On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV promulgated his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas — “The Grandeur of Humanity” — a sweeping document addressed to “all men and women of goodwill” on the subject of artificial intelligence. The new pontiff, an American-born Augustinian friar who had announced within days of his election that he considered AI the most critical civilizational challenge facing humanity, produced something formidable in scope. The encyclical addresses the concentration of technological power in private hands, the erosion of human dignity by algorithmic systems, the exploitation of workers in the global data economy, and the prospect of autonomous weapons that delegate lethal force to mathematical code. On each of these points, Magnifica Humanitas raises questions that Christians cannot afford to ignore.
And yet the most revealing portion of the encyclical is not its analysis of artificial intelligence. It is the argument that precedes it. The Introduction and first chapter — titled “A Dynamic Approach Faithful to the Gospel” — are not about AI at all. They are about authority. Before the Pope addresses the algorithm, he addresses a prior question: by what right and by what method does the Roman Catholic Church speak to such matters? The answer he constructs draws upon 135 years of Catholic Social Doctrine, the contributions of philosophy and the human sciences, the practice of “synodality,” and a vision of truth as a “multifaceted polyhedron” that the Church “does not claim to possess a monopoly” upon. This is the epistemological and ecclesiological infrastructure upon which every subsequent chapter of the encyclical rests.
It is precisely here that Christians shaped by the Reformation must begin their engagement — not because questions about AI are unimportant, but because they cannot be answered rightly until the question of authority is settled. The manner in which the Church arrives at her moral pronouncements is not a procedural detail; it is a theological commitment that determines the weight and character of everything she says. If the foundations are unsound, the structure built upon them cannot stand, however impressive its architecture.
The purpose of this article, and of the series it begins, is to examine those foundations. Magnifica Humanitas deserves serious engagement — not the dismissive reaction of those who refuse to read what Rome has written, nor the uncritical enthusiasm of those who confuse moral seriousness with theological soundness. The encyclical raises genuine concerns about technological power. But it answers them with an authority, an epistemology, and an ecclesiology that Scripture does not support. Where the Pope builds on tradition, synodal discernment, and the dialogue of human sciences alongside revelation, the Reformation insists that Scripture alone provides the sufficient and final standard for faith and life — including the questions raised by artificial intelligence. That disagreement is not peripheral. It governs everything that follows.
The New “Res Novae”
The concept of res novae — literally “new things” — has served as the structural engine of Catholic Social Doctrine since its formal inception. When Leo XIII promulgated Rerum Novarum in 1891, the phrase carried its older Latin sense of revolutionary upheaval: the massive structural dislocations of the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small class of industrialists, and the systematic exploitation of laborers who had been severed from the agrarian and guild networks that once sustained them. Leo XIII addressed these new realities not merely as political or economic problems but as matters requiring the Church’s pastoral intervention. In doing so, he established what John Paul II would later call a “lasting paradigm” — the practice of reading the signs of each era in the light of the Gospel and pronouncing upon them from the chair of the social magisterium.
One hundred and thirty-five years later, Leo XIV applies this paradigm to artificial intelligence. The res novae of our era, the encyclical argues, are no longer chiefly physical — the mine, the factory, the railway — but cognitive and systemic: the ownership of data, the control of information infrastructure, and the potential automation of human judgment itself. The Pope’s diagnosis is direct. “Never has humanity had such power over itself,” he writes, quoting Laudato Si’. And the power is not evenly distributed. Where previous technological revolutions were at least partially governed by the state, the current transformation is driven by “private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments.” Technological power has thus acquired “an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.”
The empirical basis for this claim is substantial. The top five hyperscale operators — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle — are projected to invest over $600 billion in AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, roughly three-quarters of it directed at artificial intelligence. The design of the advanced processors that power these systems is dominated by a single company, Nvidia, whose data center chip revenue now accounts for nearly ninety percent of its total sales. The physical fabrication of those chips depends almost entirely on one Taiwanese foundry, TSMC. Data center electricity consumption in the United States tripled between 2021 and 2024, reaching eighty gigawatts by 2025, while residential demand remained virtually flat — a disparity that effectively forces household ratepayers to subsidize the physical infrastructure of private AI development. Historical parallels are apt: as Western Union once monopolized the telegraph, as Standard Oil once controlled ninety percent of American refining capacity, so a handful of corporations now command the computational substrate upon which modern economies, governments, and militaries increasingly depend. The Pope is not wrong to observe that something historically significant is underway.
But what exactly is underway? And more importantly, what kind of problem is it? Here the encyclical’s analysis, though empirically grounded, reveals the theological assumptions that govern it. The Pope frames the challenge of AI primarily as a crisis of governance — a failure of public institutions to keep pace with private technological power, requiring the Church’s intervention as moral guide and facilitator of “shared discernment.” The machine is treated as a force of potentially autonomous danger, one that “deeply affects decision-making and the collective imagination” in ways not yet “fully predictable.”
This framing overstates what artificial intelligence actually is and understates what actually threatens us. AI is not an autonomous power straining against the boundaries of human control. It is a deterministic system — a sophisticated instrument of pattern recognition and statistical prediction, bounded by hard mathematical and physical constraints that no increase in processing power can overcome. Kurt Gödel demonstrated that any consistent formal system contains propositions it cannot prove using its own axioms. Alan Turing, the father of the universal computer, acknowledged that machines are dependent upon “oracles” — external, non-mechanical sources of truth — and specified that these oracles “cannot be machines.” Claude Shannon established that genuine information is defined by entropy, by surprise, and that creativity — being high-entropy — is fundamentally uncomputable. The machine cannot generate novel information; it can only recombine what its human designers have provided. Whatever danger AI poses, it does not pose as an independent agent. It poses as a tool wielded by fallen human hands.
And this is where the Pope’s analysis, for all its empirical care, fails to reach the root. The concentration of technological power is concerning not because the machine is autonomous but because the human beings who build, finance, and deploy it are sinners. Calvin observed that the human mind is “a perpetual factory of idols” — fabricam idolorum — continuously manufacturing objects of false trust to replace the living God. Luther put the matter with characteristic directness in the Large Catechism: “The trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol.” When individuals, corporations, or civilizations look to technology for what only God can provide — security against an uncertain future, mastery over contingency, deliverance from the frailty of the human condition — the technology has become functionally divine. The problem is not insufficient governance. The problem is idolatry.
The Westminster Confession addresses this with the precision that the encyclical lacks. God “in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure” (WCF 5.3). Technology is a secondary cause — a legitimate instrument of the dominion mandate given in Genesis 1:28, embedded in a creation whose raw materials God intentionally furnished for human use. Calvin himself, commenting on Genesis 4, broke decisively from the patristic tradition that treated the inventions of Cain’s line as inherently corrupt. He argued instead that metallurgy, music, and agriculture were magnificent manifestations of God’s common grace, rooted in the latent possibilities of the original creation and designed for the preservation and enrichment of human life. But Calvin also saw the danger with perfect clarity: Cain’s descendants used these providential gifts to insulate themselves from God, building a city in the land of Nod — a name meaning “shaking” or “trembling” — that was meant to provide the security and repose that only the Creator can give. Technology becomes perilous not when it exceeds human control, but when the human heart assigns it the work of providence.
The Pope identifies a real phenomenon — the unprecedented concentration of computational and economic power in private hands. But he diagnoses it as a governance problem requiring ecclesial and institutional remedy, when it is first and finally a theological problem requiring the gospel. The res novae of our time are genuinely new in their technical form. They are not new in their spiritual substance. The temptation to build a civilization that renders God unnecessary is as old as the plain of Shinar. What has changed is the sophistication of the materials. What has not changed is the heart that reaches for them.
Babel, Jerusalem, and the Encyclical’s Hermeneutic
The Pope structures the moral landscape of his encyclical around two biblical images. The first is the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 — a project “conceived without reference to God,” sustained by a “uniformity that eliminated diversity,” and destined for confusion and dispersion. The second is the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah — an enterprise marked by prayer, shared responsibility, communal coordination, and the transformation of diversity into resource. The choice facing humanity in the age of AI, the encyclical argues, is between these two models: the “Babel syndrome” of proud, self-sufficient technological construction, or the “way of Nehemiah,” in which pluralism is guided by synodality and the presence of God gives the whole endeavor its coherence.
As typology, the contrast is initially compelling. Babel and Jerusalem do represent opposing directions in the biblical narrative — the city of man against the city of God, human autonomy against divine dependence. A Christian reader encountering these images may nod in recognition. But the recognition should give way to scrutiny, because the Pope’s reading of both texts departs significantly from what the texts actually say.
Consider Babel first. The encyclical identifies the sin of the builders as building “without reference to God” and pursuing a “uniformity that eliminated diversity.” The application is clear: AI development that ignores God and homogenizes human experience replicates Babel’s error. But this is not the sin that Genesis 11 describes. The builders declared, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (Gen 11:4). The final clause is decisive. God had commanded humanity twice — once in the creation mandate of Genesis 1:28 and again in the post-diluvian commission of Genesis 9:1 — to “fill the earth.” The builders’ project was a direct refusal of that command. They built not merely “without reference to God” but in active rebellion against a specific divine imperative. Luther saw this with precision. In his lectures on Genesis, he identified the sin as securitas — a smugness and total contempt for the true church represented by Noah and Shem — combined with Nimrod’s violent consolidation of the peoples into a centralized empire that directly contravened God’s command to disperse and fill the earth. Calvin agreed: the builders sought to erect an eternal monument to their own autonomy, breathing out an unbridled pride (superbia) and a direct defiance of the living God. Both Reformers understood that Babel was not a failure of pluralism. It was a rebellion against a word from God.
The distinction matters because it determines the diagnosis. If Babel’s sin was a lack of diversity, then the remedy is inclusivity and synodal discernment — precisely what the encyclical prescribes. But God’s own response to Babel undermines that reading. He did not introduce diversity within a framework of continued communion. He shattered communication entirely and scattered the builders across the face of the earth — accomplishing by judgment the very dispersion they had refused to undertake in obedience. Calvin lamented that “God did not create men to make them strangers,” yet the curse of Babel made them exactly that. The divisio linguarum was not a gift of pluralism; it was a punishment that, as Luther observed, “birthed wars, slaughter, and evils of every kind.” If the sin had been uniformity, God’s remedy was strangely punitive. But if the sin was rebellion against a specific command, then the judgment fits perfectly: God forced upon humanity what humanity refused to do willingly. The Pope’s reading tilts the diagnosis toward his preferred ecclesiology before the text has been allowed to speak on its own terms.
The reading of Nehemiah is more strikingly reshaped. The encyclical presents Nehemiah as a model of collaborative leadership: he “did not impose solutions from above,” but “convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition.” The rebuilding is characterized as “shared responsibility” in which “diversity” becomes “a resource” and the whole enterprise illustrates synodality — “the practice” by which “pluralism does not dissipate into disorder.” This is a recognizable portrait of modern participatory governance. It is not a recognizable portrait of Nehemiah.
The biblical Nehemiah was not a facilitator of dialogue. He was a governor armed with royal authority and driven by zeal for the law of God. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he conducted his initial survey of the walls in secret, at night, telling no one what God had put in his heart (Neh 2:12–16). When the work was opposed, he armed the builders and posted guards — the sword and the trowel together (Neh 4:17). And when the walls were complete, the spiritual center of the entire restoration was not “shared discernment” but the public reading and exposition of the Torah. Nehemiah 8 records that Ezra the scribe stood upon a wooden platform, opened the book of the Law before the assembly, and the Levites “read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Neh 8:8). The people wept under the weight of the Law’s demands, then covenanted to obey. This was not synodality. It was theocratic reform driven by the written Word of God. The Puritans understood this with exacting clarity: they treated Nehemiah 8:8 as the primary biblical warrant for expository preaching — the clear, distinct, authoritative exposition of Scripture that alone can reform a community. Matthew Henry identified in this verse the threefold duty of the minister: the distinct reading of the text, the giving of the grammatical-historical sense, and the direct application to the hearts and wills of the hearers. The wooden platform from which Ezra read was not a symbol of collaborative governance. It was a symbol of the supreme, objective authority of the Word of God over both the preacher and the congregation.
And the Nehemiah of chapters 10 and 13 is even further from the Pope’s portrait. Upon discovering that Israelites had intermarried with the surrounding peoples, Nehemiah “contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair” (Neh 13:25). He physically expelled Tobiah’s household goods from the temple chamber. He shut the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath and threatened the merchants who gathered outside. This is not a leader who “transforms diversity into a resource.” This is a leader who enforced covenantal holiness with considerable vigor. One may discuss the application of Nehemiah’s methods to the present day, but one cannot honestly present him as a practitioner of the Pope’s synodal vision without suppressing substantial portions of the text.
The pattern revealed in both readings is consistent: the encyclical imports its ecclesiology into Scripture rather than deriving its ecclesiology from Scripture. Babel becomes a cautionary tale about insufficient pluralism, and Nehemiah becomes a model of synodal governance, because the Pope needs them to be. The biblical text, read on its own terms, teaches something quite different. Babel fell because humanity defied God’s word, and Jerusalem was restored because a community submitted to it. Luther’s theology of the cross illuminates the distinction sharply: the theologia gloriae — the theology of glory — always seeks to climb to God through human construction, human consensus, and human achievement, while the theologia crucis recognizes that God reveals himself in the apparent weakness and foolishness of his own declared word. The encyclical’s hermeneutic, for all its sophistication, operates by the logic of the former. It builds upward from human collaboration and synodal process. Scripture operates by the logic of the latter. It comes downward, from God to his people, through his word, and demands obedience before it invites discussion.
The hermeneutical question — does the Church’s tradition govern her reading of Scripture, or does Scripture govern her tradition? — is not a technicality. It is the question upon which every subsequent argument in the encyclical depends.
Human Weakness, Human Dignity, and the Question of Anthropology
The encyclical’s most arresting passage in the Introduction is also, on its surface, the one most likely to win Protestant assent. “Building for the common good,” the Pope writes, “means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected.” He warns against the “unlimited ‘upgrades’” promised by technology, against “forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities,” and insists that “true fulfilment is not achieved by eliminating weakness but through harmonious growth.” The language culminates in a pastoral summons to “remain profoundly human” and to “lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.” Read in isolation, these sentences could have been written by any thoughtful Christian theologian. They name a genuine temptation of our technological moment — the Baconian ambition, as Todd Daly has traced it, to reclassify every human limitation as a disease awaiting a cure — and they name it correctly.
The agreement, however, is more narrow than it appears. The Pope and the Reformation both reject transhumanism, but they reject it for fundamentally different reasons, and those reasons lead to fundamentally different conclusions about what human beings are, what ails them, and what can be done about it.
The anthropology underlying the encyclical is the one codified at the Council of Trent and systematized by centuries of scholastic theology. Its governing axiom is spoliatus in gratuitis, vulneratus in naturalibus — deprived of supernatural gifts, wounded in natural capacities. In this framework, Adam’s fall did not corrupt the ontological substance of human nature. It stripped away the donum superadditum, the supernatural gift of original righteousness that had been added to an already complete natural constitution, leaving humanity in a state that is weakened, darkened, and subject to concupiscence, but structurally intact. The essential faculties of the soul — the intellectual capacity to know truth and the free will to choose between moral options — remain operative. Trent’s Decree on Justification is explicit: the free will of man was “by no means extinguished, though weakened and debilitated in its powers,” and Session VI, Canon V anathematizes anyone who claims that “since Adam’s sin, the free will of man is lost and extinguished.” The human person, in this account, is wounded but alive, diminished but capable — a patient in need of the physician’s help, not a corpse in need of resurrection. The medieval allegorical tradition even pressed the Parable of the Good Samaritan into service for this anthropology: the traveler left semivivus — half-dead — on the Jericho road became proof that fallen humanity retains enough life to receive and cooperate with the Samaritan’s healing ministry.
The Reformation rejected this diagnosis root and branch. The Reformers did not deny that fallen human beings retain certain natural capacities — Calvin distinguished carefully between the broader sense of the imago Dei, which includes the natural faculties of intellect and will and survives the Fall in corrupted form, and the narrow sense, the justitia originalis of true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, which was completely destroyed. What they denied was that these residual capacities constitute any ground for spiritual cooperation with God. Luther, in De Servo Arbitrio, argued that the unregenerate will is not coerced to sin against its inclination; it sins voluntarily, because its deepest preferences are corrupt. It loves darkness and hates the light. It cannot turn itself toward God because it cannot choose to love what it naturally detests. The Formula of Concord formalized this in language of remarkable precision: in the act of regeneration, the human will is pure passive — purely passive. It does not cooperate in its own rebirth. It is simply the subject upon which the Holy Spirit acts through the preaching of the Word. The Reformed tradition states the same truth in its own idiom — the Westminster Confession teaches that God draws the elect “effectually… yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by his grace” (WCF 10.1) — but both confessions stand united against Rome on the decisive point: the unregenerate will contributes nothing to its own regeneration. Jonathan Edwards sharpened the point further by distinguishing between natural and moral ability. Fallen human beings possess the natural ability to obey God — they have minds to understand and bodies to act — but they completely lack the moral ability, because their hearts are so entirely inclined toward self-glorification that they cannot choose spiritual good. The inability is not mechanical but moral, and therefore deeply culpable. Against the parable-as-allegory, Calvin dismissed the reading outright: “The allegory which is here contrived by the advocates of free will is too absurd to deserve refutation.” Paul’s letter to the Ephesians does not describe humanity as half-dead. It describes them as dead — dead in trespasses and sins — and the dead do not cooperate with physicians.
This is not a merely technical disagreement between theologians parsing Latin formulae. It determines everything about how one diagnoses the human condition in the age of artificial intelligence — and it produces an irony that the encyclical does not appear to recognize.
The Pope warns against viewing human weakness as “an error to be corrected.” On this, the Reformation agrees — but it agrees far more radically than Rome’s own anthropology permits. If humanity is totally depraved, if every faculty of the soul is corrupted from the heart outward — the mind darkened, the will bound, the conscience stained, the affections disordered — then the promise of technological “upgrades” is not merely an illusion. It is a category error. The problem that besets humanity is not weakness. It is sin. And sin is not a software defect to be patched by better engineering; it is a moral corruption so thoroughgoing that Herman Bavinck could say it “is not located on and around humans but within them, and extends to the whole person and the whole of humankind.” No gene therapy, no neural implant, no algorithmic optimization can reach a corruption that resides in the springs of the will itself. Michael Horton is right to identify transhumanism as a systematic parody of Christian dogmatics — it adopts the exact narrative structure of creation, fall, redemption, and glorification, but replaces every divine element with a technological counterpart: evolutionary design for the Creator, biological limitation for the moral Fall, artificial intelligence for the work of Christ, neurochemical manipulation for the Spirit’s sanctification, and mind uploading for the resurrection of the body. The Reformed doctrine of total depravity exposes this substitution with a clarity that Rome’s wounded-but-capable anthropology cannot match, precisely because total depravity insists that the problem runs deeper than any instrument — biological or digital — can reach.
And here is the irony the encyclical cannot afford to confront. The very anthropology that undergirds the Pope’s warning against technological utopianism is the anthropology that leaves the door most conspicuously open to it. If human nature, even after the Fall, retains its essential structure — if the will remains free, if natural capacities for good persist, if the image of God survives fundamentally intact on its natural plane — then the transhumanist does not oppose Catholic anthropology so much as extend it. He merely proposes to enhance what Rome already concedes is there: residual capacity, natural goodness, a grandeur that need only be “safeguarded” and elevated. The scholastic tradition built its soteriology on the premise that grace perfects nature; the transhumanist simply substitutes technology for grace and draws the inference. Daly has traced this logic to its historical root in Francis Bacon, who argued that while moral innocence could be recovered through faith, human dominion over nature — including dominion over aging and death — could be partially restored through applied science and practical rationality. Bacon’s program was not atheistic; it was deeply theological, and it operated on precisely the nature-grace distinction that scholastic theology had bequeathed him. The Baconian project is, in a real sense, the scholastic project secularized. And the Pope, who builds on the same anthropological foundation, finds himself in the awkward position of condemning the superstructure while defending the base upon which it was constructed.
The Reformed alternative does not share this vulnerability. Bavinck argued that Rome’s nature-grace dualism, built upon the donum superadditum, creates a fatal split in human identity: by defining human nature as complete in itself on a natural level, scholastic theology makes supernatural grace an additional extra rather than an essential restoration of what humanity was created to be — and thereby renders the natural world conceptually autonomous, self-sufficient, and available for secular manipulation. Bavinck insisted instead that the image and likeness of God are not separate qualities but refer to the same reality: the whole human person, soul and body, created to bear the image of the Triune God. The Fall did not merely strip away a supernatural ornament from an otherwise intact nature; it left what Calvin called a “frightful deformity” — horrenda sit deformitas — where the image once shone. Salvation cannot, therefore, be a simple restoration of a superadded gift to an intact natural platform. It requires a radical re-creation of the entire human person, restoring the imago Dei in righteousness, holiness, and true knowledge through union with Christ.
This means that human dignity, in the Reformed understanding, is not a residual capacity to be “safeguarded” by institutional effort or ecclesial intervention. It is an ontological reality grounded in God’s creative act, confirmed in the Incarnation, and held secure by his sovereign purposes regardless of what machines can or cannot do. Carl Trueman is right that the contemporary crisis of human identity stems from unmooring the concept of personhood from the imago Dei; once that anchor is cut, the body becomes raw material for expressive individualism, and the transhumanist project is simply the logical terminus of a culture that has already decided the human person is self-defining. But for those who confess that God made humanity in his image, that he knit them together in the womb, that Christ assumed a full human nature in the Incarnation and was raised bodily from the grave, the question is already settled. Human dignity does not need to be safeguarded by the Church as though it were a fragile human achievement; it needs to be proclaimed by the Church — proclaimed as a divine donation that no technology can bestow and no technology can revoke, and defended precisely because it is God-given, not humanly constructed.
The Pope is right that we must “remain profoundly human.” But remaining human is not a project of moral effort sustained by ecclesial guidance. It is a theological fact sustained by divine decree. The grandeur of humanity is real — but it is the grandeur of a creature whose worth is determined by its Maker, not by its capacities, and whose deepest need is not preservation from the machine but deliverance from the sin that built it.
The Good Samaritan and Ecclesial Power
The encyclical’s account of the Church’s relationship to political society contains what may be its most disarming passage. Paragraph 21 declares that the Church “does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State,” that she “esteems those who serve the common good,” and that when she intervenes in worldly affairs, she does so “following the example of the Good Samaritan, with discretion and closeness.” The image is deliberately modest — a traveler kneeling beside a wounded stranger on the Jericho road, offering bandages and oil, then withdrawing once the innkeeper takes charge. This is not the language of a sovereign power. It is the language of a humble servant. And if the claim were historically credible, a Protestant reader could affirm it with genuine warmth. The distinction between the spiritual and civil spheres is, after all, a Reformation conviction before it is a conciliar one. Luther’s two-kingdoms doctrine, Calvin’s duplex regimen, and the broader Reformed tradition of sphere sovereignty all rest on the premise that God governs human life through distinct forms of rule that must not be collapsed into each other. If the Pope is truly saying that the Church possesses spiritual authority while the state possesses civil authority, and that neither absorbs the other, he is affirming what the Reformers spent considerable blood and ink to establish.
The difficulty is that five centuries of papal history make the claim very nearly impossible to take at face value.
In November 1302, Pope Boniface VIII promulgated the bull Unam Sanctam, the most extreme assertion of papal temporal supremacy in medieval history. The document argued that both the spiritual and temporal swords reside within the power of the Church — the spiritual sword wielded directly by the hand of the priest, the temporal sword administered for the Church by secular kings, “at the will and sufferance of the priestly hierarchy.” Drawing upon the Neoplatonic cosmology of Pseudo-Dionysius, Boniface declared that because spiritual matters inherently transcend earthly concerns in dignity and sublimity, “the spiritual power holds the divine right to establish the terrestrial power and pass judgment upon it.” The bull concluded with a dogmatic definition that has never been formally revoked: “it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Whatever else may be said about the papacy’s subsequent evolution, this was not a Good Samaritan bending over the wounded. It was a sovereign demanding unconditional fealty.
The Counter-Reformation did not abandon this claim so much as modernize it. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the most sophisticated political theologian of the Jesuit order, formulated the doctrine of potestas indirecta — indirect temporal authority — precisely to address the credibility problem that Unam Sanctam had created. Bellarmine conceded what Boniface had denied: that political power is a product of natural law and the consent of the governed, not a derivative of papal authority, and that secular governments therefore possess a genuine, natural autonomy. The Pope’s ordinary jurisdiction, Bellarmine argued, is “purely and solely spiritual, possessing no direct temporal jurisdiction.” Under normal circumstances, the state rules without papal interference.
But Bellarmine’s concession was not unconditional. It contained a reserved power that rendered the concession, in practice, revocable. Because the natural end of the state — earthly peace and justice — is inherently subordinate to the supernatural end of the Church — the salvation of souls — the spiritual power must possess a corresponding indirect authority over the temporal realm. When the spiritual well-being of the Christian commonwealth is directly endangered — when, for instance, a monarch becomes a heretic or actively hinders the practice of the Catholic faith — the Pope retains the exceptional authority to intervene. This intervention, Bellarmine argued, includes the power to depose the secular monarch, declare his laws null, and absolve Catholic subjects from their oaths of allegiance.
The structural parallel between Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta and the encyclical’s “Good Samaritan” ecclesiology is too precise to be coincidental. The encyclical’s Paragraph 20, quoting Gaudium et Spes, affirms that “earthly realities possess their own proper character and order” and that “the demand for autonomy is perfectly in order.” This is Bellarmine’s natural autonomy of the state, repackaged in conciliar language. Paragraph 21 insists that the Church “does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State” and that her intervention stems not from institutional ambition but from “evangelical charity” and the urgency of “the real suffering of the men and women of our time.” This is Bellarmine’s purely spiritual ordinary jurisdiction — the Pope exercises no temporal power under normal conditions. And then the final clause of Paragraph 21 introduces the qualification that restructures everything: “what arises from urgent necessity cannot become the norm, nor replace the institutional responsibilities proper to the civil community.” This is Bellarmine’s reserved power, stated with pastoral delicacy but carrying the same structural implication: the Church ordinarily defers to the state, but reserves the right to intervene when moral necessity demands it — and the Church alone determines when moral necessity demands it.
The practical consequence of this framework becomes visible the moment the encyclical moves from principle to prescription. A document that truly respected the autonomy of earthly affairs would confine itself to theological and moral principles, leaving the specific design of regulatory instruments to the competent civil authorities. Magnifica Humanitas does not do this. It proposes specific governance structures for AI oversight. It prescribes particular regulatory approaches to algorithmic transparency, data sovereignty, and autonomous weapons. It calls for international frameworks, taxation policies, and institutional reforms. Whatever these proposals may be — wise or unwise, prudent or overreaching — they are not the actions of a Good Samaritan tending wounds on a roadside. They are the actions of a sovereign institution issuing a comprehensive political program under the authority of the papal magisterium. The gap between the ecclesiology of Paragraph 21 and the practice of the subsequent chapters is not a minor inconsistency. It is the structural signature of potestas indirecta at work: autonomy is formally conceded, and then functionally reclaimed the moment the Church decides that the urgency of the situation requires her voice.
The Reformation understood this pattern with a clarity born of bitter experience. Luther’s two-kingdoms doctrine was forged in direct opposition to the medieval papal vision of spiritual-temporal empire. In Luther’s framework, God governs human life through two distinct regiments: the spiritual reign, in which God rules inwardly and directly through the Holy Spirit and the Gospel, producing faith that has no need of the physical sword; and the temporal reign, in which God rules outwardly and indirectly through secular magistrates, human reason, and civil law, restraining wickedness and maintaining outward peace. The civil magistrate is not a subordinate agent of the Church operating at the sufferance of the priesthood, as Boniface had insisted. He is God’s own minister, a larva Dei — a mask of God — through whom the Creator actively provides for the order and sustenance of human society. The two regiments operate by different principles, serve different ends, and must not be confused. The Church cannot wield the civil sword, and the state cannot administer the sacraments.
Calvin refined this distinction in the Institutes, describing a twofold government — duplex regimen — in which the critical division does not separate the church from the state but runs directly through the church itself. The invisible church, the mystical body of the elect united to Christ, belongs entirely to the spiritual kingdom. The visible church, with its human officers, liturgies, and administrative structures, operates within the temporal, external forum. The civil magistrate is ordained by God to preserve public order and, in Calvin’s original formulation, to enforce both tables of the Decalogue — but he must do so only through external, bodily means, employing natural law and sanctified reason, never spiritual keys. The magistrate cannot administer the Word or sacraments. The Church cannot exercise the civil sword. Calvin fought a series of dramatic conflicts with the Genevan Small Council precisely to defend this boundary — at one point offering his resignation and declaring he would sooner die than allow the civil government to force the administration of the Lord’s Supper to a citizen whom the Consistory had excommunicated. The institutional independence of the Church from the state, and of the state from the Church, was not a diplomatic convenience for the Reformers. It was a theological necessity grounded in the distinct character of God’s twofold rule.
This means that when the Reformation tradition speaks of the Church’s relationship to civil society, it means something fundamentally different from what the encyclical means. The Reformed Church speaks to the state, prophetically and from Scripture, declaring the moral law that God has inscribed in creation and codified in his Word. She does not speak over the state, claiming the institutional authority to prescribe specific policy instruments, governance structures, or regulatory frameworks. She does not reserve a right of intervention to be activated when she judges that moral necessity has been reached. She possesses authority in the spiritual kingdom — the preaching of the Word, the administration of the sacraments, the exercise of church discipline — and she exercises that authority with vigor. But she does not extend that authority into the civil kingdom by relabeling political prescriptions as pastoral care. The Good Samaritan bandaged the wounded man. He did not seize the innkeeper’s ledger and rewrite his business regulations.
The deeper problem is not hypocrisy — it is incoherence. The encyclical wants to claim the moral authority of a prophetic voice while simultaneously denying that it claims any temporal jurisdiction. But a prophetic voice speaks God’s word to the conscience of the powerful and leaves the political application to those whom God has ordained to make it. What the encyclical actually does is something quite different: it speaks the Church’s social tradition to the governments of the world and prescribes the political application itself, reserving to the papal magisterium the right to determine when “urgent necessity” justifies the intervention. This is not prophecy. It is indirect government. And the distinction between the two is precisely the distinction that Bellarmine formulated five centuries ago — the same distinction the Reformers rejected then, and the same one that Protestant theology must continue to reject now. Not because the Church has nothing to say about artificial intelligence, but because the authority from which she speaks, and the manner in which she speaks, determine whether her voice is prophetic proclamation or institutional overreach. The Church that speaks from Scripture, declaring what God has said and leaving the application to the magistrate, is exercising her proper vocation. The Church that speaks from her own tradition, prescribing specific regulatory outcomes and reserving the right to escalate her intervention, is exercising something else entirely — something that looks remarkably like the temporal power she claims to have renounced.
Sola Scriptura and the “Many Voices”
The epistemological question underlying the entire encyclical surfaces most clearly in Paragraphs 22 through 24, where the Pope describes how the Church applies the word of God to the “complex situations of our time.” The passage deserves careful attention, because the word that bears the weight of the entire argument is not a theological term but an adjective. The contributions of philosophy and the human and social sciences, the encyclical declares, are “essential.” These disciplines “help us understand and analyze cultural, economic and political dynamics more deeply.” John Paul II is quoted approvingly: the Church welcomes the contributions of the social sciences “to draw from them concrete insights that help her carry out her magisterial office.” The word of God, in this account, provides “reliable standards,” but those standards cannot be applied to the particularities of the present age without the mediating assistance of human intellectual disciplines. The Gospel is not diminished by this dialogue, the Pope insists. On the contrary, it “makes it possible to identify with greater clarity what genuinely fosters the lives of individuals and communities.”
The claim is carefully worded, and it would be dishonest to caricature it. The Pope does not say that philosophy replaces Scripture. He does not argue that the social sciences override revelation. He presents them as partners in a collaborative enterprise of discernment, in which the eternal truths of the Gospel are brought to bear on the specific questions of each historical moment through the interpretive assistance of human knowledge. The image is of two sources of light converging upon a single object, each illuminating what the other cannot reach alone. For anyone formed by the culture of the modern research university, this sounds not merely reasonable but self-evident. Of course you need economics to understand economic policy. Of course you need political science to evaluate political structures. Of course the Gospel alone cannot tell you the optimal regulatory framework for algorithmic transparency.
And this is precisely where the Protestant must slow down, because the Pope’s claim is not that Christians should read widely, think carefully, and apply the full range of their God-given intellectual faculties to the problems of their age. No serious theologian has ever disputed that. Calvin himself drew upon Cicero and the classical tradition in articulating the civil use of reason. Luther celebrated the capacities of human intellect to manage worldly affairs and promoted universal education. The Westminster Confession acknowledges that “there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word” (WCF 1.6). The Reformation never demanded that Christians approach complex social questions armed with nothing but a concordance.
What the Pope claims is something categorically different. He does not say that human knowledge is useful for the application of Scripture. He says it is essential. The contributions of philosophy and the social sciences are not peripheral aids that Christians may or may not employ as circumstances warrant; they are necessary components of the Church’s interpretive apparatus, without which the word of God cannot be properly applied to the questions of the age. And the reason this distinction matters — the reason it is not a pedantic quarrel over an adjective — is that it determines whether Scripture is sufficient or insufficient for the task to which God appointed it.
The Reformation answered this question with a clarity that the encyclical directly contradicts. Paul writes to Timothy that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16–17). Peter declares that God’s “divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us” (2 Pet 1:3). The Westminster Confession codifies the doctrine: “The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men” (WCF 1.6). The sufficiency of Scripture does not mean that the Bible contains a treatise on semiconductor fabrication or a policy brief on algorithmic governance. It means that Scripture provides the theological categories, the moral principles, the anthropological framework, and the doctrine of God’s sovereignty that are sufficient for the Church to address any question that confronts her — including artificial intelligence — without requiring supplementary authorities to complete what Scripture has left unfinished.
The distinction between the Reformed and Roman positions is therefore not whether Christians should engage with human knowledge. It is whether human knowledge functions as a tool employed under the authority and illumination of Scripture, or as an essential dialogue partner whose contributions are necessary for the Church’s magisterial office to function. The difference is architecturally decisive. In the Reformed framework, Scripture stands above all other sources of knowledge as the supreme and final standard. The Christian uses economics, philosophy, political science, and the natural sciences as instruments of common grace — valuable, genuinely informative, and sometimes indispensable for understanding the empirical dimensions of a problem — but always subordinate to the word of God and always subject to correction by it. The sciences inform the application; they do not constitute the authority. In the Roman framework, the relationship is different. The social sciences are received as “essential” contributors to the magisterial office itself. They do not merely inform the Pope’s analysis; they are required for the Church’s teaching to achieve its proper function. The word of God provides “reliable standards,” but those standards are incomplete without the contributions of human disciplines. This is not a partnership of equals. It is a redefinition of the authority upon which the Church speaks: not Scripture alone, but Scripture in necessary dialogue with human intellectual traditions, mediated through the institutional discernment of the magisterium.
The practical consequences of this epistemological structure are visible in the encyclical’s own method. Paragraph 22, quoting Gaudium et Spes, instructs the Church to “listen to and distinguish the many voices of our times and to interpret them in the light of God’s word, in order that the revealed Truth may be more deeply penetrated, better understood and more suitably presented.” The language appears modest — who could object to listening? But the phrase “more deeply penetrated” carries a specific implication: that the revealed Truth, without the interpretive contribution of the many voices, is less deeply known, less fully understood, less suitably presented. The voices of the age are not merely the context in which Scripture is applied; they are an epistemic supplement that deepens the Church’s grasp of what Scripture means. The direction of illumination flows both ways — Scripture interprets culture, but culture also opens Scripture to fuller comprehension.
The Reformation reverses this direction with a conviction born of hard experience. Luther’s theological breakthrough did not come from listening to the many voices of his time. It came from reading Paul’s letter to the Romans against the consensus of the entire medieval interpretive tradition. The nominalist theology that dominated the late medieval university had taught Luther that God would not deny grace to those who did their best — facere quod in se est — and that the interior preparation of the heart through contrition constituted a human effort that merited divine favor. This was precisely the kind of theology produced when philosophy becomes an “essential contribution” to reading Scripture: the Aristotelian metaphysics of the schoolmen and the moral categories of nominalism filtered Paul’s doctrine of justification through a philosophical grid until the apostle’s actual argument was no longer visible. Luther himself described his liberation in unmistakable terms — he had been taught to understand “the righteousness of God” as the active, punishing justice by which God condemns the unrighteous, and he confessed that he “did not love, but rather grumbled against and hated the just God who punishes transgressors.” His breakthrough came only when he allowed the text of Romans to speak on its own terms: the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel is not the justice by which God punishes but the righteousness he freely gives to sinners through faith. “Here I felt that I was altogether born again,” Luther wrote, “and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”
The history is instructive because the soteriological distortion Luther encountered was not an aberration of the medieval system. It was the system working exactly as designed. When the philosophical categories of Aristotelian metaphysics became the essential framework for interpreting Paul, the result was a doctrine of justification that required the active cooperation of the human will — precisely the opposite of what Paul teaches in Romans 3 through 5. Trent’s Council codified this reading: justification is not a forensic declaration of the sinner’s righteousness in Christ but “the sanctification and renewal of the inward man through the voluntary reception of grace and gifts.” The instrumental cause of justification is not faith alone but the sacrament of baptism. Good works are not merely the fruit of justification but “truly meritorious.” And the human will, though weakened by the Fall, retains the capacity to “freely assent to and cooperate with” divine grace — a capacity the Reformers denied root and branch, insisting with Paul that “by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight” (Rom 3:20).
The relevance of this to the encyclical’s epistemology is not merely illustrative. It is structural. The same interpretive method that produced the Tridentine doctrine of justification — Scripture read through the essential mediation of philosophical categories and institutional tradition — now produces the encyclical’s social doctrine. The mechanism is identical: the word of God provides “reliable standards,” but those standards are applied through “the contributions of philosophy and of the human and social sciences,” and the result is a body of teaching that the magisterium presents as authoritative. The Pope does not deny that Scripture is important. He denies, in practice, that it is sufficient. And the practical fruit of that denial is visible throughout Magnifica Humanitas: the encyclical’s engagement with Scripture is minimal and allegorical (two brief typological readings, both significantly reshaped to fit the document’s prior commitments), while its engagement with the social sciences, political philosophy, and institutional governance is extensive and detailed. The word of God appears as the foundation. The human sciences provide the actual architecture.
The Reformed confession offers a fundamentally different epistemological architecture. Scripture is not merely the foundation upon which human knowledge builds; it is the standard by which all human knowledge is evaluated. The Christian does not need the social sciences to tell him that the concentration of power in fallen hands is dangerous — the doctrine of total depravity already teaches this. He does not need political philosophy to inform him that human institutions require accountability — the biblical doctrine of sin’s universality and the Fall’s corruption of every human faculty already establishes it. He does not need the contributions of moral philosophy to recognize that human dignity must be upheld — the imago Dei, proclaimed in Genesis and confirmed in the Incarnation, already grounds it beyond anything the human sciences can provide or revoke. The sciences may supply data. They may quantify the scale of a problem. They may identify empirical mechanisms that Scripture does not address in technical detail. But they do not complete what Scripture has left incomplete, because Scripture has not left its essential teaching incomplete. The man of God is “complete, equipped for every good work” — not because he possesses technical expertise in every domain, but because he possesses the word of God, which provides the categories of thought, the moral framework, and the knowledge of God and man that are sufficient for every question the Church is called to address.
The Pope invites the Church to listen to the many voices of the age so that revealed Truth may be “more deeply penetrated.” The Reformation responds that revealed Truth does not need the voices of the age to be deeply known. It needs the Holy Spirit, working through the word, to illumine the minds of those who read it. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor 2:14). The problem is not that Scripture is insufficiently penetrated without the help of the social sciences. The problem is that fallen human minds, including those of popes and philosophers, suppress the truth in unrighteousness and require the sovereign work of the Spirit to understand what God has plainly spoken. The remedy for this suppression is not more dialogue with the academy. It is repentance, faith, and submission to the word — the word that is, as the Psalmist declared, “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps 119:105), needing no supplementary illumination to fulfill its appointed purpose.
Truth as Polyhedron
Perhaps the most theologically significant sentence in the first chapter of Magnifica Humanitas appears not in the Pope’s discussion of artificial intelligence but in his account of how the Church relates to truth itself. “The Church does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth,” Leo XIV writes, adopting language he attributes to his own earlier statements, “because truth is not a territory to be defended, but a good to be shared.” The sentence is amplified by Pope Francis’s image of truth as a “multifaceted polyhedron, in which the one truth of the Gospel is reflected from different angles,” and by the Bergoglian principle that “time is greater than space” — that initiating good processes matters more than occupying positions of power. The cumulative picture is of a Church that holds truth loosely, shares it generously, and approaches it humbly, never imposing but always inviting. Social Doctrine, on this account, “is not a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a process of shared discernment.” The Church speaks “not in order to dominate, but to promote communion.”
The humility is attractive. It is also, on the terms of Rome’s own dogmatic commitments, incoherent.
On July 18, 1870, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm that shattered a window of St. Peter’s Basilica, the First Vatican Council promulgated the dogmatic constitution Pastor aeternus. The document defined, as irreformable dogma requiring the absolute assent of faith, that the Roman Pontiff possesses “full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the Church dispersed throughout the whole world.” This jurisdictional power is not delegated from the college of bishops. It is ordinary — belonging to the Pope by virtue of his office. It is immediate — exercisable directly over any cleric or layperson, in any diocese, without intermediate permission. It is episcopal — carrying the full governing authority of a bishop over the entire global flock. And it is supreme — the Pope is defined as “the supreme judge of the faithful,” whose sentences are not subject to revision by any human authority. Pastor aeternus concludes with the definition of papal infallibility: when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, defining a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, his definitions are “of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable.”
The anathemas that accompany these definitions are not suggestions. Anyone who denies that the Roman Pontiff possesses “full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church” is condemned. Anyone who asserts that “the perpetual succession of the primacy is not of divine law” is condemned. Anyone who has “the temerity to reject or call into doubt” the definition of papal infallibility is condemned. These are not the actions of an institution that does not claim a monopoly on truth. They are the defining actions of an institution that claims exactly that — and enforces the claim with the most solemn spiritual penalties at its disposal.
The Council of Trent, three centuries earlier, operated by the same logic. Its Sixth Session anathematized anyone who affirms that “the sinner is justified by faith alone” — the doctrine for which Luther risked his life and Calvin built the systematic theology of the Reformation. Its canons pronounced judgment after judgment upon Protestant teaching: anathema against those who deny the merit of good works, anathema against those who claim certainty of salvation, anathema against those who deny that the sacrament of penance is necessary for restoring justifying grace after mortal sin. Calvin responded with his Acts of the Council of Trent with the Antidote — a meticulous, line-by-line refutation in which he treated the Council’s decrees not as legitimate ecclesiastical law but as theological poison. He observed that councils are “inherently fallible, often contradict one another, and are frequently populated by men devoid of the Spirit of truth.” The anathemas of Trent have never been revoked. They remain in force as defined Catholic dogma. And the Church that pronounced them now tells the world she claims no monopoly on truth.
The contradiction is not resolved by the distinction between infallible and non-infallible teaching that modern Catholic theology employs. It is true that papal encyclicals, including Magnifica Humanitas, occupy a lower tier of magisterial authority than ex cathedra definitions — they require what Rome calls obsequium religiosum, a “religious submission of will and intellect,” rather than the absolute assent of faith demanded by infallible pronouncements. But this tiered system does not eliminate the problem; it compounds it. The Church simultaneously claims to possess an infallible teaching office that can define truth with irreformable certainty and anathematize those who reject it — and claims not to possess a monopoly on truth. These two propositions cannot both be true. If the anathemas of Trent and the definitions of Vatican I represent the authentic mind of the Church, then the Church does in fact claim a monopoly on defined truth, and the language of Paragraph 25 is pastoral rhetoric that obscures a dogmatic reality. If, on the other hand, the Church genuinely holds that truth is a “gift to be shared” rather than a “territory to be defended,” then the anathemas and irreformable definitions represent a historical error that ought to be repudiated. What the Church cannot do is hold both positions simultaneously — anathematizing in one century and disclaiming monopoly in the next — without the disclaimer functioning as a diplomatic veneer over an unchanged dogmatic structure.
The polyhedron metaphor deepens the difficulty. Truth, in this image, is not a single, clear proposition but a multifaceted solid, reflecting the one Gospel “from different angles.” The metaphor is borrowed from Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium and is designed to honor diversity — the “great variety of historical situations” in which the Gospel takes root, the different “functions, vocations, cultures and traditions” that enrich the Church’s life. The image is aesthetically appealing. It is also philosophically ruinous, because it smuggles perspectivism into Christian epistemology under the cover of pastoral generosity.
Truth, in the Christian confession, is not a polyhedron. Truth is propositional. God has spoken, and what he has spoken is true — not from multiple angles, but absolutely. “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth,” Christ prays in John 17:17. “The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever,” the Psalmist declares (Ps 119:160). The truth of Scripture is not a geometric object to be viewed from various positions, each yielding a partial but legitimate perspective. It is a word spoken by the living God, possessing a determinate meaning that the Holy Spirit illuminates in the minds of those who receive it. The polyhedron metaphor treats the diversity of human perspectives as a constitutive element of truth itself — as though truth is somehow more true when refracted through multiple cultural vantage points. But the diversity of cultural perspectives is not a facet of truth; it is a feature of the audience. The Gospel does not change its shape depending on who is looking at it. It confronts every culture with the same demands and offers every sinner the same salvation. The task of the Church is not to hold truth up to the light and admire its many reflections. It is to proclaim truth clearly, so that men and women may hear, repent, and believe.
The practical consequence of the polyhedron epistemology is visible in the encyclical’s redefinition of Social Doctrine as a “process of shared discernment” rather than a body of defined teaching. The move is significant because it renders the Church’s social teaching functionally unfalsifiable. If Social Doctrine is a process, it can never be wrong — it is always “developing,” always “encountering,” always “being challenged by the signs of the times.” A body of teaching can be tested against Scripture and found wanting. A process cannot, because a process has no fixed propositions to evaluate. It is always in motion, always provisional, always absorbing new voices and new perspectives into its ever-expanding polyhedron. The result is a teaching authority that cannot be corrected, not because it claims infallibility on every point, but because it never stands still long enough to be measured.
The Reformation offers a fundamentally different account of the Church’s relationship to truth and to error. The Reformed confession holds that the Church can be wrong. Every church, every council, every confession is subject to the authority of Scripture and must be willing to be corrected by it. The principle ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei — the church reformed, always being reformed according to the word of God — does not mean that the Church is perpetually evolving toward a fuller understanding through dialogue with the human sciences. It means that the Church is perpetually accountable to a fixed standard that stands above her, and that her teaching must be continuously tested against that standard, not continuously expanded beyond it. The Church reforms when she discovers that her teaching has departed from Scripture. She does not “develop” by absorbing the insights of the age into her doctrinal corpus.
This means that the Reformed tradition takes the prophetic posture rather than the discernment posture toward culture and the world. The biblical prophets did not practice “shared discernment.” They did not listen to the many voices of their times in order to identify Christ’s presence in cultural transformations. They declared, “Thus says the Lord.” Isaiah did not form a committee to assess the socioeconomic dynamics of Judah’s idolatry. Jeremiah did not consult the human sciences before announcing the fall of Jerusalem. Amos did not engage in a process of encounter between the eternal truth of the covenant and the questions of history. They spoke God’s word to the powerful and the powerless alike, and they left the response to the conscience of those who heard. The prophetic word is not a conversation. It is a verdict — a verdict delivered in love, bearing the weight of divine authority, and demanding a response that the prophet does not negotiate.
The Pope quotes John Paul II’s confession that the Church must “examine honestly the times when acquiescence was given to intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of truth.” The confession is welcome, and the Protestant tradition has its own sins to acknowledge on this count — Calvin’s Geneva was not free from coercion, and the magisterial Reformers collaborated with the civil sword in ways that the later Reformed tradition rightly corrected. But the remedy for past intolerance is not to abandon the claim that truth is definite and authoritative. The remedy is to separate the authority of truth from the coercive instruments of the state — which is precisely what the two-kingdoms theology of the Reformation was designed to accomplish. The Church speaks truth. The state enforces civil order. The Church does not wield the sword, and the state does not wield the keys. The Pope’s solution is different: rather than separating truth from coercion, he softens truth itself, redefining it as a polyhedron to be contemplated from multiple angles rather than a word to be obeyed. The effect is not to make the Church more humble. It is to make the Church less prophetic — less capable of saying what God has said, with the authority with which God said it, to a world that desperately needs to hear it.
And here the deepest irony of the encyclical’s epistemology comes into view. A Church that claims no monopoly on truth and defines her teaching as a process of shared discernment has, by her own logic, disqualified herself from speaking with the very authority the encyclical assumes. If truth is a polyhedron and the Church possesses only some of its facets, why should governments, corporations, or international bodies treat the Pope’s pronouncements on artificial intelligence as anything more than one perspective among many? If Social Doctrine is not a handbook but a process, why should anyone treat its conclusions as binding? The encyclical wants to speak with prophetic urgency about the dangers of AI — and on many empirical points, it speaks with genuine insight. But the epistemological framework of Chapter 1 systematically undermines the authority the subsequent chapters require. A Church that will not say “Thus says the Lord” cannot expect the world to listen as though the Lord has spoken. The world does not need another voice in the conversation. It has plenty of those. It needs a word from God — authoritative, sufficient, and clear. That is what the Reformation confesses Scripture to be. And it is precisely what the encyclical, for all its moral seriousness, declines to offer.
A “Harmonious Development”
The heart of Chapter 1’s argument lies in paragraphs 28 through 45, where the Pope traces the development of Catholic Social Doctrine from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 through the pontificates of Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, arriving at last at his own encyclical on artificial intelligence. The narrative is comprehensive and, in its own terms, impressive. Each pontiff is presented as having interpreted the res novae of his era in light of the Gospel: Leo XIII addressed the conflict between capital and labor, Pius XI the concentration of economic power, John XXIII the global dimension of social issues, Paul VI the crisis of development, John Paul II the collapse of Soviet communism, Benedict XVI the dynamics of globalization, and Francis the ecological emergency. The cumulative picture is one of organic continuity — what the encyclical calls “a harmonious, though not always linear, development” marked by “an unchanging core of revealed truths regarding the human person and society” that is “constantly intertwined with a renewed capacity for listening to historical situations” (¶45). AI, in this account, is simply the next chapter in a story that has been unfolding coherently for more than a century.
The narrative deserves careful examination, because it is not merely a historical summary. It is an argument — an argument that the institutional longevity and cumulative weight of Catholic Social Doctrine constitute, in themselves, a warrant for the authority with which the encyclical now proposes to address artificial intelligence. The implied logic runs: we have been doing this, faithfully and continuously, since 1891; we possess a tradition of discernment that has met every major social crisis of the modern world; therefore our competence to speak on AI is established by our track record. This is recognizably the same praescriptio argument that Cardinal Sadoleto deployed against Calvin’s Geneva in 1539 — the claim that historical longevity and continuous institutional presence function as a title deed to truth, thereby disqualifying any protest before the merits of the case can even be examined. Calvin’s reply remains the definitive Protestant answer: the true Church is not defined by external succession or institutional continuity but by the continuous proclamation of the Word of God. The question is never how long an institution has been speaking but whether it speaks from Scripture or alongside it.
The “unchanging core” claim, examined historically, proves far less stable than the narrative suggests. Catholic Social Doctrine has undergone not merely “changes in perspective that do not break with what came before” — the encyclical’s careful phrasing — but outright reversals on matters of substance. The most conspicuous example is religious liberty. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, the official teaching of the Roman Church was that error has no rights and that the civil state has a duty to suppress false religion where Catholicism is the established faith. Dignitatis Humanae (1965) reversed this position, declaring religious freedom a fundamental right grounded in human dignity that must be guaranteed by law. Whether one regards this reversal as a legitimate development or a contradiction, calling it “harmonious” requires a generosity of interpretation that the document itself does not extend to the Reformation. The history of papal teaching on usury underwent a similar trajectory — from absolute prohibition under threat of excommunication to quiet accommodation as the medieval economy gave way to modern finance. And the papal record on slavery, which included Popes who authorized the slave trade and others who condemned it, resists any description as the smooth unfolding of a single “unchanging core.” These are not marginal adjustments. They are substantive shifts on questions of human dignity, economic ethics, and political authority — precisely the categories the encyclical now deploys to address AI.
Even the institutional history that the narrative presupposes is more fractured than its smooth progression from Leo XIII to Leo XIV allows. The Great Western Schism of 1378 to 1417, in which three rival popes simultaneously excommunicated one another and divided Western Christendom for nearly four decades, demonstrated that the papacy was not an indefectible divine institution but a deeply political office subject to factionalism, ambition, and corruption. The crisis was resolved not by papal authority but by the Council of Constance — which asserted that a general council, deriving its authority directly from Christ, was superior to the pope in matters of faith, reform, and governance. That the papacy subsequently crushed conciliarism does not erase the precedent. If a general council could depose a pope to save the Church from ruin, the claim that the Roman Pontiff holds absolute authority by divine right was already broken in principle before Luther posted a single thesis. The exposure of the Donation of Constantine as an eighth-century forgery and the unmasking of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals — a vast collection of fabricated papal letters and conciliar decrees used for centuries to assert Roman jurisdiction over local bishops — further demonstrated that the “unbroken lineage” of papal authority rested, at critical junctures, on deliberate fraud rather than apostolic heritage.
But the more telling problem with the encyclical’s narrative is not what it distorts but what it omits. The entire history of Protestant social thought is absent from the account. The reader of paragraphs 28 through 45 would never know that Christian engagement with political and economic life had any history outside the Roman communion. Calvin’s Geneva, with its system of ecclesiastical discipline, poor relief, and the Consistory’s moral oversight, represented one of the earliest comprehensive experiments in Christian social order — and it operated on principles fundamentally different from papal Social Doctrine. Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex (1644) argued from Scripture that political authority is held in trust from God and is subject to law, not personal prerogative — a work that directly influenced the development of constitutional government and the limitation of arbitrary power. The Puritan political tradition, with its covenantal theology of civil government, its insistence on the consent of the governed, and its practical experiments in New England, contributed more to the formation of modern democratic institutions than any papal encyclical. Abraham Kuyper’s public theology, with its doctrine of sphere sovereignty — the conviction that God has established distinct spheres of authority (family, church, state, commerce, science) each operating under its own divine mandate and none absorbing the others — offered a vision of social order that explicitly rejected the papal model of centralized ecclesiastical authority over every domain of life. None of this exists in the encyclical’s account of “the development of Social Doctrine in the Magisterium.” The harmonious development is harmonious because it has excluded every voice that challenged Rome’s monopoly on Christian social thought.
This silence is not an innocent editorial choice. It is a theological claim. By narrating the history of Christian social engagement as if it began with Leo XIII and developed exclusively within the Roman communion, the encyclical implicitly denies that the Reformation produced any legitimate social theology at all. Yet the historical record is precisely the reverse: the Reformation’s doctrinal convictions — the priesthood of all believers, the two-kingdoms distinction, the sovereignty of God over every sphere of human life — generated social, political, and economic consequences that transformed Western civilization. Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers invested holy dignity in daily vocations, dismantling the medieval hierarchy that had placed the clergy in a separate spiritual estate and desanctified ordinary work. His two-kingdoms doctrine, whatever its later distortions, established the principle that the Church’s authority is spiritual and that the civil magistrate holds a distinct, divinely ordained commission — a principle that, in its Reformed and Puritan elaborations, became one of the foundations of the constitutional separation of powers. Calvin’s insistence on doctrinal succession over tactile succession — that the legitimacy of a church depends not on its institutional pedigree but on its faithfulness to the apostolic message — redefined the terms on which any Christian institution could claim authority. To write the history of Christian social thought without these contributions is not to produce a harmonious narrative; it is to produce a partial one.
The encyclical concludes its historical survey with an admission that is more significant than it perhaps intends. The Pope writes that AI “challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within” (¶28) — that it represents a development that strains the existing framework and requires the tradition to stretch beyond its established concepts. This is an honest concession, and it deserves a candid response. If every major social transformation of the modern era — industrialization, totalitarianism, globalization, the ecological crisis, and now artificial intelligence — requires Social Doctrine to be “challenged from within,” to undergo “progressive insights” and “changes in perspective,” then the tradition is not functioning as the stable foundation the narrative claims. It is functioning as what it is: a human interpretive tradition, impressive in scope but limited in authority, adapting itself to circumstances it did not anticipate because it was never equipped to anticipate them. The Reformed confession is that Scripture does not need to be “challenged from within” by artificial intelligence or any other historical development. Its anthropology — the imago Dei, the fall, the noetic effects of sin, the mandate of dominion — applies to AI as it applies to every human endeavor, not because it has been updated to address new circumstances but because it addresses the human condition at a depth that no circumstance can outrun. The doctrine of creation tells us what human beings are and what their tools are for. The doctrine of sin tells us why those tools will be misused. The doctrine of providence tells us that God governs the course of human technology as He governs the course of human history — sovereignly, purposefully, and toward ends that no papal encyclical can foresee or direct. What is needed to address the age of AI is not another chapter in a tradition that must perpetually revise itself to meet the next crisis, but the unchanging Word of the living God, which has already spoken with perfect sufficiency on every question that artificial intelligence raises about human nature, human responsibility, and human destiny.
What Scripture Actually Gives Us
If the foregoing critique is sound — if the encyclical’s hermeneutic is flawed, its anthropology insufficient, its ecclesiology overreaching, its epistemology self-undermining, and its historical narrative partial — then the question presses itself: what does Scripture actually give the Church for addressing the age of artificial intelligence? The answer, stated plainly, is everything it needs.
The doctrine of creation establishes the framework. Human beings are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–28), crowned with dominion over the works of His hands, and commissioned to fill the earth and subdue it. Artificial intelligence is a tool of that dominion — an extraordinary one, to be sure, but a tool nonetheless, subject to the same mandate and the same limits as every other product of human making from Tubal-Cain’s forge (Gen. 4:22) to Bezalel’s tabernacle craftsmanship (Ex. 31:1–5). The imago Dei is not a fragile endowment that requires institutional protection from technological encroachment; it is an ontological reality grounded in the creative act of God, confirmed in the incarnation of the Son, and secure regardless of what machines can or cannot do. No algorithm can bestow it. No algorithm can revoke it. It does not need to be “safeguarded” as though it were a human achievement at risk; it needs to be proclaimed as a divine donation that stands because God stands behind it.
The doctrine of sin tells us why this tool will be misused. The concentration of AI infrastructure in the hands of a few corporations — the $600 billion capital expenditure, the semiconductor bottlenecks, the private governance of systems that affect billions — is not an anomaly requiring novel social analysis. It is the predictable outworking of fallen humanity’s drive to accumulate power, the same impulse that built the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–9) and that prompted Israel to demand a king “like all the nations” (1 Sam. 8:5). Technology amplifies human fallenness; it does not escape it. Calvin’s observation that the human heart is a fabricam idolorum — a factory of idols — applies to silicon as readily as it applies to gold. The transhumanist dream of uploading consciousness or engineering immortality is not a secular project at all but a parody of the resurrection — what Todd Daly has traced as the Baconian ambition to conquer death by technique rather than by grace, and what Trueman identifies as the logical terminus of a culture that has already decided the human person is self-defining.
The doctrine of providence tells us who governs the course of this technology. God works through secondary causes — through the decisions of engineers, the policies of governments, the dynamics of markets — without being reducible to any of them. The Westminster Confession affirms that God “from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass” (WCF 3.1), and that His providence extends to “the first fall, and all other sins of angels and men” (WCF 5.4). The rise of artificial intelligence does not catch God off guard, and it does not require His Church to scramble for new categories. He governs it as He governs the nations — sovereignly, purposefully, and toward ends that glorify His name.
And the gospel addresses what is, in the final analysis, the deepest threat that artificial intelligence poses — not the economic displacement, not the concentration of power, not the erosion of privacy, grave as all of these are, but the perennial human temptation to find salvation in human achievement. The builders of Babel sought a name for themselves and a tower whose top reached heaven. The builders of artificial general intelligence, in their most candid moments, speak in remarkably similar terms. The gospel answers this temptation as it has always answered it: not with a social program, not with a discernment process, not with an encyclical, but with the announcement that salvation belongs to the Lord, that it is received through repentance and faith in Christ alone, and that the wisdom the world needs is not the wisdom it can manufacture but the wisdom that comes down from above — “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). Scripture does not need to be supplemented by a century of papal social teaching to address these realities. It has already spoken, with perfect sufficiency, on every question that artificial intelligence raises about human nature, human responsibility, and human destiny.
The Closing Argument
Magnifica Humanitas Chapter 1 is not primarily about artificial intelligence. It is about authority — the authority of the Roman Catholic Church to define the terms on which AI will be discussed, the framework within which it will be evaluated, and the tradition from which solutions will be drawn. The entire chapter is ecclesiological and epistemological infrastructure: a case for why Rome’s voice should be heard, on what grounds her social tradition deserves deference, and by what method her conclusions should be reached. The question the chapter implicitly poses — by what authority does the Church address the age of AI? — is the right question. It is the answer that fails.
The case this article has built can be summarized in its principal contentions. The encyclical’s hermeneutic, tested against the texts it cites, does not hold: Babel is read as a parable of diversity when the text presents it as a judgment on human pride, and Nehemiah is read as a model of synodal reconstruction when its central event is the public reading and exposition of God’s law. The encyclical’s anthropology, rooted in the Catholic nature-grace distinction, underestimates the depth of the fall by preserving a residual natural capacity for moral and spiritual orientation — a position the Reformation rejected on the grounds that Scripture teaches a corruption that reaches to the roots of human willing, not merely to its highest aspirations. The encyclical’s ecclesiology deploys the Good Samaritan as an allegory for institutional mediation while the parable itself teaches mercy that operates outside institutional channels, and it claims a pastoral authority that rests historically on the very structures — Unam Sanctam, Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta, Pastor aeternus — that the encyclical’s own ecumenical tone implicitly disavows. The encyclical’s epistemology declares that the Church holds no monopoly on truth and defines her teaching as a polyhedron of perspectives — while simultaneously maintaining irreformable dogmatic definitions enforced by anathema. And the encyclical’s historical narrative presents Catholic Social Doctrine as a harmonious development sustained by an unchanging core, a narrative that excludes the entire Reformation tradition and papers over genuine reversals in the Church’s own teaching on religious liberty, usury, and political authority.
The common thread running through each of these critiques is not anti-Catholic antagonism. It is the Reformation’s principled insistence, maintained now for five centuries, that Scripture alone — not tradition supplemented by the sciences, not magisterial development tested against the sensus fidei, not the accumulated weight of encyclicals from Leo XIII to Leo XIV — provides the sufficient foundation for the Church’s witness in every age, including this one. Where the Pope sees a polyhedron of truth requiring shared discernment, the Reformation confesses a Word that is “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119:105) — sufficient, clear, and authoritative. Where the encyclical proposes a tradition that must be “challenged from within” by every new historical development, the Reformation confesses a Scripture that does not need to be challenged from within because it addresses the human condition at a depth that no technological revolution can outrun.
The remaining chapters of Magnifica Humanitas will apply this framework to specific questions — the concentration of AI power, the ethics of autonomous systems, the future of human labor, the governance of algorithms. Part 2 of this series will engage those arguments as they come. But the critical work has been done here, in Chapter 1, where the foundations were laid. If the foundations are unsound — if the authority claimed is not the authority Scripture grants, if the anthropology assumed is not the anthropology Scripture teaches, if the epistemology adopted cannot sustain the conclusions the encyclical requires — then what is built upon them, however morally serious, stands on uncertain ground.
The questions this chapter raises are worth reflection, whether you read them as a Protestant, a Catholic, or a skeptic watching both traditions from the outside. If the Church “does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth,” on what basis does she issue binding moral teaching — and if her teaching is not binding, why write an encyclical at all? Can a tradition that must be perpetually revised to meet each new crisis provide the stable ground from which to address any of them? And what does Scripture itself say — not what the magisterium says Scripture says, but what the text says when you open it — about the making of tools, the accumulation of power, and the temptation to transcend human limits? Start with Genesis 4, Genesis 11, and Deuteronomy 8, and see whether you need a 135-year tradition of social encyclicals to understand what God has already said.