The Real Problem with AI Prayers - Christianity Today

At a recent Gospel Coalition conference, celebrity pastor John Piper told his audience about a task he had given ChatGPT: Write a prayer informed by the theology of Don Carson. He proceeded to read the resulting text. ChatGPT’s “prayer” seemed to tick all the theological boxes; the crowd murmured, seemingly impressed. But John Piper was not. He declared that such a “prayer” was not a prayer at all, being the product of a soulless machine rather than the expression of a worshipful human heart.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence have raised unsettling questions about our own humanity; indeed, each new advance in AI technology might seem to erode a once-secure realm of human uniqueness. Formerly situated in the vast expanse between beasts and the gods, our territory is now threatened by the rising capacities of our creations, raising the specter of our obsolescence. What remains to set human beings apart? As AI leaves a wave of redundancies in its wake, will it make humanity itself redundant?

These questions about human distinctiveness are important. People are made in the image of God; code is not. I imagine that’s much of what John Piper was getting at in his critique.

But his exercise also raised interesting questions about language itself. Machine-generated prayers really can sound just like human-generated ones, prone as we are to fall back on generic formulations and common clichés. If an AI prayer isn’t truly prayer, what implications might that have for our own praise and petition, which too often evince our programming in Christianese and other habitual forms?

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns his disciples not to “heap up empty phrases [“use vain repetitions,” in other translations] as the Gentiles do” (Matt. 6:7, ESV throughout). He then proceeds to teach the disciples the specific words of the Lord’s Prayer.

At first blush, it might seem that such a prescribed prayer is contrary to the warning of the preceding verses. Rather than “empty phrases,” staid and overly familiar, we should privilege spontaneity in our communication with God.

But in the AI era, the “spontaneity” of our prayers (indeed, of anything we say) might be less convincing. Large language models have shown us that speech initially presumed to manifest thoughtful, individual, creative expression may merely be routinized functions operating on generic data, no internal reflection required.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus addressed the problem of “vain repetitions” not by extolling the authenticity of spontaneous and personally composed—or generated?—prayers but by giving his hearers a specific prayer, with petitions whose depths his followers have meditated on for around 2,000 years.

Clearly, Jesus’ prior warnings must have some bearing on how we use the Lord’s Prayer. If we mindlessly and distractedly repeat its words with no regard for their import, we might as well be turning a Tibetan prayer wheel, automating the practice. Critics of liturgy have frequently complained of “reading set prayers” and often with genuine cause. Set prayers are there to be prayed. The words must become our words.

The words are ours neither by virtue of composition nor, in the context of a liturgy, by virtue of spontaneity or individuality. We did not come up with the words of the Lord’s Prayer, and we did not independently determine to pray them at a certain juncture in a service. While our mouths might be speaking the words, this does not seem to be sufficient to make them truly ours either. Scripture frequently calls for an integration of heart, word, and action, condemning these who honor God with their lips while their hearts are far from him (Matt. 15:8).

If we look for our human uniqueness in our capacity to produce textual artifacts, AI poses an existential threat. Not only does it show the difficulty of distinguishing the products of machines from those of human beings; it also reveals just how mindless and machine-like much human speech and writing can be, especially in a bureaucratic society.

Yet there is another way of regarding our relationship to language, a relationship more apparent in a society before the dominance of the written and printed word. In an oral culture, words are encountered not in autonomous texts but in speakers, ceremonies, and performances—in poets and singers, liturgies and plays, storytellers and orators, priests and public readers, politicians and philosophers. The primary vehicle of the word is the person.

While the apparent difference between human beings and AI as generators of words might be diminishing, the difference between human beings and AI as creatures of the word is vast and categorical.

Evangelicals have typically thought about Holy Scripture according to the mindset of literate moderns: Holy Scripture is equated with the physical object of our personal Bibles, which we study for knowledge of God. Yet Holy Scripture itself presents us with a more complicated picture. Yes, there are physical scriptural texts external to us—this is important. However, throughout the Scripture, God’s Word is progressively taking humanity itself as its proper vehicle. Also, for much of the history of the people of God, Holy Scripture was chiefly encountered not in the latent textual object of a privately owned Bible but in the living words of public reading and preaching, in liturgies, in the singing of psalms, and in texts treasured in personal memory.

The Lord is a speaking God. He delivers the Law to his people at Sinai, calling them to give their assent to it, to observe all its commandments, to take them to heart, and to serve him in love. The Law is an external word, standing over against resistant people and judging them for their rebellion.

The Book of Psalms opens with the figure of the blessed man who delights in and meditates on the Law day and night (1:1–2). It describes a righteous man who has the Law in his heart, speaking justice and having wisdom (37:30–31). In the Psalms, the second-person imperatives of the Law are encountered in the form of first-person expressions of delight and commitment—“Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (119:97).

The Book of Psalms depicts and encourages a relationship with the Law characterized by meditation, memorization, delight, elevation of words in song, and collective performance. Something similar can be seen in the Wisdom Literature, where external commands of the Law give way to the declarations of the wise man, who has internalized the wisdom and justice of the Law and can speak with insight and authority.

In the Prophets, human beings become bearers of God’s word in a new, more pronounced way. Ezekiel ate the scroll so that he could speak God’s word to the people with authority (Ezek. 3:1–9). Isaiah’s lips were touched with a coal from the divine altar so that he could speak with a burning holiness (Isa. 6:5–8). Jeremiah’s mouth was touched so that he might bear God’s words and thus be equipped with authority over nations “to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:9–10).

In Jesus Christ, the Word of God comes to humanity in person. In Jesus, the wisdom, authority, righteousness, justice, and life of God’s Word is fully realized in the medium of our flesh. Although the world would not contain the books that could be written about him, Jesus himself never wrote a book. He himself is the Word.

And he is forming people as living words. In 2 Corinthians 3:3, the apostle Paul described the Corinthian Christians as a “letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” Elsewhere, in Colossians 3:16, he spoke of “the word of Christ dwell[ing] in you richly” in the singing of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. The church is a living message of Christ, a people who are formed as word bearers as Holy Scripture is metabolized into us through memorization, meditation, song, prayer, sermons, reading, and praise.

This, of course, is the purpose of something like the Lord’s Prayer: that in constantly returning to these words, we might be formed by them, becoming the sort of people who can pray them fully. Spontaneity and originality can be worthwhile in their place, but far more important than the words that we produce are the words that go down into our bones and are treasured in our hearts.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates observes how writing can substitute external reminder for internal memory and therefore risk encouraging forgetfulness in those who depend on it. Relying on writing, they no longer need to take words into themselves, forfeiting wisdom in the process.

In many respects, AI is a radical intensification of the externalization of the word first encouraged by writing. Perhaps its greatest danger is a deeper forgetfulness and forfeiture of wisdom. Within creation, it is only in human beings that the word enjoys its proper living character, being found with delight, wisdom, willing obedience, justice, and authority. Although AI can simulate the products of such creatures, it remains lifeless.

When we pray, presenting ourselves to God as creatures of his words is more important than presenting our own verbal creations. The words of our seemingly spontaneous prayers, seldom as original or expressive as they might appear, are of considerably less value than hearts and lives that treasure, internalize, and embody God’s own words. This is worship that no AI will ever be able to offer.

Alastair Roberts is an adjunct Senior Fellow for the Theopolis Institute and a professor at Davenant Hall. You can follow his work on The Anchored Argosy Substack.