So, you want to live forever?

You'll have to die first

Bryan Johnson made millions as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Now he’s using that money to try to buy eternal life.

Poster from a Netflix Documentary about Johnson. Source.

Johnson’s Blueprint is the result of $2 million a year in research. His goal is to reverse aging. He aims at building the “next era of human.” A human who is able to overcome the biological restrictions associated with aging, disease, and—eventually—death.

Through Johnson’s research and subsequent “protocols,” he claims to have successfully slowed his aging to a rate of 8 months per year. He gets a perfect sleep score every night. He eats dinner at 11 am. Every meal is perfectly calibrated with every calorie, macronutrient, and micronutrient obsessively calculated. His supplement list looks like a CVS receipt.

And he’s still going to die.

Johnson’s attempts represent what I call biological transhumanism. The fundamental assumption is that through the right therapies, diets, supplements, and exercises, human nature can be overcome. These bags of flesh can be fine-tuned like an F1 car (apparently, at an F1 price), and maximized for peak biological efficiency. The tree of life is available to us, we just have to uncover it with technology and scientific inquiry. The human body is a machine. And, like any machine, it can be tweaked and tested and stretched and remade for maximum output.

There’s other (less health-centered and more tech-dependent) forms of transhumanism: attempts at pushing human nature into new frontiers, redefining what it means to be human at all. Transhumanists imagine that the next stage of “human evolution” can be decided by us. We can remake ourselves in whatever image we see fit.

Every flavor of transhumanism has one thing in common: the desire to overcome death. For the transhumanist, death can be defeated by finding the right multi-million-dollar biological hacks, or by uploading individual human consciousnesses to future software that will enable the body-less human to live forever in the digital space or be downloaded to an analog body made of nanotech.¹

Transhumanism: the age of Ultron IRL. Image source.

This drive for eternal life at all costs should be ironic to Christians. Eternal life isn’t found in bio-hacking ourselves into bankruptcy or uploading our consciousness onto a server. It’s found in a Man. His name is Jesus Christ. And while the world looks for the key to living forever, He’s already demonstrated Himself to be the way, the truth, and the life.

But—and here’s the really ironic bit—the path to living forever is the exact opposite of what the likes of Bryan Johnson and Martine Rothblatt think it is. Eternal life isn’t found in avoiding death, preventing death, or transcending death with technology.

Eternal life is only found in dying: dying to self to live with Christ, then our natural body dying in order to receive our spiritual body at the resurrection.² Put another way, “You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.”³

We must embrace our finitude and need for Divine power to experience eternal life. Only God can make dead bones live again, and only dead bones will be made alive.

Eternal life is possible, but only in and through the grave-opening, death-killing, devil-destroying Lord Jesus Christ.⁴ What the world seeks anywhere but Christ, only Christ can provide.

He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 25:8)

1. These beliefs are out there and are backed by some very rich people.

2. Luke 9:23-25; 1 Cor. 15:42-49

3. 1 Cor 15:36 ESV

4. John 5:28-29; 1 Cor 15:25-26; Heb 2:14-15