I’ll open with a statement from Elon Musk on the state of artificial intelligence.

The rate of improvement of AI is faster than any technology I’ve ever seen, by far. . . . The good future of AI is one of immense prosperity in an age of abundance. No shortage of goods and services. Everyone can have whatever they want, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like special artwork. But with the advent of AI plus robotics, any manufactured good or provided service will trend to zero [cost]. I’m not saying it will actually become zero, but everyone will be able to have anything they want. That’s the good future. In my view, that’s probably 80 percent likely. And only 20 percent probability of human annihilation. Frankly, I do have to engage in some degree of deliberate suspension of disbelief with respect to AI to sleep well, because I think the actual issue, the most likely issue, is how to find meaning in a world where AI can do everything we can do, but better. That’s perhaps the bigger challenge.¹

Gathered in the heart of an emerging computer-chip fab city, we find ourselves on the brink of an AI transformation that may disrupt every part of life. But what keeps Musk up at night is a crisis of human value. Where do we find purpose and meaning when we’re unemployable? That’s a massive AI challenge to address, and one I war-gamed in the book God, Technology, and the Christian Life (pages 254–61). I’ll skip that angle tonight.

Dormant Superpower

Here are three other caveats before we begin.

A decade of writing precedes this event, and in the last three years I’ve examined technology from a macro perspective. From a whole theology of technology now done, I speak on AI tonight. Some see emerging technologies — AI, advanced robotics, self-driving cars — as Promethean powers we were never meant to wield, new powers that tip the balance of human supremacy and make us masters over the gods, or over God himself. I disagree. So, if instinctually you saw an ad for a Christian lecture about AI and assumed that I would be anti-technology, you’ll be disappointed and quite confused. I’m not a Luddite.

Partly this is because I celebrate God’s sovereignty over every square inch of Silicon Valley and his sovereign governance over all things in the age of big tech, including every output, as Proverbs 16:1 says: “The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.” All outputs, all talk, all Google searches, all AI chatbots — every output is divinely governed by God. And without a sweat. God is not pushed out of a technological culture; he remains at the center, gloriously relevant to it.

And for time’s sake, I must assume some familiarity with AI and with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, or Apple AI. I don’t have time to explain how AI works, just to say it does. I’ve recently done my morning devotions in ChatGPT. I’ve given it my Bible reading schedule for the day, read the text it spit out from the ESV, and then asked for a two-thousand-word sermon-like summary that takes all four Bible readings into one application-oriented devotional to get me ready for my day. And I have been consistently shocked at how accurate, orthodox, and helpful those mornings have been. AI is now integrated into Bible-software programs like Logos. I haven’t used that, but I can testify that AI is very good at spitting out orthodoxy. No surprise there. Paul says orthodoxy has a pattern to it (2 Timothy 1:13). Sound doctrine is patterned. And AI is pattern recognition.

AI is a “dormant superpower,” a powerful, free assistant available to you right now. To us come the questions: if to use it, how to use it, when to use it. And none of us knows the extent of possible uses, because the horizon of what is possible keeps moving out. But for the past eight months, I have interviewed Christian leaders in the AI space, brothers and sisters in Christ building all types of searchbots that can scour Christian websites to offer you specific and interactive Bible answers to questions. I’ve seen a church high school ministry that printed square cards for students to hand to friends at school. One side asks, “What is the meaning of life?” The other side has a QR code that drops you into a live chat with a bot that gives you a brief answer to the question about the meaning of life from Scripture, welcomes follow-ups, and leads the conversation toward an invitation to the next youth gathering. I have friends building chatbots that answer theology questions. One built an interactive Bible counselor. One allows a publisher to leverage the entirety of their backlist to answer questions in a chat to prove the value of their books.

Pastors I know use AI every week. One pastor-friend spends the first hour Tuesday morning in an open dialogue with ChatGPT over his Sunday sermon text, to discuss Greek exegesis, discuss hard bits, play with possible sermon outlines, find ways to connect the sermon to pastoral concerns he has in the church, to find illustrations, etc., and after that hour is up, he asks for the whole conversation to be summarized in eight hundred words, prints it to review later, before moving on to staff meetings, with this first hour percolating in his mind all week. Another pastor-friend now uses ChatGPT exclusively for his early sermon-prep research, until he feels sufficiently researched, then he dictates his personal notes into his phone with all the points he wants to make in his sermon, and then he takes those rough notes and pastes them back into the same AI chat, sets a word-count output for length, and gets all those ideas organized and spit out as a first-draft sermon — outlined, organized, and edited in ten seconds.

Drawing the Line

Obviously, the immediate question we want answered is, Tony, where’s the line? What are the rules? And we’ll return to that. My point here is that AI uses are expanding every week. And AI already exceeds the possibilities a pastor needs to preach orthodox sermons.

Now, I’ve lost some of you already. Hang in there. Give me a second to talk to those who are tracking with a hypothetical scenario. Let’s say you take all the works of Charles Spurgeon, his 63 volumes of sermons, Bible commentaries, along with all his other books, letters, notes, and everything he ever produced. You take that immense reservoir of content and feed it into a bot. Easy. You’ve recreated Spurgeon’s brain.

Next, you create a British-sounding preaching voice. Easy. Next, you create a 3D holographic moving avatar of Spurgeon, all lifelike. Doable. Add it together, and we have the Spurgeon AI Preaching Bot 2000. It’s great for new church plants. You can set it up in a high school gymnasium and put the Spurgeon bot on stage with a little hologram projector. There’s your weekly preacher on Sunday mornings. A team of elders could write the prompts, what current events to address, and what modern illustrations to draw from. You could assign a Bible text, set a sermon length, hit send, dim the lights, and sit back and watch Spurgeon flicker and resurrect to life in digital form to preach a beautiful Christ-centered sermon, as good as any of his real sermons.

Spurgeon AI Preaching Bot 2000 is hypothetical. But all the tech exists. All of it. Some of you unfamiliar with AI are thinking to yourself, Yeah right. This Reinke guy lives in the clouds. There’s no way the sermons would sound like Spurgeon. It would be random words and phrases in a jumbled patchwork of noise! Well, let’s take this out of the hypothetical realm and ask a living pastor-theologian.

“God is not pushed out of a technological culture; he remains at the center, gloriously relevant to it.”

A month ago, in Ask Pastor John, I asked John Piper his thoughts on AI. To which he went to ChatGPT with this prompt: “Please write an eight-hundred-word answer in the theology and style of theologian John Piper to the question ‘What are the dangers of a pastor using AI?’” Meta. Five seconds later, it produced an answer that Piper said “was so good that if I were reading it right now, I don’t think you, Tony, or our listeners would know that I’m reading from ChatGPT. It was amazing.” And then he said that if he had done so — claimed it as his own and read it — it would have been “wicked.”²

All the tech we adopt must be adapted to human flourishing as we scale down tech to its most profitable uses. That’s the long story of the iPhone and social media. We are scaling down what we do with them. But before we scale down tech to its most profitable uses, we explore all the possibilities by pressing down the gas pedal all the way to the floorboard, to hold it there for as long as our nerves will allow — not because we want to drive to the grocery store screeching on two wheels every time. We rev the engine to eight thousand RPMs to discover what is possible before scaling back to what is helpful. That’s our dialogue with tech: what is possible versus what is helpful. Once you are certain that your enriched uranium can blast a foreign adversary into oblivion, only then do you begin to think of how that enriched uranium can generate 30 percent of the electricity we’re using right now in Scottsdale. Keep in mind the distinction between possible and helpful.

So, if we press the gas pedal all the way down, and AI proves it can deliver perfect recall of all biblical and theological truth, patterned to sound doctrine, in the voice and theology of whomever you want — “in a world where AI can do everything we can do, but better” — why do we need authors, scholars, seminaries, evangelists, or Bible counselors at all? If AI can generate in five seconds a two-thousand-word sermon devotional in the morning, tailored to my liking and my reading, or if we can make a preaching bot, or if ChatGPT can amaze John Piper, we are left with this question: In the age of AI, do we really need preachers anymore?

And of course, the only way to answer that question is to ask, Well, what is a preacher?

Ezekiel’s Commission

For one answer, turn to Ezekiel 2:1–3:11. It’s a text about the commissioning of a prophet, long held in the church to be a representative model of God’s calling of all his messengers.³ Ezekiel is commissioned to speak to God’s stubborn people in exile. The commission begins with Ezekiel on his feet in 2:1.

And he [the Lord] said to me, “Son of man, stand on your feet, and I will speak with you.” And as he spoke to me, the Spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and I heard him speaking to me.

In Ezekiel 1:28, he fell on his face before the Lord’s radiant glory. Now Ezekiel is called to stand on his feet to be commissioned. As we read this dynamic calling of Ezekiel, we’ll see reflections of it in other callings. The apostle Paul comes to mind, a man first buckled to the ground by the Lord’s glory. But when commissioned to ministry, the glorified Christ said to him, “Stand upon your feet” (Acts 26:16).⁴ So, like Paul, Ezekiel stands silent on his feet to be spoken to, and that’s how God’s commissions begin.

And he said to me, “Son of man, I send you to the people of Israel, to nations of rebels, who have rebelled against me. They and their fathers have transgressed against me to this very day. The descendants also are impudent and stubborn: I send you to them, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ And whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house) they will know that a prophet has been among them. And you, son of man, be not afraid of them, nor be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns are with you and you sit on scorpions. Be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. And you shall speak my words to them, whether they hear or refuse to hear, for they are a rebellious house.” (Ezekiel 2:3–7)

Ezekiel’s ministry is not about sparking revival but pronouncing judgment, to go toe to toe — forehead to forehead — with God’s rebellious people and say, “Time’s up; it’s too late. You missed your chance.” They will refuse to repent, which is, in the Old Testament, the precursor to idolatry.⁵ Such a dark outlook is not like the preacher’s commission today. Maybe. Some would say in a culture hostile to the gospel, it’s not too far off. Nevertheless, the equipping for ministry retains similarities.

“But you, son of man, hear what I say to you. Be not rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you.” And when I looked, behold, a hand was stretched out to me, and behold, a scroll of a book was in it. And he spread it before me. And it had writing on the front and on the back, and there were written on it words of lamentation and mourning and woe. And he said to me, “Son of man, eat whatever you find here. Eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me this scroll to eat. And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey. (Ezekiel 2:8–3:3)

Israel rejected God’s word with their mouth shut, so don’t worry about what comes out of their mouths. Instead, Ezekiel, open wide your mouth to take in this abundant revelation, this hard word — “words of lamentation and mourning and woe.” It’s a two-sided revelation. Every inch is covered. It’s a complete word. No white spaces for additions.

Eat the Book

Eat this scroll! Stuff yourself with the scroll! Gorge yourself on this scroll. Take this roll of paper towels and eat it. Stuff it down. Cram it down to fill your stomach. It’s a hard word, choked down in a repulsive act that results in . . . a taste as sweet as honey. In obedience, the roll of paper towels tastes like a Fruit Roll-Up.

Again, this is emblematic of other callings, like Jeremiah’s in Jeremiah 15:16:

Your words were found, and I ate them,
     and your words became to me a joy
     and the delight of my heart,
for I am called by your name,
     O Lord, God of hosts.

It’s also emblematic of John in the New Testament in Revelation 10:8–10:

Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me again, saying, “Go, take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.” So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll. And he said to me, “Take and eat it; it will make your stomach bitter, but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey.”

For Ezekiel and Jeremiah and John, this word is to be ingested by the mouth before it is spoken from the mouth.

And he said to me, “Son of man, go to the house of Israel and speak with my words to them. For you are not sent to a people of foreign speech and a hard language [no translation needed], but to the house of Israel — not to many peoples of foreign speech and a hard language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely, if I sent you to such, they would listen to you. But the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me: [people reject the God of the word, not simply his word] because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart. Behold, I have made your face as hard as their faces, and your forehead as hard as their foreheads. Like emery harder than flint have I made your forehead. Fear them not, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house.” (Ezekiel 3:4–9)

Again, Ezekiel is sent out to make sparks fly in confronting spiritual stubbornness. Israel refuses to even hear the word with their ears, let alone embrace it with their hearts. Ezekiel is anti-stubborn. He’s now eaten the scroll, and it has stirred his heart’s affections. Covenant faithfulness is tied to what you do with God’s word.

Ezekiel is called to die to celebrity status and popularity. Animosity against God is the animosity he will feel. Preacher, it’s not about your image. You’re not being sent out to be celebrated or followed. You speak on behalf of the One you want others to follow. We are channels of ministry, not the end of ministry. Our success metric is not how many people follow us on social media but how many people follow Christ.

Ezekiel has eaten the scroll, and finally, we get an interpretation of what that means:

Moreover, he said to me, “Son of man, all my words that I shall speak to you receive in your heart, and hear with your ears. And go to the exiles, to your people, and speak to them and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD,’ whether they hear or refuse to hear.” (Ezekiel 3:10–11)

Eating the scroll meant feasting through the ear to satisfy the heart — feasting on “all my words.” It’s an intensive hearing, not selective. It’s a calling to hear the word, love the word, eat the word, speak the word. Mouth to the stomach; ear to the heart; all back through the mouth.

Eight Marks of Authentic Preaching

From this brief survey of a remarkable commissioning, I draw eight marks of authentic preaching in the age of AI.

1. Authentic preaching requires a lifelong diet of the revealed word.

This vivid metaphor of a scroll eaten marks the “absorption” of divine words into one’s inner being, of God’s messenger “becoming totally one with the word of God.”⁶ For Ezekiel, this is pictured in one scene. For us, it happens over a lifetime. The act of eating encompasses not only the initial reception but the entire process of digestion and assimilation — the stomach retaining food, extracting nutrients, and converting them into life-sustaining energy for the ministry of speaking God’s word. He is fed by what he is to deliver. He is feasting on the meal he serves.

The prophet Ezekiel “embodies the message,” carrying “in his own body the word of God.”⁷ Here we see the essential characteristic of genuine preaching — the unification of the scriptural text with the preacher’s life. It’s not a casual browsing but a thorough digestion over a lifetime — as God’s word becomes more and more integrated into one’s very identity.

Seminary training is merely the beginning of a continuous feast on God’s word. Here is where lifelong habits are forged. If AI is writing your papers or your sermons, you are failing by bypassing the very habits you need to be an authentic preacher, which demands consistent, persistent consumption of God’s revealed word that transforms you to become a living vessel through which the eternal message flows. Authentic preaching requires a lifelong diet of the revealed word.

2. Authentic preaching is whole-Bible consuming.

The divine call to preach God’s word is first the call to eat God’s word. All of it. Even the hard bits. The preacher’s calling is the calling of every Christian in Colossians 3:16 — that God’s word dwells richly within us. How much of that word? All of it! So, we eat from the buffet of its historical narratives and holy laws, its poetry and hymns and songs, its wisdom and proverbs and parables, its prophecy and apocalyptic literature and woes and laments, its gospels and epistles, and even its genealogies. Of the whole word, we hear it, eat it, love it, speak it. It goes through the mouth to the stomach, through the ear to the heart, and comes back through the mouth. It involves all of us engaged with all the Bible — the whole Bible dwelling richly inside us at all times.

As Puritan William Greenhill said,

Other scrolls and books we may investigate, but this one we must eat. The Book of Christ is the book for our studies. Many scholars study other books more than the Scriptures, more than the scrolls of Christ. They are book-eaters. They devour the Fathers, the Schoolmen, the historians, the poets, and pamphlets, yet they are least acquainted with the Scriptures. But Christ’s command is to eat this scroll, to “search the Scriptures” (John 5:39), and to “meditate in the Law day and night” (Psalm 1:2). Paul, therefore, exhorts Timothy to give himself wholly to the word (1 Timothy 4:11–16).⁸

Investigate other books. Eat Scripture. All of it. Authentic preaching is whole-Bible consuming.

3. Authentic preaching requires personality.

Eat the scroll; then speak it. This whole word must get assimilated into us or we cannot deliver it. We do not deliver God’s revelation as a mailman but as an executive delegate who shows up in person. In the flesh. “God did not supplant the personality of the prophets through whom he spoke,” but he spoke through them in messages that “reflected their personalities, backgrounds, and individual character traits. Thus, the truths that emerged were neither wholly from the prophets alone nor from God alone but from both. Their messages were divine truths through human channels.”⁹

Word ministry is “a joint presentation . . . the assimilated message which was to be proclaimed, not an alien word uttered robotically. The prophet was verbally and intellectually committed to his proclamation.” This is key. And yet, the prophet’s message “possessed absolute authority precisely because it had originated with God, and its persuasive power originated from the same source, and not from the intellectual capacity of the prophet or his rhetorical skill.”¹⁰ Note this balance. The message’s power is not in the personality. The power is in God and his word. And yet the personality of the prophet is essential in this joint presentation.

Personality drives so much of culture. Take sports documentaries. Formula 1 was a sport for European elites until Netflix featured all the drivers and their interpersonal stresses. The NFL has done this with Hard Knocks. Pro soccer, tennis, golf, and now baseball are in on it too. The way you brand your sports league is by featuring personalities. This explains also the popularity of podcasting, where now the favorite podcaster of your congregant may be better known than you will be, as their pastor. It shouldn’t be this way. Word ministry is embodied and deeply personal — a message from God, assimilated into you, the preacher, carried forth through living personality of a messenger who has died to the trappings of celebrity culture. Authentic preaching requires personality. AI cannot do that.

4. Authentic preaching is applied.

Scroll-eating means application is not an addendum at the end of a sermon. It means application frames the preacher’s whole living engagement with the meaning of the text. The whole sermon is application. The preacher doesn’t “speak by hearsay” of what he’s heard about the text; instead, he “delivers God’s message out of a deep impression on the heart” because “what comes from the heart and from experience is quick and lively.”¹¹ Sermon application flows from a preacher who has eaten the scroll and whose life has been impacted by a text and who can only preach that text through his own personal engagement with it.

This is why I find in sermon preparation that about 30 percent of my time is needed to understand the text and 70 percent is needed to digest the text into my own heart, to assimilate it, to feel it, and then to put all of it into my own words, to determine its significance for me and for my audience, and then to find illustrations and applications to reinforce it all. That’s 70 percent of the work. Authentic preaching of the word is from a preacher who has applied that word to himself. AI can’t do that.

5. Authentic preaching exemplifies the spiritual war for the word.

Ezekiel is called to live his covenant faithfulness before others, in contrast to Israel’s covenant insubordination. Ezekiel eats the word; Israel doesn’t even want to hear it. Likewise, the preacher models for his congregation what they are to do with the Bible. This is why great preachers make you want to read your Bible more, right?

Preachers model for the church what we all are to do with what God has said to us.¹² We need a living model of how to love, trust, assimilate, and obey God’s word. He’s not delivering a TED Talk. He’s not delivering “content.” This is a man who has eaten the scroll to say to his people, “Follow my lead and fight for truth.” Satan is not concerned with gospel impressions. He’s not worried about the flash of joy in a truth encounter, the bliss of some new discovery. Satan is not worried about orthodox AI outputs. He can snatch all that away from hearts. What Satan fears is truth eaten, ingested, rooted deep in the soil of the heart that grows into fruit. That has always been his fear, according to the parable of the four soils.¹³

Puritan William Harrison observed,

People can listen to a preacher for an hour, hearing many clear and valuable truths, yet most walk away unable to recall a single word. They’ll say he was a good man and preached a fine sermon, but ask them what he said, and they have no answer. Why? Because the Devil has stolen it from their hearts and minds. Tell them a story from history, or some shocking news of the day, or advice for making money or for improving their health, and they’ll remember it perfectly — ready to repeat it anytime, anywhere. But teach them a truth about salvation or a duty to God or others, and it vanishes from their minds the moment they hear it. Why? Because the Devil knows worldly knowledge won’t benefit their souls, so he lets them keep it. But when it comes to spiritual truth that could lead to their salvation, he works hard to snatch it away.¹⁴

Authentic preaching exemplifies victory in this war. AI outputs don’t.

6. Authentic preaching is relational.

Preaching requires love. You stand and look out upon your congregation with a heart of love — embodied and in person. And then you preach. Or, on the contrary, if I stand up, and “if I have all knowledge” — if I can draw from all the best AI bots all week and have all knowledge — “but have not love,” says Paul, “I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2). In the age of AI, where vast information is easily accessible, this verse is especially relevant for preachers. Don’t be a nothing-preacher. Preach with authentic love. Bringing God’s word into a stubborn world is not about preaching angry. Don’t preach angry. And it’s not about being a pulpit pushover who itches ears.¹⁵ It’s about a bold, compassionate, fearless, courageous love. Authentic preaching is relational. The sum total of all knowledge isn’t.

7. Authentic preaching is affectionate.

Ezekiel was commissioned to speak to stone-faced people who were impudent (the word in Ezekiel 2:4) — impudent people with faces showing zero emotion. That’s his congregation. They were dead-faced. (Maybe that’s what you see on Sunday mornings.) But he met them affectionately, with a message made sweet by his personal encounter with the divine word.¹⁶ Don’t underestimate the soul-feeding nature of even the hardest parts of Scripture. AI is great at predicting what people naturally want or don’t want. The preacher delivers what God has spoken, even hard words. And that means no preacher is fit to preach until “they have received the word of God in their heart and have a zeal for it and delight in it.”¹⁷

God’s word is sweet, a delight to the soul, surpassing anything in this world. The honey-sweet taste of the word is not candy; it is soul food.¹⁸ Its sweetness comes from revealing the mysteries of God and Christ, nourishing and sustaining spiritual life. It sanctifies, comforts in affliction, and satisfies the conscience like nothing else. Even its warnings and judgments satisfy the heart. And from the sweetness of the word, authentic preaching is full of affection.

8. Authentic preaching is Spirit-empowered.

The Holy Spirit set Ezekiel on his feet. He set Paul on his feet. And that same Spirit sets every preacher on his feet. All of these dynamics — the word ingested, the word proclaimed with love and affection through a personality, a personality dead to celebrity, a humbled man — is all the miracle of the Holy Spirit. AI can suggest and summarize and organize and edit content, but true preaching depends on the Spirit’s power to lead, to convict, to comfort, and to transform hearts. The Spirit sets us on our feet and indwells us and directs the output of our mouths to meet people’s spiritual needs in supernatural ways.

“Authentic preaching of the word is from a preacher who has applied that word to himself.”

I find great comfort that even as the prophet ingested God’s word, he was not set off like a bot programmed with a final dataset. Already in Ezekiel 3:22–27, we see that God will be right there with Ezekiel, working dynamically in him, when it comes to what to say and when. He is no soulless machine spitting out sermons prompted from a preloaded dataset. He will feel the presence of God guiding him through every twist and turn of his ministry. Authentic preaching is Spirit-empowered.

These eight sacred priorities ground us in the age of AI possibilities.

To Know Ourselves

The superpowers of AI come with dangers we must figure out. Surveillance culture, loss of privacy, reducing human identity to data, replacing human bonds with AI bots, the deskilling of the human workforce, and the dangers of multiplying online misinformation. All those concerns are real and all well addressed in the Vatican’s recent warning about how AI could dehumanize society and erode human dignity.¹⁹

But there’s another angle to all this too. Long before AI, the British scientist turned novelist and public intellectual C.P. Snow introduced the concept of “the two cultures” to explain the ways humans make new discoveries about themselves.²⁰ The first one, “humanities culture,” is a realm where artists, writers, and philosophers explore the human condition through creativity and introspection by reflecting images of humanity back to itself through works of art, literature, and philosophical inquiry. We learn what it means to be human through the humanities.

Then along came “science culture,” a realm where researchers seek to understand human nature and our world through empirical investigation — science, experiments, careful observation, and the systematic testing of hypotheses about reality, using data.

But technologist Kevin Kelly proposes that in the last fifty years, a third distinct intellectual culture has emerged in how we discover things about ourselves. He calls it “maker culture” — so “humanities culture,” “science culture,” and now “maker culture.” We explore ourselves by attempting to recreate ourselves synthetically. We study life by attempting to create artificial life. We deepen our understanding of how social trends work by building simulated societies. MIT, Stanford, and Oxford all run AI-driven political science and sociology experiments. In another lab, we make bipedal robots to walk fluidly on two legs. And by them we come to a deeper understanding of how our bones and joints and muscles work together as we walk.

And now we probe the nature of intelligence by trying to reconstruct it artificially. In this way, technology doesn’t simply threaten what it means to be human; it forces on us deeper questions about what it truly means to be human. Every attempt at artificial intelligence is a step toward understanding the mystery and majesty of human intelligence even more deeply than decades of traditional neurobiology. When we try to replicate something as complex as intelligence and fall short, those very limitations and failures illuminate the true complexity and uniqueness of human intelligence — a new approach to tech that defines human dignity with even greater specificity.

Servant or Idol?

So, my opening question — “Do we even need preachers anymore?” — gets replaced by better questions that we all must answer now. In the age of AI, where the Spurgeon AI Preaching Bot 2000 is possible, and where AI can write your sermon from scratch in ten seconds, we are back to fundamental questions about us: What is preaching? And what does it mean to listen to preaching? By attempting to mimic preaching technologically, a definition of true preaching is forced to the foreground like never before.

It becomes clear to us that

• Speaking robotically without personality is not preaching.
• Saying orthodox things without conviction is not preaching.
• Delivering sermons devoid of affection for God is not preaching.
• Speaking while being personally guarded is not preaching.
• Ministering without the love required to see needs in your congregation is not preaching.
• Sermons that never challenge a congregation is not preaching.

Likewise,

• Listening to a sermon without engaging your ears to truly hear is not sermon hearing.
• Listening to a sermon without engaging the heart is not sermon hearing.
• Filling a notebook with notes but with no intention of fighting for those truths to be worked into your soul by digestion is not sermon hearing.

In the age of AI, we seek new clarity on human authenticity.

Technology is a wonderful servant and a terrible god. And if you look to AI for self-aggrandizement, or because you’re lazy, you will find in AI a new idol — and not the dumb idol the Old Testament prophets warned about, those without ears or eyes or mouth. No, you will find yourself trapped by an idol made by human hands that can hear and see and speak. But AI is not an idol. Not necessarily. Done right, AI doesn’t threaten the preacher. And the preacher doesn’t threaten AI. With these eight convictions in mind, dare I say it, AI — used wisely in its present form and in future uses we cannot conceive of yet — will make good and faithful preachers even better.