We need to bring together people with diverse competencies (theology, ethics, and technology) to explore the ethical ramifications of AI in everyday life, discover what uses are ethically permissible, and create simple frameworks for everyday Christians to both see and evaluate their own uses of AI.

It took Twitter two years to reach 1 million users. Spotify? 5 months. Instagram? 2.5 months.
ChatGPT? Five days.
In the span of five days, AI broke into the conscious awareness of everyday people. For the first time, people played ChatGPT’s linguistic slot machine: tough questions in, surprisingly good answers out. White-collar workers experienced exactly what blue-collar workers did decades earlier: Here’s a machine that can do what I can do at a fraction of the cost.
Alarm bells clanged across culture with a ferocity that, in some cases, bordered on panic. Serious thinkers who knew nothing about AI before ChatGPT felt a sudden need to share their hot takes on social media and podcasts. But another set of thinkers took a different tack: they relished the generative possibility of AI, launching a cottage industry of new AI products promising to change the world.
In the span of a few months, Christians have divided mostly into two camps about the place of AI in the church: (1) critics who fear generative AI will take jobs and sabotage spiritual formation and (2) pragmatists who hope AI will free ministry leaders to do more.
The rapid technological polarization didn’t surprise me, but I didn’t find it helpful. After several years of writing about AI, I struck a mostly cautious tone. Yet, despite my fears, I became increasingly convinced that generative AI—used ethically—could serve kingdom ends.
Now is the time to pause, converse, and think, not choose sides in a war about technology most of us still know little about. The wise man is correct: “It is dangerous to have zeal without knowledge” (Prov. 19:2, NET). The risks associated with pure critique and pure pragmatism are dangerous because both leave us far more susceptible to the unethical use of AI than we would be otherwise.
Danger of AI Critics
Let’s start with the fearful. Generative AI (i.e., algorithms that can generate text, images, code, videos, etc.) can do sermon research, create sermon graphics, generate small group questions, and write sermons, blogs, and podcast scripts. Ordinary Christians can bypass pastors and mentors (and Google, for that matter) when they have spiritual questions. Instead, they may ask an AI, which happily dispenses “wisdom.”
Where does this all-knowing computer get its information and how does it produce it? All large language models (LLMs) are trained using a specific data set. For example, ChatGPT trained on the pre-2021 internet. When you ask it a question, it predicts an answer you’ll find satisfactory given the parameters of your inquiry and its own training on what counts as satisfactory. LLMs give crowdsourced answers, calibrated to be crowd-pleasers.
If you ask ChatGPT for Christian life advice, it gives only the most conventional wisdom—highly individualistic, self-expressive, rote answers. But the mediocrity of ChatGPT’s answers isn’t the only problem.
Quick, easy access to seemingly infinite information can hijack discipleship. Why do the hard work to learn the Bible and grow in wisdom when a bot can do it for you? LLMs like ChatGPT offer the promise of mastery without work.
So when people say the sky is falling, they’re not totally wrong. AI is a technological shift so titanic that it’ll make the widespread adoption of the internet look like a skiff.
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While the Bible reigns as King in the library of human history and is all sufficient and authoritative, we must reject the shallow and deceitful little creed, “No creed, but Christ” that denies the importance of historic creeds and confessions and opens the door for false teachers to pervert the truths of God’s holy Word. Take your place in the long line of church history and confess the historic faith of the saints of old. Make your doctrinal positions clear and unapologetically declare the truths of Jesus Christ.

One great way of teaching the Bible is to summarize the doctrines in such a way that the complex becomes clearly visible to the common man. This was one of the main approaches of the learned theologians of the Reformation era. They were capable of teaching learned doctors of theology and at the same time proclaiming the doctrine of the atonement to farmers.
While it may seem like a helpful summary statement, “No creed, but Christ” is actually a superficial creed that provides shade to false teachers who lurk in the shadows with their false doctrine and perverted theology. We need far more than, “No creed, but Christ.”
Many groups in modern church history have embraced the “No creed, but Christ” slogan or a longer version that reads, “No creed, but Christ. No book, but the Bible.” This idea surfaces within groups such as the Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, Calvary Chapel, some Pentecostal groups, as well as some independent Fundamental Baptist circles. These groups claim that they don’t need anything other than the Bible and no creed is necessary other than an affirmation of faith in Christ.
Historically, creeds and confessions find their source in Scripture. No only do the historic creeds and confessions of church history emerge from the source of Scripture, they find their model of usage in the early church as recorded in the pages of the Bible. God’s people were known to recite Deuteronomy 6:4, known as the Shema every morning and evening. The practice of reciting creeds and confessions would continue in the life of the church of Jesus in the New Testament.
One of the standard confessions of the early church was Peter’s confession of Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God” as recorded in Matthew 16:16. It is the widely accepted belief that what we find in Ephesians 4:4-6 is a creed that would be recited when new converts were baptized as followers of Jesus. When Paul wrote to Timothy in 1 Timothy 3:16, he recorded what is believed to be an early Christian creed that was recited and sung as a hymn that summarized the faith once for all delivered to the saints. In other words, the use of creeds and confessions is not contra Bible.
In the fourth century, a false teacher named Arius plagued the church with his false doctrine that denied the Trinity and specifically denied the deity of Jesus. The Arian heresy centered on language found in Colossians 1:15 and John 1:14 about Jesus being the “firstborn of all creation” and “the only begotten of the Father.”
The followers of Arius would go through the streets singing a little song that said, “There was – when he was not.” The song carried the following meaning, “The Father was – when the Son was not.” God raised up a faithful soldier named Athanasius who would become a champion for truth. He refused to compromise, even when everyone else around him seemed to capitulate on matters of sound doctrine. The climate surrounding Athanasius became known as Athanasius contra mundum –
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Monday, January 2, 2023
What could be discarded from the local church operation that seems objectionable to the world but have the message remain the same? However, the changes created a worldly ethos that nullified the message that was proclaimed. Soon, as part of the friendly look of the local church, the meeting place was scrubbed of all religious symbols and replaced with symbols of entertainment—flat screens for example. Music followed much the same path and sermons became more theologically innocuous. Evangelicals began to parrot pet phrases of the Woke crowd to virtue signal to the culture and let the young people know they “got it”, they were “cool.”

In 1984, Francis Schaeffer, speaking of evangelical Christians, points out that “very few have taken a strong and courageous stand against the world spirit of this age as it destroys our culture and the Christian ethos that once shaped our country” (GED, 310). He goes on to claim that the primary battle is the “spiritual battle which is being fought in the heavenlies” (GED, 310). This he notes “is a life and death struggle over the minds and souls of men for all eternity, but it is equally a life and death struggle over life on this earth” (GED,310). In this spiritual battle many evangelicals have not only lacked the courage to stand for truth, but a good number have actually imbibed the spirit of this age in the name of being relevant.
Unfortunately, many evangelicals have ignored Schaeffer’s warning as they have become complicit either by remaining silent or actually accepting some ideas of groups such as the Social Justice Warrior, a movement owned by the spirit of the age. They seem oblivious to the redefinition of social justice, thinking they are virtuous for defending such a noble idea—Justice.
Of course, Justice is a noble idea but according to Isaiah 59:14 justice must be grounded in Truth, not lies. Every Christian ought to be a concerned defender of equal opportunity and equal protection under the law when those terms are defined in the normal use of the English language. It is not that there must be some evangelical crusade against all of this, but at least evangelicals should expose the anti-human, anti-Christian rhetoric of all forms of Wokeness so to protect the church against its insidious ideas.
Quite to the contrary, evangelicals try to walk a fine line where they give mouth support to the authority of Scripture while virtue signaling to the world that evangelicals are benign creatures and truth does not matter. It seems to me that evangelicals made a misstep earlier which has led to either an uncritical acceptance of Woke doctrine or simply remaining silent.  As many young people turned away from the church, understandably evangelicals became worried.
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