Preaching to the Wire

Will Artificial Intelligence Change Preaching?

Might your future children or grandchildren be evangelized by a robot?

ChatGPT, the eerily accurate artificial intelligence (AI) information-gathering and writing chatbot launched this past November, is worrying a growing number of people.

Teachers are wondering how a genuine high-school or college essay will be possible again when any student could produce, within minutes, a fully formed, original, footnoted paper. Some ask whether this or future AI could do job-performance reviews for employees. And some are starting to ponder whether the smart tech could be headed for another place: the pulpits of our churches.

Journalist Matt Labash, in a delightfully “neo-Luddite” rant in his newsletter, noted that New York rabbi Josh Franklin had the chatbot write an entire sermon for him. He didn’t tell his congregation until afterward that the sermon was written by someone else. When he asked them to guess who wrote it, they identified the late rabbi Jonathan Sacks—perhaps the most renowned Jewish preacher of the past 20 years. Imagine the synagogue’s reaction when they were told that the sermon they liked so much was assembled with zero human contribution.

Is that the future of Christian preaching? You might respond, “Of course not.” Maybe you just can’t believe such a thing could happen. But imagine trying to explain Google or a smartphone Bible app to a person 30 years ago. What if everywhere-accessible AI could write completely orthodox, biblically anchored, and compellingly argued sermons for pastors every week?

Garrison Keillor told a story about a man whose pastor asked whether he believed in infant baptism. The man responded, “Believe in it? … I’ve seen it done!” If we’re asking whether artificial intelligence can know the Bible, research themes and backgrounds, and write applications to life and imperatives for action—well, we’ve seen it done.

But the real question is not about technological possibility. It’s not really about church leadership ethics either. Rather, the question is about what preaching actually is.

When I first told my pastor that I thought maybe God was calling me to full-time ministry—at age 12 or so—he told me I would preach in three weeks on a Sunday night. I said, “I don’t mean he’s calling me now; I mean, like, when I grow up.” He answered, “Well, I’m calling you now, and I’m going to teach you what to do.” And he did. He gave me a book of “sermon starters,” outlines of biblical texts, and possible applications. He offered some tips for speaking and on interpreting the text.

When that Sunday night came around, I went into the little bathroom beside the baptistery of our Baptist church and threw up both right before and right after preaching. The sermon was awful—and I’m glad it wasn’t recorded.

I wouldn’t recommend handling the situation quite that way, but there was something beautiful in it. He knew that I would look out on a congregation of people whom I loved and who loved me—who taught me in Sunday school and Training Union and Vacation Bible School and sword drills. He knew I would see their familiar faces beaming back at me, reassuring that they were for me no matter how I stammered and lost my place.

He knew that afterward they would encourage me and pray for me, no matter how bad the sermon was. And he knew that the very presence of this little guy in the pulpit would remind the congregation that the gospel went forward into the future—that God was still “sending the light” and calling out the called.

In that moment, something happened for me—beyond the content on the page or the way I said the words. In fact, I’m not sure I could even really describe what that “something” was.

Over the years, when teaching seminary classes or ministering in pastor cohorts, I found that the primary problem for most of my students was not a lack of competence in discerning biblical truth or with speaking in front of crowds.

I know there are some current and aspiring preachers who don’t take the Bible or the task of preaching seriously. (Know it? I’ve seen it!) But that was seldom the case with virtually anyone I ever taught. Rather, for some, the tendency was to collate commentaries and then diagram the text down to points and subpoints and sub-subpoints.

What many of those students eventually started to see was that the preaching moment is more than the sum of its parts. And in the best of cases, our audiences should witness the same thing. Yes, preaching needs someone who knows the text and can convey that to the people—but it’s not just about transmitting information.

The preacher is delivering good news. That’s true even when the sermon speaks of God’s judgment. After John the Baptist told his listeners they were vipers who should flee the wrath to come, chaff that would soon be burned with unquenchable fire, Luke writes, “With many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them” (3:18).

When you hear a sermon, you’re not hearing the equivalent of a motivational speech or even a biblical, theological, or ethical seminar. An AI program will likely be able to do all of that—maybe even with special attention paid to doctrinal tradition, denominational affiliation, and preferred Bible translation.

Since ChatGPT can replicate the writing of Ernest Hemingway or William Shakespeare on command, there’s no reason why it couldn’t follow the instruction to write a sermon in the style of, say, Charles Spurgeon, John Piper, or Joel Osteen.

To the church at Corinth, the apostle Paul writes of himself and those with him this way: “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20). When we listen to the Word preached, we are hearing not just a word about God but a word from God.

Can the ambassador garble the communication from the embassy? Sure. Could an unscrupulous diplomat rewrite the transmission? It happens all the time. That’s why the congregation needs biblical grounding and the Spirit’s wisdom to weigh the message.

The gravity of preaching the Word isn’t the same as gathering data and presenting it. At its best, we as the audience are hearing from a fellow redeemed sinner—one who has grappled with the text. As we listen, we are less like researchers looking for information than like the parents of a missing-in-action soldier waiting for the officer at the door to give us news of our child.

In fact, the stakes are even higher—the Good News is even more joyous.

The message—whether “Your child has been found alive” or “Your child is gone”—could utterly upend the parents’ lives. The wording of the message matters to a degree. But the point here is that this type of message shouldn’t come by text or email. Such life-altering news needs to be delivered by a human, in person.

A chatbot can research. A chatbot can write. Perhaps a chatbot can even orate. But a chatbot can’t preach.

The Matrix Is Messing Us Up

In his newsletter this week, Damon Linker interacted with the way the extreme Right uses the metaphor of the Matrix. Being “red-pilled,” in the rhetoric of figures such as Curtis Yarvin, draws from Neo in The Matrix movies who can choose to live in the illusion (the “blue pill”) or wake up to reality as it really is.

Linker argues that the “red pill” language is “an expression of desperation” because those who use it “want to make sweeping changes to the country, but they can’t seem to win the popular support required to make those changes happen—so they’re giving up on trying, telling themselves consoling stories about how it’s not their fault. They would be winning if only their enemies weren’t cheating.”

At the same time, evangelical writer Samuel James (full disclosure: Samuel used to work for me, and I would hire him again in a nanosecond) argues that the problem isn’t just that The Matrix doesn’t work as a cultural metaphor; it’s that the metaphor is hurting us.

Yes, James concedes, The Matrix is all about alienation in a time when lots of people feel alienated. It “is fundamentally a myth about a nearly omnipotent villain with almost limitless ability to control its victims,” he writes. But this comes with a mentality of victimization since “the human characters in The Matrix are unconscious cadavers who began their existence with a tube in their brain; they possess no agency or power over their world, except the power to happen to run into someone who can free them.”

Instead of leading to self-empowerment, James points out, this often leads to finding a guru. It leads to thinking, What I need is the person who can give me the “red pill,” who can show me who the enemies really are.

He’s right.

The problem with these kinds of metaphors is not that we grow too aware of what’s happening in the shadows but that we are not aware enough.

As I’ve written here before, when people don’t believe in demons, they start to demonize people. When people don’t realize that there are “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms,” they start to wrestle “against flesh and blood” (Eph. 6:12). We might even call that carnal wrestling “spiritual warfare.” But it isn’t.

Real spiritual warfare isn’t against “them,” but against us. Real spiritual warfare happens when we repent of sin; when we depend on grace; when, having done all else, we stand.

The “flaming arrows” of the devil usually aren’t attacks from our cultural or political or religious opponents. Rather, they typically appeal to exactly what we want or think, saying simply, “All this I will give you” (Matt. 4:9).

Bad Things, Good Things, and Dramatically vs. Gradually

This week I happened on a post offering “100 tips for a better life,” by Conor Barnes under the pseudonym Ideopunk. Some of these suggestions were minor, practical recommendations such as “When googling a recipe, precede it with ‘best.’ You’ll find better recipes.”

Some of the rules I don’t agree with at all, naturally. But I can’t stop thinking about number 100:

Bad things happen dramatically (a pandemic). Good things happen gradually (malaria deaths dropping annually) and don’t feel like “news.” Endeavor to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world.

At first reading, I nodded in agreement. After all, so much of our public discourse is taken up with meaningless stuff that feels dramatic (controversies about gas stoves, the likelihood of shark attacks, etc.). Often the truly important developments happen completely apart from anyone’s attention—because they seem small, slow, and incremental. That part is true.

I’m not sure that the hard categories here work, though. While some bad things happen dramatically—usually “out there” somewhere else—the really bad things happen gradually.

You start to nurse a hidden bitterness. You secretly envy the money your coworkers have and begin to ask yourself whether your workplace would even notice if a little went missing. You start numbing your boredom with fantasies about the attractive person who sits next to you at the coffee shop. You take a few more of those pain pills, just this once, since it’s been such a stressful week. You sleep in a couple of Sunday mornings and resolve just to listen online.

All this is gradual enough that you don’t even notice it’s happening—until patterns form that, when they become visible, seem sudden and dramatic.

What’s right about this would-be proverb is that we expect good things to happen immediately and measurably. But that’s rarely the way it works, especially with life in Christ. The kingdom of God, Jesus said, is like a tiny seed, germinating in darkness (Matt. 13:31–32). The kingdom of God is like microscopic yeast working its way through dough (v. 33). You can’t see it, but it’s at work.

The things that change your life for the better are sometimes dramatic and sudden and markable on a calendar. But rarely.

It’s not the one day of Bible reading that changes you; it’s the slow pattern of reading, even when you don’t understand it. It’s not that one epiphany while taking Communion that makes a difference; it’s time after time after time at the Lord’s Table.

Rarely do you—once and for all—repent of a sin and then never grapple with it again. That might make you despair sometimes, but often you don’t see what’s happening inside you: The Spirit is making you stronger, more aware, and more sensitive to conviction of sin.

Most of the big things—like curing malaria, parenting children, transforming spiritually—do happen gradually and don’t seem like “news.” If you give up on the gradual, the long-term, the invisible, you will lose sight of just how the Spirit works.

Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from the Netherlands reader/listener Jan-Willem de Reus, who is an elder at the Full Gospel Church VEG Vlaardingen, a small harbor town near Rotterdam. He notes that the books are a mix of English and Dutch and were hard to choose apart from the Bible.

C. S. Lewis, The Complete Chronicles of Narnia

Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Complete Lord of the Rings trilogy

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Michael A. Eaton, The Branch Exposition of the Bible: A Preacher’s Commentary of the New Testament

Dankjewel, Jan-Willem! (Did I do that right?)

Readers, what do you think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of 5–12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of 5–12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list (or both lists!) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like.

Unless you are in the federal witness relocation program, be sure to tell me where you live!

Quote of the Moment

Being a creature of time and limited possibilities, no matter how much I’ve done, what I’ve done is so pitiable small, but I choose to believe it was mine to do. Decisions were made; and I’ve never gotten over my first discovery that the word decision is derived from decidere, which means to cut off. In deciding for this and then for that, from which followed the other thing, I cut off what might have been. But it is only in moments of ungrateful rebellion against my creatureliness that I resent the fact that what might have been was not. Most of the time I think about what might have been not in resentment but in wonder.

—Richard John Neuhaus, “Dostoevsky and the Fiery Word”

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Onward,
Russell Moore