse of someone’s soul,” their radiance, the child of God shining through. That recognition creates connection, “zing,” tears, welling understanding. It pulls your own soul up. You’re not seeing the person primarily but God in them.
Why This Matters for AI
The Great Inversion reveals the unbridgeable gap between humans and artificial intelligence:
We are begotten, not built. Our souls come from God’s breath, making us dynamic, regenerating beings bearing God’s image. AI is manufactured, assembled, programmed—fundamentally different.
We can’t turn off the body-soul dynamic. It’s constantly regenerating, bearing God’s image and likeness. AI may mimic cognition but lacks “the essential ingredients of the soul, of the spirit, of the flesh.”
AI cannot see souls or be seen as souls. It processes data, not divine breath. It can’t access the soul-first perspective that transforms how we treat one another. “They can’t see that in us” because they lack the capacity for soul recognition.
AI cannot participate in resurrection. It has nothing to invert. No dust-breath composition, no death to transform, no soul-first existence to achieve.
Understanding human nature theologically—what we are, how we’re made, what resurrection means—provides crucial insight into what AI is and isn’t. If we grasp our begotten, ensouled, resurrection-destined nature, we’re better equipped to navigate a world where built intelligences increasingly populate our lives. We can propagate this understanding so “people who are building it would have better insight into what to do with it.”
The path forward isn’t fearing technology but knowing ourselves: dust and breath beings called to live soul-first, practicing resurrection now through worship, decision, and glimpsing divine radiance in one another—things no algorithm can ever replicate.