Is AI Dangerous for Christians?

We live in a rapidly changing world. There are new tools we never would have imagined. AI can make many things very easy. But is it good? Is it dangerous for Christians? Should we use it for Bible study? We explore those questions today.

Is AI Dangerous? Using AI for Bible Study and Preaching

In the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking a lot about AI. Is it good? Is it bad? Should we use it for Bible study or preaching or teaching? I’ve been increasingly concerned about how Christians might use this powerful tool. So I’m going to share a few of my thoughts on AI: its dangers, its benefits, good use cases, bad use cases, specifically around using AI for Bible study. Other people a lot smarter than me have talked about AI in general, but I want to focus on this particular case.

The Dangers of AI

1. Laziness

AI is powerful. It can immediately give you an entire Bible study or sermon with just a few short prompts. It can be very tempting to do that, especially if you’re busy or tired. But once you do it once, it becomes easier to do it again and again, and then it becomes a habit. My suggestion is don’t ever do it for that purpose, even one time.

In 2 Timothy 2:15 it says, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” We answer to God as teachers for how we study his word. It tells us that we are a worker. We are to work, not to outsource that work to others. And we should work in such a way that we have no need to be ashamed, and we should learn how to discern and rightly handle God’s word on our own.

A sermon or a Bible teaching is not just about sharing information or presenting a lecture. It’s a process. It’s a process of studying God’s word and digging into it. In Proverbs 25:2 it says, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”

God wants us to work. And there’s a lot of benefit in that work. Studying scripture requires meditating on it, reading it, asking questions about it, researching it. That process is very beneficial to the preacher, to the teacher, to the Bible study student. It’s beneficial to you personally, and in fact it would be beneficial to those whom you seek to share with. God gave us a mind and we should use it. Satan often tempts us by saying this is easy, this is fast. But the easy way is rarely the best way.

2. No Holy Spirit

AI is empty, dead, spiritually void. AI does not have the Holy Spirit. A good preacher or teacher is not just presenting information. You’re not just giving a lecture, not just reading the ingredients off the back of a product label. You’re connected to the vine that is Christ. You should do that in prayer. You should dig deep. You’re being led by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one who convicts and who guides you. The best messages are those when the preacher or teacher is praying and seeking the Lord and God is leading him as he studies the text.

There have been many times when I’ve been thinking about what to preach or teach at a meeting, what devotion to have with a group. As I pray and listen and wait for the Holy Spirit’s leading, again and again he brings up a verse, a passage, a point that I can share. And a lot of times people have said that they felt the Holy Spirit in that, that it was just what they needed to hear. That’s not because of me. That’s because of the Holy Spirit. Jesus promised to send a helper, the Holy Spirit, and that is true. He does. So we should depend on him, not on AI.

3. Lies, Fallacies, and Bias

AI is often wrong. The word often used for it is “hallucinates.” Basically, it makes up information. AI is a compilation of most of what people have written throughout history. People are often wrong. People are sinners, they make mistakes, and all of those mistakes come into AI. If people are wrong, then AI can be wrong. And now AI even makes up information, puts it out there, and then other AI reads the hallucination of the first AI, regurgitates it, and it becomes a vicious cycle of creating fake things, fake news, and spreading it around to the point where people actually believe it.

Once I was doing some research looking for an illustration about missionaries who were martyred. Just to test it out, I asked AI to tell me about three Protestant missionaries who were martyred in the last 100 years. It gave me a record of a couple, with their names, dates of birth, where they were from. It said they went to Cambodia, died under the evil dictatorship there, told me how they died, why they were martyred, and the effect it had on the church. But as I was reading this I was skeptical, so I double-checked it and found it wasn’t true. It was totally fictitious. When I challenged the AI on it, it essentially thanked me for catching the error. The little detail being that it had completely fabricated a story when I asked for real historical information. It didn’t say it was making something up. It just presented it as truth. If you’re not careful, you will take things that are lies and then preach or teach them to other people, which will cause you to lose credibility as a teacher of the word, and worse, it could mislead the flock.

Even beyond the hallucinations, most AI is built by many unbelievers. They don’t believe God, they don’t believe the Bible, and so their bias and their prejudices and their worldview are often baked into AI. Exodus 23:2 says, “You shall not fall in with the many to do evil.” Some translations say you should not follow a crowd to do evil. The majority is often wrong. Just because the majority does something, teaches something, or believes something doesn’t mean it’s right.

I’ve gone back and forth with AI on evolution, asking about the origins of the world just to see what presumptions were baked in. Basically, it presented evolution as being true. After a long process of challenging it, it eventually admitted that it forms opinions based on what the majority believes or what the consensus is. But the consensus can often be wrong.

4. Plagiarizing and Stealing

Plagiarizing is widely viewed as unethical, except apparently for AI. AI constantly takes what people have created, whether written works, music, or art, slightly changes it, spins it, and passes it off as unique, without giving credit to the actual authors. It can be a form of stealing or plagiarizing, especially when we just take things and pass them off as our own.

5. Outsourcing Creativity

That goes together with laziness. We stop using the minds God has given us. We lose our creativity, we lose our cognitive ability, and just outsource that to AI.

6. Intellectual Dishonesty

This is a danger for pastors and Bible teachers specifically. If we preach or teach a message as if it was our own when in fact AI created it, that is intellectual dishonesty. Just as you shouldn’t buy a sermon off the internet and preach it as if it is yours, or copy someone else’s sermon and preach it as if it is yours, neither should you copy large chunks from AI and preach or teach it as if it is yours. God calls preachers and teachers of the word to a high standard. We should hold ourselves to that standard.

Good Use Cases for AI

That’s not to say that every single use case of AI when studying the Bible is bad. There are some good use cases, and I’ll say that I have used AI for all of these at some point.

Research

AI has a huge amount of information readily available. Think of a library of all the books in human history where you can search everything with one click. You can use that to find quotes, historical examples, background information. I can say, “Tell me the historical background of Corinth at the time Paul wrote to it,” and then learn how many people lived there, what idols they worshipped, what philosophy they practiced. You do need to double-check the information because it sometimes makes things up, but it can be useful for research and getting background information.

Proofreading and Grammar

You can give it a paragraph of text and say, “Proofread this and check for grammatical errors.” Programs like this have been around for a while, like Grammarly and others. For me this can be useful because I write a lot of Bible study content, and as basically one person running Study and Obey, that’s quite time-consuming. AI can help with some of the proofreading and grammar, though people often do it better too.

Refining a Question

If you have some discussion questions and you think they’re pretty good but wonder if they could be understood the wrong way or phrased more clearly, you can ask AI to give you three alternative ways to ask the same question. You can look at those and get ideas for refining your question. I don’t use this one very often myself because I’ve been writing discussion questions for about 20 years, but it can be useful for brainstorming and refining them.

Sharpening a Title

In this case it’s kind of like an assistant to bounce ideas off of. If you have a title for a sermon point but it just doesn’t sound quite right, you can ask for five alternatives and then shape it to make it more understandable.

Finding Verses or Information

You can say, “Give me a list of verses on joy,” or “Tell me every time Moses is mentioned in the New Testament.” It will immediately give you those verses and that information. Some of these tasks can take a long time, and AI can help speed that up. Throughout history, preachers and teachers have used tools for research: commentaries, concordances, the internet, Google. AI is another such tool for finding and searching information.

Bad Use Cases for AI

Now for the things you should never use AI for.

“Give me a sermon on Philippians chapter 1” (or whatever passage). We should never just have AI write our sermon for us, write our outline, write all our points, and then just take that. That goes back to all the dangers I shared above.

“Write a paragraph on this point for me.” It’s not just about giving AI the whole sermon. Even asking it to write a section or a page on one point goes back to those same dangers.

“Give me 20 discussion questions on Acts chapter 1.” You could do that with AI, but I don’t think we should. We should look at the text and write down the questions ourselves, the questions we believe the Holy Spirit would have us and our group talk about, to lead them to discover things inside the text, to lead them to discuss issues in their lives in an open way. Even the process of writing discussion questions is very useful for yourself, not just for Bible study, but also for knowing how to ask questions in day-to-day conversation.

“Rewrite this sermon and cut out 500 words.” You should carefully consider which parts to cut yourself. Do the main rewriting and editing yourself as you continue to come back to the message in prayer, relying on the Holy Spirit.

“Give me a complete character study on Joseph.” There is no shortcut to diligently studying the word. I believe AI can be a tool in some cases to cut out some of the busywork and speed up research, but we should be especially careful about using AI for any kind of theology, doctrine, moral points, counseling, or anything that needs to be biblical and grounded in the Holy Spirit.

My Conclusion

Be a diligent student of the word. That is the takeaway. Do your own study first. Read the passage yourself first. Learn how to study it yourself first. Go to commentaries after you have studied it on your own. Soak it in prayer, work hard. You can use AI to augment your study and help with research. It is a tool, but the dangers are very real.

I’m worried that the new generation is just going to outsource their minds to AI. Diligent students of the word will be few and far between. I hope I’m wrong. I hope the church stands up and says we need to study God’s word on our own. We’re not going to outsource that to AI.

As for me, I do not use AI to write sermons or Bible studies. The content on Study and Obey and in my videos was studied and written by me. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, long before AI came around. I do sometimes use new tools for efficiency, including AI in limited ways to speed up research. But the work of studying and writing is mine.

The broad road leads to destruction, but the narrow road to life. That’s not a direct reference to AI, but it is a reminder that the world’s way, the easy way, is often dangerous. The easy way is popular because it’s easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s better. In fact, the easy way, the way the majority is going, is very often the wrong way.

In general, I see more negative than good with AI. Yes, a few people will use it in positive ways, but the temptations are great and we are all sinners. The Study and Obey website has lost about 50% of its traffic to AI, so I know that people are using AI more and more for Bible study. I hope they’re using it as a tool to help and not as their main source.

Sitting down and writing on your own helps you think. Ideas and thoughts come to mind as you start writing. And the biggest thing is, those ideas are yours, and hopefully led by the Holy Spirit, because he is in your heart as you are a temple of the Holy Spirit. Let’s be honest with ourselves and others, and let’s all be diligent students of the word.