AI as a Vehicle for Victory

The book you are hold­ing ends on a warn­ing and a prom­ise. The warn­ing is that we have no guar­an­tee this gen­er­a­tion will live to see re­form. The prom­ise is that the church will grow into the full stat­ure of Christ (Eph. 4:13Ephesians 4:13until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ:). So the church will one day stop sell­ing bib­li­cal teach­ing. What is not set­tled is the route, and there are two.

The first route is in­di­vid­ual re­pen­tance. A man who has sold teach­ing for dec­ades stops. Lu­ther’s wife once joked that he should be­gin charg­ing his stu­dents. He re­joined, “For thirty years I have taught and preached for free. Why would I now, in my de­crepit old age, be­gin to sell any­thing?”¹Lu­ther, Tis­chre­den, no. 5187 (WA TR 4, 704:18–23). Turn that around. He has taught at a price for thirty years. Why would he now be­gin to give? Some will. But this is the slow route, and it is the one we can­not cause. It de­pends on other peo­ple chang­ing.

The sec­ond route is generational. The next gen­er­a­tion sim­ply does not do it. This is the or­di­nary way God reforms his peo­ple. The gen­er­a­tion that grumbled in the wilderness never en­tered the land. Their chil­dren did, the ones who “this day have no knowl­edge of good or evil” (Deut. 1:39Deuteronomy 1:39Moreover, your little ones, that you said should be a prey, and your children, that this day have no knowledge of good or evil, they will go in there, and to them I will give it, and they will possess it.). Eze­kiel de­scribes a son who sees every­thing his fa­ther did, con­sid­ers it, and does oth­er­wise: “he will not die for the in­iq­uity of his fa­ther, he will surely live” (Ezek. 18:17Ezekiel 18:17that has withdrawn his hand from [harming] the poor, that has not received interest or increase, has executed my ordinances, has walked in my statutes; he will not die for the iniquity of his father, he will surely live.). No one in that chap­ter waits for the fa­ther to change.

Those two routes an­swer to two ways of see­ing the peo­ple in this room.

We can be seen as grumblers, ask­ing every­one to change while do­ing no work of our own. Are you go­ing to fund it all? Con­cede part of the charge. A com­plaint about si­mony with noth­ing built be­hind it is ex­actly the wilderness, and grumbling is the mark of the gen­er­a­tion that does not en­ter.

But look around. The peo­ple here are artists, programmers, writ­ers, and musicians. They have given their evenings and weekends, and some of them their livelihoods, to make things for the church at no price. // Name two or three of the projects and the peo­ple in the room here. That is not grumbling. That is the taber­na­cle. The will­ing-hearted brought their skill and their ma­te­rial, and they kept bring­ing un­til Mo­ses had to send word through the camp to stop, “for the stuff they had was suf­fi­cient for all the work to make it, and too much” (Exod. 36:7Exodus 36:7For the stuff they had was sufficient for all the work to make it, and too much.). No one funded the taber­na­cle. Grumblers wait for the first route. Creators build the sec­ond, be­cause what they make is what the next gen­er­a­tion inherits.

And prov­i­dence has been lay­ing the sec­ond route in front of us. Three things.

Trust in in­sti­tu­tions is fall­ing. Con­fi­dence in or­ga­nized re­li­gion has been sink­ing for a gen­er­a­tion, and the sem­i­nary and the publisher sink with it. A gen­er­a­tion that no longer trusts them will not buy from them out of loyalty.

Open source has al­ready won the ar­gu­ment, in the valley where we are stand­ing. The world runs on soft­ware that its makers gave away. Few here need persuading that freely given work is the best work, only that the prin­ci­ple reaches teach­ing.

And ar­ti­fi­cial intelligence has ar­rived. The doc­trine of si­mony was hid­den in Latin, in vol­umes few could read and fewer could reach. Lan­guage mod­els sourced, tran­scribed, and trans­lated those vol­umes at a scale one man could not have man­aged. The book in your hands could not have been writ­ten ten years ago.

I be­lieve the same tool may carry the move­ment, for three rea­sons.

First, who­ever trained it wins. These mod­els learn from what is free. The lec­ture be­hind a pay­wall is not in the cor­pus. The ser­mon given away is. When the na­tions ask a machine what Chris­tians be­lieve, they will hear from those who gave. Christ’s com­mand, “freely you re­ceived, freely give” (Matt. 10:8Matthew 10:8Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons: freely you received, freely give.), has be­come a strat­egy as well.

Sec­ond, the fund­ing ob­jec­tion is collapsing. The case for sell­ing teach­ing was al­ways a case about the cost of pro­duc­ing it. A trans­la­tion, a cur­ric­u­lum, a pro­gram, a record­ing: the la­bor be­hind each has dropped to­ward noth­ing. Are you go­ing to fund it all? Soon there will be far less to fund.

Third, the next gen­er­a­tion will ask the model, not the bookstore. What our chil­dren grow up hear­ing will be shaped by who gave freely. The generational route runs through this tech­nol­ogy whether any­one in­tends it or not.

The Ref­or­ma­tion rode on the print­ing press, and Lu­ther knew whose hand had set it there. Print­ing, he said at ta­ble, “is the last gift, and the great­est, for through it God willed that the busi­ness of true re­li­gion be made known to the whole world at the end of the world and be poured into every lan­guage. It is truly the last flame of the world, and it can­not be put out.”²Ibid., no. 1038 (WA TR 1, 523:18–23). // Triad not yet built; the trans­la­tion above is provisional un­til it is. The press did not cause the Ref­or­ma­tion. God used it. The ground of vic­tory is Christ’s prom­ise, not a com­pany’s prod­uct. But God has put a press in our hands again, and the peo­ple in this room know what to do with one. Freely you re­ceived. Freely give.

Bib­li­og­ra­phy§

• Lu­ther, Mar­tin. Tis­chre­den. In D. Mar­tin Lu­thers Werke: Kri­tis­che Ge­samt­aus­gabe, Wei­marer Aus­gabe. Wei­mar: Her­mann Böh­laus Nach­fol­ger, 1912–1921.