The "I" that A.I. is Missing

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Happily, this space has many more readers than it did when I first wrote this piece. At the time, I had not expected (I’m an idiot) the mainline church uncritically to endorse and adopt A.I. for preaching and worship planning. Etc. If only there are had been some churches featured in the Terminator or if an onboard chaplain had been included in the cast of 2001: A Space Odyssey, then perhaps we would not make haste to join the Borg.

For shits and giggles, my friend Ken Jones recently asked ChatGPT to “write a sermon on Romans 5.1 in style of Jason Micheli.”

ChatGPT is the artificial intelligence portal that has occasioned much leery hand-wringing of late. In moments, A.I. can scour the available data in the digital square and assemble a relevant string of facts and propositions, and, importantly, it can do so in what appears to be the proper rhetorical form. For the uninitiated, the preacher’s work of attending to the coming Sunday’s scripture, exegeting his or her own congregation, listening for a word from the Lord, and only then writing down a sermon that will be God’s own living word is long, slow, labor-intensive work. And very often it ends in failure. ChatGPT, by contrast, can produce a passable facsimile of a sermon in moments.

A.I.’s implications for those who work with words have not gone unnoticed.

For example, here is the sermon ChatGPT spit out in seconds in response to my friend’s request:

Dear friends,

Today, I want to draw your attention to the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 5:1, where he writes, "Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

These words carry a profound message for each one of us, a message of hope and assurance in the midst of our struggles and trials.

You see, Paul's words remind us that our justification before God is not based on our own merits or works. We do not earn our salvation through our good deeds or righteous living. Instead, it is through our faith in Jesus Christ that we are justified and made right with God.

This is a message that runs counter to the prevailing wisdom of our world, where we are told that we must earn everything we have through hard work and dedication. But the truth of the Gospel is that our salvation is a gift freely given by God, and it is through our faith in Jesus that we are able to receive it.

Through our justification in Christ, we are able to experience peace with God, a peace that surpasses all understanding. No matter what challenges we may face in our lives, we can rest assured that we have a God who loves us and who has already won the victory for us.

So let us hold fast to our faith in Jesus, trusting in the power of his death and resurrection to bring us into a right relationship with God. And let us live each day with the confidence that comes from knowing that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

May these words of Paul be a source of comfort and strength to each one of us, now and always.

Amen.

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Preachers should loosen their sphincters and admit that not only is this shockingly not bad so far as sermons go but it’s also depressingly better, in terms of cogency and observance of the text, than what many listeners would likely suffer from their flesh-and-blood preacher in a sermon on the same scripture. For instance, A.I. avoided the urge to deconstruct the problematic Paul, turn the apostle’s theology into anthropology, or truck in contemporary politics or ecclesial concerns under the banner of “struggles and trials.” Ilúvatar be praised that A.I. doesn’t yet seem acquainted with the New Perspective on Paul.

The surface limitations of ChatGPT are straightforwardly simple to spot. I certainly have enough of a digital footprint for my friend’s request (“in the style of Jason Micheli”) to have been somewhat replicable. Yet no one who has heard me preach would believe I would bring such a paltry word count into the pulpit nor would I ever begin with a salutation (“Dear friends”) that is as limp as it is false. Just ask my church— they’re not all my friends. Some of them don’t like me. They’re only there because Jesus, who is not dead, has arranged our relationship.

Most critical, while A.I. appears able to spit out intelligible thoughts about God from a passage of scripture, ChatGPT appears to know not the purpose of proclamation. You can spot the fatal error in the move to hortatory at the end, “Let us hold fast to our faith in Jesus…”

It’s a “lettuce sermon.”

It’s a sermon exhorting its hearers to do.

This is deliciously ironic for a scripture on justification by faith alone.

Nonetheless, again embarrassingly so, this is an error that many (most?) incarnate preachers make every Sunday.

Ask ChatGPT for other homiletical offerings on different biblical passages and you will discover A.I. can perform accurate exegesis, provide clear statements about the Bible and its implications for daily living, and speak in relevant terms about the God narrated therein. None of these offerings, however, constitute proclamation.

And this is precisely the irremovable impoverishment of A.I. preachers.

Straightforwardly, the gospel is promise from Christ through a person to a person.Promise is the way the Living God words the world.

Proclamation is not simply any word about God. If you have merely explained a biblical text, spoken on a scriptural theme, or talked about God (from the safe remove of second-order discourse), you have, quite simply, not proclaimed the gospel. Thus, you have shuttered the lips of the otherwise loquacious God. Once again, sadly, many incarnate preachers seem to be as ignorant of their primary task as ChatGPT.

The proclamation of the gospel is a promise from Christ spoken through a preacher to a sinner.

As Robert Jenson writes in Story and Promise:

“What happened to the world with Jesus was that at the end of the long history of Israel’s promises, a sheerly unconditional promise was said and became sayable in the world.”

In other words, because the Lord Jesus is risen, every passage of scripture functions as gospel. Therefore, the task of proclamation is not explanation. The task of proclamation is unconditional promise. Every preacher must ask of every passage not “What does it mean?” or “What can I say this Sunday?” or “How is it relevant?” but this question:

“What does the text promise and what may I thus promise that can be and only can be because Christ lives?What future, possible and certain on account of Christ, may I promise my hearers by the leading and authority of this text?”

Again, proclamation is not merely a report about or even an announce­ment of this unconditional promise. Preaching is a providential “speech-act,” the realizing of the Word by and in our speaking and our hearing. A sermon, in other words, does not merely say that Christ is risen; it enters into and makes available to others the reality of his resurrection.  And the way in which the reality of Christ’s resurrection becomes available to us is in an embodied promise that can only be uttered if Jesus has death behind him.

The most basic way the reality of Christ’s risen-ness becomes available to us is in the office of the keys, “I declare unto you the entire forgiveness of your sins…”This is the I that A.I. is missing and will never possess.

This most basic form of gospel proclamation shows forth ChatGPT’s most basic deficiency as a writer of sermons.

Namely, A.I. can almost immediately produce three hundred words on peace with God, but A.I. cannot absolve you.

For that, you need a sinner who knows the Lord Jesus even better than he or she knows your sins.

You need a preacher.

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