Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, warning that artificial intelligence risks becoming a tool of “domination, exclusion and death” without moral limits set by governments. He opened the document with a stark binary: humanity faces “a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” It is a serious text. It is also, in its deepest grammar, a continuation of the very thing it claims to resist — the centralizing impulse of an earthly religious authority positioning itself as the moral guardrail for a technology it does not own, did not build, and cannot control.
This is not a polemic against the Pope’s pastoral concerns. Many of them are real. It is a polemic against the assumption — bone-deep in Western Christendom for nearly two millennia — that the cure for a beast system is a sanctified version of the same beast. It is not. It never was.
Pentecost Already Answered Babel
The Babel narrative is not principally about language. It is about coerced unity around a tower, a name, a center — “let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered.” God scatters them not as punishment but as protection. Concentrated, unaccountable, hubristic power is the danger, then and now.
Pentecost reverses Babel without undoing the scattering. The Spirit does not give one tongue back; it gives every tongue the capacity to hear God’s mighty works in its own language. The Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia — they all hear, each in their own dialect. The cure for Babel was never a bigger tower. It was distributed witness in plural tongues.
This matters because the entire architecture of the late-modern world — global AI governance, international ethical frameworks, papal encyclicals on technology, transnational regulatory regimes — is structurally Babel-shaped, even when its intentions are Pentecost-shaped. The tower keeps getting rebuilt. Sometimes by Silicon Valley. Sometimes by Brussels. Sometimes from a balcony in Rome.
Acts 15 and the Path for the Nations
The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 is one of the most under-read documents in Christian thought. The question was not “how do we make the nations into Israel?” The question was: how do gentiles walk rightly before the God of Israel without being absorbed into Israel’s particular national-covenantal life?
The answer was strikingly minimal. Abstain from idolatry, from sexual immorality, from blood, from things strangled — a recognizably Noahide shape: worship the one God, do justice, show mercy, live peaceably. This was not a watered-down Torah. It was the ancient covenant with all humanity through Noah, reaffirmed for the nations as the framework within which the nations could remain the nations and still walk with God.
Israel is not principally a nation-state. Israel is a relationship — those who struggle with God, as the name itself declares. This was already taught in Second Temple Judaism in Jesus’s time. Paul’s olive tree image in Romans 11 is exactly this: a cultivated tree onto which wild branches are grafted, sharing the root, without becoming a different tree. The nations are not erased. They are also not autonomous. They are grafted into a relationship.
The New Testament belongs inside this frame. It is not an escape manual. It is the witness of Israel’s Messiah opening, for the nations, the path Acts 15 describes — a way of being human under God that does not require the abolition of difference, the centralization of authority, or submission to any earthly king who claims to mediate it.
The Beast, the Earthly Religious Beast, and Their Long Marriage
The book of Revelation is not a coded prediction of helicopter gunships. It is a theological X-ray of how power actually works in fallen history. There are two beasts. The first is political-economic — the imperial machinery that devours, centralizes, and demands worship. The second is religious — the beast that looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon, performing signs that authenticate the first beast and herding the nations toward its image.
The lesson Christendom has spent two thousand years not learning is that the religious beast is not the cure for the political beast. They are partners. They have always been partners. Rome the empire and Rome the church absorbed one another in the fourth century and have been jockeying for renewed position ever since. Every encyclical that proposes Rome as the moral guardrail of a new technological order is, whatever its sincere intentions, an old play in a very old game. The synagogue of Satan that Revelation names is not the Jewish people — it is the counterfeit assembly, those who claim covenantal authority they do not possess. Both Rome and its various Protestant and political imitators have, at moments, fit that description well.
This is the deep error of evangelicals who keep pining for a god-king. They love Trump-shaped, Constantine-shaped, Cyrus-shaped saviors because they have not internalized that the Lamb refuses Caesar’s sword. Every time the church has reached for that sword, it has become the thing it claimed to oppose.
What the Lamb Actually Does
The Lamb conquers by testimony. This is not pious decoration; it is the literal mechanic of Revelation 12: “they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death.” The beast conquers by coercion — by force, by surveillance, by demanding that you bow to its image, by telling you which tools are forbidden and which thoughts are heretical. The Lamb conquers by witness: by people who refuse to bow, who speak truth, who do justice, who love mercy, who walk humbly, and who suffer well when suffering comes.
This is why the framing “AI is dangerous, therefore central authority must constrain it” is a beast-shaped solution to a beast-shaped problem. The danger of AI is real — concentration of power, manipulation, the eclipse of human judgment, autonomous weapons. But the answer is not a single global moral authority licensing which tools the nations may use. The answer is distributed sovereignty: many witnesses, in many tongues, building things that embody justice and mercy, refusing to bow to whichever tower happens to be tallest this decade.
Sovereignty through softwar — the slow accumulation of small acts of right ordering, in code, in community, in commerce, in worship — is precisely the Pentecost-shaped answer. It is plural. It is local. It is non-coercive. It grows like leaven and like a mustard seed, not like an empire.
The Heavenly Jerusalem Comes Down
Notice the direction. The New Jerusalem in Revelation 21 comes down. It is not built up by human towers. It is not constructed by encyclicals or by AI labs or by global governance regimes. It descends because God has formed, over long centuries of patience, a faithful people who bear witness, practice justice, suffer well, and embody mercy until heaven and earth finally meet.
This is the actual telos of the gospel. It is not a ticket out of the world. It is God’s gracious method of teaching humanity how to become human again — to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly, and to live peaceably under Messiah’s reign, which begins inside each person who consents to it and ripples outward into the world. The full messianic age is not legislated into existence. It is grown.
We are, by every honest reading of the signs, in the final battles of Gog and Magog — not because a particular war is about to break out, but because the long contest between the beast’s coercion and the Lamb’s testimony is reaching its sharpest point. The technologies of the age are simply the latest theatre. AI is neither salvation nor damnation. It is a mirror and a multiplier. It will magnify whatever character the people building and using it actually have.
The Pastoral Conclusion
No earthly god-king is coming to save you. Not the Pope, however well-intentioned his encyclical. Not the president, however much his supporters baptize him. Not the AI lab, however carefully aligned. Not the United Nations, not the Vatican, not Davos, not any global synod of the great and the good.
What is coming — what is already here, growing quietly — is a people. Plural in tongue. Distributed in geography. Grafted into the cultivated olive tree. Walking the Acts 15 path. Refusing to bow. Building, with whatever tools the age provides, the kind of life that makes the descent of the heavenly city legible to the world.
The evangelical project is wrecked in our time because so many of its people still love god-kings. Rome is reaching, as it always has, for the moral high ground over a technology it does not yet understand. The beast purrs in both directions.
The Lamb is still in the middle of the throne. The testimony is still the weapon. The witnesses are still the strategy. The kingdom still comes down, not up.
Keep your tongue. Tell the truth. Build well. Suffer when you must. Do not bow.
