Day: February 1, 2026

“A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel”

I don’t know which I find more disconcerting, the question “Can AI help us find God?” or the observation that occasioned the question, namely, a study claiming that “a majority of sermons in Christian churches are likely co-written with AI” (The Free Press, Jan. 28, 2026). Not mine. The idea that “AI knows more about the Bible than most human specialists” is philosophically mistaken; at best, AI is a tool for information gathering and one which is entirely dependent on what is digitally available, but information or data is not knowledge. AI knows nothing. There is no knower, thus to outsource one’s own thinking in having AI write a homily, is to my mind, sad, unethical, and undermines one’s own humanity.

Knowledge should be shared, to be sure, but in a transparent and open fashion. Sermons are about our engagement together with the Scriptures, wrestling with the understanding of heart and mind about spiritual matters which cannot be reduced to a technique or technological device. The question “Can AI help us find God?” reveals a profound spiritual problem emphasized over and over again in the Scriptures. It is simply a form of idolatry against which there is no end of denunciations in the various books of the Scriptures and with great clarity and even humour.

“Shall the ax vaunt itself over him who hews with it, or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it? As if a rod should wield him who lifts it, or as if a staff should lift him who is not wood!” This is but one example from Isaiah (Is. 10. 15) who is fully aware of the problem of confusing the Creator and the created and by extension the tool and the maker of the tool. It is wisdom to realize the age-old problem. We are the makers of the tools or technology which unmake us. It is really about us, about ourselves as knowers negating the very thing that makes us human as spiritual beings who know and love. We are made in the image of God. There is a kind of ontological line that cannot be erased between the Creator and creation, between the maker and the thing made, which all of our technological exuberance overlooks and in folly denies.

There is a wonderful story about the Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse who spent some of his summers in Europe and occasionally went to Anglican Churches in Europe; this was after the internet but before AI. Once he was at a service where he heard a sermon of his own, though unacknowledged by the preacher! At the end of the service, he simply said to the preacher four devastating words: “I am Robert Crouse.” Preachers draw upon other preachers, to be sure, but there is the principle of honouring your sources. And to be sure, in our classical Anglican heritage, there are The Books of Homilies which were required to be read or preached by those who were not licensed to preach themselves. But they weren’t pretending that it was their own work.

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