The Spark That Started This Conversation…
My AI Bible Study
When ChatGPT first came out, I was curious and started playing around. Fast forward to today and I’m working a full-time job at Church.Tech and writing a dissertation on the use of AI in church planting.
This year I felt God leading me to read the Bible chronologically. In January I started reading but because I’m always using AI, I had a chat thread going along with my study. I hope this story gives you some clues on how to read your Bible with AI, but also gives you the background on how Aaron and I came to this deconstruction conversation.
I started by reading Genesis 1-9 and read through the stories of Creation and Noah’s Ark (the Flood). I remembered that other cultures had similar stories and was curious how they all compared. So I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of all creation and flood stories and what each revealed about God and humanity. Within seconds I had a nicely organized table. That research would have taken me weeks previously.
I then asked ChatGPT to analyze what was unique about the Biblical versions of the stories. It was pretty cool. Long story short, the Bible says there is one God not many and humanity has way more dignity and value in the Biblical accounts. In the other accounts the gods are distant and usually pretty violent toward humanity i.e. “if the gods get angry, it’s not going to go well for you”. This is the angry god I talked about in my last post.
What I noticed is that the Biblical account is beginning to unveil the truth about God. Using stories common to the day but tweaking them to reveal the true nature of God. Interesting…
Chronologically the next reading was the Book of Job. It’s an interesting tale. Job’s a righteous guy and pretty well off. Satan and God chat. Satan says the only reason Job’s righteous is because he has it so easy. God disagrees and allows Satan to attack Job. In a short period of time, Job loses his family and his wealth.
Now hop back to the creation and flood stories. A common thread in those stories was that if you did something wrong, the gods punished you. This story of Job is going to challenge that thinking because Job did nothing wrong.
Job has three friends that show up. They spend a week with him in silence just sitting with him. That’s pretty impressive. May we all have friends that just sit with us in our worst moments. But after a week, they all start to talk and that’s when everything hits the fan.
About half way through the book, I was getting lost. Those unfamiliar names make it hard for me to follow. So I asked ChatGPT to summarize the arguments that each of Job’s three friends were making. LIGHT BULBS WENT OFF!
The friends of Job had a similar worldview to those creation and flood stories common in the day. They were arguing with Job because Job was saying things like “I want a relationship with God”. His friends were like, “Job that’s not how it works. You’re a lowly human.” Job was pushing back and in doing so Job is unveiling a bit more about the truth of God in humanity. Fascinating how God uses story to slowly unveil these truths.
Aaron Interjection: Wait a second Doug, are you saying the Bible isn’t just a rulebook and manual for living? But instead, it’s filled with stories that are told from different points of view, none of which are perfect, but instead help us grasp a more varied and true perspective of who God is? ;)
If so, that’s pretty controversial (I love that) and also incredibly enlightening! That makes me think, “wow, so the more diverse perspectives we consider about God, the more faithful our perspective of God will be!” That means your particular pastor, or church, or denomination doesn’t have truth cornered.
Doug Response: No it’s not a rulebook or manual for living even though it includes rules and has lot to say about how we should live. It primarily reveals God to us and uses stories as well as other mediums to do that. Are the stories perfect? Define perfect. Or don’t, it’s just going to lead to arguments. The Bible contains different perspectives. That’s pretty obvious as it wasn’t written by one person. Those different perspectives work together to reveal a more complete understanding of God. Same today. We can learn a lot from the Body of Christ (the Church) which is full of different perspectives. There are some limits though. There are universal truths that the Church all agrees on. Take for example the divinity and humanity of Jesus. I can’t have a perspective that says Jesus was human but not divine and toss that up to perspective.
Alright, back to Doug’s blog…
Fun sidenote: I asked ChatGPT to act as a psychologist and analyze the conversations through the lens of emotional regulation. If you’re a psychology junkie, this was flat out amazing.
So what I saw was that the reason Job and his friends were fighting is because they had different worldviews. They fundamentally saw the world in different ways. And this is where deconstruction starts. Or at least that’s my theory.
I think the older generation that has power and influence in the church today has a different worldview than the younger generations. This leads the younger generation to always have a bit of unsettled feelings like “something here isn’t quite right”. And then something happens to trigger a more critical look and deconstruction starts.
That’s our theory at least that we are going to unpack and discuss. We aren’t claiming to have all the answers. In fact, we welcome your dialogue. We hope you’ll approach this with curiosity, and continue the conversation in the comments.
Written by: Doug Foltz