Theology and technology are two things that I have thought about for many years. Regrettably, I would be called a novice in both of those areas by some. However, I long ago came to the conclusion that someone can have joy and take pleasure in something without having to first become an expert. I was pleased with the first part of this assignment that my professor commented with this encouragement: “I can tell that you have thought through some of these issues before entering the class. I appreciate this aspect of starting from God and working outward.”
I cannot say that anything technically changed concerning how I understand the crossroads of theology and technology to intersect. That is not to say that I did not learn anything this semester: sounds board knobs, lighting effects and principles, and microphone and speaker patterns are things that I had never even considered. But from the bigger picture, I would have to repeat the question I opened my first paper with: “One’s theology of technology is really a subsection of one’s theology of the sovereignty of God—is the Creator surprised when the creatures he told to have dominion over the earth begin to recreate earthly elements to accomplish what he commanded them to do?” Again, my answer is a confident, “No—God isn’t surprised when his imagers innovate.”
As I reflected last week on this assignment and what has occurred this semester, there are three events that have taken place in the world of technology that caught my attention. The ending of my feedback from the first paper had the following from Dr. Totman: “I don’t think we have really even touched the surface of how creative we can be and what’s possible in the future considering what God has already demonstrated.” Considering these three events and my professors thought that we have not even touched the surface, I will mention those three events and raise a question on how a Christian should think further about these matters.
Logos and AI
First, among Bible nerds, nearly everyone has heard of Logos Bible Software. Ten years ago, someone surprised me with a Logos library package soon after I entered full-time ministry. And I (and my wallet) have not been the same since. Recently, Logos has made two decisions that created a firestorm in the user forums. The flames may be small relatively speaking, but the debate can be seen in our culture on a much larger scale.
Logos announced that the next version of Logos (Logos 11 in the fall) is going to move to a subscription model. Part of their argument was that it will allow for a more sustainable flow of income that will allow for more frequent releases of updates; rather than wait for new features with a major update every two years, subscriptions will allow them to be releases as soon as they are developed. What makes this worthy of considering the way technology and theology intersects is what one of those features will be: AI. Cue the stone-casters…
“Christians have always been at the forefront of technology when it comes to accessing and understanding the Bible, whether adopting the codex in the second century or the printing press in the fifteenth… Logos’s AI tools are backed by your Logos library and designed to ensure AI is used responsibly and in a way appropriate for Bible study.” 2
Some features are fairly mundane: Smart Search will “curate” one’s library searches so that they are sorted in a way that it thinks will be most relevant to the user. No big deal—it would be somewhat hypocritical to argue with this if we have ever used Google and clicked the first result that came up because Google thought (based on watching our actions online) it was most relevant for us. The larger debate is Sermon Assistant, a feature that will provide application, questions, and illustrations based on the sermon, the audience, and the tone desired (serious, humorous, etc.). The company is clear that they are not writing the sermon for the user.
One of my online acquaintances, Mark Ward, wrote a piece for the company when all of this started: “At Logos, therefore, we’ve been careful not to talk about AI as a replacement for hard work, but as a facilitator of it.”3 Simply, they aren’t doing the work for me but helping me do the work. Is that any different from sermon outline books, illustration books, dictionaries, or commentaries? That is the debate among someone Christians. On a larger scale, and in academic circles, where do we draw the line? When I became an AU student in 2019, I paid big money for a Grammarly account so that my papers would be free of mistakes. Then, the school put their stamp of approval on the service by giving students (graduate only I believe?) free access and encouraged us to use it. Spelling mistakes? Sure. Grammar mistakes? Grammatical opinions? Ummm… What about rewording a sentence so that it has words I never thought of using to make it more clear? The slope is slippery.
Question 1: How can Christians think fairly about the use of artificial intelligence tools and services without being hypocritical by giving other time-saving innovations the benefit of the doubt but AI tools suspicion from the outset? If the ministry is about people, and a tool can take my sermon document and create a slideshow in 30 seconds that would have taken me 30 minutes, is it unethical or spiritual mature to use time-saving AI tools so that I may spend more time with my family or with the people I serve?
Steve Jobs the Prophet
I sometimes forget that today’s young folk have not only never lived without a smartphone, but the youngest ones have never even lived with voice assistants. We are almost at the time when the release of Siri on October 4, 2011 and the death of Steve Jobs the next day on October 5, 2011 were so long ago that those events happened before a thirteen-year-old teenager was even born. Wow.
A few years ago, a group of people founded The Steve Jobs Archive. The releases have been slow, but there have been periodic publications of Jobs’s emails, letters, and correspondence. A few weeks ago, on July 18, a second technological event happened that has gripped my mind. It was footage from an Aspen conference on design in 1983 when Jobs was 28-years-old. Without going into the lengthy details of example one above, I will let Jony Ive’s (long-time Apple hardware designer) quote summarize the takeaway from the video. “Steve remains one of the best educators I’ve ever met in my life. He had that ability to explain incredibly abstract, complex technologies in terms that were accessible, tangible and relevant.”4
The ability to take complex ideas and explain them in such simple and tangible ways has challenged me in the youth group to remember that teenagers need complex theology simplified and shown to be practical. There’s a quote on my office board with a story of how Jobs introduced the first iPod. He didn’t describe it as a 1.8” hard-drive enclosed in a case with a 1/8-inch audio output that was manipulated with a scroll-wheel to hear music digitized in the new MPEG format. That would have bored the audience from the opening statement. Instead, in a day of large music players that held very few songs, he simply said it was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” The world was changed.
Bringing it back to the paper—there were three aspects of the 1983 speech that wowed me as I watched. One small part of the talk described a future where software is downloaded to a device so that the user can try it out for a limited time without having to go to a physical store and buy a physical disc. And, if the user wanted to continue to use it they could purchase it right there on their device—it described perfectly the App Store and in-app purchases. But there were three even greater predictions.
First, the vision was given that computers would go from large desktop items that weighed 15 lbs. to eventually becoming objects the size of a book that would connect to radio waves in the air that would perform unfathomable operations per second. And when you were finished, you simply took the book-sized computer to the next meeting you had. The Lisa was released a year earlier, and the Macintosh would come the following year, and we already were given teases of our modern Wi-Fi laptops while admitting the technology to do so was not even invented yet but one day they’d get there.
Next, the idea of a vehicle that took pictures as it drove around town was described. Once all the images were processed and done in such a way that they were tied to a physical location and address, a user could virtually travel a road from their computer and even look at different version of the road depending on the season. It was a near-perfect description of Google Maps and Street View decades ahead.
Finally, the one that has gripped my mind the most was the description of (tying to the point above on AI) one day being able to ask dead teachers how they would answer a question. Though the language used did not match ours today (artificial intelligence, large language models, hallucinations, etc.), it was again, a near-perfect description of ChatGPT and even the ability to upload custom document to create a specific ChatGPT using specific documents to create a personal LLM. He noted that sometimes the computer will get it wrong (hallucinate), but most of the time it will get it right. “One day we might be able, in any given situation, to ask a computer, ’What would Aristotle have said?’—and get an answer.”
Question 2: Is it possible that the reason Christians usually are reactionary to technological innovation is because they have been taught that technology is either neutral or even against the purposes of God? If the next generation of seminarians were taught to think about technology the same way they are required to learn about ethics, hermeneutics, and leadership, would that lead to technologically inclined visionaries (who happen to also be Christians) contributing to yet-undiscovered revolutionary advancements so that major innovations are predicted (and planned and directed) by believers? Or, will we continue to push technology aside and only consider it when it presents an unforeseen issue (because we were only given Christian examples of reactionary and critical instead of visionary and thankful)?
Musk and Neuralink
Last week, the popular Lex Fridman released on his podcast his fifth interview with Elon Musk—over eight hours long. I confess that I have not finished it, but even in the beginning hours there are subjects that thoughtful Christians should already be thinking about before the days comes. What day? When a child is given the option of encouraging their aging parent to receive a brain-implant so that they can have their memories… When a parent is given the option of their blind newborn receiving a brain-implant so that they can see.
These scenarios are very fun to talk about as far off future hypotheticals. But just as our technologies of today were once only predictions, the day will come when a Christians is presented with a very real and very personal decision that “seems” to blur the reality between humanity and augmented humanity. But haven’t we already crossed that bridge? At one time, someone somewhere was the first Christian to receive a pacemaker, or a defibrillator, or a heart transplant. While there are still groups of people and Christians that choose none of those innovations, most Christians today are perfectly fine with medical procedures as long as it enhances and prolongs life.
However, what about having something implanted in the brain that allows for reading signals and then interpreting and displaying them in an understandable manner? Kids today won’t relate, but what if today the brain is a CD and tomorrow it is a CD-RW? Perhaps it starts with only reading information to make it understandable, but what if it began to write information? How would we know that we are truly autonomous over our own humanity (God notwithstanding, of course)?
If it’s extremely safe, and you can have superhuman abilities, and let’s say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn’t lose memories, then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it. It would supersede the cell phone, for example. I mean, the biggest problem that say, a phone has, is trying to figure out what you want. That’s why you’ve got auto complete, and you’ve got output, which is all the pixels on the screen, but from the perspective of the human, the output is so frigging slow. Desktop or phone is desperately just trying to understand what you want. And there’s an eternity between every keystroke from a computer standpoint… So, if you had computers that are doing trillions of instructions per second, and a whole second went by, I mean, that’s a trillion things it could have done.5
In one fascinating part of the interview, the topic turned to the bits per second that we normally communicate with using audible letters, words, phrases, and sentences compared to the amount of information that is communicated in a conversation in total and the amount of total information that content was gleaned from. It is a very slow process. If a computer can transfer huge amounts of information, what if we could transfer information from one brain (or medium) to another brain by bypassing spoken word or written word? Currently, I can speak a few dozens of words a minute. As a very slow reader, I struggle to read 100–200 words per minute. What if those mediums were removed and my ability to read and communicate were no longer measured in words per minute but in gigabytes per second? Would I object to that, or would I be tempted to call it stewardship (very, very efficient stewardship) of the time God has given me?
Given enough time for the technology to evolve and the price to come down, what if an AU student is given the option to take Crisler’s Greek and Cribb’s Hebrew via two routes: pay $10,000 to take it the traditional way, or have it fully subsidized and pay $0? Is it any guess which one of those an 18-year-old would pick? Or, if someone could listen to a sermon in thirty minutes or receive it (and the supporting commentaries, research, etc.) in a fraction of a second, which one would the busy parent choose?
I am not the person to think deeply about these things—I don’t even have the foresight to predict what this (and the two above) would look like down the road. I am simply asking questions (one that comes to mind is what if today the information we consume is a subscription model… and tomorrow the information we get downloaded to our brain is a subscription model? The ability to read the New Testament in Greek is for four years, but if I want to use it long than that I must pay monthly, or it will be formatted and erased?).
Question 3: if God is the creator of humanity, and if God is the giver of all knowledge that is used by humanity, but if we are responsible for using the knowledge in an ethical and righteous way, then how can thoughtful Christians begin thinking through (and predicting the unknown) the innumerable situations where technology will move from a technological tool to a biological procedure that prolong and enhance our lives and the lives of people we love?
Conclusion
So, over the course of this semester, I have studied about the use of technology in the sound booth and the ever-changing world of technology in my hobby time. The thing about the world is there is always more to learn about. The thing about technology is there is always more to innovate. The thing about being a Christian who looks at theology and technology is that there is the humbling wonder that there will always be something new to learn about God and there will always be new ways to learn it. Whether it is the use of AI to enhance our work in the ministry, the need for Christians to be theological visionaries to impact the industry, or the coming blur between the lines of machines and humanity, this is my conclusion: Christians today should fear the intersection of theology and technology as much as Geutnburg feared the intersection of the Bible and the printing press. In the words of how I ended a CHR 507 paper on technology for Dr. Crisler, I write with more enthusiasm in 2024 than I did in 2021:
Even so, click ‘upgrade,’ Lord Jesus!
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