A couple of years ago, my son-in-law showed me ChatGPT on his phone. I had heard of it before, but didn’t know what it could do. It seemed pretty cool, and he was able to have it answer some questions and then even use it to write a short sermon that was somewhat suitable for a Christian in the Reformed tradition. It was almost like a magic trick, one where you wondered how that was actually even possible. We moved on to Christmas dinner, and I didn’t think much about it for a while.
Now, I wonder about artificial intelligence (AI) almost every day and how it will impact the future. The future of my teaching, my scholarship, and the future of my life. And especially that of my children and grandchildren. I also wonder about the future of education and what will happen to my educational home, Hope College. I wonder about the future of the church. It is possible to envision some of the benefits of AI, but the potential dangers are even easier to imagine. What will life be like under the influence of such a powerful tool? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that God still sits on His throne.
Over the last year or two, I have been influenced by the writing of the economist Tyler Cowen at his blog Marginal Revolution. Cowen is generally an optimist on the impact of AI, although reasonable (like most economists!). One of his major points is that this stuff is coming faster than we think. He provides links to many examples of his ideas, and he also links to the new AI programs that have recently been released onto the market. As a result, I have tried many of them out.
Until recently, I doubt that many of us were thinking about whether artificial intelligence would be capable of doing Christian scholarship. Today, with the rise of ChatGPT and similar AI models, I believe this issue is squarely on the table. I will admit that I have more questions than answers here, and that the ground is changing quickly below our feet. AI models are a powerful tool, but it is also clear that Christian scholars will need to think carefully about where we want to use AI and where we don’t.
So, how do we approach the questions of whether AI can do Christian scholarship and whether we should let it? First of all, it is necessary to define what is meant by “Christian scholarship.” The mission statement of Christian Scholar’s Review can provide us with some clues about its nature.
Christian Scholar’s Review describes its mission as “a medium for communication among Christians who have been called to an academic vocation. Its primary objective is the publication of peer-reviewed scholarship and research, within and across the disciplines, that advances the integration of faith and learning and contributes to a broader and more unified understanding of the nature of creation, culture, and vocation and the responsibilities of those whom God has created.”
It also states that it “invites contributions from Christian scholars of all historic traditions, and from others sympathetic to the task of religiously-informed scholarship, that advance the work of Christian academic communities and enhance mutual understanding with other religious and academic communities. The Christian Scholar’s Review publishes original manuscripts reflecting high standards of scholarship that align with the goals of its mission.”
Three points stood out to me as being crucial to remember when we consider Christian scholarship and its potential relationship to AI. First, Christian scholarship serves as “a medium of communication among Christians who have been called to an academic vocation.” When we do such scholarship, we do so as humans who are made in the image of God, and as a people who have been called to co-create with God in our academic writing. God’s creation is also the source of tools that we can use, but the tools themselves should work to promote and facilitate our calling, not substitute for our role.
Second, Christian scholarship should “advance the work of Christian academic communities and enhance mutual understanding with other religious and academic communities.” As Christians, we have clear goals for our scholarship: to love God with all our heart and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Many artificial intelligence programs are constructed with what are called large language models. The conclusions of AI are based on all the data it can collect from throughout the world. We don’t know much about the goals of the designers of these programs, and we know the material that they gather is not typically going to be from Christian thinkers. The information we receive from AI could reflect the goodness of God’s creation, but it will also certainly reveal the pervasive nature of sin that inhabits the creation. It is a very open question as to whether AI will “enhance mutual understanding.”
Third, “The Christian Scholar’s Review publishes original manuscripts reflecting high standards of scholarship.” The question of originality looms large when we consider the relationship between AI and scholarship. If we can just write a prompt or two and push a button to get results, does this qualify as original scholarship? Even if the results are well-written and sensible, do they meet “high standards?”
There is much more to say about the nature of Christian scholarship. A seminal book in this regard is George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. Christian Scholar’s Review has just published a review symposium on the revised edition of this volume.1 In addition, different Christian traditions have a variety of perspectives as to what exactly Christian scholarship entails. These traditions can help us navigate the waters where we will now either sink or swim. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen have argued for “enlarging the conversation” on the relationship between faith and scholarship.2 Christian scholars will need to do this more than ever as we deal with the consequences of artificial intelligence.
As I reflected on this topic, I wondered what AI models would have to say about whether they could play a part in Christian scholarship. I decided to engage one of them in a “conversation” about this subject. When I asked Gemini v2.5 the question, “Could Christian scholarship ever be done by AI,”3 and followed up with requests for more detail, the program provided a thorough discussion about what AI should and shouldn’t do with regard to Christian scholarship, and why. It concluded that “AI cannot truly do Christian scholarship in the full sense, although it can be an extremely powerful tool for it” (emphasis theirs).
It also described what it labeled as “the crucial distinction.” The program wrote that
AI might become capable of generating text that looks like Christian scholarship, potentially passing a kind of intellectual Turing Test in specific contexts. It could synthesize existing arguments, analyze texts according to learned methods, and present coherent outputs.
However, this would be a sophisticated simulation based on pattern recognition and data processing, not the authentic intellectual and spiritual activity of a human scholar engaging with God’s truth from a position of faith, lived experience, and personal commitment. The “who” doing the scholarship matters. Christian scholarship involves the engagement of the whole person – mind, spirit, and experience – in dialogue with God, tradition, community, and the subject matter. AI lacks this personhood.4
I will admit I was shocked by what I read after engaging with the program for less than half an hour. My next thought was literally, “Couldn’t have said it better myself.” I didn’t know that these programs could write quite that well or synthesize so much information. I didn’t provide the program with anything except questions, and I didn’t ask it to look at any particular articles.
I am fairly confident that with a few hours of work with the program, I could have produced a blog post that has many of the same ideas presented here. But I didn’t. I reflected on these questions for months, thought about my audience, and spent hours and hours writing over several days. I used Google for searches and Grammarly for correcting grammar, but I didn’t just adopt the ideas that were produced in the AI program (many of which were quite similar to my own). The volume of information the program generated was stunning. It felt like AI could write a full article on this subject, and one where I would learn a lot. Navigating the writing process itself led to a substantial amount of reflection.
So how do Christian scholars use AI as a tool for scholarship, without letting it take over? Do we need a new definition of scholarship? How will we determine whether what we read is written by AI or by humans? Who is the servant, and who is our master? As noted above, there are a lot of questions, and I believe the substantial incursion of AI into academic life is coming our way much faster than we might think. I look forward to hearing how other Christian scholars respond to these issues. Let’s get the discussion started—now is the time.
Footnotes
- See Christian Scholar’s Review, 54:3, at christianscholars.com/issues/spring-2025/.
- Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation, Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Interaction with Gemini v2.5, March 26, 2025.
- Interaction with Gemini v2.5, March 26, 2025.
Thank you, Todd, your post is raising the kinds of questions we need to consider more deeply. In my conversations with faculty at my institution and colleagues across universities, I keep coming back to the idea of Imago Dei and the Gospel which have profound implications for our scholoarship and teaching, our work. Sin working through all aspects of our lives can often lead us to giving production more importance to our sense of personal value and worth. Particularly, it seems, in scholarship which places an inordinate emphasis on new perspectives. Work, being a Creation mandate, is God-given and good. The Gospel must redeem our work understandbly as the affects of the Fall are pervasive. What I haven’t been able to connect with my faculty is this sense of importance to the rising concerns of AI. (Understandbly, they are concerned with student cheating.)
I’m curious how we respond to AI with Gospel correction which I think relates to the questions you raise in your post. So, for Christian scholars, the question I’d want to ask in response to your title, what motivates a Christian scholar to use AI for their work? Is it so that they can produce more, do they feel the pessure to produce to find meaning and worth? (I hear it often, using AI has saved me a lot of time. Or, I can do more in my day using AI.) Alternatively, do scholars hope to use AI so that the machine can do menial labor to free the human being to do only that which a human can do? AI will never grapple with the effects of sin. AI will never grapple with values and morals. Perhaps it is time to redefine scholarship and teaching away from information production and consumption towards cultivating knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.
This blogpost is needed and raises a clear ethical issue for Christian faculty, students, and leaders of Christian universities and colleges.
A problematic issue I’ve found, though, is that we still lack of sufficiently detailed definition of “scholarship”. As a student in higher ed for “many” pursuing a B.A. M.Ed., and Ed.D, and subsequently a professor conducting my own research and teaching courses in research methods, I’ve found that scholarship can be receptive and/or productive. It is receptive when we search the literature in our discipline in preparation for conducting our own empirical research, and in this respect, AI has been a great servant for many years, permitting us to do otherwise impossible searches through the use of search engines both within (through our institutions’ online libraries) and without (e.g. Google Scholar) the workplace. As a receptive tool, therefore, AI is indispensable to the academic community, and falsely produced references aside, has helped a great deal to advance our scholarship.
But then there is the question of its use as a productive tool, and here I think both Christian and secular universities and colleges need to draw a very firm line in the sand for ourselves, colleagues, and students. AI being by definition “artificial”, I do not believe we can ethically accept its use for the production for any scholarship (thesis, dissertation, article, book, webinar/conference presentation) presented as the original ideas of the student or researcher responsible if it fact it is not. That is the essence of plagiarism, and we need to continue to firmly forbid it in the academy.
God is not artificial, and neither should we be. Our authentic selves — what God has created — are needed in everything we do. By the way, AI has doubled my grading time for my writing students as I try to sort out questionable passages flagged by a very good chatbot checker. It is truly awful that this artificiality pervades everything and obscures our authentic thinking.
Yes, grading writing is indeed more of a nightmare with AI.
The great current rhetorical question: How do we make them see it is worth the effort NOT to use AI in their writing?
I think there are a few things to make note of here. First, as the author pointed out, AI cannot create new information. Large language models like ChatGPT are probability machines. They don’t even know what they are saying. They are picking the next word in the phrase based on the prompt provided them and a massive database of word connections. When an AI doesn’t know “the answer” it will make up something that is plausible. These are called hallucinations and are well documented. If AI cannot create something original and when it gets stuck it hallucinates to make the user happy, it doesn’t seem likely that AI can ever be a scholar.
Second, before we throw the baby away with the bath water, there can be a place for AI in scholarship and most any other activity in life. LLMs are simply the next iteration of the fire -> wheel -> gas engine -> calculator -> internet -> smart phone ->… list of technology innovations. Just as we don’t do long division by hand anymore, we don’t necessarily need to go to the library stacks and search endlessly for information that is at our fingertips online. LLMs can be very helpful as an editor or idea generator just like a colleague can. In all cases it is incumbent upon us to listen, filter, accept/reject the information from the LLM and the colleague and move on. As tremendous synthesizers of information, LLMs can expose you to what seems to be brand new ideas. It is up to the us to properly handle the information. This may lead to a refined definition of scholarship.
Finally, God created AI and all other technologies and algorithms long before we had the opportunity to discover them. He didn’t wake up one morning and say “Wow, didn’t see that coming.” It is a gift from a loving God and it should be our goal to redeem the technology and use it for God’s glory. The challenge going forward is how do we adapt to what seems to be a very powerful tool so that it helps and doesn’t hinder. A corporate trainer from way back in my tech days once said “A fool with a tool is still a fool.” nothing has changed. We just have more powerful tools that can make us look like bigger fools if we aren’t careful.