How should Christians think about AI?

Welcome to Theology Thursday! Theology is the study of God, his relation to the world, and our relation to him; it is "faith seeking understanding." I hope these newsletters help enhance your faith and deepen your love for God and his people, the church.

Today's question:
How should Christians think about AI?

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
There’s a debate going on right now in Christian circles about how believers should view the relatively new technology of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially the rising prevalence of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and others. Is AI neutral? Like a brick, which can be used to build a house or break a window, is AI simply a tool, and whether it’s used for good or for ill is up to the human user?

Or, as some commentators argue, is the very use of AI damaging to our understanding of what it means to be human? Even if it can do some cool and useful stuff, maybe it’s not worth hurting our humanity by outsourcing our thinking to a machine.

For those who believe AI is neither necessarily good or bad, but are nonetheless cognisant of the value of keeping the computers in their place, the basic principle for AI use is something like this: you should only use AI to do things you can’t really do under normal circumstances. Examples vary for different people, but may include things like research, graphic design, or editing something you’ve written might all be relatively appropriate uses of AI.

Recently, I was working on a sermon in our series on Isaiah 40-55. Here’s a prompt I plugged into ChatGPT: Show me where the writers of the New Testament reference or allude to Isaiah 53 and how it makes the connection to Jesus. The results produced 12 instances where the New Testament directly draws upon the character of the “suffering servant” in Isaiah 53 and uses the same language to refer to Jesus: both Isaiah 53 and Matthew 8 say the servant “bore our sins,” both Isaiah 53 and 1st Peter 2 write that “by his wounds you have been healed,” both Isaiah 53 and the Gospel of John call this savior the “lamb,” and so on.    

I’ve read the New Testament, of course, and am familiar with these passages, but part of my goal in the sermon was to make the case that Isaiah 53 is unquestionably talking about Jesus, so I wanted to be able to say something like, “At least 12 times the New Testament talks about Christ by drawing on Isaiah 53.” Without AI, I would have had to read the entire New Testament through again and caught every single one (or got lucky by catching it in a commentary or book), which just isn’t feasible for one sermon’s prep time.  

Still, what I didn’t do was prompt: Here’s my theme for a sermon on Isaiah 53. Write my sermon for me. To me, using AI for research helped bolster my ability to write a quality (hopefully!) sermon myself. But using AI to actually write the thing would have been cheating God, myself, and our MCC congregation out of the opportunity to hear from a real person who really prayed for God’s guidance and really studied God’s word what God has really laid on his heart to preach. The proclamation of the gospel deserves more than regurgitating whatever vague truthisms a robot - even a very sophisticated one - collects and organizes from millions of skin-deep online resources of questionable validity and relevance.

Yes, AI can present a decent facsimile of human-seeming communication, but it will always only be that: human-seeming. For people who believe God created humans to be his image-bearers, we ought to resist the temptation to exchange that identity for something that can only pretend to be human.

The Christian writer Samuel James is good on this issue. He writes, “the AI revolution is a question of human identity before it’s a question of human ethics. By that I mean that the most important question anyone needs to ask when they’re thinking about AI is not, “Am I allowed to do this,” but, “What am I, and what is this?”...There is only one path toward coexisting with AI technology in a non-destructive way, and it goes through this question.”

James goes on: “Here’s my point: If you’re not actively thinking about what this tech cannot be or do, you’re not being “realistic.” You’re being transhuman. You’re taking less than five years of innovation as a new baseline of human existence. You’re moving the goalposts of your own personhood. But you don’t have to. You don’t have to have all the answers or the perfect plan. You just have to really do what AI only pretends to do: Think.”

So what does it look like for Christians to think faithfully about AI? I think it means more than just a list of dos and don’ts - we need some principles that help us remember who (and whose) we are, what AI is, and what our calling is as the people of God. Here are a few:

1. AI can extend your abilities, it shouldn’t replace your responsibilities.
There is a meaningful difference between asking AI to help you find or learn something and asking it to do something that you are personally responsible to do. A calculator can help me do arithmetic, but it doesn’t relieve me of responsibility for the answer. A spell-checker can help me catch a typo, but it doesn’t make me a better writer. In the same way, AI can help me research, organize, brainstorm, or identify possibilities without becoming the person who actually does the thinking.

The question, then, isn’t simply, “Can AI do this for me?” It is, “Should I be the one doing this?”

That question matters because some things are valuable precisely because they require us to exercise our God-given capacities. If I ask AI to summarize a book because I don’t have time to read it, I may save time. But if I routinely outsource the reading, writing, thinking, praying, and reflecting that make me into the person God is forming me to be, I will have lost a great deal more than I’ve gained.

2. Focus on the things that elevate our human-ness.
There are some tasks where efficiency is a virtue. If a computer can search a massive body of information in seconds, there’s no particular spiritual virtue in refusing to use it. In fact, there may be great service to humankind in just this kind of computing. I think AI may transform medical research and healthcare in our lifetimes, and probably for the good!

But Christians should be especially cautious about outsourcing the activities that form our character and relationships.

AI cannot pray for you, cannot administer your repentance, and cannot love your neighbor.  

Don’t ask AI to compose the words you should say to someone you love because you’re unwilling to wrestle with what you actually want to say. Even if the script it produces is “better,” you and your recipient will be worse for it. Don’t let a chatbot become your substitute for friendship, pastoral care, or Christian community.

And be especially careful with Scripture. There is a difference between asking AI to help you locate passages about a particular theme and asking AI to tell you what the Bible means so that you don’t have to read it yourself. The first can be a research aid. The second can turn a living encounter with God’s Word into a content-delivery service.

The goal of the Christian life is not merely to arrive at correct answers as efficiently as possible. It is to be conformed to the image of Christ.

3. Remember that convenience is not the highest good.
One of the great promises of AI is that it can save us time. That is genuinely useful. But Christians should be suspicious of the assumption that saving time is always the same thing as using time well.

Sometimes the long way is the good way. We cannot confuse “easier” with “better.”

I could have AI write a thoughtful-sounding note to a friend in ten seconds. But perhaps writing it myself is part of what makes the note meaningful. I could have AI generate a Bible study in moments. But perhaps wrestling with the text for an hour is part of how God changes me through it. I could have AI produce a sermon outline almost instantly. But the hours spent reading, praying, thinking, struggling, and finally finding the right words are not wasted time at all.

Christianity has never taught us that the most efficient path is necessarily the most faithful one.

Jesus spent thirty years living a supposedly unproductive life before beginning his public ministry. Paul spent time in Arabia. The disciples walked many miles on dusty roads with Jesus when he could have simply given them the information they needed. God seems remarkably uninterested in optimizing our lives according to the standards of Silicon Valley.

We should therefore ask not only, “Will this save me time?” but also, “What will I do with the time it saves?” If the answer is simply that we will fill the newly created space with even more consumption, entertainment, and distraction, we may have gained efficiency without gaining anything of value.

4. Keep a human being responsible for the truth.
AI can be remarkably useful, but it can also be confidently wrong. It can invent sources, misrepresent evidence, flatten nuance, and present falsehood with the grammatical polish of an expert.

That makes discernment especially important for Christians.

The person who uses AI remains responsible for what he says and does with its output. “ChatGPT told me so” is no more an excuse for falsehood than “I found it on the internet.” If I put something into a sermon, an article, a classroom, a conversation, or a decision, I am responsible for it—even if a machine gave me the idea.

This should make us slower to trust and quicker to verify. Christians are supposed to be people of truth. We shouldn’t surrender that responsibility simply because the machine sounds confident.

5. Let AI remain a tool, not an authority.
A tool is something I use. An authority is something I submit to.

AI becomes dangerous when we stop treating it like a tool and start treating it like an oracle. The fact that a robot can summarize thousands of opinions does not mean it knows what is true. The fact that it can answer almost any question does not mean it understands which questions are worth asking. The fact that it can imitate wisdom does not mean it possesses wisdom.

Christians already have an authority that is far greater than anything artificial intelligence can provide. We have the Word of God. We have the wisdom of the church. We have the Holy Spirit. We have prayer. We have the ordinary means by which God forms his people: scripture, worship, fellowship, preaching, sacraments, suffering, service, and obedience.
AI may be able to tell us what people have said about wisdom, but it cannot make us wise.

That still requires something AI cannot do for us: becoming the kind of people who love what is true and good.

So perhaps the Christian question about AI is not ultimately, “Is this allowed?” Nor is it simply, “Is this useful?” The better question is: What kind of person will this technology help me become? Am I becoming more or less like Christ through this medium?

If it helps us do good work, discover useful information, communicate more clearly, or steward our time for the sake of loving God and neighbor, then perhaps we can receive it as one more tool under God’s providence.

But if it gradually trains us not to think, not to read, not to pray, not to write, not to create, not to talk to one another, or not to do difficult things ourselves, then we should be willing to put it down.

TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE HIM KNOWN!
- Pastor Brady

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