Teaching Theologically in an AI World

I remember sitting in my Hermeneutics 101 class a few years ago when one of my professors told us that he had noticed some students were using AI to write their papers. This was back in 2022, when I was first being introduced to artificial intelligence, and honestly, the whole thing sounded too good to be true. Looking back now, I think we quickly adopted something before we fully understood what it was capable of or how deeply it would change the way we work, think, create, and even study.

Note: I used Claude to generate the thumbnail image of AI preaching, because I thought it was ironically funny.

Think about it: AI can write a sermon.

That sentence would have sounded ridiculous not that long ago. Today, I can open ChatGPT, give it a passage of Scripture, tell it my audience, specify how long I need to speak, and within seconds have an introduction, three points, illustrations, discussion questions, and a closing application.

And honestly, some of those points might be pretty good. They might even be better than what I could come up with on my own.

And therein lies the problem.

To quote Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

I think those of us who teach the Bible need to start asking that question about AI. The question is no longer whether AI can help us prepare. The more important question is what happens when the tool designed to help us begins replacing the very work that qualifies us as faithful teachers of Scripture.

AI Can Give You Information but it Cannot Form You

The greatest temptation of AI is efficiency.

Here’s a likely scenario: it’s Wednesday afternoon and youth group starts in a few hours. You’ve spent time meditating on the passage and praying for the Lord’s wisdom, but you’re stuck on how to make your final point and conclude the message. Should you power up ChatGPT for advice?

Sermon preparation takes time. Reading the passage repeatedly takes time. Following an argument through a biblical book takes time. Looking up words, tracing themes, reading commentaries, wrestling with difficult theological questions, and figuring out how all of it points to Christ takes time. Turning to AI can realistically cut that time down significantly, and you can find ways to justify it if you want to.

Here is what I want to challenge you with: efficiency is not formation. There is something that happens to us while we sit with an open Bible wrestling with the passage that simply can’t be replicated by receiving an instant answer from a machine. And there is something that happens in our pastoral hearts when we turn to AI for wisdom about how to feed the sheep God has entrusted to our care.

Paul tells Timothy: “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” 2 Timothy 2:7 Notice the relationship between thinking and understanding. Timothy is called to think deeply, while recognizing that understanding ultimately comes from the Lord. That process matters.

The struggle to understand a difficult passage is not necessarily an obstacle to sermon preparation. Oftentimes the struggle is part of the preparation. God is not only preparing a sermon through your study. He is also preparing the preacher.

If AI removes every struggle, answers every question immediately, and organizes every thought before we have wrestled with the text ourselves, we may become more efficient content creators while becoming weaker theologians.

The Danger of Theological Outsourcing

I read commentaries. I listen to sermons. I use study Bibles. I benefit from theologians who lived hundreds of years before me. None of us approaches Scripture as though we are the first Christians to ever read it.

The problem with AI isn’t simply that we are receiving help from somewhere else. The issue is theological outsourcing.

What AI does is completely different from what commentaries provide. It can summarize ten commentaries and give me the apparent consensus. Essentially telling me what it thinks the passage means, and that’s dangerous because the responsibility of understanding a text shouldn’t be delegated to AI (or to a commentary either).

Titus 1:9 says an elder “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.”We, as pastors, must know why something is true, where it comes from in Scripture, how it relates to the gospel, and why competing interpretations fall short. If we outsource our theological grounding, then we’ve outsourced our qualifications for pastoral ministry.

Your People Don't Just Need Your Information

Our students don’t simply need theological information. They need youth leaders (volunteers, small group leaders, pastors, etc.) who have been transformed by the Word. That happens by wrestling with Scripture. AI undermines that process.

Ezra gives us a beautiful picture of this: “For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.” Ezra 7:10 The order we see in Ezra is study, do, and teach. Nowadays in the world of social media clips and notoriety, we tend to want to jump from study to teaching. And what we see is that AI enables us to skip the first two almost entirely.

Instead of study, do, and teach, we are tempted to generate, edit, and teach. Biblical teaching was never meant to work that way. Before the truth reaches our students' ears, it should pass through our heart.

There is a difference between saying, “The sovereignty of God means that God rules over all things,” because an AI-generated outline told you this was a good way to explain it, and proclaiming the sovereignty of God after spending a week watching that truth confront your anxiety, expose your desire for control, and remind you that Christ really is Lord over everything you’ve discussed with students in recent weeks.

The sentences might even be identical, but the way it’s taught will be very different.

So Should We Stop Using AI?

This can go both ways, and I’m sure most people skimming this article will immediately jump to this section, so here is my answer to the question:

Yes, but also no.

If you are a youth pastor who has completely outsourced your calling to AI, it would probably be wise to shut it down sooner rather than later. Our brains are like muscles, and like any muscle, when we stop exercising them, they get weak.

You might have gone to seminary. You might have earned your MDiv. You might have spent years learning hermeneutics, theology, Greek, and Hebrew. But if you have stopped doing the work of studying the text, wrestling with its meaning, developing your own main idea, and thinking through how you will faithfully teach it because you can simply ask AI to do those things for you, then I would argue that we have a serious problem.

At the same time, if you are using the right AI tools to help you go deeper into the Word of God rather than allowing them to replace your personal wrestling with Scripture, then I think you should use them. The distinction is important. AI should assist your study, not replace it.

Not every chatbot should be treated as a trustworthy theological research assistant. One tool I have found particularly helpful is Logos’ Study Assistant. I use it regularly because it works within the resources available through Logos rather than simply giving me an answer with no clear path for verifying where that answer came from. When I ask a question about a text I’m wrestling with, it can point me toward relevant resources and provide citations that allow me to go directly to those books and dig deeper into the material for myself.

Pastorally, let’s return to the scenario mentioned earlier: Should I use ChatGPT if I’ve studied and prayed, but still don’t know how to conclude my message? In short: no. I offer this counsel for two reasons. First, leaning on AI to conclude your message will introduce a bad habit, opening a gateway of leaning on it to write your message on weeks when time has been short and you don’t have a message yet. Second, this enables a false belief that the content of your message is the most important part of your message. It’s better for your students to hear a mediocre message that’s been prayed over and prepared by a youth leader who genuinely loves them than it is for them to hear a message you wrote through AI.

Some Struggles Are Worth Keeping

I don’t know what AI will look like five or ten years from now. Chances are good it will become even more efficient at interpreting texts, constructing sermons, and answering theological questions. I also know that the calling of the pastor will remain the same.

We are called to know the Word, to be shaped by the Word, and to faithfully teach the Word to the people God has entrusted to us. That isn’t intended to be an efficient process. But it is a transformative one. And that’s what matters most.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether AI belongs in sermon preparation. That is a question each pastor will have to resolve for themselves. The more important question is whether, somewhere along the way, we have allowed a tool designed to make things easier to remove the very process God uses to form us.