Almost all of Hollywood’s producers, i.e. those who actually produce films and shows, (writers and actors) went on strike in 2023. One of the major issues being struck at was AI. Either the writers or the actors guild did so because they said it was soulless. Now that I know of LCMS pastors writing sermons with AI is this solid sermonizing or is it soulless?
This subject came up again because a Confessional pastor more technological than I showed me an AI written Bible Class. He was filling in for a vacant parish. He gave only these instructions to AI: Write a 25 minute Bible study for a conservative Lutheran congregation that has just lost its pastor and it’s the first Sunday after. He said in 4-5 seconds AI produced one. He said he tweaked it here and there, adding and subtracting, but it was in the main AI.
I was gobsmacked. It was better organized, better written, more Scriptural, and more Catechetical, referencing Luther’s Small Catechism, than many a Lutheran Bible study I’ve sat through, even that of Confessional Lutheran pastors, even my own.
I admire this retired Confessional pastor. He is not afraid to try new technology as I am. He experiments, but does not blithely or blindly accept technology. He has his doubts, but rightly points out: To do this study, he would have consulted the Greek, commentaries, dogmatics, and Scripture. AI did it in seconds. It would have taken him hours, me perhaps days.
The long gone, Saint Aho, said in Homiletics that the Holy Spirit helps the pastor caught unprepared not the pastor who doesn’t prepare. Is giving a one sentence command to AI preparation or lack thereof? Saint Aho also said: never let yourself find out that you can wait till Saturday night to write your sermon. (Okay, I can’t but hear the Bay City Rollers 1974 “Saturday Night”.) Is the updated warning: never let yourself find out that AI can write as good as, if not better, sermon than you? (Okay, I can’t but hear Zager and Evans’ 1969 “In the Year 2525” saying, “Some machine’s doin’ that for you”.)
On the internet I have posted 24 years’ worth of sermons, I have 30 years electronically stored on my computers. The elder statesman, confessional pastor mentioned above, at my suggestion, had AI write a Christmas sermon using my electronic database of Christmas sermons. The result? I recognized the words as my own. The sermons were good, so said he and I agreed. But here’s where I believe the problem to be, and believe it or not, I foresaw this circa 2013 or so because of Rush Limbaugh.
You know the aphorism that everyone has one good novel in them? I’ve proved this false by trying and trying. Nothing. Till one day hearing Rush Limbaugh whom I thought was entertaining always, right sometimes. Well, he was a money-machine, a cash-cow, a limitless ATM. I thought about his eventual dying. This was years before he was diagnosed with lung cancer. I knew all of the words he had ever publicly spoken were electronically stored somewhere. I thought: What if those living and prospering wildly off him kept his death secret? What if they just produced new radio shows cobbling, splicing, mixing old tapes together? But what if in doing so they bit by bit changed his message, which the left already considered radical and racist, to rebellion, to jihadist, to apocalyptic, without realizing it?
Couldn’t AI do that with my words? But even if the new words were not off, bad, or heretical, would new sentences, new combination of words really be Holy Spirit inspired? I have always believed that the Lord intends His Words come to men from other men in accordance with Luther’s dictum in his Genesis commentaries that unless it specifically says the Lord appeared to someone you must put the Words attributed to God in the mouth of a man. Thus it is it Shem who tells Abram in Ur to go to Canaan.
This isn’t the Invisible Man scenario I warned of in an earlier post. This is the Frankenstein scenario. Just because all the parts were human doesn’t mean Dr. Frankenstein didn’t make a monster. And just because all the words came from Holy Spirit inspired sermons based on His Words, doesn’t mean AI won’t produce a monstrosity.
I think I’ve used this illustration before of a mathematician I know grading papers. We were on a flight. He, a professor at UT, was grading math papers. I would see him turning pages and slashing red lines here and there. At the end, where the solution was, no red slash, but turning back to the first page he gave a low grade. After several tests ended this way, I asked him, “What gives? They didn’t get the wrong answer, yet you graded them very low?” He replied, “They got the right answer but they solved the problem the wrong way.” Although Luther tells Zwingli, “God is above mathematics.”, he also said, “Doctrine is like mathematics. Error in one place makes the whole thing wrong.” So, you can produce an AI sermon that reaches the right conclusion but does so the wrong way. And soulless sermonizing would seem by definition wrong.
Nevertheless, I think the majority of Protestant churches will be sitting at the feet of AI sermons and eventually pastors. In those ads on TV where you see in little letters something like “Comments by actual customers by AI produced actors”, I certainly can’t tell they’re AI. In mega churches, and I’ve been to two, where a pastor in another state preaches to hundreds gathered here in Austin. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be happy with an AI pastor who has no salary, no healthcare, no vacation, no retirement, and like flesh and blood pastors is on call 24/7, but not in the paraphrased words sung by Roberta Flack in 1973, “Killing him Softly”. (Forgive this self-indulgent comment. I make it because it was true for me through no fault of the laity, and I know there are others still under the yoke who feel this way.)
The only denominations that won’t be satisfied with AI pastors will be the Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and Confessional Lutherans. The first two because of their concept of the priesthood. Something is transmitted from pastor to pastor all the way back to the Apostles Jesus breathed on and so give the man they ordain powers others don’t have.
Confessional Lutherans won’t be satisfied with AI sermons or pastors, but some conservative Lutherans who have a purely functional view of the Office of the Ministry might. Now you Waltherians are going apoplectic here. (By the way, I’ve become more Waltherian in my dotage.) But you need not. The Kolb translation of the German of AC V is, “To obtain such faith God instituted the office of preaching, giving the gospel and the sacraments. Through these, as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit who produces faith, where and when he wills, in those who hear the gospel.” Tappert is essentially the same, and remember being a lay confession of faith the German is authoritative not the Latin.
And surely the much ignored, modified, or denied AP, XIII, The Number and Use of the Sacraments, comes into play: “But if ordination be understood as applying to the ministry of the Word, we are not unwilling to call ordination a sacrament.” Really, Waltherians don’t need to admit either point. The Office of the Ministry being divinely instituted requires it be filled by a soul, a male soul in ordinary circumstances, not a soulless AI.
St. Waldemar Degner did not believe a mob could have a collective soul. Surely no matter how powerful AI becomes it will remain hollow-eyed and soulless capable of fast computations but also of monstrosities.
