SALVATION WITHOUT RESURRECTION? A SOTERIOLOGICAL-ESCHATOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF TRANSHUMANISM, MIND UPLOADING, AND THE PROMISE OF DIGITAL IMMORTALITY

Abstract

Transhumanism increasingly relocates the human longing for salvation from the religious sphere into technological projects. Among its most radical proposals is mind uploading: the claim that human mental structures, memories, personality, or consciousness could be transferred to, or reconstructed on, a non-biological substrate, allowing some form of existence to continue beyond biological death. This article subjects the promise of digital immortality to a Christian soteriological-eschatological critique. Using a constructive-systematic theological approach, it combines literature review, conceptual analysis, and critical engagement with recent scholarship on transhumanism, personal identity, artificial intelligence, and Christian eschatology. It argues that mind uploading cannot be identified with salvation or resurrection because informational persistence is not the same as personal continuity, disembodiment is incompatible with a resurrection-centered anthropology, and Christian salvation is not achieved through technological preservation but through God's action in Christ. The article's contribution lies in formulating “resurrective-continuity criteria” comprising four interrelated elements: divine agency, embodied personal continuity, Christological participation, and cosmic renewal. These criteria show that technology may extend, represent, or simulate life, but it cannot produce the eschatological mode of life that Christian faith names resurrection. The decisive problem raised by transhumanism, therefore, is not merely the limit of technological capability. It is the redefinition of salvation itself: from gift to engineering, from resurrection to informational replication, and from new creation to the persistence of a system.