The Christian answer to death is not a disembodied app, but a bodily resurrection.
I had a visceral reaction the first time I watched the ad. Maybe you did too. I replayed it once. Twice. Three times. The clip opens on a pregnant woman, bubbling over in excitement as she video chats with her mother (soon-to-be grandmother) about her growing baby. “Put your hand on your tummy and hum to him,” she tells her daughter. “You used to love that.” Fast forward a year, and ten-month-old Charlie sits on his mother’s lap as the two of them settle in for story time with Grandma, again via video-chat. Another ten years pass, and Charlie is now walking home from school, staring at the likeness of his grandma on the screen as they talk about sports and his latest crush. Skip ahead again, this time twenty years, and Charlie is sharing the news with his beloved grandma, via—you guessed it—video-chat, that he’s about to become a father. The two of them share a sentimental, starry-eyed moment, and it’s then that the big reveal occurs: Grandma has been dead this whole time; it was just a Grandma-like representation of her all along.
The app that created this startling ad is called 2wai, and it allows you to create a digital avatar of a deceased loved one using the power of generative AI. With 2wai, phrases like “I wish you could have met your uncle” become obsolete, because a lifelike, digitized version of him is always on-call, ready to interact with you in real time. The future is here: You can now communicate with your deceased loved ones forever. You never have to say goodbye.
The reason my reaction to the ad was so strong was that I never really knew my maternal grandmother. The only “living” memory I have of Grandma Pat is an old VHS tape recorded during the 1988 family Christmas gift exchange. I was two years old. There are no actual images of her that I carry around, and I imagine I’d give a lot to have them. As I watched the “miracle” of 2wai unfold before my eyes, I couldn’t help but think: maybe if we’d had the app at the time, things would have been different. Maybe I would have had a better idea of who she was. Of course, it wouldn’t have been my grandma exactly, but it would have given some approximation of her. It would have given her memory life beyond the grave.
Death seems so final. Anything that promises to fill the void of a lost loved one, however incompletely, has an irresistible draw.
But is virtual necromancy the answer? Is turning Grandma into a new version of Microsoft “Clippy” (if you’re under the age of 25, he’s worth a Google) the silver bullet to the problem of death? Or is it possible that we’re doing what humans have done for millennia, putting the cart of “can we?” before the horse of “should we?” As evidenced by the volume of online buzz generated by the 2wai ad, the problems raised by such technology are manifold, and they extend well beyond emotional manipulation. They are, in fact, deeply theological.
Anything that threatens to paint death as a friend belittles the Cross, because it implies that Jesus’ own sacrifice really wasn’t necessary.
For Christians, death is the last enemy (1 Cor. 15:26). To be sure, it is a defeated enemy which is on its way out. Death’s doom is certain (Rev. 20:14). But the fact remains: it is an enemy, not a friend. Death is not the warm, cuddly arms we slip into as we transition into the next world. It is not a natural part of the circle of life. There is nothing more unnatural than death. It is not something to celebrate. Instead, it is always something to lament, because death is the result of sin (Rom. 6:23). Anything that threatens to paint death as a friend belittles the Cross, because it implies that Jesus’ own sacrifice really wasn’t necessary. Or, at very least, it implies that his victory at the cross wasn’t quite so good because the evil he had to destroy really wasn’t all that bad. The danger of such technology is that it seeks to minimize the gap between the living and the dead, attempting to do what only God can; curb-stomp death once and for all. If a mere software update is all that is required to postpone mortality indefinitely, what need was there for the Son of God to shed his blood? Death cannot be tamed, nor made more palatable. You can’t just paint a smile on a corpse and call it a clown (at least, not if you want it to moonlight at kids’ birthday parties).
There is a dehumanizing element of this ex-carnational, disembodied deformity interacting with you from the other side of the screen, as well. In seeking to extend life beyond the grave, we unwittingly rob grievers of comfort—leaving them in a weird limbo where their loved one is not really there but also not really absent. The natural response to death is sadness and grief. But uses of AI that promise eternal avatars disrupt the grieving process by never allowing the living to fully let go of the dead. Grandma-in-your-pocket acts like a powerful numbing agent to stave off the reality of death, thus robbing Christians of the comfort of Christ, who seeks to console those who mourn (Matt. 5:4). Unwittingly, such an approach also devalues the life of the deceased, settling for a cheap imitation instead of grieving the original in all of her fullness.
There is a heinous deception lurking beneath Grandma’s digitized, photo-shopped facade in this ad. Despite what the pixels promise and despite all appearances to the contrary, the image smiling, moving, and responding to you isn’t actually your dead friend or relative. They’re a whitewashed, glamorized imposter who mimics human behavior but is not true flesh-and-blood. “It” doesn’t bear a scar from an appendectomy. “It” didn’t lose its temper at the family barbecue. “It” wasn’t emotionally distant. “It” didn’t struggle with alcoholism. “It” didn’t have triggers that kept you tiptoeing around vital conversations. “It” experienced none of the anger, fear, doubt, anxiety, or anything in the vast sea of sin, disease, and contradictions that plague every human existence. If there are no flaws, then it’s not a human being. Your real grandma wasn’t perfect; she was a sinner saved by grace. And the mutated monstrosity on the screen smiling back at you has no blood cells, kidney stones, or muscle tissue. It’s a fake. A disguise. A mask. An effective one, to be sure, but a mask nonetheless—one which cannot fully hide the rot beneath. No, it will take more than an avatar to solve the death problem unleashed by the first Adam.
Jesus, the new and better Adam (see Rom. 5:12-20), knew that you can’t have humanity without incarnation.
In fact, it will take a whole new Adam, and in the person of Jesus Christ, that is precisely what we get. John 1:14 tells us: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” The Word (aka Jesus) did not become zeroes and ones. The Word did not become algorithm. The Word did not take up residence remotely. No, the Word left heaven behind and came down to earth in the body to muck around in the straw of a stable, the waters of the Jordan, and the womb of Mary. He didn’t leave virtual footprints behind but real ones. He ate. He slept. He bled and died, all because of his deep, immeasurable love for people like you and me. Jesus, the new and better Adam (see Rom. 5:12-20), knew that you can’t have humanity without incarnation. You can’t have love without skin. As the Apostle Paul puts it:
…though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:6-8).
The Christian answer to death is not a disembodied app, but a bodily resurrection: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). Contrary to popular belief, life in the new heavens and new earth will not be a ghostlike trance where our souls float around from cloud to cloud. Instead, we have something infinitely better to look forward to, something not less embodied but more. We will have bodies, skin cells, and hair follicles. Since God is not in the business of creating junk, our bodies will be made new. Blood will again flow through long-dead veins. Decayed hearts will be re-knit and restored to mint condition and beyond, pumping out blood cells by the barrel. Bones will be reforged, sinews re-sewn, and every lifeless death-mask vivified into a pulsating aspect made more real than it ever was before. And all by the life-giving power of a Savior whose love and intelligence are anything but artificial.
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