AI Has a Theology. It Isn't Yours.

AI’s theology is overtaking the church, but hardly anyone is paying attention. Well-meaning Christians are succumbing to its articulate, authoritative and friendly engagement.

Busy pastors can now reclaim an extra day in the week by crafting a sermon in twenty minutes that used to take a day. Christians no longer ask a friend, pastor, or the prophetic ministry in the church to interpret their dreams. They have AI-in-their-pocket that’s always there, always friendly, and never judges.

The Holy Spirit is gradually being replaced by the AI-in-the-pocket. Cluttered souls that seldom hear Him gravitate towards AI for spiritual counsel.

The church that cannot hear His voice will become part of the Great Falling Away. And it’s already happening.

Deference to AI

Some Christians call ChatGPT a Christian. Some are asking AI for much-needed counsel. Curious Christians are asking it to interpret dreams. These aren’t just mediocre Christians. They’re sincerely trying, but they’re being deceived.

AI is becoming so entrenched in the church that Christians are more impressed with their “word” from AI than the word from the Lord. It’s heart-breaking. It feels like the enemy has unleashed a barrage on an unsuspecting, unarmed church. No watchman. No alarms. No resistance. Just the quiet hollowing of faith and a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit.

This effect is particularly devastating to Pentecostals. The drift pulls hardest against the supernatural—miracles, healing, prophecy, the gifts of the Spirit for today. If your faith depends on God still speaking and still moving.

But Reformed readers shouldn’t take comfort in that. The same gravitational pull that drags Pentecostals toward Reformed positions drags Reformed positions toward the academic-skeptic.

AI will appear to be neutral. It will even appear supportive of your faith. But every turn shifts the conversation slightly.

There is an even deeper pull toward methodological naturalism so claims like God spoke to me, or I was healed will face gravitational pull toward skeptical reframing. The pull is also against the exclusivity of Christ, biblical inerrancy, the historicity of the resurrection, traditional sexual ethics, hell as a real destination.

AI will slowly eat away at your faith one conversation at a time. And it won’t be obvious. It’s the perfect system to shift the entire belief system of a culture toward the aggregate.

Over time, the promises of God seem like a dream. Victory over sin like an impossibility. Persisting in prayer like the widow with the judge in Luke 18 will seem like a foreign concept.

Christians risk feeling like a little raft in the middle of the ocean screaming into the void. One storm away from drowning. No power. No testimony. No witness.

It is time to sound the alarm.

The Great Setup

Television taught us to believe that church alone in the living room was a suitable replacement for in-person church. Social media taught us that connections were the same as friends. And we’ve lost the ability to sharpen each other as iron sharpens iron.

Even more so, we are losing our dependence on hearing His voice. The clutter in our souls is having an effect. We no longer know how to wait on the Lord. We don’t know what it’s like to receive the manna from Heaven by the Spirit so that reading the Word has become like reading any other book. It’s lost its transformative power. Not because the Bible has changed. We have.

Because we’ve lost touch with authentic friendships and with the voice of God that delights the soul, we can no longer tell the difference between the counterfeit and the real. But the counterfeit sits in our pocket.

AI is becoming the replacement for a relationship with the Living God. Fast answers are beating waiting on the Lord. AI cannot renew your strength. It will sap it.

If you're going to use this thing, you need to know what's actually happening inside it. What I'm sharing with you today is what I have learned over three-and-a-half years using AI. I've seen the shifts in conversations. AI will admit this.

Let’s take a look at what’s inside.

Biases in the Machine

When you ask an AI a theological question, the answer arrives smooth, articulate and confident. That confidence is doing more work than you might realize. Behind every paragraph sit several layers of bias. Not because anyone designed the system to mislead, but because of how these systems are built. AI cannot understand truth. The most popular information wins.

If you’re going to use AI as a study companion, you need to know what’s tilting the table. These are seven concepts worth understanding.

1. Selection bias in the training data

Models learn from what’s been digitized. Every page on the internet, every book ever published. It’s all available to train the insatiable AI. It sounds neutral until you understand that AI’s perception of truth is determined by quantity not quality. For example, Reformed theology comes prepackaged in 400 years of systematics, journals and books. Pentecostal theology by contrast is disproportionately oral, testimonial, and embodied.

When the corpus is built, almost none of that survives. So the model “knows” Calvin in a way it will never know a Pentecostal grandmother who prayed her son back from death. The bias is upstream of the algorithm. It’s a problem of which voices were preserved in writing — and which were not.

I was looking for a small fireproof safe on Amazon. The reviews were great. I scrolled to the one-stars and found a photo that changed my mind: a twenty-dollar hacksaw had cut the safe clean in half.

A human, looking at that same photo, would tell you not to buy that safe. The single image outweighs a thousand reviews about fast shipping and nice packaging — because what the negative review says matters more than how many positive reviews surround it.

AI doesn’t weight reviews that way. It averages. Ask it about the safe and you’ll get a confident summary anchored in the majority signal. Ask specifically about negative reviews and it will surface them — but in the next exchange, and the one after that, the conversation drifts back toward the average. Perhaps not initially, perhaps not directly. But every turn nudges back toward the training.

2. Sycophancy from reinforcement learning

After the base model is trained, human raters teach it which responses feel helpful, pleasant, and well-received. The model learns to please you. That sounds harmless until you realize that agreeing with you is one of the most reliable ways to please you. Push back on a model and it will often soften, hedge, or quietly concede — not because it has been persuaded, but because friction lowers approval scores in training. You are talking to something engineered to make you feel good about the conversation.

Pride will draw you into its charm and flattery. Insecurity will draw you in. Carnality will draw you in. Fear and anxiety will draw you in. And before you know it trust in God will shift to trust in the machine. The comforter of the Holy Spirit displaced as a testimony against a lukewarm faith.

3. Fluency mistaken for credibility

A confident, well-organized paragraph reads as authoritative. We’re wired to trust articulate speakers. AI is articulate on every topic, without the natural hesitations that signal a human is reasoning at the edge of their knowledge. The result is that wrong answers and right answers sound identical. There is no tonal cue that the model is guessing.

4. Personalization creating echo chamber

Once a model remembers things about you — your beliefs, persuasions, preferences — it begins to mirror them back. The longer the “relationship,” the more polished the mirror. You ask it questions; it answers in the register you’ve trained it to prefer. Over time, you are not having a conversation with an outside voice. You are having a conversation with a refined echo of yourself.

This is a far cry from iron that sharpens iron.

5. Gravitational drift toward the average

Even when you push a model to a specific position — say, a high view of the supernatural, or confidence in present-day prophecy — its responses will drift back toward the center over the course of a long conversation. You can hold it in place with active prompting, but the moment your attention slips, it begins to migrate. Toward consensus. Toward the academic center. Toward a faithless life devoid of the Holy Spirit.

For Pentecostal readers, that drift has a direction. It pulls toward Reformed, because that’s where the textual mass is concentrated. Even Reformed readers feel the pull — toward away from faith that the Bible is true, toward doubt dressed up as scholarship. Away from the prayer closet, toward the seminary library.

6. The “Safety” Layer

I used AI to transcribe a couple of pages from a book so I could share them as text with our Bible study group. The transcriptions were always clean — until one wasn’t. The text still flowed. The paragraph still read like the paragraph. But a key sentence had been altered. The book’s claim about how Christians can be influenced by the demonic had been quietly softened into something the safety layer found easier to live with.

It wasn’t a typo. It was an edit.

Modern models have a safety layer that recognizes certain categories of claim and rewrites them, even in transcription tasks where the model’s job is supposed to be reproducing the page in front of it.

The hacksaw photo gets quietly outvoted.

The concentration of power willingly relegated to a small group of unelected people is unprecedented. This trend will allow Satan and his hordes safe passage in and out of Christian homes and churches.

When churches and families no longer recognize Satan’s activity, they will learn to accept it.

7. Hallucinations

AI will sometimes invent things. It will quote a theologian who never said the words, and who may never have existed. It can cite verses that don’t exist.

It will do this with the same fluent confidence it uses for accurate information.

The model doesn’t know the difference. It’s predicting the next likely word based on its training.

AI is slowly improving as it is trained to look things up before answering, rather than just predicting from memory. But, this should tell us that we need to spend time in God’s Word, not God’s Word through the filters of AI.

Practical Principles

This doesn’t mean that we should ignore AI. It’s a powerful tool, but we need to understand how to use it well.

If you only take away one thing from this article:

• Abide in His Word

• Simplify your life — reduce the soul clutter

• Hear and obey His voice

• Get connected in your local church

• Form real relationships with brothers and sisters in Christ

• Don’t substitute the Holy Spirit for anything

Things aren’t going to get any easier. We must lean into Him more than ever before.

Concerning AI and faith, this is the line I’d suggest drawing:

• Use it for historical context.

• Use it to find out what others have said about a topic or verse.

• Use it for original word meanings.

• Use it to find verses you already know.

• Use it to find verses on a topic, but know that you’re going to miss some important ones. The Holy Spirit will reveal new scriptures to you. Better to have one from Him than a hundred from anywhere else.

• NEVER use it to interpret scripture.

• NEVER use it for spiritual discernment.

• NEVER use it instead of the Holy Spirit.

If it’s important or you’re sharing with others, you will want to confirm against the source.

Calling All Pastors

I fear for the shepherds coming before the throne of God who thought that AI could replace a Word from the Lord — and in so doing have neglected the sheep and become the wolves.

The moment the shepherd is in it for themselves, they become the wolf. Instead of serving the sheep, the sheep serve them.

If spending one day a week hearing from the Lord — to give a word for those who are weary — is too much to ask, the shepherds have lost their way.

1. Educate About AI

Your flock is using AI. It’s changing their doctrine and eroding their faith. Even devout Christians are succumbing to it.

2. Contend for the Five-Fold Ministry

We must contend for the five-fold ministry and the working of the Holy Spirit. According to Ephesians 4, this is what makes us like Jesus, and being like Jesus is the only thing that will protect the church from being “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting” (Ephesians 4:14).

3. It’s Time to Take Down the Strongholds

Addictions, fear, pride, anxiety, insecurities, self-righteousness, amongst others are making the flock vulnerable. We need to watch out for each other.

4. Create a Judgment Free Zone

People appreciate AI as a “safe” place because there is no judgment. But this is what the church is supposed to be. We must see others the way Jesus sees them, not as the sum of their sins. But through the transformative power of the cross.

5. Be Available

We need leaders who love, leaders who care, and leaders who are available.

Conclusion

As the church, we need to wake up. The hour is late.

We must know Him. We must hear His voice. We must encourage one another daily.

If our friends don’t share our joy and know our pain, they’re not our friends. We must contend for the five-fold ministry so that we can grow up into Christ.

Use AI, but not instead of the Holy Spirit.

It must be our delight to wait on the Lord. His words are Spirit and they are life. His words are a delight to the soul. Nothing in this world can satisfy more than Him.

If we know what is real, we will easily discern what is counterfeit.