My Personal Beefs With Theological Education

Pastors will hear guys like Vaynerchuk and Jobs tell you to not go to college and instead do “XYZ”. They’ll even back it up with success to prove it. And somewhere between the gusto and the grace those same pastors will exclude the modern seminary as if its bullshit doesn’t stink all the same. As if to beg the question of the value of guys like Vaynerchuk and Jobs dropping out from their secular college, if we hold our Christian colleges in a similar high place.

Why does this matter? Well. Why is the baseline requirement for Pastoral positions an M.Div. Because I’ve seen accurate Greek scholars and experts in New Testament history get M.Div.’s and rainbow stole wearing gender study majors have them as well. Which is a problem because both with lean hard on that flimsy paper to exhort the other to repentance. Though to be fair, I think the one might have a stronger position to do so from.

But that’s only the icing on the theological education crap cake.

Centuries ago, a religious and theological education would get you the technological equivalent of a free Logos subscription, sans search function. And while I’d be remised to not say it’s much better to know your Bible than to know how to search in your Bible. The equivalency is still there. Modern theological education likes to boast of technological prowess but never actually does anything with the name of Gutenberg, after they’ve stolen it for their clout. We could make seminary free for the church. Or as free as ad revenue would let us. But are we? No. It’s way to institutionally valuable to have alma maters that perpetually ask for funding from its alumni, then to move education online through the decades old practice of online video and the half century old technology of electronic mail. But no. The liberal elites all have dorm rooms and cafeterias and quads to study on, So we must too.

Eventually we need to sit down, methodically, and look at the world we mimic as if that mimicry had consequences and begin asking some very hard comparison questions. Ones like “We all know why we don’t hire liberal arts students from the secular schools. So, why are we so cool with hiring them from the Christian schools? They’re still liberal arts students.” I’m sure the seminaries stop where the transferable credits end. Right? I mean if one school with 120 credit hours produces blockheads with degrees and no common sense or biblical obedience, then we must, by necessity, know that our program that is modeled after them, in almost every fashion, will give us different results and stalwart alumni in the faith afterward.

Guy’s like Musk can say things like “We don’t hire college grads.” But there is a transferable and comparable amount of demonstrated skill in his fields. You can do the work of a programmer on your own demonstrably. You don’t need an institution to say your code works, Your code will show if it works or not. We don’t have that in ministry. We can have fruit from good ministers and things that can be fruit flavoured from ministers who work at big enough churches. Who cares if you have 400 kids in your youth group. Are their 40000 youth within driving distance to your church? That’s not success, that’s demographic percentages. And those demographics are not affected by how many MDiv’s are on staff at the mega church. Even though the Mega church’s hiring standards would suggest so.

But eventually these hums and haws land us in the age of the internet and the dual natured problem of online credentials and online reach shows up. It’s all well and good if a guy at a mega church with an Mdiv. has a popular blog where he flexes his theological muscle a bit. But when the drywaller with a penchant for reformed thought, puts out twice as much content, and garners twice as much a following. What do we do with his lack of a MDiv. ? We can’t just let him do that and hold that kind of persuasion and content generation, as equally valid as writing papers, and doing research on campus, through the internet to sources off campus, can we? The problem with Christians, especially credentialed ones, being online and participating in online discourse, is that this is functionally what is done offline in their houses of credentialing. Or is the theology the drywaller has to contextualize to the painters on his heels somehow made invalid because the right kind of people having followed his twitter account?

Back in 2020 we shut every church down as if it were universal good, moving every bit of our Christian practice onto online platforms with some of the worst theology to date. Theology, I might add, pertains to none of the practices that are currently being done in Christian higher education. There is not mandate, in scripture, to gather weekly for gospels 101 and contemporary worship screen management 302 classes. Yet during the same pandemic that closed the doors to the churches, the colleges asked that students return to their dorms and attend online classes from there.

Why?

Because the institutions needed to stay afloat in the midst of a flood of online engagement that the pandemic brought. And unlike the churches, they need to provide a return on the students tuition. The credentials.

Ask yourself. Are credentials as important as important than online church services? Well they must be. We closed the door of the church and invented new ways to do the Eucharist over Zoom, but heaven forbid our senior pastor not have an actual diploma on the wall of his office. Would a jpeg work so long as he could share it to the entire email prayer chain. Or would he have to commit to helping the Boomers convert it to a PDF.

Here’s my theory.

At the back end of 100 theology books read, 100 sermons/papers written, and 100 hours of bible reading at a grade 12 level. You’ll have everything but the Greek and Hebrew that a modern BA in Theology could muster out of you. Sans, dorm life, cafeteria food and annoying classmates telling girls in the student lounge that God wants them to get a ring by spring. And that Greek and Hebrew can be learned, for free, on YouTube.

Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together.

John 4:35-38 KJV

Hiding Behind The Cool Idols, A Response To Austin Gravely's "What Churches Need to Know About Smart Glasses"

Austin Gravely wrote a great little piece a while back on the new landscape of church security and media privacy, in the age of the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Find it here.

I enjoyed it and think, like most of the people that shared the post on Twitter, (Still not calling it X), that pastors should read it. Because they should. Where I want to engage with this is how this replacement idol of the Holy Spirit’s gift of interpretation of tongues, managed to hide behind the idea of coolness and reactive safety, so it could enable the predation of the vulnerable in the church as a diversion for its idolatry. And I know that’s a mouthful. So please, let me explain.

In the article, Austin wants to address the very real logistical issues that a genuinely visually impaired person might have, if they attend a church with their smart glasses, and inadvertently model a behaviour a predator could use, to digitally record people in secret via those glasses. A nightmare for any church operations guy to be sure, but a growing and sufficiently relevant reality these days. Austin does a fantastic job at this and highlights the issues at hand and gives solid wisdom to advise church staff on what to do next.

What I want to point out though, as a way of following this great work, is the dichotomy of when tech enablement gets abused and then something behind it gets ignored. In that order. And how there is no stops on that trolly problem. Tied to the idea of tech enablement is always going to be a vein of tech abuse. You do not get the ability to do good without evil because, unlike God, we did not come stock with the ability to discern good from evil. That happens later. Expressly when we have God back in the control center of the human descension making mechanisms. I.E., the heart. Where the Holy Ghost resides. We can broadly assume Christians will act like Christians when planning for ministry and worship. They can fall to temptation, but so long as we do not present temptation that a Christian would reasonably fall to, then our practices won't be affected by the fallen natures of redeemed people attending our churches. Because the have the Holy Spirit at the helm of their decisions, for the most part.

Ah, but there’s a hidden assumption here, like the snake in the garden. Here to bite us on the heel as we take our first nibbles of the forbidden fruit. Are churches for Christians? Then what are these non Christian predators doing here? Or any for that matter? Well, we put up a massive sign and internet ad campaign telling everyone is welcome at our church. We’re seeker sensitive. And wanted our particular fellowship to be a welcome place for everyone. I'm sure that’s a good strategy.

Cool. Then you get perverts using your manufactured soft target as a place to target practice.

You can try to hide behind the idea of being inclusive to actual infirmities, but all that will do is let the opposition to the church know, where you have decided to be weak with no strength to speak of. The privacy terms that your website boasts, let the perverts know private things happen inside your church’s walls. Things that they can add to a list of voyeurisms. And all this is just the hidden danger that a snake in the garden, once found, could produce if given the right circumstances. Like a hypothetical situation of being alone in a mega church with said snake. How long do you think you could evade it? Does it really matter? This is just a hypothetical. But the same kinds of metrics would come into play with hard of sight people needing Ray-Bans with Wi-Fi to see subtitles of what’s being said, in a language they could hear. It’s not just that the glasses can record video, it’s that they can write audio, too. How many short sighted techies do you have in your church that need this intricately inclusive plan? Is it more than one? Is it even one? What happens when it’s almost one? Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?

What gets glanced and feather touched in this article is the useless need for hardware to transcribe words that can also be heard. That’s not what they’re going to get used for the most or best. They’re gonna get used to TRANSLATE words that can get heard. Which is a different kind of thing than transcription. Though it uses the same motions and you end up with the same words. And it won’t be perverts with a second language or two, trying to sneak the smart glasses into the baptism service, so they get wet T-shirt videos, while they hear/read the testimonies in Spanish. All the while the congregation hears them over the PA in English. It will be when the children's church staff bring them in, with pastoral approval even, to minister to the Spanish speaking kids. It will be when the Ukrainian immigrants wear them to read a sermon’s A.I. generated subtitles in real time along with their host family, from the church’s immigration ministry. And while these seem like great applications when weighed against the obvious sinful ways to use this tech. What we miss is that by framing the tech as good or bad we also start missing how it can be a bad thing presented as good.

These kind of translations are exactly what the Holy Spirit did in Acts 2, and what Paul talks about in 1st Corinthians 12. And what the Meta glasses do is create a functional object, to facilitate worship, in place of the gifting of tongues, or interpretation of tongues. Activities that were once miraculous and dependant on the Holy Spirit being present, now commodified for convenience. Anywhere else that would be called idolatry. But, hidden as the acceptable use, framed against the unacceptable use, it shows up like a snake would. Asking what God’s policy is on tech in the worship service. You would notice a person saying they can only worship with their anime body pillow of Jesus with them, and clearly identify the problem as being a weird kind of idolatry. Even if it’s in the form of Christian figures, or Christ himself. It would be a very uncool idolatry, even icky. And that’s primarily why you would notice that kind of thing. But cool things get a kind of hall pass. Even when they as dangerous as Austin described. But hidden behind the idea of the Ray-Ban wayfarers, this techno idol barters it’s dangers along with it’s benefits. A problem it’s predecessors in the AR field didn’t have because they weren’t cool.

Google Glass came out in 2012, and it had most of the same features of Meta’s head gear that Austin's piece deals with, but not the AI translation. And on top of all of that, It looked dumb. Which is why, I think, We don’t have a similar piece, from the same time, outlining the dangers of them being worn to church from back in 2012. Because no one was gonna tarnish their Sunday bests with a jaunty piece of tech with no style to speak of. And that’s also why the google glass got discontinued. We’ll pay $1200.00 for cool sunglass with AR to boot. But we will not pay that much to look like Locutus of Borg. Because then we’ll look like nerds. The tech doesn’t really change much here. But the coolness does. And the second it’s cool, now we can hide things behind it.

“Did God really say you cannot use AR in your worship services?”

No, But that’s not why we shouldn’t do that. We can eat the fruit of the garden and keep ourselves form idols, without ceding ground to the opposition. But we have to know we are doing both of those things, or else we will inadvertently do both of other things. That’s how enticement works. The glasses, are also, not alone. Apple is working similar tech into their current gen of AirPods and we all know how fond the current caste of worship leadership is of their AirPods. And other apple products, for that matter. At least they have the transparent irony to sport the bitten apple in jest of our ignorance. And the reason AirPods are almost universal among that caste, is because Apple knows how to make cool products, for people who need to look cool in public. Or maybe better put, on stage. Or at least they did when Jobs was at the helm. Which is why the Apple VR/AR Headset is so weird. It has none of the cool that the colourful iPod ads had before it. Where everything is abstracted except the music player and how it gets to your ears.

Austin absolutely nails the concerns and wise actions needed to navigate the issues of smart AR glasses and media policies in the modern tech savvy church. And if that were the be all end all, we’d be sitting pretty. But it’s not. I don’t think he purposely missed the AI powered idolatry angle, I think the coolness masked it. But it’s definitely there, if you listen for the hiss. And while the creepy dude with techno wayfarer’s is a problem. It’s not as big of one as a church full of idols that doesn't know what their idols look like, or what they replaced for them. Where the replacement of tongues and interpretation can simply look like a techno adaptation on evangelism and preaching. That kind of ignorance comes back to bite you.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

Matthew 7:20-23 KJV

There are going to be so many sermons made with the help of these A.I. tools. A sermon written for the most part by a GPT that replaces the gift of preaching. And then translated by another GPT, connected to smart glasses, replacing the gift of tongues and interpretation. And the fruit will be exactly the kind of dedicated, busy, productive Christian, that thought he was doing the Lord's work. When really he was practicing a technologically enabled iniquity. Because they forgot that these kind of things are supposed to come from the Holy Ghost, not the latest gadget. People will listen to them too. Because they will look cool while doing it and cool is a hard thing to fake but can mask a lot of fake things.

Out on the same limb we may have got the apple from in the first place, what if Church is meant to be tech free and uncool in that regard? Not in the sense that a large room may need a microphone but we’re scared of where it may lead us. But in the sense that no tech gets the hall pass of use, simply because it has a godly heads to a corresponding snake's tails. Churches do need to know about the predatory enhancements of sinners, that technology can accomplish, when permitted to do so. But if it can’t see the spiritual advancement technology makes, merely by existing, then it is just as blind as it were before.

And no version of AR is gonna help that lack of sight. Because it will be a spiritual sight that no app will ever be made to replace. One that comes from the Holy Spirit we are technologically working around.

Austin. Keep up the good work.

The Spellcheck Whomst Thou Gavest Me...

Cowardice and complicity go hand in hand like Jack and Jill, and the current mood of A.I. in the church always seems to follow a script. As if it were it’s own little techno nursery rhyme.

Or.

Why on earth do you feel the need to point out when we were using things like A.I., in order to justify the way you use A.I. now?

I know it doesn’t show up as predictably as a rhyme does in a poem, but it does show pretty predictably. The knee jerk defence of saying we were already doing the bad thing, whenever it’s brought up that we may be doing a bad thing. Yeah, I know. The bad thing is enjoyable and makes your life easier in some regard. But maybe, just maybe, you’ve been duped by a subtlety you have no category for.

And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

Genesis 3:12-13 KJV

This is where tech entered the church for the first time, don’t ya know? Not as a shiny new gadget, but a camouflaged danger with a way with words. A technique as the seed of all technology that we are still grappling with every time it shows up to give us the best way to ensure human flourishing. God gave an entirely good earth filled to the brim with dominion and variety as an explicit way of saying how much he wanted the humans to flourish. He made it their job description. And the serpent, made it his, to be a kind of right that can only make wrongs. The way a knife cuts and a hammer smashes. And the aftermath of him asking the dumb questions is that we now had our script for what to do when caught predictably unprepared by our wrong doings. That being our wrong makings.

We made fig leaf aprons to shift the wrong from being sinful and disobedient to merely being naked. We were always gonna be naked. There was no need for clothes given the work we were tasked with. What do you need pants for in the naming of all the animals. What use is a shirt and tie when you’re tasked with a fruitfulness best done without them. But the second we sinned we learned and then knew that you can always share your wrong doings with others. The snake taught us well. Yeah you can die for the sins you commit like you should. Or die for the sins of others like God would. But you can also make sure you take someone along with you as you die, so that there's a heel to bite in the thistles.

God could have just as easily said “Make free use of calculators and spell check, but use ye not the GPT in the center of the garden. For on that day you will die.” But he didn’t, and we know he wouldn’t and there’s no snake to tell us otherwise or Grok to check the facts. But there is a pattern recognition outside of any software that can tell us, and show us, that we’re way to comfortable using the serpent's logic and arguments for the ministry we claim to be doing. Or did you miss the part where Adam and Eve only do what their supposed to do, after they’re given the less than proverbial boot from the garden. Their job was to be fruitful and multiply and they got caught up with being like God in function instead.

And now A.I. has us just as exposed as being apart from God in the garden, where we were harmlessly correcting sermons with Grammarly and MS Word, so we didn’t have to be as exact in our speech as pastors before us. And all that did was let the serpent know, that as a green squiggly line, we wouldn’t entirely object to a red squiggly line, under a word letting us know we could be better at spelling, without actually being better at spelling. Never mind that the only reason we use spellchecks in the first place, is that we can type wrong words faster than a pencil ever could. We had a grasp on how to exercise our dominion over the pencils of the paper, but are increasingly beguiled by all the computers after their kind and programs after their kind.

And along with all the tech that might have been created to be good and godly, there maybe, just maybe, might be one that is a bit more crafty than the others. Something we should exercise dominion over like a good gardener would, and keep it from our most precious things and people. Something subtly entering into the discourse of what we are and aren’t allowed to use, that we know we aren’t allowed to use. But also something that is smarter than anything else we have to deal with in our work. Managing sheep and tending gardens can be full time jobs. Searching for snakes on top of that will only ever present a need for efficiency. Which is exactly how it makes it’s arguments. It hides in efficiency like a snake in the bush. And unless you know what a snake looks like you will not see it. Because it will not talk to us again. It cost it more than just an arm and a leg the last time it was so brazen. It will make the idea seem like it came from you. Or better yet from God, so that you are the only one who gets any sort of negative consequences. It hides in efficiency because efficiency almost begs to be seen as a universal good. Even apart from God. Unlike the work you are cursed to do as a way to showcase a weakness, in need of the Lord's Strength. A bad thing done to you for the acquisition of universal good.

“Did God really give you a ministry that you can’t do under your own power and skill?” Said the serpent.

“God gave me a ministry that I can expressly not do under my own power. For his strength is made perfect in my weakness.” Said the busy pastor using a GPT to write his sermons and prayers all the same.

There may be no way for us to be theologically correct and technologically savvy at the same time. The same way you cannot think of yourself as anything but naked when you have no clothes on. Adam and Eve would have been able to at one point. Or that if you find an easier way of doing something that it’s somehow always better. There are a myriad of ways to lift a dumbbell. Levers and pullies and hydraulically powered robot arms. But only one makes you strong out of a pre-existent weakness. That weakness, like the nakedness, is only truly fixed when Jesus enters the picture and the technology and techniques we began to use, are discarded like the fig leaf aprons were for clothing made from sacrifices on our behalf. Clothing from the motions of worship can only point to Jesus, and a right relationship with him. The same way A.I. can and could be pointed towards Jesus.

But is it being pointed towards Jesus right now?

Or are we just trying to get at the fruit again?

On The Treatment Of Labor Replacements As Christians.

How we treat slaves after we stop using them will be important a few years. Because at the rate things are going now, we’ll be importing more slaves than needed when the robots finally start competing with them. Especially in Canada. Now if you’re shocked right now it’s likely because you went to public school and can’t fathom the idea of “slaves” being a thing these days. Let alone being something you use. But rest assure my friend, we have a slave class. They’re just not privately owned anymore. They’re corporately “employed.”

Don’t believe me?

Go get your own coffee for once, from the nearest rainbow clad Starbucks you can find. Go at noon, and see how many SkipTheDishes drivers show from the time you get into the store to the time you leave with the caramel macchiato. I get it. There’s not whips and manual labor. Just whipped topping on top of the coffee and some beck and call servitude that makes sure the underpaid minority that is employed, brings the white women their fraps. Go to Wendy’s, next,  and see the same lineup of servants. Headed dutifully to the store at the sound of a bell on their apps, to fetch Baconator's for the middleclass that know, sharing a slave service with one thousand people, beats owning a thousand slaves and all the needed infrastructure and resources to do so.

We still have slaves, they just have flexible hours and mobility. But make no mistake, as horrible as I can make the treatment of service workers sound, I'm still on the side of the fight that want’s them gainfully employed and providing for themselves and their families. Because I actually care for the poor. Because none of these service level employees can afford the service level replacements that will be bought instead of keeping them on the payroll. And that replacement will be a robot.

All a robot amazon driver needs to be is bite proof for the dogs and as accurate a driver as the flesh and bone one was with the GPS. It will never sue the company for getting bit by the dogs and can’t be sued for not registering that the obstruction on the road was a child, not a pothole. They’ll paint the robot car hi vis yellow, blame the victim, and fire the immigrant either way because all that car has to do is be cheaper than one year of the wage slaves wages. At which point the cost line goes down on the graph and the shareholders will all but demand, or be presumed to demand, the higher cost human resource to be demoted to amazon customer, from employee.

“Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”

”For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.”

Luke 10:36, John 12:8 KJV

If everything goes according to the plans we aren’t a part of, or have influence over in our secularized culture, we are about to have a bunch of suddenly poor people who look as foreign as the Samaritan did to the Jew. People promised a new life and new opportunities here in Canada, only to receive a new form of poverty at the hands of the newest machines.

There’s a reason we got an easy to read book about how to treat slaves, in Philemon, and a reason why most of the evangelical world was scared of the implications of what a book about the treatment of slaves could mean. We adeptly pivoted away from the chattel slavery comparisons of the deep American south and forgot that one of the unfortunate but predictable realities for the poor, is to become a slave. And that how we treat the poor and slave might coincide with the grace of Christ and his expectation of our behaviour. Because If Jesus meant what he said about the poor, it would necessarily mean that modern slaves would line up beside the modern poor as well.

And in all this complication and concern for the plight of the poor and how to properly sell perfume as a church, we are adequately kept busy enough to not notice the modern slave class’s impending doom. And briefly, We find ourselves as busy as Martha, and as calloused as the Jew and the Levite all the same. Because these poor slaves are Hindu’s who are exponentially more different to us Christians as the Samaritan was to the Jew and Levite. Or they’re Muslims and oppositionally different to us and the Jews and Levites. What we find ourselves in then is a well orchestrated chaos. That mixes the abuses of tech against the poor, with and against the benevolence and mercy of the faithful. So that most courses of action that we could take, betray a moral value we would otherwise not compromise on. You could free these slaves by adopting the robot, but it does make them poor. You could employ the poor by forbidding the robots to work, but it essentially enslaves them.

This is what sin and brokenness look like. And not dealing with these issues as if they were sin and brokenness is what causes the angst you currently feel. The tech titans need to stop what their doing and repent. Sacrificing all the market share they could have made by the commodification of laziness, to a a God who can forgive sins. Their workers, also need to repent and find Jesus as a God who knows what it’s like to be born into poverty and to live in heavenly wealth and power. And the Christians stuck in the middle need to repent of where they got stuck in the middle, even if they didn’t get completely stuck. And all of them need to find themselves in church the next Sunday. The rich should be giving to those in need from the poor (1 Tim 6:17-19) and the poor should be serving as if their money was worth more than it actually ever could be (Mark 12:41-44.) And the Unbeliever needs to become a believer, and we all need to be looking forward to a day where there is no deliveries, no KPI’s, and no payroll, and no slaves but unto Christ ( Romans 6:15-23.)

That last verse came from a letter sent to a slave owning empire on the tell tale signs of decline all the same. They had less robots, and less apps on their phones. But they still had the poor, the way we have the poor. Almost as if Jesus knew how that works.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Ecclesiastes 1:9 KJV

The Current 5G Hostage Situation

Cell phones often get marketed as a great collector of other technologies. Because no one wants to use them as just a phone. Not when there's cameras, a GPS, and calculators and all the other things that you couldn’t hold in one backpack, let alone the front pocket of your jeans. But what hasn’t happen, though appearing to be so, is the culmination of all these devices into one device. What we didn’t get was a pocket sized thing that was a calculator and a GPS and a calendar and the internet to boot. What we got was a hostage situation of all these things at the hands of the device.

It may not look like that now because of the slow and steady adjustment to our confines, but make no mistake. To try to live in a world without a smart phone, these days, is next to impossible. That’s why there is a market to a Smartphone's ubiquity as well as a corresponding market to give it up entirely. But that’s not actually what the hostage wants. What he wants is to be able to use a calculator without having to answer phone calls anywhere on the planet. He wants to use a calendar without social media dooming his scroll. And what he really doesn’t want, if we’re being honest, is a dumb phone instead and a backpack full of gear to replace the smart phone.

And when you tally the wants you see that really he just wants a smart phone he controls.

Ah. There it is. The control of a hostage situation is bound up in the people they bind up in order to make the demands before releasing the hostages. Yeah, a gun helps. But there’s no way Apple and Samsung are working on that app. They’re not that dumb. So, they stick to whatever digital rope and data plans necessary to keep society locked into the use of a smart phone. At least until the Stockholm syndrome sets in. But when we play this out as to how the smartphone keeps its hostages bound we find out that it’s rope is nothing more than a second hand conveniences. Why have your own road atlas when you can have google maps that the entire public has access to? There's no good answer to this singular question, that would get you packing paper instead of an app. Except that when you ask that question about everything a smartphone sticks into the cloud or app store, the fibers coalesce and all of a sudden, you have a rope around you and a gun to your head.

“Give me the money and no one gets hurt.”

How did that happen I was just trying to do my online banking? Why am I lost I was following the online map? Why did I get hacked I thought I had online security? Well, honey, you “had” none of this stuff. You actually only had being had. And the only way out is seizing a kind of control that can seem as impossible as a civilian wresting the gun away from the bad guys, so that they can free the hostages. Looks so easy on any given Netflix special till you take a jujitsu class and find out digital can’t hold a candle to a rear naked choke.

All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.

1 Corinthians 6:12 KJV

Right now, smartphones hold a powerful hold on the population but not a moral one. And while they have been mostly peaceful to their owners, there's still the threat of what they’ll do to us if they ever needed or wanted to. A myriad of ubiquity in maps, apps, and games is worthless if your teenage son can get addicted to porn on the very same devices. No father alive wants his son lost without a map, broke without a bank card, and stranded without a ride share. But those same fathers should want to have their sons walk the long way home, both ways, up hill, in the snow, if it meant they could never see a pair of tits on anything but the girl they were marrying.

These screens didn’t need to come with these kinds of costs, but do. because rope is useful and harmless until its used for evil, then it can never be not a means to imprisonment. Maybe one fine day in the golden age of the cellular phone, that rope could only be used for climbing up mountains and keeping the kayak tied to the roof of the car. Now it’s only a subtle means to keep you on the phone for everything you do. Including the way you find yourself staring at tits.

Until a smartphone comes out that can, just as methodically, keep you away from porn as it does a paper map, you should be suspect about its motives and capabilities. The same way you should be if a man in a trench coat enters your bank right behind you.

Which is why, by the common grace of God, CTRL+SHIFT+N brings you to one. At least in the Chrome Browser. Let it remind you every time you see it of the convenient situation you’re actually in.

The Shallow End Of Technically Not Quite Right.

Do you know how to use the following?

A pencil?

A concordance?

And a keyboard meant for ignoring in favor of a speech to text function on a smart phone?

We all have a list of words we know how to spell wrong so the red squiggly lines can auto correct it for us. Definitely, beautiful, sincerely, the list goes on. But part and parcel with that list is a growing trend of humanity not being technically good with its means of communication, because our technology is technically as good, for the most part.

I mean touch screens still put I’s where U’s are supposed to go.

This could all be the grumpy ramblings of your slightly GenX-Millenial unc, but I do want to point out that you likely never spell words wrong that you know how to spell right, with a pencil. Why is that, by the way. I thought the keyboard was a more advance version of technologies that preceded it?

Unless, keyboards aren’t the next best thing in a line but rather a new contender in a ring. Because the keyboard inherently accepts human error where the pencil and concordance are used to express human truth.

The reason you use a pencil to do the action of handwriting is to express what you could think or say in a transferable medium. It is very hard to spell a word you know wrong if you in fact you know it. But it’s proportionally easy to spell a word wrong on a keyboard that you do know how to spell, which is why the red squiggly lines tell us what we did wrong when we use a keyboard and those red line only show up with an elementary schoolteacher when we use the pencil.

But from there to touch screen phones with a laughable accuracy for our giant fingers to type on the world made a winding rope of paths back to clarity of expressed written thought. Voice to text works, but only kinda. That swipe method seemed to do the trick, but only kinda. And before too long the world seemed to want to do away with any real input method that had them do all the imputing and we got the GPT. Where would could enter in the gist of what we wanted and it would spit out its best approximation.

And this is where the lines got crossed because it's one thing to write a love letter in fountain pen and lipstick to a lover, and another thing to print a smooch via jpeg on the corner of the page, and use a hand written font and GPT to get the exact same words you “could” have use. Even if you would use those exact same words and the GPT flexed some prophetic/synthetic muscles, saying exactly what you thought but couldn’t muster your fingers to type, would that be a love letter or what looks like a love letter. Because it’s currently what a sermon is, or what it could be.

What we’re witnessing is commodification of intent and meaning. And what you don’t ever get when you do that is what you meant or intended, only what meaning and intent looks like.

For example. You, likely, don't know what the Bible says, you know what a translated copy of the biblical text’s copies say. And all of that under the assumption that you have your copy of a copy memorized. Which you don’t. Let’s be real here. But we can all rest easy knowing that the Bible doesn’t tell us to be as textually accurate in its distribution as that new weird tech-theology blogger you know.

Right?

“And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites:”

Deuteronomy 17:18 KJV

Uh oh guys, I think we may missed something.

And before the armchair theologians and/or language scholars come at me, let’s just consider that if the most important people in a kingdom are told to do this, that it would be at the very least beneficial to do it ourselves. Yeah. We aren’t told in Hebrew and Greek to hand copy our NLT bibles. Let alone to translate them into Hebrew And Greek. But it may be the only way to rescue meaning and intent from the content machine of the internet. Especially in the age of getting GPT’s to create that content for you, because of the glorification (Literally) of efficiency.

We have a unique chance at the top of this waterslide to not only realize it’s a slippery slope but to also realize, while we are equipped to slide, we may not know how to swim. The walk down the stairs to that slide will be arduous and intellectually embarrassing. Some might say humbling, but it will guarantee that we will not drown. To go down the slide anyway hoping a God that can walk on water, might find ourselves quoting the wrong person in the Bible to make our points about Christian tech use.

“Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

Matthew 4:5-7 KJV

I would have loved to have typed that out in Greek for the full effect of the bit. But I fear that those of you with ears to hear would have miss heard me.

There is a way to play nicely in this water. Even in the shadow of a slippery slope as large as the one we just walked down from. A way that will will teach us all the necessary skills and techniques needed to go head first down the slide all the same, to the glory of God and the enjoyment of all men at the water park. But it is clearly not where a GPT can recite more of any given Bible translation than you.

That way means putting the GPT in the shallow end with you as you write down what you know and not search for what you could find out the hard way. The way hand and foot kick and flail until you suddenly find yourself swimming. The way you splash and cannon ball before a swan dive knocks the socks off the cute lifeguard you want a phone number from. GPT’s can be a great set of water wings in this pool, and an even greater surf simulators. But only if we learn to swim first. Everything before that is a kind of danger that is as transparent as the water is when it's still. And the reason why fences are mandated around pools these days. Not to prevent swimming but to prevent drowning. Which will look the same until it’s almost too late. But there is a way to enjoy the swim in spite of the danger that comes from understanding the nature of the danger instead of trying to compensate for it.

Swimmers have the same muscles that drowners do. The difference is the application of wisdom through knowledge, and just not its replacement through technique.

“For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”

Habakkuk 2:14 KJV

Google's Exhausting Concordance Of The Bible

We all do it. We know enough of the Bible verse to remember it but not enough of the Bible verse to quote it properly. And if we’re being responsible, we don’t want to simply quote our version of a Bible verse, we want to quote the version of a Bible verse. So, we google our version of the Bible verse and google corrects the order of words we used to give us the actual Bible verse.

We’ll search for something that resembles a verse out of the NIV with 14 words in it, but has the wrong adjective and Google matches the other 13 words to the NIV and corrects our misplaced adjective use. And the Substack post gets more scholarly, and the green grass grows all around all around.

Google has become our concordance and commentary. Whether we knew it or not. Whether we like it or not. And at the moment we are transitioning to A.I. becoming our Google.

A few weeks ago, on a work computer, I looked up a Bible verse in the above-mentioned process, knowing full well that I didn’t know the verse by memory, and knowing full well that the search bar would compensate for that. And as I did, something strange happened. The search bar didn’t give me my expected answer. The A.I. that has taken its place did. My work uses Microsoft products for all its I.T. needs and part in parcel with that is no Chrome or Firefox. To each his own. I don’t need brand loyalty in browser selection like some. So, I do my work, and when I needed to get a Bible verse properly quoted. I improperly searched for it. Google tends to give me the NIV approximate I tend to enter into it, having been raised in mostly evangelical circles, it’s the Bible I know the most of and have heard the most of. So, it's the bible I enter the most of into the search bar, to get my corrections from.

What happens next doesn’t happen in the search bar. The Bible verse I get is almost always from the NIV but my writing requires me to use the KJV because I don’t want to deal with copyright issues and what not. KJV is in the public domain, so I use it for most of my writing now. I don’t know the KJV enough to quote it. Even though I like it when reading and writing about it. But when someone asks me to quote scripture from memory, they never get my approximation of the KJV. They get my best crack at the NIV. My search terms, once corrected, generally lead me in the first few results to biblegateway.com where I check the verse and switch the translation, before a copy and a paste into whatever article I am working on.

Here’s where the A.I. stepped in, and instead of giving me the NIV, gave me the KJV with no extra steps.

Now I could go on a conspiratorial bent on how it knew that. But the truth is I know how it knew that plainly. I know the A.I. built into MS copilot can get any web history I have and any temporary internet files I have out of the browser for its work as an A.I. The issue this raises is the joint practice I was guilty of, and the vulnerabilities that a culture that practices that practice, might have in a world of genuinely helpful but wisdom-less A.I.'s. Because not everyone who types a half-recalled bible verse is looking for biblical clarity. Some of them are trying to see what they want the Bible to say. And the A.I. is not equipped with the “Thou Shall Not’s” to deal with that kind of thing.

At least not yet.

When I was in Bible college, I had a unique front row viewing of this kind of thing happening, sans A.I. if you will. I was enrolled in a class about the gospels, taught by one of the smartest people I have ever met. He read from a Greek New Testament, which he had memorized and knew enough about the translation techniques of Bible translators to know if you were reading from an NIV or a NKJV or even, as one poor freshman found out as inadequate for proper biblical study, the Message.

But it was when I replied with a verse from my Bible (A thrifted NASV from 1979) that he gave me a quick puzzled look and asked me what Bible I was reading from. I showed him and he explained that the NASB had been updated in 1995 and that the older version caught him off guard. He knew about the change but was only familiar enough with the 1995 version to know it as the accepted NASB. With his party trick adequately demonstrated, we proceeded to learn about the bible. The hole was in the ground and the green grass grew all around all around.

But that man didn’t trace a probable course through likely data, and then change his output to suit the user. He saw an otherwise mundane anomaly in a set of things he intrinsically knew and corrected the adjacent user.

That’s what the Bible for, dontcha know?

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

2 Timothy 3:16-17 KJV

What A.I. is at least capable of doing, is correcting the use of our correcting tools to fit with the use of them by ourselves. It did not profit the misguided Message user to look for original meaning of the text as she received it via Petersons paraphrase. But that’s okay. Someone who knew better because he actually knew the original text, stepped in and corrected the use of that paraphrase in biblical study. He did so by knowing what the text was to define what the text wasn’t. And A.I. could and would do that too. But to ask it to do that, we need to ask it to do things on behalf of abstracted unknown people and not specific engaged users. That professor learned Greek because he knew he would need Greek for the unlearned students he would teach.

The worry is that A.I. does the same kind of thing, so well mechanically, that it will get placed in the professor's place because it can be bought for a much lower price than the tenure. Because technology never wants you to do the work so you can be useful elsewhere in abstract. It only ever does work for you so it can be useful in practice immediately. You don’t vibe code to learn how code properly. You vibe code to offload the skills of a proper coding to desire and little else. The same way, guilty as charged, a guy could of load knowledge of the scriptures he reads and writes from to a search engine. Yeah, it gets the job done, but see how slow my writing gets the second my omnipresent concordance isn’t there for me and the lights go out? All it took was a solar flare, A power outage. A long list of fragilities growing longer by the second, as if they weren’t by design.

I know another brilliant mind who knows how to code and uses A.I. to code all the same. And the only difference between him and the pure vibe coders are he can make his way back out of that cave when the lights go out. He knows how, and knows how much work it is, because he’s done it. And is fully capable of doing it the hard way, but has paid enough dues and attention to know what to look for when the A.I. cuts the wrong corners. He sees, as a growing number of actual technicians see, that offloading our mental capabilities to a machine is nothing more than vulnerability as a service. VaaS if you will.

And VaaS does not just apply to code it applies to anything needing technique via language. Like knowledge of the bible.

For as much wisdom as us theologians claim to have, we didn’t notice that offloading when we asked Goggle to start doing it for us biblically. Or when that offloading itself got turned into a service and we started paying for Logos. Which is a powerful tool, but not a great tool. A great tool showcases talent and skill and knowledge through its use. A powerful tool approximates all three by technique and technology. A paint brush gets paint on the roof of the Sisteen chapel only by the hands of Michelangelo. And a Paint sprayer does it all the same via power and a tradesman.

But don’t believe random myths about technology you see on the internet. Believe the Mythbusters instead.

Paintball Mona Lisa

Is that painting great or powerful? What are the throngs of tech enthusiasts in the crowd cheering for? The approximation Leonardo da Vinci’s work? Or the Powerful GPU and air pressure that accomplished it?

When art becomes nothing more than the application of paint, study nothing more than the application of search terms, and programing nothing more than the ctrl-V of stack overflow, these things lose their meaning. And their purpose hot on meaning’s heels will follow. Purposeless coders would be a devastating end to the use of A.I. to code. Hundreds of thousands of men and women’s livelihoods lost to nothing less that technological progress and profit. A sad reality, at the very least on the horizon if we’re being honest.

But that honesty in being will also have us look at the purposeless pastors. Made as nothing more than stewards of RigthNowMedia, The GPT sermon, and search terms. It may not bother most that their pastor may not know Greek or Hebrew, but knows how to find out about Greek and Hebrew words via technological advancements. Even ones as old as books like a concordance. But it does bother some of us who know biblically accurate sermons and discipleship rest on some teachers, in inexorable ways. But not most teachers in anything close to inexorable ways. There isn’t a soul in the world that could take the intimate knowledge of Greek away from that gospel class professor. But just about anyone could take mine away. With a push of a button and the theft of a few large books from my bookcase.

See how smart ignorant people sound?

Makes you wonder, huh.