Machines now write essays, compose music, pass exams, and hold conversations, and each new capability quietly unsettles something. For a couple of centuries the West has increasingly measured human worth by output, by intelligence, productivity, and usefulness. That was always a fragile place to stand, and artificial intelligence is now kicking the legs out from under it. If your value is your usefulness, and a machine can be more useful, what exactly are you worth?
It is a genuinely frightening question if worth is a matter of capability, because capability is exactly what we are now automating. The anxious search for the one thing machines cannot do, creativity, emotion, consciousness, keeps finding the ground moving. Every definition of human specialness built on a skill is a definition waiting to be outperformed.
If your worth is your usefulness, a machine can threaten it. If your worth is the image of God, nothing can.
Christianity has never located human dignity there, which is why it does not flinch at this moment. Its claim, made long before the first calculator, is that a human being is not valuable because of what they can produce, but because of whose image they bear. 'God created man in his own image.' That worth is not a score. It is not earned by intelligence or forfeited by disability, dementia, infancy, or unemployment. It is given, and it cannot be computed, competed with, or taken away by a better machine. In an age anxious to prove it is more than a very clever algorithm, Christianity offers the deepest possible ground to stand on: you were never valued for your output. You were loved as an image-bearer of God.