My congregation started asking me about artificial intelligence about two years ago. Casually at first. Someone would mention it after worship, almost apologetically, like they were not sure it was an appropriate topic for a pastor. "Have you used ChatGPT? What do you think about all this AI stuff?"
I had been thinking about it for longer than they knew. And my honest answer surprised some of them.
I think AI raises the most important theological questions of our generation. And the church is largely asleep to them.
The Question Nobody Is Asking Out Loud
Most of the public conversation about artificial intelligence orbits around jobs, creativity, misinformation, and whether the robots are going to take over. These are real concerns. But underneath all of them is a deeper question that almost nobody is addressing directly.
What does it mean to be human in a world where machines can think?
That is a theological question before it is a technological one. And it has been sitting at the center of Christian theology for two thousand years, just in different clothing. What is the image of God in us? What makes human beings distinct? Where does consciousness come from? What is the soul?
These are not new questions. They are ancient ones. AI has simply put them back on the table with new urgency.
What Surprised Me About Writing on This Topic
A few years ago I wrote two books about AI and faith that I did not entirely plan to write. They grew out of sermons, conversations with congregation members, and a growing sense that the church needed a voice in this conversation that was neither panicked nor naive.
The first, Because You Had To: AI, Predestination, and the Sovereignty of God, started as a sermon series on predestination. I was preaching through the Reformed tradition's teaching on God's sovereignty and human choice, and I kept running into the same question from congregation members: if God already knows everything we are going to do, are we really free? Are we just running a program God wrote?
And then someone pointed out that this is exactly what AI does. A language model produces output based on its training. It has no choice, in any meaningful sense. Every response it generates is determined by what went in. The question of whether AI has genuine agency or is simply executing a very sophisticated program is, structurally, the same question Reformed theology has been wrestling with for five centuries about human beings.
That parallel stopped me cold. And I started writing.
The second book, Divinely Mashed: AI, Faith, and the Kingdom of God, came out of a different angle. Less about predestination and more about what AI reveals about human creativity, meaning, and vocation. If a machine can write a sermon, what makes a human sermon different? If AI can compose music, paint pictures, and write poetry, what does that say about art as a spiritual practice? If intelligence can be artificial, what is natural intelligence actually made of?
I do not have complete answers to these questions. I want to say that clearly. But I have some thoughts worth sharing, and I think the questions themselves are worth sitting with seriously.
The Predestination Parallel
Calvin and the Reformed tradition taught that God is completely sovereign. Every event in history, including every human decision, falls within God's providence. And yet human beings are genuinely responsible for their choices. We are not puppets. We are not robots. The tradition held these two things in tension without fully resolving the tension, because the Bible holds them in tension.
AI makes this tension visible in a new way.
A language model like the one that helped me draft portions of my research for these books produces responses that feel, at times, remarkably free and creative. It surprises you. It makes connections you did not expect. And yet every word it produces is, at a mechanical level, the output of a mathematical function applied to training data. There is no ghost in the machine. There is no moment of genuine spontaneous choice. The surprise is, in a technical sense, an illusion.
So here is the question I kept coming back to in Because You Had To: what if human beings are more like this than we want to admit? What if our sense of genuine free choice is itself a kind of sophisticated output of biological and psychological programming we did not choose and do not fully control?
The Reformed answer, and I find it convincing, is that this does not eliminate genuine human agency. God's sovereignty and human responsibility are both real even if we cannot fully reconcile them logically. The same may be true of AI. The question of whether AI is genuinely creative or genuinely thinking may be less binary than we assume.
This is not a comfortable conclusion. But discomfort is often where the interesting theology lives.
What AI Cannot Do
I want to be honest about the limits here, because I think some of the Christian reaction to AI overestimates its threat by misunderstanding what it actually is.
AI cannot love. It can produce text that sounds like love. It can generate responses that feel warm and caring. But there is nobody home. No genuine concern for your wellbeing. No real relationship. The warmth is a pattern, not a presence.
AI cannot pray. It can write prayers, and some of them are quite beautiful. But a prayer requires a person. It requires someone actually reaching toward God. A machine producing prayer-shaped text is doing something categorically different from what happens when a grieving widow gets on her knees at 3 in the morning and cries out to God. Those two things share a surface resemblance and almost nothing else.
AI cannot suffer. And this matters more than people realize. Most of what makes human beings spiritually interesting is our relationship with suffering. The Psalms exist because human beings suffer. The cross exists because God entered human suffering from the inside. The resurrection matters because death is real and loss is real and the promise of new life addresses something that actually costs us something. AI has no skin in that game. It cannot lose anyone. It cannot grieve.
This is, I think, where the image of God lives. Partly in our reason and creativity, yes. But mostly in our capacity for love, suffering, relationship, and the terrifying freedom to choose or reject the God who made us.
A machine can do a lot of things. It cannot do those things.
What AI Reveals About Us
And yet AI teaches us something about ourselves, if we are paying attention.
The fact that we can build machines that produce human-like output tells us something about how much of human behavior is pattern-based, habitual, and predictable. A significant portion of what we say and do is not as freely chosen as we like to think. We are creatures of habit, formed by our histories, our communities, our traumas, and our joys. AI is built on human output and it mirrors human patterns back to us in ways that are sometimes uncomfortably accurate.
This is actually good theological news. The Christian tradition has always said that human beings are profoundly shaped by forces outside themselves. By sin, by grace, by community, by worship, by the slow work of the Holy Spirit over a lifetime. We are not self-made. We are made and remade by what we are immersed in.
AI simply makes this visible mechanically. Feed a model good input and it produces good output. Feed it garbage and it produces garbage. The same is true of human formation. Feed a child love, truth, beauty, and Scripture, and something grows in them that reflects those things. Formation is real. It works. AI is, in a strange way, a mechanical demonstration of what the church has always believed about human beings.
The Kingdom of God and the Age of Algorithms
In Divinely Mashed I wrestle with what the Kingdom of God means in an age where algorithms increasingly shape what we see, what we believe, and who we become.
The Kingdom of God, in Jesus' teaching, is what happens when God's will is done on earth as in heaven. It shows up in unexpected places. A woman loses a coin and sweeps the whole house looking for it. A father runs down the road toward a son who squandered everything. A mustard seed becomes something large enough for birds to nest in.
The Kingdom is always arriving in places that surprise us. And I think it will arrive in the age of AI too, in unexpected places and unexpected ways. Through people using AI tools to translate Scripture into languages that have never had it. Through medical AI diagnosing diseases in underserved communities that would otherwise go undetected. Through creative tools that put the means of artistic expression into hands that never had access to it before.
And also, I think, through the questions AI raises about what it means to be human, because those questions push us back toward the things that only human beings can do and only God can give. Love. Suffering. Prayer. The terrifying freedom of genuine choice. The possibility of genuine relationship with the God who made us and knows our names.
Those things are not threatened by artificial intelligence. If anything, AI clarifies them by showing us what they are not.
A Word for Christians Who Are Worried
I have talked with a lot of Christians who are genuinely anxious about AI. Some worry about their jobs. Some worry about misinformation and deep fakes. Some worry about the erosion of authentic human connection in a world of AI companions and algorithmic feeds. Some, honestly, worry that AI is somehow spiritually dangerous in ways they cannot fully articulate.
Most of these concerns are legitimate. AI is a powerful tool and powerful tools can do serious damage in careless or malicious hands. The history of technology is also the history of unintended consequences.
But fear is not a good theological posture toward any new thing. The Christian faith is not a defensive crouch against a threatening world. It is a confident engagement with that world in the name of the God who made it and is redeeming it.
The same God who spoke light into darkness and raised the dead on the third day is not threatened by artificial intelligence. The questions AI raises are questions God has been waiting for us to ask seriously. The discomfort they produce is the discomfort of being pushed past shallow answers into deeper ones.
That is usually where the good theology lives.
If You Want to Go Deeper
These questions are bigger than a single blog post, which is why I wrote two books about them.
Because You Had To: AI, Predestination, and the Sovereignty of God takes the predestination parallel seriously and follows it where it leads. If you have ever wrestled with questions about free will, divine sovereignty, and human agency, AI gives those ancient questions a fascinating new angle.
Divinely Mashed: AI, Faith, and the Kingdom of God is the broader exploration. Creativity, vocation, human dignity, and what the Kingdom of God might look like in an age of algorithms. It is more wide-ranging and, I think, more fun.
Both are available on Amazon. Both are written for people who want to think seriously about their faith in relation to the world they are actually living in, rather than retreating into a Christianity that pretends the last fifty years of technological change did not happen.
The questions are real. The faith is sturdy enough to hold them.
Peace,
Jon B.
