Theology as a Critical Interface: Transversal Rationality Across AI Ethics and Posthumanist Accounts of the Human

Abstract

This conceptual-theological study asks how J. Wentzel van Huyssteen’s postfoundationalist notion of transversal rationality can enable theology to function as a critical interface across AI ethics and posthumanist accounts of the human. Here, “critical interface” names a site of reciprocal scrutiny rather than a claim that theology supplies an exclusive moral vocabulary: technical, ethical, posthumanist, and theological claims are compared, translated, and tested while retaining their distinctive forms of reasoning. Using a conceptual-hermeneutical method, the study brings major theological interlocutors into conversation with scholarship on AI ethics, education, governance, and posthumanism. Higher education serves as the principal heuristic case, while the framework is intended to address broader AI-mediated contexts. The article argues that theology should neither withdraw into disciplinary isolation nor claim authority over technical questions; rather, it can contribute cross-contextual normative judgment concerning human dignity, epistemic autonomy, personhood, responsibility, and the common good. The analysis develops four interconnected implications: a theological anthropology of human uniqueness that resists functional reduction; a distinction between technological collaboration and communion; a public-theological response to post-truth and algorithmic mediation; and a model of responsible technological stewardship grounded in oikonomia. The article does not claim that theology uniquely discovers norms unavailable to non-theological ethics. Its original contribution is to show how transversal rationality makes the different grounds and anthropological assumptions of these norms mutually accountable within a four-part theological-ethical framework.