Chatbot GPT and Brain-on-a-Stick Discipleship
Chatbot GPT gets one part of discipleship right, but God desires complete disciples - not partial ones.
You’re reading “Passing Through Digital Babylon”, a newsletter of insights and reflections from the digital empire while journeying towards the heavenly city. If that sounds interesting to you, please consider subscribing!
This week’s newsletter will be much shorter than previous ones. Two weeks ago I wrapped up some expanded commentary on my recent piece on ERLC.com, “4 social media shifts the church should know about”, and last week I was filming (and being filmed!) for a project I am producing called Mending Division Academy. This week, I am one thing: exhausted. What follows is a very short train of thought, but I hope there is enough here to be worth your time.
Chatbot GPT vs Blockchains and the Metaverse
If you’ve spent the past couple of years betting on the future of blockchains/crypto and the Metaverse, 2022 was a very bad year for you. Crypto winter was already settling in well before Sam Bankman Fried’s arrest in the Bahamas, and outside of the slowly dwindling crypto community1, anything that crypto touches with a 50’ pole is now seen with increased disdain and mockery to the general public - including the ever-hard-to-explain-how-this-is-actually-practical-in-real-life technology of blockchains.
The Metaverse fared no better. What originally began as an attempt to distract the press from the contents of the Facebook Papers (which was successful, I might add) has now become the albatross that has cost Meta and Zuckerberg untold billions of dollars while generating untold billions of eye-rolls and groans. Very few people, even among Meta’s own staff, want the Metaverse, and contrary to numerous well-meaning primers to the contrary, the Metaverse was never coming just because Zuckerberg said it was2.
But if you bet on AI last year, you won big with Chatbot GPT.
Where both crypto/blockchains/Metaverses have struggled to justify their relevance and benefit to people outside their respective communities, Chatbot GPT has already demonstrated - and caused - major disruptions to multiple industries. By now you’ve probably seen examples of the bot generating shockingly good responses to very complicated queries, writing down-to-earth explanations synthesizing multiple perspectives and structures together. What would take most people weeks (if not months), Chatbot GPT can do in seconds.
What I want to focus on today is Chatbot GPT’s impact on pastors and church leaders. Patrick Miller and Ian Harber have already done a great job exploring this in My AI Spiritual Director, and what I have to say here is simply another angle of many things they write about in their piece. Specifically, I want to focus on how Chatbot GPT is the nail in the coffin for one of the most common, well intentioned, but ultimately incomplete views of discipleship: discipleship as information transfer.
Brain-on-a-Stick Discipleship
I love doctrine. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that I love theological dogma, which is the strongest articulation of a theological tradition’s distinct emphases. I love both confessional-maximalism and creedal-minimalism, and see the strengths and weaknesses of both. Few thing make my day more than expounding on the basics of Nicene Trinitarianism or answering obscure doctrinal questions for friends or church members.
But part of the reason why I love doctrine is because there is more to discipleship - and my spiritual growth - than just doctrine alone. The reason for this is I am more - and you are more - than the sum of the thoughts and beliefs in our minds. We are more than brains-on-a-stick.
The term “brain-on-a-stick” comes from James K.A. Smith paradigm-shifting book You Are What You Love. Few books have proven to be more formative for my adult life and faith than his. The view that we are little more than a brain-on-a-stick has come to shape how we approach discipleship as a whole:
“While paging through an issue of a noted Christian magazine, I was struck by a full color advertisement for a Bible verse memory program. At the center of the ad was a man’s face, and emblazoned across his forehead was a startling claim: ‘YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK.’ That’s a very explicit way to state what many of us implicitly assume. In ways that are more ‘modern’ than biblical, we have been taught to assume that human beings are fundamentally thinking things… we view our bodies as (at best!) extraneous, temporary vehicles for trucking around our souls or “minds”, which is where all the real action takes place. In other words, we imagine human beings as giant bobblehead dolls: with humungous heads and itty-bitty, unimportant bodies. It’s the mind that we picture as “mission control” of the human person; it’s thinking that defines who we are3.
This does not, in any way, diminish the importance of doctrine or theology. What it does is re-contextualize doctrine’s relationship to other areas of discipleship. Doctrine, or what we believe about God and the Bible, is not the sum total of the Christian life, because Christian discipleship includes more than doctrine:
“Jesus doesn’t encounter Matthew and John - or you and me - and ask, “What do you know?” He doesn’t even ask, “What do you believe?” He asks, “What do you want? This is the most incisive, piercing question Jesus can ask of us precisely because we are what we want. Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow. Our wants reverberate from our heart, the epicenter of the human person. Thus Scripture counsels, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:32).4
As Smith goes on to describe, we do not always love what we think we love, and what we truly love will be displayed in our habits and actions. A holistic view of Christian discipleship, then, is aligning our habits and actions with our beliefs about God, to truly love the Lord with how we live as much as we think high and profound thoughts about him.
Love and doctrine are the two sides necessary to make the “coin” of Christian discipleship. If you have one, you ought to have the other. Chatbot GPT has one - but it is fundamentally incapable of the other.
Chatbot GPT does not, and cannot, love Jesus
This point sounds incandescently banal, but it is true: Chatbot GPT does not love Jesus. Not only does it not love Jesus, it is fundamentally incapable of loving Jesus. And if Chatbot GPT is incapable of loving Jesus, it is equally incapable of loving what Jesus loves - which ought to be the things disciples of Jesus ought to love as well.
Chatbot GPT represents the pinnacle of discipleship as information-transfer. You can ask it virtually anything and get down-to-earth summaries and explanations of nearly anything you want. Pastors, church leaders, seminary professors, and Sunday school teachers spend their entire lives studying just to get to the point to where they wished they were that smart. Chatbot GPT is the perfect catechumen, able to instantly expound on any point of a creed or confession with everyday language.5
And yet, we intuitively know that something is missing here.
Yes, Chatbot GPT knows a lot, and can do a lot, but there is also a lot it cannot do, and those things strike us as being as non-negotiable to Christian discipleship. Chatbot GPT will not make hospital visits. It will not bring you a meal when you are sick. It will not go outside its comfort zone to greet people at the door on Sunday mornings, or serve in the nursery. It will not return good for evil when reviled and insulted. Chatbot GPT can do a lot of things - indeed, a lot of things Christians wished they could do - but it cannot deny itself, pick up its cross, and follow Christ.
Chatbot GPT also cannot bear the fruits of the Spirit. It may be able to summarize what the Bible says about love, but it cannot grow in it. It may be able to describe how the Bible uses the word “joy”, but it cannot display it. It may be able to explain the Hebrew and Greek for the word “peace”6, but it does not know to live peaceable with anyone - nor display goodness or self control.
Chatbot GPT shows us that discipleship cannot be reduced to just doctrinal information transfer. Being a Christian is more than your ability to quickly produce answers to theological queries. Being a Christian involves things that no AI program could ever display, because no AI will ever learn how to love the way God has created us to love. It gets one part of discipleship right, but God desires complete disciples, not partial ones.
Both love and doctrine are necessary for Christian discipleship. Emphasizing one over the other (or collapsing one into the other) is not biblical discipleship. We must pursue both, and train Christians how to pursue both.
Substack Chat for This Week: Your Favorite Chatbot GPT Inputs and Responses
Thanks for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. Next week I am going to write on the momentum to ban TikTok in the United States and how even if TikTok gets banned, our problems with short form video are not going to disappear. TikTok is a hydra, and if it is slain, three more heads will take its place, and are already positioning themselves to do just that.
For this week’s Substack Chat, I want to know what are some of your favorite Chatbot GPT inputs and responses? I have seen several in the academic-seminary sphere of Twitter that, as a seminarian, made my side hurt from laughter, but I want to see what you’ve found (or even made yourself) that has been so amusing or bewildering.
If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends wherever you can! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.
Austin
This is a community that you can only participate in if you have the money to participate in. Since the value of crypto is crashing all across the board, it may create this weird state where participation is driven by reminiscing over how much one has lost - but that’s not exactly the same thing as bragging and flexing on how much your digital currency is worth, which is one of the biggest attractions to this space in the first place. If/when crypto regains its value, a good number of people will be left holding bags and be on the outside looking in.
I do want to caveat that there is a difference between “metaverses” as a mediated technological space a “the Metaverse” as Zuckerberg’s specific branding for Meta’s particular…well, metaverse. While I was (and remain) firmly convinced the latter was never going to happen, I will not rule out the former, especially if a company like Apple gets involved in the VR headspace arena. It is still a long shot, and I am not convinced the cultural tolerance for a “metaverse” is very high for any company at this point - but even if Meta’s fails, I will not rule out the possibility of someone else doing what Meta was never going to pull off.
Smith, James K.A. You Are What You Love (p. 3). Brazos Press.
Smith, James K.A. You Are What You Love (p. 1-2). Brazos Press.
I keep bringing this point up because one critique that I see of Chatbot GPT is that its writing is often that at a high-school reading level at best. I don’t see that as a critique at all - I actually think it’s among its biggest strengths. No amount of booksmarts can overcome your ability to explain something down at a level where people can understand you, and that skill doesn’t come from cramming more information into your brain; it comes from practice and experience.
I don’t actually know if it can do this.
Brilliant