Should Christians Use AI? A Guide to Discernment Without Fear
There is a conversation happening in the church right now, and most of it is happening at volume.
On one side there are people telling you that artificial intelligence is the greatest gift given to the Great Commission since the printing press :)
On the other side there are people telling you it is the spirit of antichrist wearing a friendly interface. Both are certain. Both are loud. And somewhere in the middle is you, quietly wondering whether it is alright to use a Bible study tool that summarises a passage for you, and feeling faintly guilty that you already have!
Let me be honest with you. I think the question is a simple one, but I think the way we are asking it is causing fear in us. And fear makes a poor teacher. It always has. And the Christians I love most, the ones who have served faithfully for decades and are tired in ways they cannot name, do not need one more thing to be frightened of. What they need is discernment. Which is a different thing altogether.
You are already using it
Here is where I want to begin, because I think it clears the ground.
If you have searched for something on Google this week, you used artificial intelligence. If your email inbox sorted the newsletters away from the message from your daughter, that was artificial intelligence. If your Bible app suggested a reading plan, if your phone recognised your face, if your bank flagged a strange transaction, if your maps app rerouted you around traffic on the way to church, you have been living inside these systems for years without a single moment of theological crisis about it.
This is not a trick, and it is not an argument that everything is therefore fine. It is simply an observation. The question was never whether we would use artificial intelligence. That ship left a long time ago and most of us were on it, asleep in a deck chair :) The question is what we allow it to become, and what we refuse to let it replace.
Those are two very different questions, and only one of them can be answered by panic.
We have been here before
There is a pattern in church history that we would do well to notice, because we are living inside it again.
In the 18th Century, Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod. It worked. The invention saved the men who rang the bells in the steeples during storms, who had been dying in significant numbers. And a portion of the church responded by declaring it an act of impiety. John Adams recorded what he was hearing from the religious leaders of New England: the lightning rod was, in their words, "an impious attempt to rob the Almighty of his thunder." One Boston preacher argued that diverting God's lightning into the ground would only store it up and release it later as earthquakes. In France, the physicist and priest Jean-Antoine Nollet believed entirely in the rod's effectiveness and still would not use one, on the grounds that it was impious to ward off heaven's lightning.
These were not foolish people. They were serious, godly, and frightened. And they were wrong.
The same pattern repeats. According to many at the time, for example, the printing press was going to democratise heresy. The telegraph was going to summon spirits. Radio was going to be the instrument of the prince of the power of the air. Television, the internet, the smartphone. Each time, a section of the church reached first for the word “demonic”, and each time the rest of the church quietly went on using the thing anyway, having never done the work of discerning what it should cost them.
I want to say that carefully, because both halves of that sentence matter. The reflexive cry of “demonic” is not discernment. But neither is the shrug of the person who adopts everything and examines nothing. The first is fear pretending to be faith. The second is convenience pretending to be freedom. We have specialised in both, and we have very rarely specialised in the slow, honest, prayerful work in between.
That work is what I want to invite you into as we discuss this topic.
What the global church is actually saying
This is worth knowing, because the loudest voices online are not always the ones doing the most careful thinking.
In January 2025 the Vatican released a document titled Antiqua et Nova, a note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. It is not a condemnation. Across more than one hundred paragraphs it works through education, labour, relationships, warfare, and the care of creation, and it lands on a sentence worth paying attention to. “Artificial intelligence”, it says, "should be used only as a tool to complement human intelligence rather than replace its richness." The document names real dangers. It warns that these systems can lead to harmful isolation, that presenting a machine as a person for deceptive purposes is a serious ethical violation, and that only a human person can bear moral responsibility. It closes not with a prohibition but with an appeal for what it calls a wisdom of the heart.
From the evangelical world, the Lausanne Movement has been just as measured. Its research briefing on AI and the Great Commission cautions the church against both naive optimism and paralysing fear, and states plainly that, "AI is neither saviour nor threat in itself." Its value, they argue, depends entirely on how it is discerned and governed by God's people. When Lausanne surveyed more than a thousand mission leaders across 119 countries for its Global Voices report, an overwhelming ninety-five percent said digital space is now part of the mission field, and yet leaders across every region reported low confidence in the church's readiness to respond to artificial intelligence. The report found churches were often reactive rather than prophetic. Whoah.
The theologians working most closely in this field say something similar, and they say it from an unusual vantage point. Noreen Herzfeld is both a computer scientist and a theologian, and her work argues that what makes us bearers of the image of God is not raw intelligence but relationship, and that our relating is inseparable from our embodiment. We are not minds in jars. We are bodies who touch, who weep, who sit with each other in silence. John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician, has written at length on what these technologies expose about the worldviews driving them. Jason Thacker, who led the drafting of an evangelical statement of principles on artificial intelligence, has argued for years that technology is never merely a neutral tool, because it is always shaping the way we perceive the world even as we use it.
Notice what none of them are doing. None of them are shouting. None of them are saying stop. But none of them are saying it does not matter either.
What Scripture gives us for this moment
Here is what I mean by that.
Scripture is not silent about technology, and it is not nervous about it either. The first genealogy in Genesis has barely begun before we meet Jubal, the father of those who play the lyre and pipe, and Tubal-cain, the forger of instruments of bronze and iron. Music and metallurgy, arriving in the story almost immediately, without commentary. When God furnishes the tabernacle He does it by filling a craftsman with His own Spirit. "I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship." (Exodus 31:3, ESV) The Spirit of God, resting on a man so that he can work with his hands and his mind. Making and creating is not foreign to the life of the Spirit. It never was.
And yet Scripture is also not naive. Two chapters after Tubal-cain, human ingenuity is building a tower, and the builders say to one another, “let us make a name for ourselves!” The problem at Babel was never the bricks. It was what the bricks were being used for.
This is the discernment scripture actually hands us, and it is far more useful than a verdict: Test everything. "Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good." (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21, ESV) Not reject everything. Not accept everything. Test. Weigh. Sift. Keep what is good and let the rest fall.
Let me say that again, because I think we have lost it. The biblical posture toward the new is neither adoption nor rejection. It is examination.
Where caution genuinely belongs
So let us do the examining, and let us do it honestly, because there is real cause for care here and I do not want to be glib about it.
The first caution is formation. Barna's 2026 research found that around four in ten practising Christians say AI has helped them with prayer, and nearly half say they have used it for Bible study or personal growth. Read that again slowly. That is not a small thing happening at the edges. That is a substantial portion of the church being spiritually formed by systems that were not designed with any theology at all, and largely without pastoral input. The tool is not the danger. The formation happening invisibly through the tool is where I would place my attention.
The second caution is authority. The same research found that nearly one in three American adults consider spiritual guidance from AI as trustworthy as guidance from a pastor, and among younger generations that figure rises to around two in five. Something is being handed over here. A machine trained on the internet can produce text about God that is fluent, warm, and completely untethered from the Spirit. Fluency is not the same as authority. It never has been, which is why the church has always had elders and not merely orators.
The third caution is the counterfeit of presence. Paul writes that "no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God." (1 Corinthians 2:11, ESV) A language model can generate a prayer. It cannot pray. It can produce a sentence about the peace of God but it cannot give you that peace. It can describe stillness and it has never once been still, because it has no interior life to be still within. What it produces is language that resembles the fruit of communion with God, offered without the communion. And if the resemblance is close enough, we may stop noticing what is missing.
The fourth caution is the one nobody puts on a list. These tools are astonishingly good at removing friction, and formation happens almost entirely inside friction. The slow reading. The passage you did not understand and had to sit with for three weeks. The prayer you did not know how to pray. If you outsource every difficulty, you will get answers quickly and you will not be changed by any of them. Knowing more does not make you more. That is not a new problem. It is the oldest problem the contemplative tradition has ever addressed, and it has simply found a very efficient new delivery system.
The one thing it cannot do
I want to end where I think the whole question actually rests.
Elijah stood on the mountain, and the Lord passed by. There was a great wind that tore the mountains, and God was not in the wind. An earthquake, and God was not in the earthquake. A fire, and God was not in the fire. And after the fire, the sound of a low whisper. (1 Kings 19:11-12, ESV)
Every technology we have ever built is wind, earthquake, and fire. Impressive, powerful, capable of reshaping the landscape. None of it is the whisper. The whisper has never come through the machinery, and it never will, because the whisper is a Person and He is looking for you specifically.
So use the tools. Use them the way you use your reading glasses and your car and the electric light in the room you are sitting in right now, with gratitude and without illusion. Let them summarise, translate, organise, and remind. And then close the laptop, and go and sit in the silence that no system can generate for you, and wait for a voice that has never once needed a server to communicate.
And this is where it gets really beautiful: the thing artificial intelligence cannot do is the very thing you were made for. It cannot be known by God, and it cannot know Him. You can. That is not a small consolation offered to a species being outperformed. That is the whole of it. The capacity to be addressed by God, and to answer, is what you are.
Do not let anyone frighten you out of using a tool. But do not let any tool quietly take the place of the only thing that has ever formed you - it is the Trinity and only the Trinity that can do that.
Discover Your Spiritual Listening Style
Most of us have a way that God has always spoken to us, and we have never stopped long enough to notice what that way is. Knowing how God speaks to you makes the noise easier to sort through.
If this resonates, here is your next step. Discover Your Spiritual Listening Style. It takes about ten minutes, and it is free.
FAQ section
Is it a sin for a Christian to use artificial intelligence?
Scripture does not treat tools as sinful in themselves. Making and building appear in Genesis almost immediately, and God fills the craftsman Bezalel with His Spirit to work with skill and intelligence. What Scripture examines is purpose. The tower at Babel was not condemned for its bricks but for what its builders intended. The relevant question is not whether you use AI, but what you are using it for, and what it may be quietly replacing.
Can AI help me pray or study the Bible?
It can assist with tasks that surround prayer and study. It can summarise, translate, organise notes, and surface cross-references. It cannot pray, and it cannot know God. Paul writes that no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. A language model can produce fluent words about God without any communion with Him, and the closer that resemblance becomes, the more carefully we need to guard the difference.
Is artificial intelligence demonic?
This claim has been made about nearly every significant technology, including the printing press, the lightning rod, radio, and the internet. In each case a portion of the church reached for that word first, and in each case the church later used the technology without ever doing the work of discerning what it should cost. Artificial intelligence is a mathematical system built by people. It carries the intentions of those who build and deploy it, which is precisely why discernment, rather than fear, is the appropriate response.
What does the church say about AI?
The most careful voices are notably measured. The Vatican's 2025 note Antiqua et Nova says AI should be used only as a tool to complement human intelligence rather than replace its richness, while naming real dangers around isolation, deception, and moral responsibility. The Lausanne Movement, representing evangelical leaders globally, warns against both naive optimism and paralysing fear, and states that AI is neither savior nor threat in itself. Theologians such as Noreen Herzfeld argue that what makes us image-bearers is relationship and embodiment, neither of which a machine possesses.
Footnotes:
1. Philip Dray, Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America (Random House, 2005), 111.
2. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (Simon & Schuster, 2003), 173, 176.
3. Tony Reinke, "Harnessing the Lightning," Desiring God, 2025. https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/harnessing-the-lightning
4. Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education, Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, 28 January 2025, §§58, 60–62, 112. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20250128_antiqua-et-nova_en.html
5. Lausanne Movement, "AI and the Great Commission: Asking the Right Questions," LIGHT Briefing, November 2025. https://lausanne.org/global-analysis/november-2025-issue-overview
6. Lausanne Movement, Global Voices, 23 October 2025.
7. Barna Group, "State of the Church 2026: Four Trends Shaping Ministry Strategy," June 2026. https://www.barna.com/research/four-trends-ministry-strategy-2026/
8. Noreen Herzfeld, The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic Age (Fortress, 2023); In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit (Fortress, 2002).
9. John Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity (Zondervan, 2020).
10. Jason Thacker, The Age of AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity (Zondervan, 2020); "Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles," ERLC, 11 April 2019. https://erlc.com/resource-library/statements/artificial-intelligence-an-evangelical-statement-of-principles