Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century abbess and mystic, wrote nearly 80 songs and sang them too, despite claiming never to have received formal instruction in music or composition—or, for that matter, in reading, writing, or theology.
"Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me," she wrote. "My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God."
Hildegard's musical gifts and her visions, apparently "reflections of the living light" breathed into her soul by God during her waking moments, have been regarded as affirmation that God spoke through even the meekest and most unlearned of his creations, as she often referred to herself. The idea that God's message could be delivered by any means, including those beyond our abilities of foresight or comprehension, has long formed a core aspect of Christian traditions steeped in defying the logic and temptation of crude and visible power.
But what if God's message was delivered, in part, by ChatGPT?
Like Hildegard, artificial intelligence tools do not undergo formal religious training. Whether they are touched by a divine spark, and to what degree they should be used in helping pastors write and deliver their homilies, is the subject of much more debate, confusion and ambiguity.
Our humanity “enables us to look at things with God’s eyes, to see connections, situations, events and to uncover their real meaning,” Pope Francis said last year. “Without this kind of wisdom, life becomes bland.”
"Such wisdom cannot be sought from machines," he added.
The necessity of effort, some pastors say, is what distinguishes ethical use of AI from unethical use, and it can be easy for a congregation to sense something amiss.
In December, the Vatican issued a set of guidelines concerning the use of AI in which they acknowledged that technology is “a gift of human creativity, which itself is a gift from God” — in essence, AI has theological virtue only by proxy. AI technology, of course, is both a creation in concept and its usual function relies on human input and a vast constellation of information humans have put on the internet. But that is not enough, according to the guidelines; humans must, by moral and spiritual imperative, ensure that AI development remains anthropocentric, or centered on the human mind and soul.
The necessity of effort, some pastors say, is what distinguishes ethical use of AI from unethical use, and it can be easy for a congregation to sense something amiss in what should be something more profound and emphatic than a sermon that can be generated by AI, even a particularly educational one in the most rote sense of the word.
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"AI by itself can certainly try to emulate human intelligence, but a lot of people would say that empathy can come only from humans," Braden Molhoek, a professor of science and religion at the Graduate Theological Union, told Salon. "For most texts longer than an abstract, the average person would be able to tell the difference roughly half the time."
Of course, simple ignorance by part of an audience is not proof that they're receiving the same value from an AI sermon as a human sermon — as frogs in the idiomatic frying pan know, it is always possible to miss something important without being conscious of the fact.
The advent of AI technology has raised questions, hopes and fears over all the potential ways it can be applied to human activity, from creating dinner menus to communicating with whales. For now, AI-friendly pastors have largely been using it to seek quick clarifications, check for grammar, or convey visual messages. But proximate to the easy lure of a theoretically all-obedient tool and the pressure of vocational demands, many religious leaders have expressed concerns that more innocuous uses of AI could rapidly escalate into a surrender of God's gifts into the custody of a machine.
According to some pastors and theologians who spoke to Salon, using AI to write parts of a text, conduct extensive research, or otherwise shape a homily is not just a hypothetical, but also an emerging reality.
Many religious leaders have expressed concerns that more innocuous uses of AI could rapidly escalate into a surrender of God's gifts into the custody of a machine.
Julian DeShazier, the senior pastor at the University Church in Hyde Park, Chicago, told Salon that the sense he has from conversations with colleagues is that those who rely on ChatGPT don't have enough time for what they view as a "less important part of their job," at least compared to administering a church or leading charitable activities. While DeShazier agreed that those other responsibilities are meaningful in their own right, he also argued that a homily delivered in a Sunday service stands alone as an emotional sacrament that nurtures the souls of his congregants and rests on the absolute trust they put on their pastor — trust that can be deeply shaken by a pastor’s misuse of technology.
"When I share an insight on a particular text or situation happening out in the world and in their personal lives, I'm owning that," he said. "I'm owning that anger about a war that's happening, what's happening on campus to students, I'm owning all that as something that I'm willing to get behind. If you just run it through ChatGPT, on the other hand, it can become something like emotional manipulation because it's just a machine telling you what you should feel and how you should say you feel."
Concerns over ChatGPT texts amounting to plagiarism of sources trawled from the internet, along with the possibility of unbalanced perspectives or misinformation caught in the haul, occupy the forefront of ethical debates over its use in general. In the world of religion, the potential for AI technology to excise the soul from a text is refocusing attention on what a homily is at its essence.
"Sermons are not an academic lecture. They are about encounter with God, and also about encounter with the world and the world God loves and God's people mediated through this bridge of a text," Jerusha Neal, a professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School, told Salon.
Allowing ChatGPT to act as a proxy for a human, she said, severs the connection between congregants and the voice of the risen Christ, because an AI text generator cannot ever truly know its congregation, let alone deliver a sermon as an act of love to them. Many Christians hold that because the word of God is infinite, even an ancient text like the Bible can be used to address problems and questions in the modern world and unto the end of time.
But even the infinite word of God cannot reach some people if its messenger is insensate to their needs. And when the connection is severed, some pastors argue, people will be deprived of spiritual and moral guidance, as well as their sense of communal meaning.
A church parishioner watches a laptop inside Liverpool Parish Church. (Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)"One of the sort of biblical touchstones of the work of Christ through the work of the Spirit is that it often happens in community and it happens in deep listening together," Neal said. "It's not just something that we do all by ourselves. And one of the things that worries me about AI is that it creates a sermon out of a context of that gathered group of people who are all bringing particular questions at a particular time, at a particular place, to the scriptural text."
Generally, pastors who regularly use AI to carry much of their homiletic burdens have not volunteered to speak with news outlets covering this phenomenon — one Texas pastor who did receive media attention for trying a completely ChatGPT-generated sermon in his church stressed that he would never do it again. While such reluctance might stem from concerns over privacy or damaging relationships with their congregations, experts have noted that AI is used especially frequently by novice pastors and seminary students who are not yet fully confident in their communication abilities or don't have an extensive background in divinity.
In those cases, AI is a way to "make accessible difficult specialized knowledge," said Neal — though it's difficult to predict whether people using AI at the beginning of their vocation will become dependent on it in the long term.
In the world of religion, the potential for AI technology to excise the soul from a text is refocusing attention on what a homily is at its essence.
On the other hand, there are plenty of pastors who openly praise using AI as a starting place or as a tool for specific kinds of aid, such as searching for a biblical quote to reinforce a chosen theme or translating a sermon into multiple languages in real time — the kinds of tasks usually assigned to an assistant, whether in the flesh or in code, in order to make life easier for busy people.
AI, rather than providing the text of the sermon itself, can potentially offer useful advice directly to the pastor, Molhoek told Salon.
"If you were able to feed all of your previously written sermons into an AI and train it, it could maybe give you a sense of what your own voice or what your own perspective is when looking at a new situation," he explained. "It could also be a sounding board in how to help you in the writing process, not to do the writing for you, but to maybe give insights and say, 'well, this is how you've talked about other things that might be related.'"
According to Jason Moore, a pastor who runs a technology-friendly ministry called Midnight Oil Productions, if the goal is to retain a human element in their product, then pastors unsure about how to approach AI tools within responsible limits should treat them "like humans rather than computers."
"The best interactions with AI are a conversation, not just a command or a query. So a command or a query is telling the bot, 'write me a sermon' — what we should be doing is telling it, 'I'm writing a sermon about this, and I would like to know what was happening in twenty-first century culture around this particular topic,'" he told Salon. "If you don't bring enough of your soul to the conversation, then you get soulless outputs from the technology, and it's easy to sniff out."
In some cases, though, it's fine for a part of the homily to smell distinctly like AI, as long as it's not the written material itself that's the source. Moore, a proponent of using digital tools in church services, says that in the same vein as AI merely helping a pastor fact-check rather than write a text, it can supplement an existing sermon by conveying visual messages if existing images do not work.
"The church has used images for a very long time through stained glass and other kinds of art. AI can provide a different canvas for each week and bring stories to life in a whole new way," he said, pointing to images that showed a variety of miracles, de-abstracted concepts and specific prompts like a Native American man shaping a clay bowl.
AI-generated images, however, can be considered a separate issue from the questions revolving around time-strapped pastors, because it does not actually reduce the amount of work — no one typically expects them to also be a painter or even to use visual aid at all. While there might not be a painless solution to this problem, Neal warns that trying to outsource too much of their homilitic duties might be the worst-case scenario.
A homily is not just a service provided for worshipers, she explained, but also a process by which pastors express their feelings, explore their own questions, and find company in the congregation to whom their text is addressed: "When you approach preaching as a sacramental act, it also begins to heal many of the other bruises that you get in ministry — the bruise of feeling lonely, or the bruise of feeling disregarded, or the bruise of feeling misunderstood, or the bruise of the kind of a brittleness of heart and instead, you find that the bread at the communion table is also for you."
No, she later clarified, ChatGPT does not know how to make sacramental bread.
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