The New Tower of Babel and the Naked Human: A Theologico-Anthropological Perspective on Imago Dei as Kenotic Being in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Unchecked artificial intelligence strengthened by large language models poses a crisis that reaches past ethics into ontology, and it demands that we reconfigure the basic categories of anthropological theology. Working by a hermeneutical–constructive method that places biblical exegesis in dialogue with philosophical thinking, this article advances three interconnected theses. The first is that contemporary AI is reminiscent of the theological hubris of the Tower of Babel narrative (Genesis 11:1–9); both instantiate a closed system of signification that forecloses transcendence by collapsing the distinction between naming and being named. The second concerns what algorithmic governance produces—what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life, a condition the biblical theology of nakedness in Genesis 2–3 can inversely illuminate, and which Simone Weil’s analysis of attention as decreative receptivity sharpens by exposing algorithmic distractedness as the spiritual antipode of contemplative openness. The third is christological: Agamben’s potentiality–impotentiality and Weil’s attention and décréation converge with the kenosis of Philippians 2:5–11 to ground an anthropology of voluntary self-emptying instead of replicable capacity. Reading imago Dei with Paul Ricœur as a dynamic process and drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, I argue that authentic existence in the algorithmic age requires a “second nakedness”, a deliberate refusal of egotistical self-assertion that reopens creaturely dependence, so that God’s grace becomes operative in the common life of humanity.