A pastor in California has built an artificial-intelligence version of himself. Justin Lester assembled a digital twin from nearly two million words of his sermons, books and other messages, and it now offers counsel around the clock to hundreds of people in Vallejo, in the Bay Area. According to The New York Times, which reported on it, the AI twin talks in the pastor’s cadence: it has comforted a woman the night before heart surgery, advised a person in despair over a lost job, and generated a letter for a homesick child at camp.
He is not alone in looking for ways to fold generative AI into Christian life. An app called Bible Chat, which lets users confess their secrets and sins to a chatbot and ask it how to interpret the Bible, has been downloaded more than 30 million times. Writing for Christianity Today, Chris Butler — a pastor in Chicago — sets aside the objections that have been well rehearsed already. Can a chatbot pray for you? No. Can it know you? No. Can it be trusted to tell you the truth when the truth costs something? No. He wants to ask a different question: what this does to the problem Protestants already have with spiritual authority.
His concern is the pastoral office itself. Scripture describes leaders as those who keep watch over souls “as those who will have to give an account” (Hebrews 13:17). “An AI clone might dispense words,” Butler writes. “It cannot, however, give that account to God. Nothing is at stake for it, and it answers to no one.” The same problem runs through the faith apps that offer something like pastoral care and Christian community, he argues: they risk “sidestepping the real-life mutual accountability that is inherent to the biblical model.” Christians are told to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2) and to confess their sins and pray “for one another” (James 5:16). It is people, not code, who can listen and petition God on our behalf.
That these tools are popular is, in Butler’s reading, no accident. Our society, he observes, is passionate about holding other people to account and remarkably uninterested when accountability is asked of it in return. We demand transparency from institutions and grant ourselves privacy. “A pastor who can’t see you is, for some people, exactly the pastor they want.”
He is careful not to pretend that all spiritual authority has been good. Many Christians have left churches for reasons any reasonable person can understand — pastors who manipulated and abused people, covered up problems, or lorded their authority over the sheep. “Bad authority is real, and Scripture never asks us to pretend otherwise,” he writes. “But the answer to bad authority is not no authority, or an AI bot that validates our every emotion. It is accountable authority found in a local congregation.” Real spiritual authority, he adds, comes from God, and it looks like its author: Jesus kneeling with a towel to serve the ones he led.
Butler then traces how that authority is meant to be handed on. Paul told Timothy to entrust what he had received to faithful people who would be able to teach others (2 Timothy 2:2). “The methods for this have varied across the centuries — personal discipleship, formal training, denominational ordination — and we hold a mix of them now,” he writes. The aim in every case is connectedness to the historic church, to the great tradition, and to a faith delivered and passed along by human beings. Christ gave the church pastors and teachers as gifts, so that the body would be built up and no longer tossed about by every wind of teaching (Ephesians 4:11–14).
He concedes that the church still has a great deal to work out about authority. Christians are not as united as they should be, and people “jump ship and flee accountability at another congregation across town” — something many churches permit. Existing structures have carried spiritual authority imperfectly, and sometimes sinfully, for centuries. New technology, he argues, is not making any of this better. “Keep the leaders,” he concludes. “Whatever the church becomes in the years ahead, it cannot be the church without the undershepherds who keep watch and the mutual submission that holds us together.”
Source: Christianity Today — christianitytoday.com
