Preaching from Organic Intelligence in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Rev. Dr. Casey Sigmon

Millions of people use generative AI daily. They (we) may not be forthright about our use of it, but the statistics don’t lie. From late 2022 to the end of 2023, generative AI use went from basically zero to roughly 100 million weekly users. The latest smartphones boast the efficiency and intelligence of their embedded generative AI tools. 

We are living and preaching during the rise of the chatbots.

Chatbots are word-based platforms of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity AI. How does this technology work? Generative (artificial) intelligence is fed a steady diet of information from the internet so that it can learn to predict word patterns and mimic human responses. When a human inputs a prompt, the chatbot can gather data from across the internet with stunning speed and respond in seconds with a human-like output such as a poem, essay, image, summary, and of course, a sermon.

What are the theo-ethical concerns raised by the rise of chatbots?

Melvin Kranzberg, a historian of technology, once said, “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” For religious leaders, this is not the time to ignore chatbots. Nor the time to embrace them. This is a critical time for discernment. 

My theo-ethical concerns about using generative AI for the sermon specifically emerge from a Time interview with, well, a chatbot. ChatGPT to be specific:

“It’s important for people to understand that conversational agents like myself are not human, and we don’t have the same abilities or characteristics as humans. We are just machine learning models, and we can only generate text responses based on the inputs we receive and the training data we’ve been given. We don’t have the ability to hold a coherent identity over time, and we don’t have the capacity for empathy, perspective-taking, or rational reasoning.” 

If a pastor was interviewing for a position and admitted to those weaknesses, what are the chances a congregation would hire them?

Here is more from ChatGPT:

“We are not capable of understanding the context or meaning of the words we generate…We can only produce text based on the probabilities of certain words or sequences of words appearing together, based on the training data we’ve been given.”

As I shared in my keynote last month, the risks of relying upon chatbots for sermons include more than those embedded in ChatGPT’s quotes above. Researchers also are uncovering embedded racial, religious, and patriarchal bias in these chatbots. Humans are of course biased. But generative AI is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, presenting as an unbiased machine when in fact its lack of empathy, identity, reasoning, and feeling perpetuates prejudices of all kinds as if it were fact.

Ultimately, I believe this historical moment reveals how much we have undervalued the so-called soft skills, dare I say organic intelligence, that make for compelling preaching. Modern homiletics, embedded in modern structures of theological education, focused primarily on disembodied intellectual theories, proper exegetical methods, and structures for homiletic delivery. These foci often overshadowed the importance of contextual knowing, embodiment, empathy, and feeling as vital homiletical aspects in need of cultivation and care in the development of preachers.

Preaching—compelling preaching—requires organic human intelligence, like that of Jesus Christ. Chatbots cannot access the Holy Spirit of God. Chatbots cannot access the wonderful, fragile human mind that can cultivate empathy, perspective-taking, integrity, and rational reasoning based on human experiences and accumulated wisdom.

So, instead of seeking new ways to transcend our embodiment with the latest technological toys, how can our preaching promote organic intelligence?