ChatGPT has never had a thought...and it never will.

What are some benefits and boundaries of Artificial Intelligence in a Christian's life?

“One speaks of computer memory, for instance, but of course computers recall nothing. They don’t ever store any ‘remembered’ information, in the sense of symbols with real semantic content; they just preserve certain electronic notations for their users. Not only are computers unaware of the information they contain; in themselves, they don’t actually contain any semantic information at all…A computer no more remembers the files stored in it than the paper and print of a book remembers the contents of its text.”

- David Bentley Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods, pg. 272.

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He was fidgeting as he said it because we’re all getting used to talking in this way.

“Last night,” he began, “I was asking ChatGPT about my question,” he paused again: “and I liked what it said.”

This is what someone said to me before asking me a pretty deep theological question one afternoon while we sat over coffee. I could tell he was hesitant, but he was honest. We’re still getting used to talking about our conversations with robots. It’s new, but it’s happening.

Last month, a young woman told me she had consulted an AI on her prayer life and tried implementing some of its advice, which sounded mostly good to her. She wanted my opinion on the robot’s opinion.

Another man in my church ran some theology through an LLM (Large Language Model) to find opposing views from other denominations so as to better understand his interpretation of a key biblical text. He needed help sorting it out.

It is now quite common for me to have meetings like this as a local pastor. People ask the bots before me. Consulting an AI is easier and less intimidating and the answers can be good enough to have us stay at home and out of a pastor’s strange office. I completely understand why people ask an AI before me.

I use AI everyday and you do too. Now that it’s inescapably built in to your Google searches and Meta data, being connected to the Internet has now meant being tied to artificial intelligence. What does this mean for the church and for Christians?

In general, I find the AIs and LLMs of my daily use to be remarkable.¹ In my job as a pastor, my use of AI revolves around sermon organization, memo-writing and correspondence drafting, biblical cross-referencing, researching, study tools/help, concept summarization, ideation, content structuring. I feel far more productive and can’t help but think I learn so much more by using these amazing tools.

I also share concerns many of you probably have about talking with robots about prayer, theology, and human life. Let’s think about some great uses of AI in the Christian life and some boundaries.

What are some great uses of AI?

Synthesizing theological concepts

So much theology and biblical studies is in the public domain, so the AI synthesis of large, historic/orthodox issues is usually quite good or at least passable. Ask an LLM to bring together and help you understand atonement theory or the varying views on creation or the major views of hell and eschatology and it’ll give you some thoughtful work that is organized. Press it on a few of these for greater detail, specificity, and up-to-date or new theories and it’ll start to struggle. But the general stuff is pretty good.

Cross referencing Scripture

Put a verse in to an AI chat and ask it to cross reference or show you what other passages this passage may be alluding to and you’ll mostly get great answers. I’ve long said that a solid Bible with cross references is one of the best investments a Christian can make, but now I would tell Christians to put verses into ChatGPT to help you see how a certain passage connects to other passages. It’ll illuminate a lot.

Church history overviews

Because most AIs read Wikipedia with greater depth and precision than you do, plus they are trained to scour the primary literature (which, again, is mostly publicly available), their ability to pull together and summarize church history is pretty solid, with a few exceptions. Ever wonder how medieval theologians interpreted a passage? Many AIs can give you a better answer than you or me. Want to know the diversity of beliefs the Reformers held on the Eucharist? Ask ChatGPT. Want quotes from Aquinas on baptism? It’s all in the LLM and mostly good. Again, if you press them (like I have) on details like Augustine’s view of creation or how one of his doctrines developed into the medieval period or something you know a ton about, the bot runs out of gas and gets dodgy. For most of what we need, however, it’s fast and accurate.

What are the limitations of AI?

The AIs will never challenge you or your theological views

I have asked a lot of chat bots to challenge my “views” on a lot of things. I’ve taken all kinds of theological positions (some I actually hold and others I do not), articulated them at length, and begged AIs to seriously challenge my adopted view and had pretty bad results. Mostly, the bots like to say “if someone were to challenge this belief, they might say…”² The truth is, challenge is extremely important in the work of theology. Our interpretations must be questioned and our beliefs must be interrogated. Even as a preacher, one thing I am trying to do with tact and boldness is challenge the assumptions I believe we all carry. Scripture commands us to “admonish one another” (Colossians 3:16), to “encourage and rebuke” (Titus 2:15), and “correct…with great patience and careful instruction” (2 Timothy 4:2). An AI app will never rebuke you, but a sermon should. After all, a sermon that does not provoke or challenge with great care and love is a waste of time. Our algorithmic life is so free of pushback that our real life better at least include it. The AIs aren’t doing that yet, and it’s hard to imagine them getting there.

The AIs will never meditate on Scripture

The wisest people in my life do not necessarily know the most biblical facts. Godly people have not just read the Bible, they’ve “meditated on it day and night” (Psalm 1:2). They are people who abide inside the Trinity’s life and repeat the words of Scripture into their own. They do what Paul tells the Colossians and “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16). They long for the Word at all times and think about it in their bed at night (Psalm 63:6). No computer will ever meditate on Scripture, which means as much as they may know about Scripture, they’ll never be able to produce the kind of insight that comes through a contemplative reading. If you study church history, this tends to be the richest kind of engagement with Scripture, anyways. A better answer than any AI will always come from those who have sat in the Word for a long period of time. I don’t care how advanced they get. A computer has never contemplated anything and never will.

The AIs will never obey Scripture

Who is the “wise man” in the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:24-29)? Both builders in this famous story “hear” the word, you’ll notice, but the wise man on the rock did what Jesus taught. He’s the one who has faith and work (James 2:14-26). No computer will ever obey Scripture and so, at some level, all computer knowledge of Scripture lacks what Richard Hays called “the final hermeneutic,” which is communal obedience. You don’t really know what Scripture means until you do what Scripture says. Only through obedience is interpretation complete. As much as I can give you various interpretations on generosity in the Bible and how Jesus talks about money, I’ll never know what the Bible says about generosity until I practice generosity. I’ll never know what it says about purity until I practice chastity. I’ll never know what it says about prayer until I pray. A computer will never be generous, humble, and courageous. But, Lord willing, you will. Hopefully your leaders and mentors are. What they say about Scripture will prove to be more valuable as it will come out of an actual life that has obeyed. They’ll give you more than the AI.

The AIs will never truly remember anything

In many ways, memory is Christian faith. The Eucharist is an act of collective memory: “Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus says (Luke 22:19). “Write this down,” God tells his people (Deuteronomy 31:19, Revelation 21:5). Christian maturity is not so much marked by the new information you accumulate, but through the rehearsal of truth you already know that you bring back to your mind over and over again through worship, prayer, and liturgy. For as great as the bots are, they lack an ability to help you recall the things you actually need to remember. An AI will never remember a single thing in your life or know to remind you of a significant truth, to help you situate your current struggle inside the context of the larger biblical narrative and your own walk with Christ. Even when the AIs get to a point where they have your whole life in their “data memory,” they won’t actually remember your life or God’s life in you. They’ll just “store” it; and they will never care about the difference.

The AIs will never pray

Like obedience, meditation, and memory, one can make the argument that an accurate understanding of the Bible only goes so far without prayer. In fact, Scripture itself warns us of those who “have a form of godliness but deny its power” (2 Timothy 2:15). Pharisees know a ton about Scripture and the AIs will even cite their work. Paul reminds us that “no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3) and that it is “The Spirit” who “searches all things, even the deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10). It’s not a massive leap to conclude that an operating system of data collection and organization is entirely unable to “receive the Holy Spirit” and “be filled with the Holy Spirit,” which also means this operating system would be an untrustworthy interpreter at best and a dangerous one at worst.

Various concluding concerns

I suppose I should also note the AI citation problems are still getting worked out, and I myself have been the recipient of a few strange and inaccurate responses, along with the various “hallucinations” and biases these bots undoubtedly possess (DeepSeek’s being the more hilarious and weird). This is a very new technology, but these concerns will probably be gone within two years, as I understand the progress we’re making.

More importantly—and what I’m attempting to begin here—is a theology and philosophy of the “mind” for Christian living. The conversation I’m interested in (and you do not have to be!) is the one that imagines the AIs becoming the best possible versions of themselves through human ingenuity and still lacking these innate qualities of our humanity. No matter how good they get, they’ll never bear the image of God, let alone bring about the lesser things like make us “us”—a pun randomly brought to mind for no reason, or producing a crass thought out of nowhere, or daydreaming about better weather, or fantasizing about a vacation or a kiss, or singing a funny jingle without any prompting, or spontaneously speaking in tongues. The truth is that the intelligence we make through computer programming is exactly what we have named it: artificial. In this sense, as David Bentley Hart has said, a computer has never had a thought—and it never will. This is precisely its danger.

For fun, and to close, here’s a moment where I caught OpenAI’s O1-pro (their most sophisticated version) on a key mistake (using Apple’s Nova interface). The apologies are hilarious:

1. I’m subscribed to Apple’s Nova, which grants me full access to O1 Pro from OpenAI/ChatGPT (which is probably my favorite) as well as Claude (my favorite for academic writing so far), Gemini (helpful in its relationship with YouTube), DeepSeek (weird and kind of scary because of its political undercurrents) and LLAMA (kind of dumb). I’m also using Logos Bible Software nearly every day, which just recently plopped its own AI in its search function, which is incredibly good. Most days I find myself thanking God for Logos.

2. I spent way too much time pretending I held a literal six day creation view only to find the bot frustratingly polite, assuring me “that some may say there are considerations around the relationship between science and biblical interpretation.” I hated it.