This past school year, I’ve run into Artificial Intelligence (AI) talk and text at every turn (including last night’s viewing of the new Mission Impossible, with its phantasmagorical, cyber “Entity” hell bent on devouring civilization). I’m just back from a year of fill-in, philosophy teaching at New Saint Andrews College way up in Panhandle, Idaho. While I was there, trustee (and writer and pastor) C. R. Wiley brought several talks on the subject, with give and take afterwards (hence the name of our Friday, college-wide gatherings, “Disputatio.”) His lectures were rich with references outside literature, which ranged from G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill to the “Butlerian Jihad” in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe to the writings of Booker T. Washington and Saul Alinksy.
As a corollary to that series, the library displayed a dozen new acquisitions, including Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI; The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted & Fired & Why We Need to Fight Back Now; and Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing).
Before we’d completely unpacked back in Nashville, we were off to the SBC in Dallas, where I picked up a hair-raising book from a sponsor’s table at the CBL event. (It’s available as a PDF at KeepTheFutureHuman.ai). The writer, a “physics of information” professor at UC Santa Cruz, argues that the dangers we face from AI are different in kind and not just degree. Of course, every invention brings both peril and promise: The wheel enabled Hitler’s Blitzkrieg up through Poland in 1939 but also served Patton’s Third Army in its rush to relieve Bastogne in 1944; it’s a tool for human traffickers and also for ambulance drivers. But again, the California professor says this development strikes at our very humanity.
The Rapid Rise of AI
Since the turn of the year, I’ve been scanning and pat racking items on the subject, and I’ve come to believe that the February 27, “artificial intelligence issue” of the Wall Street Journal got it right with their headline, “The Future of Everything.” Therein, I read of how it can be used to protect deep-sea cables and pipelines, to upgrade JPMorgan Chase’s call centers, and to bring humanoid robots into the workspace. Prevention magazine touts its power to boost medical research by visualizing three-dimensional protein in DNA. In Time, I read retired admiral William McRaven to say that the military needs to stay engaged with Silicon Valley’s AI work to be sure China doesn’t gain perilous advantage. Science World reports that a UC Berkeley team is learning how AI can nudge human behavior—their demonstration model, a game called Overcooked, involving two chefs working collaboratively to get tomato soup to the table. Library Journal speaks of an “AI Tool Exportation Hour,” whereby users of the options can coach each other on possibilities and hazards. And the March 27, University of Idaho Argonaut announces a $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation for “the implementation of generative AI in the administrative processes, increasing efficiency in research management.” Wowzer!
AI Comes Goes to Church
But the items that most grabbed my attention appeared in a state Baptist paper, in an issue on “Entering the AI Era.” It focused on its use in the church, and the tone was basically positive. We’re told that “AI can revolutionize church operations, particularly for small or understaffed ministries. It allows these ministers and congregations to spend more energy on their mission while reducing non-ministry workloads.” He goes on to note that it’s already proving helpful in a range of churches in “Streamlining emails, scheduling and report generation …automating newsletters, bulletins, and social media assets… sending personalized visitor follow-ups and recognizing member milestones… supporting sermon preparation, biblical research, and event organization.” Well, yes, I can see that. But the list certainly raises yellow flags if not red ones. Three questions come to mind immediately:
- What is “non-ministry church work?” Is there such a thing?
- When we deal with the flock, we major on words. What do you lose if they’re not really your personal, currently contextual words?
- Does sermon preparation suffer when you “farm it out” to AI?
To be sure, the articles note some concerns. But the pastors assure us that AI is no more than a tool, like a commentary you consult when you build your sermon. But it helps to know who’s doing the commentating, whether Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, Kidner, Fee, MacArthur, Bock, Keener, Keller, Lutzer, or Osteen. Who’s this “guy,” this amalgamated, pureed, concatenated “fellow” who’s feeding me the goods? And, by the way, which church staff members do non-ministry work? (I’ve been ministered to mightily by custodians, bookkeepers, and such, not only through the fruit of their work, but in the thoughtfulness of their personal interaction). And what AI message beats a handwritten note?
A “Form of Pastoral Care”
My concern wasn’t assuaged by one pastor’s testimony:
I use AI administratively to craft an email, make a social media post or when I need to send a text message. I’ll type it and then insert into AI and ask it to make it more professional sounding, cleaning up the grammar and it also usually tightens up the words and sentence structure. It can take the edge off some of my messaging and helps articulate my thoughts in a softer way. That’s certainly a form of pastoral care.
Well, yes, he’s a humble, pastorally-minded soul, but his account signals a measure of satisfied arrested development regarding the mastery of language. I see it all around. Yes, I’m a retired professor and former pastor who writes stuff. But the study of words is not just for nerds. They’re our tools as pastors. Sure, we use cars and chairs and phones and such. And I thank God for technological advances as I use GPS (instead of a big-old Rand McNally) to find a new member’s house or workarounds to a jammed highway. And what a blessing it is to have listservs to alert classes to changes. But these tools shouldn’t keep me from trying to up my communications game.
If we were lumberjacks, we’d be students of the choice and care of saws, the placement and angle of cuts, safety precautions, training tips for the newbies, wood types, and such. If we were bakers, we’d obsess over recipes, oven temperatures and times, and quality ingredients. But we pastors are word folks—The Word, word-filled commentaries, preached words, counseling words, hospital bedside words, words of apology for ill-chosen words, words for the weekly column, etc. For what it’s worth, I append some notes on how I’ve tried or been forced through the years to be a better communicator, a project/process still a work in progress in this my 78th year.
Limitations and Pitfalls
I’m not saying that there’s some ideal style suitable for all. The range of linguistic accents, vocabularies, and rhythms is as gratifying as the span of gifts and dispositions we find in play, by God’s grace, in the Early Church. We need Paul as well as Peter, the poetic as well as the prosaic, the warmly conversational as well as the coolly analytical, the “down home” as well as the “uptown.” But, whatever your bent, it’s important to be aware of what you’re doing, better prepared to build on it, and more alert to its limitations and pitfalls.
Again, when a minister becomes a student of language, he doesn’t go strutting off to a finishing school for snots always on the lookout for opportunities to shout “Gotcha!” when someone says “the most striking phenomena” or writes “it’s main asset is.” No, it’s germane to the calling. You’re not like a bus driver who parks his vehicle mid route to ramble through Central Park picking flowers or like an infantry soldier abandoning his patrol to set up a canvas for landscape painting. Ministry is a verbal activity. So, I get twitchy when a pastor outsources his speech.
The pastor I quoted is concerned that his words might be clumsy or otherwise offensive, so he lets a mysterious somebody be his spokesman. It’s a good-hearted notion. We’ve all needed help, either before we open our mouths (as when a partner on church visitation says, “Let me handle this; just pray for me”) or afterwards (“I should have warned you to not bring up her ex-husband.”)
But we’re not working for the Hallmark Channel. Clearly, the Bible presents a mixture of “lighten up” passages (re acceptable grain-picking on the Sabbath) and “tighten up” verses (in rebuke of the Hillel take on divorce and remarriage). The Book has edge; it’s not all Barnabas, though it is Barnabas too. So, when, in response to a huffy “Well, my God wouldn’t ask me to do that!” declaration against a clear biblical mandate, you’ll offend the listener by sticking to your guns, and, in doing so, you don’t have to surrender your pastor card. You can’t escape that if you believe that the Bible “is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”
I’m thankful the biblical writers didn’t resort to AI to dial up artificially tender or tough talk. In the former case, instead of “Go to the ant you sluggard” in Proverbs 6:6, we could have had “Even when you understandably don’t feel like it, it’s not a bad idea to pick up on a bit of the ant’s example of diligence;” in the latter, we might read, “We often give thanks for most of you. As for the others, you know who I’m talking about” in place of “We give thanks to God always for all of you” (I Thess 1:2).
Imagine that Dwight L. Moody had run his sermon on Luke 16:25 through AI. I don’t think this sentence would have fared well:
There are some people who ridicule these revival meetings, but remember, there will be no revivals in hell.
And, then, turning to Timothy Dwight, the instrument of the great revival at Yale in 1802, let’s take a look at his sermon on Ecclesiastes 8:11 (“Depravity of Man—Its Degree”). How might AI have cleaned it up to lift the spirits of potential parents and to avoid triggering gentle parents who condemned any attempt to put the fear of punishment in the child’s heart?
How vast a labour to train up even one child to virtue and to duty; or even to prevent one from becoming grossly sinful, and finally lost! What toils and pains; what cares and watchings; how many reproofs, restraints, and corrections; how many prayers, and sighs, and tears, are employed and suffered, before this hard task can be accomplished! How rarely is it accomplished at all! What then must be the corruption of that heart, which makes all these efforts necessary; and which can resist and overcome them all.
“Send in the AI!”
Yes, this is grim, and it may well prompt you to exclaim, “Send in the AI!” But understand that God has used mightily the Moodys and Dwights in church history, and we need to be wary of engineering away such talk, lest smoothies strip us of our biblical edge.
When I consider these matters, I think back to C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Don’t you know that Satan is licking his chops over what he can prompt and inspire humanity to do through AI for the sake of terror and ruin. Sure, he’ll be frustrated by the good it offers through shortcuts and imaginations. That’s true for any invention or discovery, such a fire. We came up with boilers to warm schoolhouses, but fools and miscreants employed pyres to torture and kill Polycarp, Latimer, and Ridley—much to the Devil’s delight.
Big things are at stake, militarily, academically, commercially, and medically. But also pastorally, and not just in a good way. So, let’s be careful out there.
Oh, and a closing word on sermon length. This spring, I struck up a conversation with a check-out clerk at Walgreens. Turns out, he was a University of Idaho student, and we compared some notes on the academic scene. At one point, he ventured that he had just finished a six-page paper for a class. The problem was that he’d only come up with three pages. So, he turned to AI to “fluff it up” (his expression). So please, dear pastor, don’t cram a twenty-minute sermon into forty minutes.
Appendeix
Here’s a dozen items that have shaped my communication, the sort of things I’ve found at work in my own life. It’s a sampler, and you have your own, encounters that have shaped your communication. Maybe one or two of these can make for a useful encounter, even as I find them at every hand as the Lord is helping me to talk and write gooder.
- At Wheaton, we philosophy professors would read papers to each other for feedback. One day, I used the expression, “Aren’t I?” and I got some help in seeing that I was saying, “Are I not?” Ouch! They were right, but you need to be careful not to be railroaded into admitting guilt for something not really bad, such as the “dangling preposition.” Legend has it that Winston Churchill pushed back against censure over this by saying, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”
- And it doesn’t just apply to grammar. As a teenager, I was griping about something to my mother. (It probably had to do with something other kids were doing, and I couldn’t.) She told me to listen to myself, to my whiny voice. I think she even imitated it. And I believe that was the time she told me to “police my face,” to not go around with a scowl or dead expression, sucking the life out of a room or discouraging listeners.
- I’ve found it fascinating and helpful to read magazines outside my ordinary ken, broadening my circle of what I call “periodical friends and acquaintances.” I majored in philosophy rather than business, so for a year or so, I regularly picked up a copy of Fortune, Business Week, and Forbes. I was a white guy, so I read Ebony, Jet, Vibe, and Essence. I’m conservative, so I check out The Nation, Christian Century, and Rolling Stone (and also realclearpolitics.com, which features opposing voices on current affairs). That sort of thing, not to homogenize myself with the culture, but to become alert to what’s being said out there, and how it’s expressed.
- Style-wise, I’ve picked up expressions and discovered genres that shaped my own writing. From a Vanderbilt professor, I saw “Thank you for your kind interest” in a letter, and I’ve used it repeatedly. In a George Will column, back when he wrote for Newsweek, I was surprised to see a sentence without subject or verb. After quoting some dubious claim by a pundit, he simply wrote “Really?” That’s all he needed to “roll his eyes.” And then I learned about “Timespeak,” the magazine’s use of first paragraphs to put the reader on the scene, e.g., “A frigid wind swept in off the lake, and the crunch of frozen boots on gravel caught a neighbor’s attention.” The story then works its way to toward a burglary, kidnapping, or murder that ensued. And I’ve often referred to the way that a 1970s Sports Illustrated article could grab and hold my attention, no matter how remote the connection. They could cover a junior high basketball team on an Indian reservation, and I’d be ready to move to the Dakotas and buy a fan jacket.
- When I come across an unfamiliar word in whatever I’m reading, I often circle it in pencil and draw a circled ‘V’ in the margin. V for “vocabulary.” And then I look it up, whether old (‘calumny’) or new (‘cosplay’). It’s fun and useful to find a new tool, as when I found there was a special wrench for oil filters. I think, for instance, of ‘extant,’ ‘ubiquitous,’ and ‘obsequious.’
- Etymology can be useful in finding angles on language, e.g., ‘sarcasm’ speaks of rending the flesh (Greek: sarks) and ‘comfort’ comes for the Latin for “strength” (as in fortify). And, of course, word origins are intriguing across the board, whether inspiring or offensive, as in the Greek for “womb” as the base of ‘hysterical.’
- If you think that piling big word upon big word is a surefire way to show your smarts, you can come off badly. I had a seminary student whose paper was full of glop like this: “Condign individuals are wont to engage in salubrious eleemosynary endeavors.” He was a little embarrassed and much relieved to hear that he didn’t need to do this to make an impression. Something more like “Good folks are inclined to be charitable” would do better.
- That being said, I appreciate an arcane but pointed word dropped into the text. I remember the time that National Review’s William F. Buckley called Jane Fonda an “ecdysiast” in the midst of a dismissive treatment of her moral and political crusades. Referring to her disrobing in movies, he delicately drew from the Greek to make his point, showing a class she didn’t herself have.
- I’ll never forget an article that hacked on the way that social scientists overemploy the Latinate ending, ‘ion.’ They love to deliver up mind-numbing pieces along the lines of ‘Investigation of the multiplication of the cultural manifestations that lead to the postulation of a contrasting ideations . . . .”
- It’s good to stay on top of acronyms, even if you don’t use them. At least to see whose ox is getting gored, whether RINO, DINK, NIMBY, WASP or the more recent AWFUL (“Angry White Female Urban Liberal”).
- Watch out for the tics that fill our discourse. Back in the 1970s, the word ‘just’ showed up throughout college students’ prayers. (“Lord, we just come here tonight to just praise your name. We’re just so thankful, and we just want you to know that you’re just what we need for our peace and joy.”) Today, there’s a tendency to turn many of our declarative sentences into interrogatives by adding again and again the word “Right?” Half the time, I want to say, “Hold on. I’m not so sure of that. Just say what you want to say, and quit asking me to sign off on it line by line.”
- There’s a place for lowfalutin language. I once found myself on an elevator with some brilliant young Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn, men who had been working on the technical aspects of our biblemesh.com website. All afternoon, those of us in “content” had little or no idea what they were talking about, what with their “wire frame” this and “Drupal” that. I told them they were amazing, and they responded that there was a lot left to do. I said that, well, we all needed to git ‘er done. They exclaimed, “Git ‘er done!” and I asked, “Do you know Larry the Cable Guy?” To which they answered enthusiastically, “We went to his concert last week!” Small linguistic world, and, in that exchange, we got ‘er done.
