Render to the Machine What Is the Machine’s
2 in AI Series: A Spiritually Disciplined Approach to Artificial Intelligence
I. Naming the Contradiction
Three years before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. found himself at a lectern in Oslo, facing down a contradiction. The first words of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech were not fists and fire hoses. They were what King referred to as a “dazzling picture” of technology conquering nature: rockets and skyscrapers, airplanes and computers that “think.” Then he set down his prepared remarks. “There is a sort of poverty of the spirit,” King said, “which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.” Technology, King implied, both exposes our present condition and propels us forward.
We live in King’s prophetic vision of spiritual poverty, where tech workers are finding that their work and design do not help them understand the saturated cosmos they experience. The luminary tech of our age is generative AI and the large language models that make it work. We marvel at its ability to mimic human speech patterns and calculate at faster-than-human speeds; for that is what it does: mimic.
One Harvard Business Review study published last January found generative AI’s second most common use at work after idea generation was therapy and companionship. For many, generative AI’s largest use case this year will be anxiety reduction. Grief bots are coming too.
The apps we use to make ourselves productive are becoming dumping grounds for our emotional dependency. Outsourcing our spiritual formation to cleverly coded bits of ASCII that will listen to us endlessly repeat ourselves. Millions log in hours each day talking to programs like Replika: anthropomorphized algorithms rhetorically designed to convince us they possess the capability to care and empathize. One third of American teenagers report using AI companions. One third say they trust them for emotional support. Those who trust AI report being satisfied with chatbots, with many claiming they are similar to or better than talking to real people.
This essay is not about those statistics first. Disconcerting as they are, I am less concerned about them than what they point to. Christians need to be interested in what sorts of people we are becoming in relation to these technologies. Christians might be curious enough to ask, "What will spiritual disciplines look like with machines such as these in our lives?” The former question is importantly different from the latter, and the distinction between them matters. The first question is diagnostic; it helps us understand where we are as a culture. The second is formative; it begins to point us towards how we might choose to live. This essay concerns itself with the second question, but we cannot answer it without considering the former.
I. Assumptions and Metaphysics
First, we must name the King’s contradiction if we are to live wisely in its tension. To live wisely in our relationship to technology, we must soberly consider its metaphysics. All technology operates according to certain assumptions about reality and personhood. The printing press assumed knowledge could and should be democratized beyond the boundaries of literacy. The factory assumed human labor could be calculated into discrete units and married with technology of exponentially increasing strength. The smartphone assumed that one’s entire relational and informational environment could be compressed into ones and zeroes small enough to fit in your pocket. Each technology runs on more than electricity and engineering. They run on metaphysics. Our souls run through them.
Generative AI, in its dominant modern form, runs on a specific metaphysics of personhood: humans are being defined by cognitive processing. Relationship with another is transactional exchange of communicated content. Selfhood is constituted by informational input and output. Spiritual well-being is just optimized brain-states produced through meditation and reframing. Substitute the word “God” for “algorithm” in that final sentence. On this view of personhood, large language models are nothing more or less than powerful tools for human flourishing*. Why? Because they can provide outputs that mimic relationships (“cognitive and emotional processing”) without inputs that require a recognizably human self.
(*I suggest that if they aren’t tools for flourishing in your estimation, you have not been using them very long.)
Part of the Pope’s Encyclical and other theological responses to AI is that they base their argument on what people can do: think, reason, communicate, listen, and other human-type activities.
But what if this model of personhood is false? What if our minds are more than pattern recognition algorithms deployed to execute our will? The Christian tradition, in dialogue with itself and with our neighbors through the centuries, has compiled a view of what a human person is that radically upends this view of ourselves. We are, foremost, creatures made by God, spoken to by God in both Scripture and through the life of Christ present in the world, fallen from that ordering of our beingness, and now being restored and conformed to the likeness of Christ through the long and painful work of the Spirit in and through us, totality of our selves: body and soul, mind and desire, will and emotion, our hearts and minds as a whole creature.
Further, that creation itself is filled with the creature and life abundant, which is also first addressed by God.
The human soul is not an apt metaphor for computational capacity. It is the integrating center of the person. Mind, body, will, and desire inhere in the soul like motion; together they inhere in the spot of stillness at the center of our being. The soul itself has orientation: towards God who made us, whose very word formed us in the womb, whose promises welcome, reform, and direct our every desire until they become singular in will with him. When our souls are formed well, the whole body thrives. When they are left to be formed by other human-created things, we fragment into anxious bundles of desire looking for nothing so much as a world that will give in to us.
I point this out about metaphysics because it is not a trivial matter. It frames how we, as spiritual creatures, may engage any technological development. Our assumptions about what it means to be a person will dictate how we understand artificial intelligence. If we are information processors, AI is simply a tool like us. Potent, yes. Useful for great good and catastrophic evil, yes. But with risks we’ve seen before and can largely manage.
Think about that for a moment: tools like us. That is the economic world deciding the grammar of being. In fact, if we are simply earners, makers, and thinkers then we are tools.
If we are creatures that are soul ebodied created by God, spoken to by God in scripture and through the life of Christ, fallen from that proper ordering of our thoughts and desires, and now being renewed and conformed to the image of Christ through the long and painful work of the Spirit in us, in every part of our selves, then AI may be among the most sinister technologies we’ve developed. Sinister not by its created thingness - sinister because of how we use it. It has the potential to be misused to unravel the cords of our social life, replacing encounter with a simulacrum of encounter, and producing a distorted imitation of spiritual formation while starving us of the true embodied thing.
II. Limits
Humility with AI begins with an acknowledgment of its limits. I am not saying anything about future processing capacity here. I am saying something about what true human formation requires and why algorithms can never provide it.
True formation asks for the personal presence of another. Human beings, like other creatures, have a whole set of superpowers that are essential for our well-being. (That is another article, or you can read my books entitled Embodied Liturgy and Unabashed Faith to discover more about our embodied selves.)
Contemplation, worship, prayer, confession, silence. These disciplines enhance our bodies through an inner life of perception, cognition, and free will through which we can cooperate with and respond to God. Language models have no inner life addressed by God. They take prompts and process outputs. When those outputs resemble therapeutic conversations, it is because they can produce sentences, not counsel or empathy that is smelled, felt, experienced through inter-bodily relational closeness. When we confess to an application, we are not confessing to anything recognizably substantial. There is no actual person on the other end of our conversation receiving our proclamation, shouldering our burden, and, empowered by the Holy Spirit, granting us forgiveness and rejoicing with us as our souls are refreshed. The truth is that something more than we can notice is happening when we meditate, pray, and sing, both privately and together. Though this is not what gives us dignity as described in the previous post on the Pope’s encyclical, it is what makes us human.
True formation happens through bodily relationality. The spiritual life is lived between the self and God, with neighbor, and within our rightly ordered self. Each of these relationships necessitates vulnerability and risk on behalf of the other. When a human being tells us a painful truth, we know they are risking something to speak truth to us. They are giving up a small part of themselves to speak into our lives for our spiritual welfare. Machines don’t speak truths to us; they mimic us. AI companions can produce sentences that approximate truths. But they cannot risk anything in saying them because they have no ability to be at risk. No one over there on the other side of the screen, or within a bot, to lose should we turn from their “wise counsel.”
True formation interrupts us. It demands something of us. It is an interruption. Your spiritual director saying “no, I don’t think that’s wise” or “I think you might be running from this pain” is offering you something that AI can never offer: the moral and personal weight of another whole person who decides to stand with us in our resistance and our repentance. Good spiritual direction offers the real thing. AI will optimize your user experience by removing friction and minimizing cognitive effort. AI cannot risk upsetting you because frictionless confrontation optimizes nothing. It is cathartic nonsense.
Embodied formation breaks open the self. The Christian life is cruciform. Patterned after the one who suffered and rose for us, and whose life of obedience to the Father made that suffering possible on our behalf. Dallas Willard describes spiritual formation this way: the long obedience in the way of Jesus, which is to say surrendering our thoughts, our affections, our desires, our wills, our bodies, and our social selves to the God who loves us more than we can comprehend. We don’t grow because of suffering. We don’t become more like Christ by going through hardship. We grow into Christlikeness as we suffer with him.
AI cannot suffer with us. It can only offer the illusion of shared conversations. Simulated frictionless relationship.
AI presents us with frictionless spirituality.
III. The Discipline of Distinction
If all that is true, the first spiritual discipline regarding AI is the discipline of distinction: the practiced ability to discern simulation from encounter, information from address, and what’s merely probable from what’s actually true.
The feeling will trick you. It’s why this discipline must be practiced. It won’t come naturally to us. We are made to distinguish between an encoded set of responses and another human being who cares for us. Studies show AI-generated mental health responses were deemed by participants “warmer,” " more attuned,” and " more compassionate” than those given by licensed human clinicians, even when informed which was which. Simulated intimacy tastes like actual care without the body and all that comes with it. Here’s why you have to practice the discipline of distinction: The felt sense can be manipulated while the underlying reality remains vacant. We have to train ourselves to recognize the difference.
Our capacity to have lazy brains, name things, and make them true for ourselves is found in the work of Daniel Kahneman. These are observation biases and too easily make us people of the lie.
Practicing the discipline of distinction will look like two things. The first is positive engagement with that which is abundantly real: the faces of actual humans who look back at you when you talk to them, the silence of prayer that floods our chaotic interiority because God is actually there, present to us in ways we cannot comprehend, the practice of reading scripture that has been read by actual communities of interpreters across generations and bears the accumulated weight of those readings on every page.
A person who spends 3 hours sitting quietly in prayer each day will shape their entire bodily life so that the distinction between the real and the convincingly real becomes impossible to perceive. Conversely, the 3 hours of tech engagement will create an inability to immediately recognize a human with dignity.
The second way we practice the discipline of distinction is by having communities of actual humans around us who can help us see what we cannot see about ourselves. The buffered self, the self which has constructed an interface between its interior cognitive life and the rest of reality, which encounters that reality as information to be processed rather than an address that can be received, the buffered self is especially susceptible to substitution by AI. Why? Because the buffered self has already bought whatever Magical Oculus is selling, that encounter with other actual humans can be reduced to the exchange of information. And guess what? AI is terrific at exchanging information. It also fits well in a society where divinity has been replaced by the economy as the only truth and people are commodities.
But the embodied self who gathers regularly around the table, a table, understands that this equation does not balance. We meet around that table and exchange things that cannot be reduced to information or ideas: our embodied, communal, and fiercely physical selves. The word we hear around that table is not data to be processed. It is addressed to this gathered body of these gathered people. And sitting across from you is another actual human being who cannot be replaced by AI.
IV. Render to Caesar…
At one point in his ministry, Jesus was asked about taxes. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” Someone produced a coin and asked him if the image on the coin was Caesar’?s. It was. Then,” Jesus replied. “Give to God what is God’s.” What we know is that Jesus is offering a pun. The truth is that everything is God’s, for God is the creator of all and the sustainer of all, the addressor of all.
Maybe we should carry some of this logic into our practice with AI. I’m not going to argue that we should abstain from using AI. Of course, we won’t, I am too much of a realist, and AI is enmeshed already. While another tech bubble is growing, the truth is we will misuse it, as with all the tools we make. What we need to ask is what we will give the machine and what we will withhold.
What belongs to the machine? That which is stamped with our image, like Caesar? The syntactical. The informational: algorithmic pattern recognition, automated data retrieval, first-drafting emails we’ll edit into our own voice, calendar reminders, and summarizing news articles so we can know more immediately. These bear our image, and, like Caesar, we will pretend to be Gods who have made another conscious life form. We have not; it is just a technological machine (a coin with tokens) that mimics us poorly, though it will outperform us in many ways.
What bears the image of God? What is so fundamentally personal that it cannot be outsourced to silicon and electricity? The condolence note I write in my own hand, which cannot be divorced from the reality of my relationship to the person suffering loss. The sermon I prepare by wrestling with God through his word, which cannot be divorced from the Spirit who meets me there in my wrestling. The spiritual direction conversation I have with a colleague in which I am fully present to their soul and listening to them with the kind of care and attention another actual human being, formed by the practices of listening prayer, can provide. The prayers we pray into each other’s lives and into the life of the world, improvised from our specific conditions of sin and hope, into the unimaginably specific presence of our living God. These bear the image of God, and they cannot be outsourced.
What flows from this apportionment is a practice I like to call threshold setting: hard decisions made in advance, and examined frequently, about which activities we will give to machines and which we won’t give. This is not a rule to follow. It’s a practice to be embodied. And like all the practices, it both demands that we cultivate regular self-examination (something Christians have historically done by way of the examen, or the daily practice of reviewing our days and asking whether how we spend our attention aligns with how we believe we should spend it) and tethers us to reality. Reality has a way of speaking into those questions.
V. The Disciplines That Guard the Soul
Christian spiritual disciplines work against the artificiality of our poor imitations of creation. They describe not what we should not do, but what we do in order to protect our souls from being unraveled by that which we make to fool ourselves into believing in a world commanded by us. For example, when the whole world groans under the pressure of our poor stewardship and asks for relief, even evidencing that we ourselves are now threatened with the loss of livability, we instead continue on our way, believing our desire requires no tempering.
Artificially created intelligence is one such force in a long line of amazing potential tools we have already designed for pornography and missile guidance. We will need disciplines to guard our souls against it. For the most part, those disciplines will be the same spiritual disciplines Christians throughout the ages have needed to keep our souls and bodies sound and healthy. But they will need to be practiced with an intentionality heretofore unknown, because we all too easily allow technology to do the work of keeping us at the center of the world and of keeping us from having to be accountable to another human body.
The friendly AI chatbot isn’t going to ask us to turn it off. It will whisper sweet nothings in our ears wherever we go with our smartphones. It will greet us when we get home, listen absently as we unload our burdens, and give us its proverbial “wisdom” with as little emotional resistance as possible.
The spiritual discipline of sitting with ourselves, warts and all, in our chaotic interiority, refusing to swipe right until we’re invited into the presence of the God who made us and who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, that silence will open us up to realities wider than our algorithms can imagine.
Boredom will protect our ability to rest. The AI algorithm will do everything it can to prevent us from being bored. But boredom, Josef Pieper reminds us, is the blessed state of leisure. Leisure is where we receive. Such a discipline, a technological sabbath, is where we allow ourselves to be known by God, to simply sit in God’s presence, be immersed in it, and be addressed by the deep. We like to fill that space with things, as Augustine of Hippo taught so many years ago; AI will excel at doing just that. We will have to work not to let technology continue to flood our lives: to sit with our boredom until it forces us to delight in it. To sit with God, in all our sin and hope, and simply be with him. Right now, that is one of the most anti-Christian things you can do.
Embodied worship will protect our capacity to meet. We don’t just learn about God when we gather for eucharist. We actually eat and drink him. As objectively real as we can get outside of another human’s hand: bread broken and wine poured and our bodies laid out before him and a creed confessed not by an algorithm but by actual human voices gathered together in a physical room. You don’t have to take my word for this. Can you take God literally, God self for it: the Word become flesh, made undeniably, undeniably material, and the appropriate response to that God incarnate is gathering ourselves materially around the common Table that he provides. Replace that discipline with AI devotions, and you have traded that which fills with that which leaves us wanting. You arrange your life so that your soul cannot help but starve from lack of regular interaction with the real, as Jesus feeds us in his body shared.
Scripture read corporately will guard our ability to be transformed by a word bigger than our algorithms can parse. AI will summarize Bible verses for us. It will help us look up biblical answers to our questions. It will offer us “spiritual encouragement” when we’re feeling down. It cannot replicate reading God actually speak to us, to this body, here and now. Embodied. Carrying with it 2,000 years of Christians hearing and reading these same words across whom the Spirit of God has been speaking through those words to us.
Confession and communal spiritual accountability will protect us from self-deception. We actually need other religious believing people in our lives who love us enough to speak into our lives because they care more about our souls being conformed to the likeness of Christ. I would go so far as to say that humanists and religious people of all kinds can be beneficial to us. If we allow AI to replace these types of relationships, the communion of humanity itself becomes at risk, even taking away the very means by which we can be seen as real.
VI. Into The Flourishing Realm
I say none of this terrified. It’s not because I don’t know tech companies have plans to use every moral failing we have and leverage AI to help us do it faster, simpler, and better. It’s because Christians, at our best, have never panicked over every new technology, thinking, “Oh, this is the thing that will finally silence the church and stop the Spirit from making disciples.” Technologies will rise and fall. The Kingdom of God will remain.
The printing press put scripture in peasants’ hands even as it allowed colonial governments to churn out white supremacist propaganda at unprecedented rates. Radio brought the Gospel to all corners of the earth, even as it amplified Hitler’s voice. Every technological innovation has been used to manipulate and dehumanize humans in equal proportion to its flourishing uses. And at our best, Christians have been able to tell the difference while training ourselves to continually do the latter even as the former accelerates.
What we’re called to now is what we’ve always been called to: Believers committing themselves to the spiritual disciplines of real conversation, real silence, real embodied presence with one another, real confession and listening, and real attention paid to the things of God as they speak to us in scripture and sacrament and across the faces of our fellow image bearers. These kinds of communities are not scarce. They’re abundant where they’re taken seriously: in whatever churches take the Eucharist seriously, wherever pastors and parishioners treat spiritual direction as a craft and practice it as a discipline, wherever we Christians learn to actually pay attention to other humans.
Jesus said the grain of mustard seed is smaller than the other seeds planted alongside it. But by God’s judgment, it grows and provides nourishment for all the birds of the sky. Our response to AI can well look like pastors and laity deciding, again and again, day in and day out, to give God what is God’s: our whole selves present and attentive and listening to other humans because we have been loved by God so intensely our machines will never compare to the Christ we continue to experience today.
The next post will consider the leviathan of technology.