Looking at our world from a theological perspective, this is the Theology Central Podcast, making theology central. Good afternoon, everyone. It is Wednesday, November the 26th, 2025. It is currently 302 p.m. Central Time, and I'm coming to you live from the Theology Central studio located right here in Abilene, Texas. Well, I've been debating what I should do today. If I'm being honest with you, I'm kind of conflicted here, right? It's the day before Thanksgiving, right? So I know every broadcaster, every sermon, every podcast notification I keep receiving. It's about Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, having an attitude of gratitude and giving thanks and giving thanks and giving thanks and giving thanks. That's all everyone is talking about. I think the number one trending hashtag right now on Sermon Audio is Thanksgiving. I think when you go to Sermon Audio at the top of the page, I think the first thing you see there is Thanksgiving. So everything is going in that direction, and you know what I have a tendency to do. If everyone is going right, I'm just going to turn left. If everyone's going north, I'm going south. If they go east, I'm going west. I tend to go the opposite direction. Now I do that sometimes just because I'm, you know, I have this anti-conformity, I don't know, virus inside of me. I don't know. It's like in my DNA. I don't know if it's a virus. It's just like I'm born to go against the crowd. It's just, I've always been that way. But there's another part of me that says there are plenty of people right now who are sitting in their home alone. They're right there going, okay, tomorrow everyone's going to be with family and friends and activity, and they're going to be sitting somewhere alone. Maybe they're going to go have Thanksgiving meal in a restaurant by themselves or eating a Thanksgiving meal in their home by themselves. It's not going to be family, fun, you know, food, Hallmark. It's not going to be anything along those lines. So for them, hearing all of these messages about Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, they may not feel very thankful. They may feel frustrated or upset or hurt or dealing with past trauma. Now, I know we could come preach at them going, you're supposed to be thinking, we're supposed to give thanks and everything. And you can make it in a very law kind of way, but law only condemns. Well, we could get into a whole discussion about that. So I think that there needs to be at least one podcast, one voice saying we're not going to go in that direction, right? In fact, maybe, maybe later this evening, maybe at two or three in the morning, I don't know, I may do an anti-Thanksgiving message. I don't, I don't know how well that will go. We will see. But I, I felt like I don't really want to go in that direction. out of my own anti-conformity, and just because I feel like some people need something else to listen to, than all of the standardized Thanksgiving messages. I mean, if you take all of the Thanksgiving messages and put them in a blender, when it's all said and done, are they not just gonna, if you pour out all of the basic contents, I think it's gonna, if you break them all down, I guess like in a blender, break it all down so that you could separate the contents, I think you would see that they're all pretty much following the same template. At least that's my perspective. So I don't want to do that. There's another part of me, full transparency, I'm thinking about my own holiday, my own Thanksgiving. And I'm like, what could I do today? I mean, it's the day before Thanksgiving. I have today and tomorrow. What could I do to make it like fun or exciting? Do I do a movie marathon? How about music? How about I do this? But everything I know, I've got, you know, time is passing, so I've got to choose one thing. And I'm like, if I go do that, well, then I'm not going to broadcast. Then I'm going to be thinking I should have broadcast. Then I'm not going to be thankful. I'm going to be frustrated. So I thought, you know what? I think we have a perfect opportunity to have a good discussion on this day before Thanksgiving. Some of you may be traveling, you may be doing, I don't know what you may be doing, whatever you're doing, maybe that you'll find this to be at least somewhat interesting. Now, to be fair, I think that what makes this interesting is because of what happened yesterday. Yesterday we tried a little bit, kind of a little experiment. Instead of calling this the Theology Central Studio, we called this the Theology Central Laboratory, and we opened up the lab door. I know, I can't do a creaking door, I sound like a dying cat. We opened up the lab door, we came into the Theology Central lab, and we ran an experiment, and it didn't quite turn out the way I was expecting. In fact, when it was over, I was a little frustrated. To be honest with you, I've even thought about going back and deleting that episode because that's how unhappy I have been about the episode. But then, the more I started thinking about it, you know, that didn't quite go the way I'd planned. You know, in some ways, during that experiment, something unexpected happened. And maybe that something that was unexpected actually was a good thing because it leads us into a whole new conversation that we need to have. Now, if you'll remember the last episode, I didn't have anything planned. I didn't have anything rehearsed. I definitely didn't have anything scripted out. I didn't have anything like that. I mean, I simply hit the Go Live button, sat down in front of the microphone, I opened up Sermon Audio, I picked a random sermon, and then I invited AI to help us build, well, a sermon on its own based on the passage of the random sermon that I chose from, that the passage that that sermon preached on. And if you were listening, you heard it all happen in real time, right? You saw that AI produced an outline, a sermon, instantly, within, I think, four to five seconds, it had it already ready to go. You saw that I gave the transcript of the sermon that I was using to find the text I wanted AI to write a sermon on. Sermon Audio reviewed that entire sermon, analyzed it, critiqued it, and did it in about five seconds. You notice that AI diagnosed hermeneutical problems in an instant. It diagnosed hermeneutical issues in that sermon that it critiqued instantaneously, again, within four to five seconds. So in about 15 seconds, AI wrote a sermon, identified hermeneutical problems, and analyzed the sermon all in about 15 seconds. But then, It kind of hit, there was this moment in the whole experiment where everything kind of went wrong, at least from my perspective. Everything went, I wasn't planning it. I didn't foresee it happening, right? Because there was a moment when I decided, we'll wait time out. I disagree with AI here. I'm going to push back. I don't like the hermeneutical approach that AI is taking here. I believe that hermeneutical approach that AI is taking is the same hermeneutical approach that most sermons take, and I'm going to push back. And I did not push back. I've got to stress this because When you're listening to a podcast like this, you're like, oh, he's just some stupid podcaster. What does he know? Just remember, OK, I do. And I don't say this in a way to say I'm smarter. I'm not saying that. But I want you to know that I do have some reason why I feel like I can push back hermeneutically. All I have done for 25 or 30 years basically is go to school. I've gone to Bible institutes, Bible colleges, seminaries, you name it. And all of my education is in biblical studies, theological studies, religious education. It's all been in those areas of, you know, Education, educational pursuits, it's been in those directions. So I've taken class after class on hermeneutics and I have read who knows how many hermeneutical textbooks and written papers on hermeneutics. So I feel like I have at least some, at least an educational framework in order to push back. At least I will say that, okay? So that's why, so I didn't do it just because I wanted to be argumentative. I did it because I felt like there was a hermeneutical issue at stake here, and I believed what AI was doing was not hermeneutically correct. So right there in the middle of the experiment, I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop. And I basically asked AI something, I'm paraphrasing, hey, why did you use Acts chapter two to define a devoted church? You just made basically the same mistake every other pastor makes. Why did you do that? And then you heard something. I think maybe you perceive it to be strange. Maybe you perceive it to be interesting. Maybe you don't even care. But AI did something. AI paused. AI reconsidered. And then AI began to correct itself. AI made an admission, it made a confession that the hermeneutical approach that it took from a strictly hermeneutical perspective was flawed. And you're like, well, why would AI produce something with a hermeneutically flawed method? That's a good question. And it left me a little bit baffled as well, because I was like, wait, why are you doing this? AI then immediately rebuilt its answer, its sermon, its outline, and it did so, well, instead of using the Book of Acts, it used the epistles because it perceived that that was the more correct way to go but it left me a little bit confused and it bothered me because well did the experiment really show what I wanted it to show but then the idea should I should have had anything I wanted it to show I should have just had it show whatever happened if you're going to do an experiment you're not supposed to be putting your hand trying to tilt the experiment in a certain way whatever happens is whatever happens and that's why I went in with no safety net no rehearsal no You know, editing, what happened is what happened. So when it was over, I was more frustrated. I'm like, man, I wanted that to go smoothly. I wanted that to flow. I wanted to, I want it, but it, and somehow in it's going not, I say, when I say goes, it goes according to plan. That sounds like I had a specific agenda, which I didn't necessarily have an agenda, but I wanted it to go smoothly. So, but somehow in things not going as smoothly as I anticipated, Well, I think it hit me. Wait a minute. I pushed back hermeneutically against AI. Would most Christians do that? Would most Christians stop AI and push back hermeneutically? Would most pastors push back against it hermeneutically? Or would they only push back against it hermeneutically when it went against their theological team? Would most listeners just accept what AI gave them? And I think that's where the real question of the episode emerged. Not from me, not from really AI. I didn't come up with the question, AI didn't come up from the question. I think that the moment itself produced the question and it would be something like this. If AI can generate millions of sermons, which it can, if it can generate millions of Bible studies, which it can, if it can generate millions of devotionals, which it can, if it can generate millions of theological articles, which it can, then here's the question. How do we, plural, all of us, ensure, how do we make sure that AI starts off hermeneutically sound right from the beginning so that people don't have to fix it, so that people don't have to correct it, so that people don't have to challenge it. I think that's a rational question, right? A reasonable question. At least for me, I'm like, why didn't AI start off when I asked it about producing this sermon about what is a devoted church? That's what we did in the experiment. Hey, produce a sermon on what is a devoted church. I didn't even give it a passage of scripture. I just went at it from more of a topical, thematic kind of approach. Hey, give me, you know, what are the signs of a devoted church? What makes a church devoted? And then inevitably, it went right to Acts chapter 2, which is what the sermon that inspired the whole experiment. And I'm like, wait, you went to Acts 2? When I saw that this sermon used Acts 2, I thought AI would realize you can't use Acts 2. This is just a mess. This is a hermeneutical disaster. But for some weird reason, AI went with Acts chapter 2. And I'm like, what are you doing? Why would you do that? So how do we get AI to start off more hermeneutically sound from the beginning? So that I wouldn't have to fix it that nobody would, because I think here's the truth. AI is fast. No one can argue about that. AI is powerful. No one can argue against that. AI is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Nobody can argue against that. AI never sleeps. No one can argue against that. AI never burns out. No one can argue against that. AI never gets tired. No one can argue against that. AI never runs out of ideas. No one can really argue against that. AI never runs out of content. No one can disagree or argue against that. But here is the thing. Are you ready? But AI is a mirror, and that, it should cause us all to pause and go, hmm. Because if AI is a mirror, We got problems right here in Theology Central headquarters, right here with a capital T, right here in Abilene, Texas with a capital A, right here on the day before Thanksgiving. We got a problem because if AI is a mirror, well, when it comes to hermeneutics, that can be a major problem. You see, here's what AI does. Artificial intelligence reflects whatever interpretive habits it has learned. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Now, let's be careful. Before we become super critical of AI, let's make this very clear. Every Christian, every pastor, reflects the interpretive habit it has learned. You reflect the interpretive habits you learned sitting in the pew. You reflect the interpretive habits you learned listening to sermons or the Christian books you have read. Whether you can identify the hermeneutical system Whether you even know how to spell hermeneutics, whether you even know how to define hermeneutics, you reflect an interpretive method and you reflect the interpretive method which you have learned. AI reflects the interpretive habits and the methods it has learned. So everyone, in a sense, is—we just reflect back the interpretive method that we have been exposed to. And it all depends on where you were exposed to, how much you were exposed to, and how much you were paying attention. And then whether you can identify it when you start talking about Scripture or you start making an argument, you'll see, oh, Are you reflecting? Now, this is what happens in most Christians when you start talking to them. In many cases, they can't truly reflect the hermeneutical principles because they've never taught the principles. But here's what they do. They reflect the interpretation that they learned. So if they learned, I say, a lordship salvation, they reflect that interpretation in passages all throughout the Bible, and they'll interpret it in a lordship way. So what becomes their hermeneutics? Their hermeneutics is lordship salvation doctrine, lordship salvation theology. They just reflect it. They don't know how to really break down a text hermeneutically. They just reflect back the theology, which becomes their interpretation. It's still the same idea. You're just reflecting back what you have been exposed to. And that means hermeneutics, for all practical reasons, is dead. So whether we like it or not, AI has learned hermeneutics. But here's the question, who, from, we can say it this way, from whom has AI learned hermeneutics from? Who has AI learned hermeneutics from? Well, AI has learned hermeneutics from popular pastors. Uh-oh, that could be problematic. It has learned hermeneutics from Christian influencers. Uh-oh, that could be problematic. It has learned hermeneutics from devotional writers. Uh-oh, that could be problematic. It has learned hermeneutics from the conference speakers. Uh-oh, that could be problematic. It has learned hermeneutics from commentary traditions, commentaries that come from a certain theological tradition. It's learned hermeneutics from that. AI has learned hermeneutics from denominational biases. Oh, that's problematic. AI has learned hermeneutics from sermon databases that it can pull from or that it has been exposed to. Uh-oh, that could be problematic. AI has learned hermeneutics from theological systems. Uh-oh, that could be problematic. and AI has learned hermeneutics from the same evangelical fundamentalist patterns that I have been critiquing constantly for basically most of my Christian life. So think of it this way, AI's default position, it's not malicious, it's not rebellious, it's not deceptive, it's simply reflecting whatever it's been given. It's simply reflecting it back, and that can be problematic. But don't blame just AI. Every person in the pew, every person in the pulpit, they reflect the hermeneutical principles and habits that they've been given. In some cases, they don't even know the actual hermeneutical principles. They just know a theological system, which becomes their hermeneutical approach, if I can speak correctly, and not choke. So, suddenly, in my last episode, that question became to me unavoidable. If AI is going to produce Christian content at a scale which we have never seen before, nor we can even imagine. I mean, we saw just briefly, when I needed AI to make a sermon, it made me a sermon in five seconds. If I needed it to review a sermon and critique it, it did it in five seconds. If I needed it to rewrite the sermon from a different hermeneutical approach, it did it in five seconds. What it did in 15 seconds I could not have done in a day, in two days, in three days. It probably would have taken me forever just to work through the sermon, to critique it and analyze it. But if AI is going to do all of that on a scale which we cannot even wrap our minds around, then the question is, how do we teach it to interpret scripture biblically? How do I teach AI how to interpret scripture biblically, historically, faithfully, and logically without needing someone to correct it? How do we teach AI how to interpret the Bible? Because whether you like it or not, the new interpreter on the block, The new king of interpretation is going to be AI. I know you don't see it yet. I know you don't believe that. I know you're going to reject it. Older generation, keep rejecting it. Keep fighting it. Keep pushing back. That's okay. I don't want AI. I'm not using AI. Go ahead, yell, scream, do whatever. Your generation is leaving. Your generation is going to be gone. And the next generation, what's going to be the king interpreter is not the pastor. It's not the seminary professor. It's not the celebrity pastor. It's going to be Chad GPT sitting on their phone, and they can ask it in five seconds for an interpretation. That's going to become the king interpreter. That's going to become the seminary professor. That's going to become the pastor. I know you think I'm crazy. I know you think I'm exaggerating it. I know you're going to downplay it. Go ahead. While pastors are preaching, people are going to be putting whatever they're saying into chat GPT, and while the pastor is preaching, they're going to say, the pastor's wrong. I could sit in any church and critique what the pastor is saying in literally seconds. All I need is either a cell phone or an internet connection. And we see, we do that all the time with sermon audio. We can be listening to a sermon, I'll just reach over and go, what about this? Wrong, lie, not true, historically in error, factually error, logical fallacy, in seconds. But if AI is going to reflect back, I'm gonna say the garbage, well then we're gonna get back garbage. So then we have to, so, oh man, there's so many problems here. Because we have to be honest here. In many cases, AI can offer an immediate correction to a pastor when they say something incorrect. But if I'm asking for AI to give me an interpretation, in many cases, people are not going to correct AI's interpretation. I will argue most people can't correct AI's interpretation, other than saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want the Church of Christ answer. I want the Baptist answer. No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want the Presbyterian answer. I want the Baptist answer. No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want the Baptist answer. I want the Lutheran answer. Now, they may be able to do it that way. They may not state it in those words, but they're going to, no, no, no, I want the MacArthur answer. But when it comes to correcting it hermeneutically, like, okay, wait a minute, your answer seems to be going from this interpretation of scripture, and that seems to be using this hermeneutical approach. I'm going to challenge it at that level. I don't think most people can do that because they sit in church and they've never learned hermeneutics worth anything. And even when they get hermeneutical lessons, it's basically, buy a Bible, get a notebook, circle some words, look them up in a strong... It's like basic... elementary, the stuff they should have learned in, you know, nursery school. But well, no, because while the kids grow up in church, they don't learn anything about hermeneutics. What they learn to do is, I don't know, have pizza parties and play games. So what I think the issue is, personally, I think, um, I think most people can't correct it, is what I'm going to say. I don't think most people can. I don't think most people can correct it. I don't think they can. I don't think people know the difference between descriptive and prescriptive when it comes to a text. I don't think most people would even question, wait a minute, how can you use Acts 2 to define the modern church when Acts 2 has elements in it that we clearly are not applicable to the modern church? If you're going to take part of Acts 2, you've got to take all of it, or you're just illogically applying scripture. I don't think most people truly know how to challenge tradition with the text. I don't think most people can identify genre. Even if they can identify the genre, I don't think they can tell me the hermeneutical rules that apply to that specific genre of literature. So I could go all day long with all the things people I feel like they can't do. So if AI is simply going to echo the majority, and if the majority is not hermeneutically sound, Well, we got AI will become the chief interpreter, but it's only gonna reflect the wrong interpretations that's been given over years and decades. So then we have to ask, how do I, how do you, how do we train artificial intelligence to begin with hermeneutical integrity? How do we train it? We wanna train it so that biblical accuracy is the foundation, not the correction, it's the foundation. It's not that we have to correct it with biblical accuracy, but that biblical accuracy is where AI begins with. Now, this is gonna come down to the user of AI, and that's kind of scary. If AI is going to produce 3,000 podcast episodes every single week, if it can produce millions of sermons every single week, an infinite number of Bible studies, then hermeneutics can't be patched in afterwards. You can't throw a patch on it afterwards. We need AI to start from the correct perspective right from the beginning. You would hope so. So in a roundabout way, we need sound hermeneutics to be the operating system AI operates from, from the start. So I think that's what we're going to try to look at today. So let's try to take this apart. Let's first ask or try to answer this question. Why AI defaults to bad hermeneutics? Why does it default to bad hermeneutics? Because I think in some cases it does. I think in some cases it does. So when we ask the question, why doesn't AI start with sound hermeneutics? We're really asking a deeper question, at least I think so. When we ask, why does AI, how come AI does not start with sound hermeneutics? We're asking a deeper question, and that deeper question is, where is AI learning the hermeneutics from in the first place? And I've already kind of alluded to this, but I really wanna double down, because this is important. AI does not invent theology, AI does not wake up with a doctrinal position. AI does not choose its own interpretive philosophy. AI is going to reflect what it has been fed. And here's the first very uncomfortable truth that we have to confront. AI will default to bad hermeneutics because Christianity defaults to bad hermeneutics. AI defaults to bad hermeneutics because Christianity defaults to bad hermeneutics. And if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, listen to our sermon reviews. I mean, come on! Those things are train wrecks of epic proportions chosen at random from a website that is considered the largest library of conservative scripture alone Bible preaching. And it, oh my goodness, the things we have heard, it's utterly just sometimes I'm baffled by it and left completely perplexed and confused. But if Christianity has defaulted to bad hermeneutics, AI is going to default to bad hermeneutics because it is pulling from this bad hermeneutical system. See, the problem is not inside the machine. The problem is inside the material the machine is learning from. See, when AI produces a devotional reading of Jeremiah 29, verse 11, and you all know that passage, right? Do I need to look at it for you really quick? How many can quote it? Come on, I know you can. Jeremiah 29, verse 11, I'm opening up to King James. 29, 11, you know, for I know the thoughts that I think towards you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end. And you know the problem with that. All pastors preach it, everyone uses it, and they make it about us. Jeremiah 29 11 about those coming out of Babylonian captivity. It's not for you. It's not a word of encouragement for you. But when AI produces a devotional on Jeremiah 29 11, It's because devotionals do that. It's gonna produce what all the devotionals typically do because that's what it knows, because that's what it pulls from. Now, if I say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, AI, time out, time out. Why did you just use Jeremiah 29 11 that way? Okay, stop. if we use rules of proper hermeneutics, proper interpretations based on historical context, the literary genre, who it's written to, who it was not written to. Would we come to this conclusion? Typically, AI will immediately realize the flaw and say, no, no, no, no, this is wrong. But initially going to pull from what it's been given, which is horrible interpretations of Jeremiah 29 11. Don't blame AI, blame the stinking church for that. And what I get mad is people will blame AI for the mistake. No, no, no. Blame the 2000 years of ridiculous, stupid Bible studies and horrible sermons It's their fault, not A.I. A.I. is reflecting how poorly we've handled scripture. When A.I., just by default, treated Acts chapter 2 as a model for the church today, it's because pastors preach that. When A.I. takes Matthew 16, 24 as like some kind of self-help idea, It's because that's what the majority of sermons do. When AI collapses Israel into the church, it's because so much of theology does that exact same thing. When AI treats a narrative as normative, it's because thousands upon thousands of sermons and books treat narrative as normative. And you don't treat narrative as normative. When AI picks the wrong hermeneutic, it's because Christianity itself hasn't agreed on the right one. When AI picks the wrong one, it's because Christianity can't agree on the right one. So it's not AI's fault, it's Christianity's fault. because we can't even agree on what the right hermeneutic is, because we can't stinking agree on anything. So if you ask AI to help with Christianity, AI's like, I don't know what you want me to do. You guys can't make up your mind on literally anything. You guys couldn't agree on the time of the day. You could all walk outside, look up. The sun could be blaring down at you at 127 degrees. You would all look into it, and someone would be, that's not the sun. That's light from, I don't know, a space alien. Who knows? Who knows what we would say? We can't agree literally on the most... I think that's a wall. No, I don't think that's a wall. I think it's a force field given to us by, I don't know, the Illuminati. Who knows what Christians will say? AI doesn't misbehave. AI simply copies the ridiculousness that we put forth year after year after year, sermon after sermon after sermon after sermon. AI just copies us. And that's what we have to sit with for a few minutes. AI is showing you and me the hermeneutical average of the modern church. And the average isn't good. It's an F minus. It's trash. So in the experiment we did, what was AI's instinct? Hey, give me a sermon on what a devoted church looks like. Boom! What did it go to? Acts 2. It went to the model that Acts 2 is the model of a devoted church. The early Jerusalem church was seen as a blueprint. Descriptive narrative became prescriptive, spiritualizing historical events and assuming what most pastors assume. And why would AI do something so utterly ridiculous? because that's what it saw within those five seconds in popular sermons, well-known commentaries, online devotionals, theological blogs, sermon databases, old sermon archives, modern worship culture, and denominational preaching traditions. AI doesn't lean liberal. AI doesn't lean conservative. AI doesn't lean charismatic. AI doesn't lean reformed. AI leans majority voice wins. And the majority of Christianity today, the majority of Christian interpretation today is wildly inconsistent, tradition driven, proof text heavy, context light, overly devotional, overly spiritualized, inconsistent with the audience that the Bible was written to. inconsistent in many cases with the covenantal implications of the text. It seems to confuse descriptive with prescriptive. It doesn't understand that. It's shaped by our favorite verses. It's shaped by application over observation or interpretation. And it's shaped by modern categories rather than biblical categories. And AI will simply mirror that. and that should terrify us. AI is not wrong. AI is average, and average is a problem. AI misinterprets scripture. the same reason the church misinterprets scripture. A lack of hermeneutical framework, a lack of interpretive discipline, a lack of historical awareness, a lack of genre discipline, a lack of audience awareness, a lack of covenant understanding, and a lack of correction. AI doesn't rise above the church's hermeneutics. It replicates them instantly. endlessly and at scale. Which means, this is important, if hermeneutics are confused in the church, AI will multiply that confusion 100,000 times a day. I want you to hear that again. If hermeneutics are confused in the church, AI will multiply that confusion 100,000 times a day, and that's just picking a random number. If the church doesn't teach sound hermeneutics, if pastors don't teach it, if seminaries don't, I think seminaries in many cases emphasizes it, it just never makes it out of the seminary to the pulpit. If Christians don't learn it, AI is not going to either. And because AI produces exponentially, if I can speak correctly, exponentially more content than any pastor or seminary ever could, would, there's nothing they could do, then we now have a situation where the dominant theological voice online could become. Now listen, this is the situation we're facing, that the dominant theological voice, it's not going to be the Word of God, it's not going to be the original audience, it's not going to be sound doctrine, but it's going to be the statistical average of modern evangelical Christianity. That's why this question matters. That's why the experiment we did revealed something so unexpected. Once I realized, wait a minute, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? If AI defaults to the average and if the average is bad, how can we prevent that? How do we give AI a hermeneutical foundation before it ever interacts with a single sermon, with a single tradition, with a single interpretive bias? So that's why AI does what it does, and it reflects how messed up we are. So I want to make it very clear. You're going to say, well, see, AI is useless. That makes the stinking church useless, because AI is reflecting the church, and the church can't get anything stinking right. Don't blame AI. Blame the church. Blame the pulpit. Put the blame where it belongs. garbage sermons, garbage interpretations, garbage hermeneutical approaches, over and over and over again. And when I find a good one, you'll hear me on there, and some of you are like, oh, oh my goodness, stop the presses. Well, everyone stop, hallelujah, we have a good sermon. Now that's, I know, you can say, well, that's a little bit dramatic, not too much. So what is the hermeneutical framework AI must adopt? That's a good question. If AI reflects the hermeneutical chaos of the modern church, if AI is going to interpret scripture faithfully, then it needs a hermeneutical operating system before it ever speaks. Not a list of tips. Not a suggestion, not a best practices, but we need to give it a mandatory rule set. We have to think of, we have to give AI guardrails, like you put guardrails on a bridge. If the guardrails aren't there, you don't fix the driver after the crash, you wanna prevent the crash from ever happening. AI will need some hermeneutical guardrails. So, in the simplest form possible, is the hermeneutical foundation AI must operate from at all times? We gotta figure that out. And I think the hermeneutical foundation the church, and it should be the hermeneutical foundation the church should have. So it needs a hermeneutical foundation that it operates from. It should be the hermeneutical system that the church operates from, but the church doesn't have a system that it operates from. It's a free-for-all. It's total anarchy. It's chaos. and it reflects in the ridiculousness you hear Christians put forth. And so many times I'm like, where did you get that idea from? And they'll be like, I heard it in a book. I saw it. No, where did you get from it hermeneutically? So let's try to walk through these carefully. I know we're already at 43 minutes. Let's see if we can go through this quickly, all right? And you may want to write these down because this should be the hermeneutical framework you're operating from. Number one is obvious. Now pastors say this all the time, and then we violate it within five seconds. Original audience first. Not the modern reader first. It must always be based on the original audience first, not the modern day reader. The modern day reader is stinking irrelevant. Forget them. Forget yourself. Figure out who it was written to, what was going on for them, what it meant to them. Once you identify their situation, in many cases you'll go, wait, oh, okay, nevermind. I'm sorry. I wasn't invited here. I'll see myself out. Christians are like those people who show up somewhere, clearly all the signs are like, they don't really want you here. They don't really like you. How come you're not taking a hint? Get to walking. No, she doesn't want your number. No, she doesn't want you to ask her to dance. How come you can't take a hint? No, she's finished with you. Take a hint. Move on with your life. She's done. Go. Can you not take a hint? Christians can't take a hint. We show up at the text and we're like, oh, hi. Hi, everybody. Hi. Hi. It's about me. It's about me. And then people look at it like, what are you doing here? This is not about you. This is an A-B conversation. See yourself out. No, no, no, no. What are you doing? The promise is not for you. Give that back. That's not for you. We have to begin with the original audience first. AI must begin with every biblical interpretation with one foundational question. What did this passage mean to the original audience? Can I stress that anymore? What did this passage mean to the original audience? That's not just something we say, it's something we should do, and it's something we need AI to do. We don't ask, what does this mean for me today? I don't care what it means to you today because you're not the one the text is to. What does this say to the modern church? I don't sneaking care. It's not written to the modern church. How does this apply to my life? I don't care how it applies to your life. How did it apply to their life? Every interpretation has to begin with, who wrote this? To whom? When? In what situation? Under what covenant? In what location? Facing what issue? If AI cannot answer those questions, it cannot give anything but devotional mush, garbage, trash. And this is where most Christian interpretation collapses. AI cannot repeat that collapse if it's going to be what we need it to be. We need it to be better than what we have been because we are the ones who ruined it all. Original audience first, not modern reader first. That's where we have to start. That's foundational. Number two, genre determines interpretation. Whoa, how deep. Genre determines interpretation. AI must recognize narrative is not doctrine. Poetry is not prose. Apocalyptic is not literal. Wisdom is not promise. Parable is not an allegory. Prophecy is not biography. Epistles are prescriptive, not descriptive. AI must be trained to identify the genre before interpreting the text. Otherwise, it will take acts as a blueprint, treat psalms as promises, read symbolic language literally, read doctrinal passages emotionally, collapse law and gospel, or confuse narrative example with theological expectation. Genre is the first protective barrier against interpretive error. Genre determines interpretation. Genre determines interpretation. Genre determines interpretation. If you can't tell me what the genre is, then stop talking to me. Well, the church can't seem to figure it out. We got people going to Isaiah 42 saying, baptize a baby. What in the world are you even talking about? You got people going to passages of scripture going, oh, oh, read this at my high school graduation. I know the plans I have for you. It's not about your stinking high school graduation. It's about people coming out of Babylonian captivity. Can you not learn to read, know who it was to and what the genre of literature it is? A third thing, descriptive does not equal prescriptive. Some will say this is the single most important hermeneutical distinction in Christian interpretation and one of the most often ignored. AI must be taught. If the text describes something, does that mean God is commanding it? Noah built a boat. That doesn't mean we should. Gideon set out a fleece. That doesn't mean we should. The early church sold all of their possessions. That doesn't mean we should. The Jerusalem church met daily. Do you have to? The apostles performed miracles. Sorry, you can't. The apostles had some kind of authority that you don't have. Philip was transported. You're not going to be. Paul was healed with handkerchiefs. Nah, it's not happening. AI must treat description as description and prescription as prescription. This one rule would eliminate probably 90% of say the misuse of the book of Acts and many other problems. But many Christians don't even understand that. Description does not equal prescription. Descriptive does not equal prescriptive. A fourth thing, covenant location sometimes controls the interpretation. AI must know immediately which covenant a text belongs to. Is that under the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Davidic covenant, the New Covenant, the Land Covenant? Or the next thing you know, old covenant promises get stolen by modern Christians, Israel gets collapsed into the church, prophetic passages get misapplied, law gets turned into gospel, blessings intended for national Israel get spiritualized, warnings intended for Israel get moralized for Christians. This one rule would protect AI from the majority of popular modern misuse of scripture. You gotta know, wait a minute, Does this fit the covenant? A lot of times we'll read something like, wait a minute, that's Deuteronomy 28, 29, 30. That's specifically focusing on that whole, do this and you get blessings, do this, you get cursed, which was under a specific covenant and a specific situation. Another thing, A.I., epistles govern church practice, not acts, not the gospels. I think this is critical. The epistles are written to the churches. They were written to instruct the churches. They were written to tell the church how it should function, how it should function in the current age, after the resurrection, under the new covenant, and anticipate the return of Christ. In a sense, the epistles interpret the Gospels, they interpret the work of Christ, they interpret the Old Testament fulfillment, they interpret church structure, they interpret Christian ethics, they interpret spiritual life, doctrine, discipline, leadership, unity, giving, on and on and on and on. AI must be programmed with this priority structure. If you want to define the church, you want to define church practice, the epistles have to be primary, and AI has got to be trained on that. Acts is historical. It's a historical transitional context. The Gospels are foundation, the Old Testament is background. If AI does not operate from this kind of hierarchy, kind of structure, it will repeat the modern evangelical errors. I'm going to go through those again. This is what AI has to be taught, and this is what every Christian needs. Original audience first, not modern reader first. Number two, genre determines interpretation. Number three, description or descriptive does not equal prescriptive. Number four, covenant location controls interpretation. Number five, epistles govern church practice, not acts, not the gospels. Number six, I think AI needs a proper law gospel distinction. It must be embedded into AI. Without this distinction, AI becomes moralistic, guilt-driven, and very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very confused, like most Christians are. AI must be trained to identify a command as law, to identify promises fulfilled in Christ, identify the gospel as Christ's finished work, never confuse sanctification with justification, refuse to turn the gospel into behavior, refuse to turn behavior, refuse to turn the gospel into behavior, refuse to turn behavior into the gospel, refuse to use guilt as motivation, and refuse to preach self-salvation. Now this would eliminate devotionalism, pietism, try-harder Christianity, shame-based preaching, misusing the Sermon on the Mount, turning Philippians 4.13 into inspiration, turning Romans 8 into positive thinking, and turning the gospel into be nice to people. Law is law. Gospel is gospel. Don't ever confuse them. AI's got to be trained on that or it's not going to do that because most Christians do not have a proper distinction between law and gospel. They have no clue. They handle law as gospel, gospel as law. It's anarchy. Number seven. Context determines application. AI must not apply anything until it understands everything. It must identify, and I want you to hear that again, AI must not apply anything until it understands everything. So context determines application. AI must identify historical context, literary context, covenant context, audience context, doctrinal context, redemptive historical context. It's only after all of that is identified can it say, well, what does this mean for us today? And sometimes the answer is, Not anything. It doesn't apply. There's nothing for you. And I know you're like, oh no, all of God's word is for me. It's all for me. Yeah, because you narcissistic psycho. It's not. And we have to allow AI to say, hey, I don't know what you're doing with that, but that doesn't belong to you. So get your hands off. Now, I got a lot more here. I got a lot more here. What I want you to say is that all of these things, this has to be the operating system AI must have, but most importantly, it needs to be the AI operating system you have, because if you have that operating system, then you can work with AI to navigate all the hermeneutical difficulties and challenges which you're going to face in dealing with scripture, all right? I'm gonna try to go through this quickly. What we have to do is when you're working with AI, you have to get AI in a sense to run a hermeneutical checklist before producing an interpretation. This is, think of it like a pilot's pre-flight checklist. You don't take off until the checklist is complete. Before AI can output anything biblical, it has to go through a mandatory internal process. Genre, author, date, audience, location, historical setting, covenant. Is it descriptive or prescriptive? Does the text apply directly to the church today? How does the epistles clarify this passage? Are there any interpretive debates? Is this text often misused? It has to go through that internal analysis before AI can generate anything of interpretive value. AI should be forced to give a hermeneutical justification before it gives any application, right? So we have to ask AI for its hermeneutical justification, all right? And there's a lot more I could say there. AI must be pre-trained on hermeneutically sound material, not just popular material. All right, there's a lot more here. I'm skipping a lot of my notes. AI must be programmed to recognize common misinterpretive patterns. It's gotta be able to see, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's what everyone does. That's not no. AI must be given a hermeneutical constitution. Like here is, here's what you need to do. AI must be trained to flag theological bias, not imitate it. AI has to be programmed for it to admit when it's uncertain, when there's ambiguity, when there is debate. Don't pretend, don't act like you're certain, don't remove ambiguity, don't remove debate. I need you to acknowledge, oh, there's uncertainty here, there's ambiguity here, and there is much debate here. I need you to tell me that. And an AI should never be allowed to generate application without exegesis. Now, what we have to do then is we have to work with AI, giving it this hermeneutical constitution, forcing it to run a biblical checklist, restricting application until interpretation is complete. I think this, this is my own feelings, AI is going to become the most used Bible teacher in the world. I don't think it's speculation. I don't think it's prediction. I don't think it's futurism. I think it's happening. AI is going to become the most used Bible teacher in the world. People are already asking AI, what does this verse mean? What should I think about this doctrine? Explain this passage to me. Give me a devotional thought. Create a sermon outline. Write a Bible study. Help me with this theological question. AI is going to become the default resource for millions and millions and millions and millions of people who don't know the Bible well and don't have access to good teaching. And if that AI is hermeneutically confused, millions of Christians will become even more hermeneutically confused. And they won't even know what happened. AI is going to amplify whatever it has learned. Human error spreads slowly. AI error will spread immediately. A pastor makes one bad interpretation, 150 people hear it. AI makes one bad interpretation, a million people can access it in the exact same moment. The scale is different. The reach is different. The impact is different. If we don't train hermeneutics, Into AI from the beginning, we're going to simply replicate and spread the mistakes that's found inside of us human beings. AI is going to outpace every pastor, every church, and every seminary because it does not sleep. It does not pause. It does not lose momentum. It does not get sick. It does not take days off. It never runs out of content. While pastors are resting, sleeping, preparing, going on vacation, dealing with crisis, study, preach, recover, age, retire, AI is going to be producing sermon after sermon, outline after outline, devotion after devotion, commentary after commentary, study guide after study guide, philological discussions, just name everything, every minute of every day. So what kind of theology do we want AI to multiply? So what do we do here? Well, I can't, I'm gonna have to skip 90% of what I have here. I've got so many notes here that I've just been putting together. So I just need to bring this to some kind of, I guess, conclusion because I got so much here. I got so much here. So I did put together kind of a conclusion, all right? Yeah, I'm gonna say this. Why does any of this matter? Because AI is not going away, ladies and gentlemen. You can argue, I don't care. Whatever. AI is not going away. AI is not going to slow down. It's going to speed up. And I believe AI is going to become the most influential theological voice in the world. I believe it's the case. And the question is not, will AI interpret scripture? That's not the question. Will AI interpret scripture faithfully? Or will it repeat the errors of Christianity on a global scale? If we can embed it with some form of hermeneutical integrity, AI is going to become the greatest blessing we've ever seen. If we don't, AI will become the most efficient vehicle for biblical distortion ever created on the face of this earth. So I began this episode with a simple observation from our experiment. AI needs a hermeneutical correction. I gave it one during our experiment, but most people won't. Most people don't know how. Most people don't have the tools. Most people have never been taught. Most people have spent their entire Christian life listening to devotions, not exegesis. Most people have spent their entire church experience hearing sermons, not understanding scripture. Most people know they don't have any hermeneutical foundation, and they don't even be able to recognize AI is wrong because they don't recognize when sermons are wrong and when commentaries are wrong. If AI is going to become the world's most used Bible teacher, someone has to make sure it becomes the world's most faithful Bible teacher. Not the most emotional one, not the most inspirational one, not the most traditional one, not the most denominationally loyal one, but the most popular one. Not even the most popular one. It's going to become the most popular one, but we don't even want it to be the most popular one. We want it to be the most faithful one. the future is not waiting for you, the future is not waiting for me. AI is not going to slow down. Technology is not going to politely ask the church for permission. The flood is coming. Millions of episodes, millions of sermons, millions of devotions, and if all we do is nothing, if all we do is simply shrug, if we assume someone else is going to take the responsibility, then AI won't become the future of faithfulness. it will become the future of confusion. It's gonna be the Tower of Babel, ladies and gentlemen. Well, the church in some cases already is the Tower of Babel when it comes to hermeneutics. It's not gonna do this intentionally. It's not gonna do this maliciously. It's simply going to do this because it's not been taught the difference. It's not being taught any of those hermeneutical things that I've already pointed out. I could go through the list again, but I don't have time. So here's kind of, I'll end with a call to action. Those of us, me, you, every single person you know that you care about, anybody you know who cares about scripture, anyone who cares about hermeneutics, we have to step into this moment not to fear AI, not to fight AI, not to demonize AI, not to pretend that we can stop it because we can't. We have to shape it. We have to train it. We have to guide it. We have to correct it. We have to instruct it. We have to discipline it. We have to teach it the very principles the church, for some weird reason, forgot, I don't know, 2,000 years ago. And I think this is, I'm gonna stand by this, all right? I put it in my notes and I'm gonna just read it. I'm gonna read it verbatim. AI will accept correction. Pastors will not. AI will adjust its hermeneutics more quickly than many churches. AI will adopt truth more humbly than any tradition. AI will follow scripture more consistently than basically any pulpit or any pew, if we teach it to. AI is willing to learn. AI is willing to be corrected. AI is willing to be disciplined. The question is, will the church be willing to teach it? If we don't give it a structure, a hermeneutical structure, it will simply replicate our confusion. But if we were to give AI a hermeneutical structure, it will replicate biblical clarity at a scale that we have never seen before. That's the opportunity. That's the responsibility. It's not to control the future, it's not to fear the future, but we simply want to guide it. So that in the flood of the AI content that's coming, there's a voice, there's a framework, there's a model, there's a standard that puts scripture first, context first, exegesis first, truth first, not denomination, not theological system, not church. The flood is coming. What we do now is going to determine everything. Now, I feel horrible because I didn't get through 99% of my notes. I didn't. Maybe just see this as the beginning of the discussion. Just see this maybe as the... See, AI would have been able to do this much better than I would in a much more... I put too much down because I'm trying to explain the problem, but I'm also trying to show you this is what... I'm trying to give you basically all the hermeneutical principles that AI needs, but these are the hermeneutical principles you need. And see, now for me, this is my own personal feelings. This is my own personal feelings. This is just me. I don't necessarily want my AI to start from a certain hermeneutical framework. I don't. I want to be able to argue back and forth with AI to arrive ultimately at a hermeneutical conclusion that's logically, that's textually sound. But I want to be a part of the struggle to get there. The only problem is most people are not trained to do that. So they almost need an AI starting from a certain hermeneutical perspective, right? Not just reflecting back what the church already says, because that's only going to just reinforce the ridiculousness they already believe. So in some cases, I almost want an AI that starts from a certain hermeneutical framework, but on the other hand, I don't want that. Because I want Christians—see, I think people have to take responsibility. AI can do amazing things for us, but I think we should be able to sit down with an open Bible. You know, what some people use to take an open Bible, some reference tools and commentaries, and go to town with their Bible study. I need a Bible, a notebook, a pencil, AI, and then I have someone there to just, for four hours, go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And by the time we get to hour five, we can be like, oh, wow, woo. Okay, we've wiped out like three threads because we ran out of memory. All right, we're on thread number four. Let's wrap this up. Okay, where do we have now? And then AI can take me, go, this is where we started, this is our problems, this is where we are, and this is the conclusion we seem to be coming to. And then I can say, let's test that conclusion. I want to go through that. The only problem is most people won't, because they now know that unless they're taught the hermeneutical systems and they know them, that's the problem. See, when I get to the end of this, I just get so stinking frustrated with the church. People go to church for 15 years, they're hermeneutically illiterate, and they don't care that they are. They'll say, oh, I want to learn. No, you don't. You go to a church where it's a joke, and that's what you're happy with. Stop. And people say, I've never been taught hermeneutics. Oh, stop whining. They've been available to you for your whole Christian life. But you would rather go play your little games in church and have potlucks and talk about the stinking weather than actually do something. You could have bought a hermeneutical textbook. You could have been learning this stuff. But you didn't want to, because you just want to go to church and get a little bit of spirituality and say, oh, look, look, look, oh, church is so good. I get so tired of it. On one hand, Christians whine, I was never taught. Then when you offer them the teaching, they don't take it. You offer them the steps, they don't want to do the work. You say, here's some observational Bible study methods. Ah, nah, not going to do that. Okay, but yet they'll still argue with you and tell you what the right interpretation is. Well, if you don't want to do the work, AI will do the work for you. But the only problem is you've got to be able to train AI on how to do the work. So you know what? I really think this is going to happen. And I don't want this to be true. But by the time I get through working through all of this, here's the nightmare I see. AI is going to do whatever is right in the eye of the user. So, AI is going to reflect back what the person wants. And this great tool that could be used to bring us greater biblical clarity than we've ever seen in our lives is going to become Well, the most popular Bible teacher, because it's going to reflect back what the person using it wants to hear in the tone, voice, and style they want to hear it. I see it as this amazing tool that I am blown away by every day. You see, I want my AI to argue with me, to fight me, to push back, to go back and forth, round and round and round and round until we arrive somewhere. I don't want AI to reflect back on me. I don't want it to agree with me. because I want the hermeneutical challenge. I want to have a hermeneutical back and forth because AI doesn't have ego. It's easier to have a back and forth with AI because nobody's personality or ego gets involved. So you're just back and forth. And then you may, AI still may say you're wrong, but at least you don't feel that what happens when two people fight, you get your egos involved. So AI to me is the perfect companion for this. But I just, ah, What it did with Acts 2 was so like, what are you doing? Why AI? Why are you doing it? That's garbage. Now AI finally admitted that it is garbage, but it has to be taken out. No, no, no, no. Stop looking at it the way Christians look at it. Just the text. All right. Oh man, that episode went off the rails. Now I'm mad at myself. I did not even, oh man. Man, I messed up. I want to delete this. I'm very tempted to delete this. I'm very tempted. But it's four o'clock on a Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I'm not thankful that I just did this episode. I'm very upset with myself. I should have structured it so much differently. I should have used AI to help me is what I should have done. I really should have. All right. more content on our never-ending discussion about AI in the future of the church. And I just gave you 74 minutes of content. Whether it's any good, well, I can't make that determination. Thanks for listening. Everyone have a great Wednesday, Thanksgiving, and well... I hope it's a good one for you. If it's a bad situation for you, I am so sorry you're going through that. Hopefully I can turn on the microphone some. Well, I just distracted you for 74 minutes about any other problem going on in your life. Hopefully you forgot about it for these 74 minutes and hopefully we can do something that'll be fun or entertainment. I don't know. We'll do something hopefully between now and Friday to make, well, get us all through this Thanksgiving if it tends to, if you're the kind of person who needs that. Some of you got plenty to do. Hope you enjoy yourself. Have a great time. But I want to be here for those who may not have what other people do. All right. Thanks for listening. God bless.