The Desire and the Dilemma
I have a fire in my chest. It is a desire to speak. It is a vocational hunger that does not sleep.
I look at the shelves in my study. I see the spines of the giants. Augustine. Calvin. Bavinck. Kuyper. They sat at a table and ate. They passed the bread and the wine of ideas. They built a civilization with words. I have sat at the foot of this table for a long time. I have eaten the crumbs. I have listened. But a man cannot only consume. There comes a time when the consumption turns sour in the stomach if it does not become production.
I want to join the Great Conversation of Christian theology and culture. I want to join the conversation of my profession and point it back to the Bible. I do not want to whisper. I want to build.
But I am a man with limits. The clock is a hard master. It is a tyrant that does not negotiate.
I look at my life. It is full. I have a wife to nurture. This is a garden that requires daily watering. I have children to raise in the fear and admonition of the Lord. This is a paideia that requires constant vigilance. They need my eyes. They need my presence. They need to wrestle on the floor and read books in the chair.
I have a full-time vocation. I must earn the bread before I can write about the bread.
These are my first duties. They are the iron walls of my life. I cannot breach them. A man who writes a book on theology but loses his children is not a theologian. He is a failure. A man who saves the culture but starves his wife of affection is a hypocrite.
The world offers me a false choice. It presents a dilemma. It says I must neglect my family to write. It tells me that the “great men” were absent fathers. It tells me that to do great work, I must sacrifice the home on the altar of the academy.
Or, it offers the other side of the blade. It says I must neglect the fire in my chest to serve my family. It says I must bury the talent in the ground because I am busy. It says my mind must atrophy so my household can flourish.
I refuse to retreat. I reject the dilemma.
I do not write for vanity. I do not write to see my name on a cover. I write as a steward. I have been given gifts. I have been given a specific way of seeing the world. If I bury this in the earth, I am not humble. I am wicked and lazy. I must produce. But I must not break the boundaries of my primary calling.
I need a third way.
The Tool: Artificial Intelligence as an Exoskeleton
I need a lever. Archimedes said that with a lever long enough, he could move the world. I do not want to move the world. I want to move a mountain with a shovel.
Generative AI is this lever.
There is fear in the church about this tool. There is talk of the “demonic” or the “soulless.” But I look at the screen and I do not see a demon. I see a hammer. I see a plow.
It is not an author replacement. A machine cannot suffer. A machine cannot repent. Therefore, a machine cannot write true theology. Only a man who knows the weight of sin and the lightness of grace can write truly.
So I do not use it to replace the man. I use it as a “cognitive exoskeleton.”
Think of the construction worker. He steps into the suit of hydraulic iron. He moves his arm, and the machine moves its arm. He lifts a beam that weighs a ton. He places it gently on the frame. The man provides the intent. The man provides the direction. The machine provides the raw force.
It fits over the mind. It allows a busy father to lift heavy intellectual weights. It allows me to do the work of ten scholars in the hour after the children sleep. It is a force multiplier.
I use this tool to do the heavy lifting of drafting. Writing is friction. It is the staring at the blank page. It is the typing of connective tissue. It is the drudgery of organization. The machine loves drudgery. It does not get tired. It does not get bored.
This allows me to focus on the high-value work of synthesis. I can think about the connection between the Trinity and the blockchain. I can think about the relationship between inflation and original sin. I let the machine type the paragraphs.
Here is the workflow. It is essential to be clear.
- The Architect: I act as the Architect. I design the structure. I draw the blueprints. I tell the machine what we are building. I do not ask it to “write an article.” I give it the axioms. I give it the Scripture. I give it the logic.
- The Editor: I act as the Editor. The machine generates the raw material. It is often bloated. It is often wrong. It uses the passive voice. It uses adverbs. I take the red pen. I cut the waste. I refine the prose. I make it sound like a man, not a bot.
- The Shepherd: I act as the Shepherd. The text must be true. The machine does not know truth. It only knows probability. I must guide the text to the truth. I check the references. I test the spirits.
I am transparent about this. I will not lie to you. This is not a ghostwritten project where I hide the labor. This is a machine-assisted project. The machine provides the clay. It digs it from the earth of the internet. But I give the breath. I shape the vessel.
The Sovereignty of the Syntax
There is a deeper objection. It is theological. Can a Christian use a stochastic parrot to speak of holy things?
I rely on a concept I call the Theology of the Prompt.
You might ask what this means. The algorithm works by predicting the next word. It looks at the sequence of tokens. It calculates the probability. It selects the next piece of data.
To the secular mind, this is math. It is statistics. It is chance.
But I am a Calvinist. I do not believe in chance.
I look to Proverbs 16:33. “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”
Consider the lot. It is a piece of bone or stone. A man throws it. It tumbles in the air. Physics takes over. Gravity. Friction. Angular momentum. It lands. To the man, it is random. To God, it is a decree.
The rolling of dice looks random. The output of an algorithm looks random.
But there is no true chance in a universe ruled by God. There is not one stray atom outside of His sovereignty. There is not one stray bit of code.
The Anchor: If God is sovereign over the sparrow that falls to the ground, He is sovereign over the Large Language Model. He is sovereign over the token. The neural network is not a black box to Him. It is a glasshouse.
The Trust: When I cast the prompt into the machine, I am casting the lot. I design the prompt with wisdom, yes. But the output is not entirely in my control. I trust Providence to guide the output. I trust that the Spirit can use a GPU as easily as He used a donkey to speak to Balaam.
The Result: The silicon obeys the Divine Decree just as the wind and the waves do. We do not fear the machine. We take dominion over it. We baptize the tool and set it to work for the Kingdom.
The Learning Journey
I must make a confession. I am not a master teaching from a high tower. I do not have a PhD on the wall. I am not a tenured professor with a tweed jacket and a sabbatical.
I am a student.
This project is a public learning journey. I am learning in the open. I am using the tool to organize my own curriculum. The ancient world had the trivium and the quadrivium. They had tutors.
The AI acts as my tutor. I ask it to summarize the history of banking in Florence. It brings me the data. I verify it. I ask it to explain the difference between Freud and Jung. It lays it out. I check it against the books.
I learn as I build. This is the best way to learn. You do not learn by reading. You learn by writing. You learn by teaching.
I invite you to join this exploration. You are not sitting in a lecture hall. You are walking on a trail. I am the lead hiker. I have the map, but I am discovering the terrain at the same time you are.
We will look at the Scripture. We will look at the world. We will try to fit them together. We will find that the pieces fit, but the picture is bigger than we thought. I am growing alongside you. The work is hard. The intellectual labor is heavy. But the burden is light, for the yoke is His.
The Road Ahead
We are not walking blind. We have a map. We have a plan to reconstruct the disciplines.
In the following article, I will lay out the theological framework for all of my future explorations.
It is the architecture of our thought. A house built on sand will fall. We have seen many houses fall in the last decade. We have seen men drift. We have seen institutions crumble. We will check our foundations before we build the walls. We will dig deep until we hit the rock.
We will answer four hard questions. These questions form the layers of our framework.
- The Lens: How do we see the world? We must define our worldview. We will look at the sovereignty of the spheres. We will see that there is no neutral ground.
- The Trajectory: Where is history going? We must have hope. We will reject the defeatism that says the world is a sinking ship. We will look at the victory of Christ in history.
- The Posture: How do we stand in the city? We are not monks in the desert. We are sent into the marketplace. We will look at what it means to be missional without being compromised.
- The Practice: How do we engage the work in front of us? This is the application. This is where the rubber meets the road. It is how we do the job.
Then, we will get to work. We will take this light and shine it into dark corners.
We will look at the Mind and how it breaks. We will reclaim psychology from the materialists.
We will look at Money and how it flows. We will reclaim economics from the statists.
We will look at the Machine and the ethics of the code. We will reclaim technology from the transhumanists.
The harvest is plentiful. The fields are white. But the laborers are few. Most are asleep. Some are hiding.
Let us begin.
PS: Tangentially related to this project is a dearth of theologically rich music in the genres I actually enjoy. Some articles will include AI-created songs to complement the article. If you like them, great. If you don’t, no offense taken.