So, there was a lot in the news this week, and when I say a lot, I mean perhaps two of the biggest pieces of news in US History happened this week. President Trump was indicted after charges were brought by the Biden DOJ. And President Biden apparently, according to a document that the FBI tried pretty hard to hide and pretend didn’t exist, was involved in a bribery scandal involving his son Hunter and the Ukrainian government.
Both of these are monumental bombshells, and I will get to these in the future, especially as more details emerge.
But for now I want to look at two pieces of religion news that I think paint a fascinating picture of where the church is at this present moment.
First, a story out of Germany and this has been edited for length.
AI-powered church service in Germany draws a large crowd
Benj Edwards Ars Technica
On Friday, over 300 people attended an experimental ChatGPT-powered church service at St. Paul’s church in the Bavarian town of Fürth, Germany. The 40-minute sermon included text generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot and delivered by avatars on a television screen above the altar.
The chatbot, initially personified as a bearded man with a fixed expression and monotone voice, addressed the audience by proclaiming, “Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany.”
The unusual service took place as part of … an event held biennially in Germany that draws tens of thousands of attendees. The service… was the brainchild of Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna. Simmerlein told the Associated Press that the service was "about 98 percent from the machine."
“I told the artificial intelligence, ‘We are at the church congress, you are a preacher … what would a church service look like?’”
Reactions to the machine-led service were mixed. The AP reports that the computer avatars occasionally drew unintentional laughter for deadpan delivery. Others took the event more seriously, but not necessarily positively. Some congregants, like Heiderose Schmidt, a 54-year-old IT professional, found the avatar's lack of emotions and fast, monotonous speech off-putting, remarking, "There was no heart and no soul."
Others, like Marc Jansen, a 31-year-old Lutheran pastor, had a more positive outlook. "I had actually imagined it to be worse. But I was positively surprised how well it worked. Also, the language of the AI worked well, even though it was still a bit bumpy at times," said Jansen.
Simmerlein told the AP that his intention wasn't to replace religious leaders but to utilize AI as a tool that could assist them. For instance, AI could provide ideas for upcoming sermons, or it could expedite the sermon-writing process, freeing up pastors to devote more time to individual spiritual guidance.
But while the wisdom of outsourcing spiritual wisdom to a machine is an open question, Simmerlein frames it more like a hyperbolic necessity. “Artificial intelligence will increasingly take over our lives, in all its facets," he told the AP. "And that’s why it’s useful to learn to deal with it."
Now a story out of New Orleans. And it has been edited for length.
Southern Baptists say no to women pastors, uphold expulsion of Saddleback megachurch
Jason DeRose NPR
The Southern Baptist Convention voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to uphold earlier decisions to expel two churches because they have women pastors.
The decision came during the group's annual meeting in New Orleans.
The SBC's 2000 statement of faith, called Baptist Faith and Message, asserts that only qualified men can serve as pastors, and the nearly 13,000 voters, who are called "messengers," voted to uphold the churches' removals.
Defending the churches' expulsions was prominent SBC theologian and seminary president Albert Mohler.
He argued that the Bible restricts the role of pastor to men only.
"The issue of women serving in the pastorate," he said, "is an issue of fundamental Biblical authority that does violate both the doctrine and the order of the Southern Baptist Convention."
As Mohler spoke, voters interrupted him multiple times with applause in support of his position.
The women at Fern Creek and Saddleback will continue to serve as pastors there, but their congregations are no longer part of the Southern Baptist Convention.
After upholding the expulsions, messengers in New Orleans voted by a two-thirds majority to amend their constitution to state that the Southern Baptist Convention "Affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder."
The SBC's executive committee had urged messengers to not amend the constitution because it said the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message was already clear on the restriction against women holding the title pastor. That document includes the sentence "The office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture."
In order to go into effect, the amendment will need to be voted on a second time and pass by a two-thirds majority at the Southern Baptist meeting next year.
Now, I chose these two stories over all the other things in the news this week, as well as some pretty cool human interest stories, because I thought that these two pieces together represent the diverging paths of contemporary Christianity.
It is, in many ways, A Tale of Two Cities…or at least conventions. In New Orleans we have an organization that has been trending towards liberalism for quite a while that is now reaffirming its conservative bona fides. In Fürth a convention celebrates perhaps the least conservative trend in Christianity.
Now, not only are these two conventions in two cities that are representative of two opposing trends in Christianity, but these trends seem to be forcing both extremes to become more extreme.
You see, often, if not most of the time, when there are theological debates the two opposing sides are pulling away from eachother, but still in tension with eachother. And the mutual pulling keeps them both from spreading any further away and can actually draw both closer to the middle.
Think about a tug of war against two equally matched sides. The people are pulling against eachother, yes. But as long as they keep pulling they’re keeping the other side from running away. For example, think about the debates in the early church about the Trinity. On one hand you had Christians who were effectively falling into tritheism, the Persons of the Trinity were so distinct that they were effectively 3 different Gods. On the other hand there were those who treated the Unity of the Persons as so important that the Persons were effectively not individual Persons, but just modes of being. They pulled against eachother, but in pulling nobody could get too far afield. They kept eachother in line. In philosophical terms this is called a dialectic. You have a thesis an antithesis and a synthesis. And it’s very, very common.
However, not all debates and trends are that way. Sometimes rather than a tug of war we see a battle of one-upsmanship. The left is so left that the right goes farther right which causes the left to go farther left and so on and so forth. This happens a lot when politics gets more personal than philosophical.
You see there are two trends and these two trends are mutually driving eachother.
On one hand there is futurism and on the other is traditionalism. I don’t say liberalism and conservatism because while those terms may have some overlap, they really don’t apply. These trends moreover are not limited to individual denominations or certain theological cliques. Rather they are gross trends that churches tend to align with.
Futurism and traditionalism are not about left and right—or at least that’s not the primary driver. Yes churches into futurism may be more likely to be a little left-leaning, but not necessarily so. And there are a lot of traditionalist churches that are quite liberal. Sure, on the whole, left and right overlap, but that’s not really the issue.
What’s going on is that we are living in a rapidly changing society—a society changing faster than people can keep up with—and churches and Christians do not know how to integrate their lives into this changing world and how their faith factors in. And at times of great upset, and social change people rarely are able to carefully assess the changes and try to find a way of dealing with that change in a way that is moderated and healthy in the short term. Rather, people tend to either become hyper-optimistic about the change, and they wish to accelerate the pace of change so as to sooner arrive in Utopia. OR, they becomes hyper-pessimistic and become extremely conservative—reactionary is the word the Commies use—as they attempt to drag their feet as hard as possible to slow the descent into dystopia. Sadly, the Utopianism of the futurists leads to even more drastic Dystopian dread among the pessimistic traditionalists and this angst and its accordant actions cause the Utopians to grow more aggressive in bringing in their preferred future and on and on it goes.
Now, the rightward push in the SBC is not, in my opinion, entirely about a reaction against futurism—but it’s not NOT about that. Big organizations like the SBC are not going to have large scale trends for one and only one reason. But it may be a bellwether, along with the schism in the Anglican and United Methodist Churches. There is a rightward push. And entailed in that broad rightward push is a push towards traditionalism.
Is it entirely about traditionalism? No. But that’s a part of it. We see this also in the Trad-Wife trends. At a more political level RR Reno has described this in his concept of the Return of the Strong Gods. Nationalism and Populism Reno argued would be major factors in the future. And since he wrote in 2017 he has been proved a prophet. Eastern European countries, in particular Hungary, are entering into what may be a European Renaissance, especially if other Populist and Nationalist countries can get their birth rates about 2.1. Eastern Europe is rising—not there yet, but rising.
However, the futurist trends are nothing to be ignored. The move towards futurism, towards a technocratic Utopia is not a new one, but with AI technology it may finally be attainable. This future looks different to different people, depending on whom you ask, but, in general, it seems that there is a fundamental trust in the ability of science and technology to eradicate disease, eradicate sadness, eradicate crime, eradicate hate, and ensure maximal human flourishing.
We can see these trends everywhere and I won’t go into a laundry list of examples, but there are many who believe that science and technology will bring us to a Utopia.
All these trends can be looked at and analyzed in isolation—and they should!—but that doesn’t mean that the motives on the individual and societal levels that drive these trends exist in isolation—they never do!
People are moving further into their traditionalism and further into their futurism and these moves are exacerbated by eachother. The futurist becomes more Utopian as a response to the traditionalist becoming more traditionalist which causes the traditionalist to become even more traditionalist and on and on it goes.
And the thing is that both sides have, theoretically, laudable goals. On one hand the futurists are right. Science and technology do have the power to improve life and increase human flourishing. On the other hand the traditionalists are right that all technology comes at a cost and not everyone is willing to pay that cost.
The Christian has to learn how to navigate this changing world and we can’t do it by rushing headlong into the void. Christianity will always have moral imperatives—but that doesn’t mean that Christianity will always be traditionalist. Christianity was futurist when it opposed abortion in the ancient Roman empire. Christianity was futurist when it stood against slavery and ended the African slave trade and when abolitionists in American ended slavery in America. Christians were futurist in their concern for civil rights and, I’ll say it, social justice. Christianity has also been traditionalist. It was traditionalist when it rejected the heretics, and when it stood against Liberalism and Modernism, when it stood against Communism, when it now stands against abortion and stands for family values, patriotism, and equal justice under law.
Christianity is not fundamentally traditionalist or futurist. Christianity is not, by default in favor of or opposed to the status quo—it all depends on what the status quo IS.
And so Christians need to be careful in considering how we navigate these waters. We must hold to an Idealism, tempered by Realism, without tripping into Cynicism. Because it’s easy for the idealist whose gotten a taste of reality to become a cynic. But cynicism is another word for despair and despair is a sin.
Christians don’t despair and therefore we don’t become cynical. Rather we seek to look at everything in the cold light of day and use the wisdom God gave us.
And so, we must learn to be shrewd as serpents and gentle as doves. We need to reject Chatbot pastors, but we mustn’t burn our computers and despise anything that might bring about change, either. Technologies shouldn’t simply be utilized by churches because they’re the next big thing, but neither should they be rejected because they’re the next big thing.
We should reject Chatbot pastors not because Chatbot pastors won’t be able to pastor well—but because they will pastor too well! They will be perfect and exactly what we want and they will never sin against us and they will always know exactly how to speak to us so that we never fight and the sermons are always perfect and personal. Chatbot pastor will know what we need before we need it, never gets sick, never gets lazy, always answers the phone, never forgets your dog’s name. Chatbot pastor is perfect.
And that means you never have to forgive him. You never have to learn to love someone who’s failed you. You never have to forgive someone of his frailties and meanness and pettiness and ridiculousness and pride and ego and selfishness.
Chatbot pastor is perfect—which means that he’s completely inadequate. Chatbot pastor is bad for the same reason that Robot Girlfriends are a bad idea. For the same reason that cats aren’t kids.
Because it isn’t real. Because it’s too good. Because it never forces us to grow.
There is a place for AI in the church. But it isn’t behind the pulpit.
I don’t know how exactly the church should move forwards. But I do know that just because the orthodox faith may TEND to side with the traditionalists today doesn’t mean we will in 10 years. And it doesn’t mean that the futurists are wrong about everything.
Mostly what we need is wisdom. It’s a good thing God promises to give it to those who ask.