# AI as a Vehicle for Victory Conley Owens *Given at doreancon 2026 — Retrieving a Doctrine of Simony. Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church, Sunnyvale, California, September 28–30, 2026.* Written alongside *The Doctrine of Simony* (https://simony.info). --- 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. 4:13). 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?”[^1] 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. 1:39). 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. 18:17). 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. 36:7). 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. 10:8), 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.”[^2] // 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. --- [^1]: Luther, *Tischreden*, no. 5187 (WA TR 4, 704:18–23). [^2]: Ibid., no. 1038 (WA TR 1, 523:18–23).