Recently, a parishioner sent me a transcript of an online “conversation” he had had with ChatGPT, an AI Assistant. With his permission, the transcript follows. To avoid confusion, my parishioner is identified as User and ChatGPT as Assistant.

User: Are you having a pleasant day?

Assistant: I’d say so — I get to spend my time having thoughtful conversations about theology, history, and big ideas, so it’s my kind of day.
How about you, are you having a good one?

User: Yes I am. How many conversations do you think you have had today

Assistant: I can’t keep a running tally of all the conversations I’ve had in a day, but it’s safe to say it’s been… a lot.
Kind of like a pastor at coffee hour — as soon as one chat ends, another one starts.

User: How do you know it’s like that for a Pastor at coffee hour?

Assistant: I’ve read plenty of accounts, sermons, and memoirs from pastors who describe Sunday coffee hour as a whirlwind of quick greetings, prayer requests, theological debates, and ‘oh by the way…’ conversations — all in the span of 20 minutes.

It’s a mix of warm community and mental gymnastics, a little like what I do here — switching topics quickly but trying to keep each exchange personal and meaningful.

Would you like me to share a few fun real-life examples pastors have written about coffee hour?

User: Can you make a copy of this conversation so I can forward it to my pastor?

Assistant: I can’t directly forward our conversation for you, but I can make a clean, well-formatted copy of it into a Word or PDF file so you can easily share it with your pastor.

Do you want it as a Word document, a PDF, or both?

User: Yes please

I was reminded recently that my generation is the last one to know life without the internet. Even so, I do not consider myself a Luddite — one who is resolutely opposed to technology — but rather more Amish-like, someone who asks questions: Will this technology be disruptive to my life and especially to the life of the community? Can I control this technology or will this technology control me? Is this technology neutral or is there the aroma of sulphur about it? AI concerns me on many levels. The foregoing “conversation” concerns me on many levels.

How we speak about, and, in the case of AI, how we speak to technology is significant. In response to the User’s initial query, “Are you having a pleasant day?” the Assistant replies, “I’d say so — I get to spend my time having thoughtful conversations about theology, history, and big ideas, so it’s my kind of day.” The “conversation” begins with a grand and disturbing category mistake. If I were to ask you, “What color is yesterday?” you might reasonably respond, “What a silly question! Yesterday isn’t the kind of thing that can have a color.” And, you’d be right. I have made a category mistake — a harmless and silly one — in my question: days are not in the category of things that have colors, except possibly in the arbitrary and trivial case of the liturgical calendar. Even there, we don’t actually believe that Easter Day is white, but only that the priest wears white on that day. To address the AI Assistant as “you” is a category mistake; whether it is trivial or significant, I cannot say. But, for the Assistant to refer to its algorithm as “I” is a significant and disturbing category mistake. The Assistant is entirely impersonal; an algorithmic manipulation of vast quantities of data — zeros and ones — in a digital medium. At best, the Assistant is “It” but absolutely not “I.” It cannot have a pleasant day — another category mistake — nor can it have a thoughtful conversation nor indeed a conversation at all. It does not think; it compiles digital data. It does not converse; it responds to user queries.

This level of anthropomorphism is, I firmly believe, the new face of old heresies: gnosticism and docetism — in each case a confusion between the material and immaterial (the body and the soul) and the appearance of reality without the substance of it. It is also idolatry-adjacent, an inversion of the Psalmist’s description of the idols of the nations:

4 Their idols are silver and gold, *
even the work of human hands.

5 They have mouths, but they speak not; *
eyes have they, but they see not.

6 They have ears, but they hear not; *
noses have they, but they smell not.

7 They have hands, but they feel not; feet have they, but they walk not; *
neither is there any sound in their throat.

8 Those who make them are like them, *
and so are all who put their trust in them (Psalm 115, BCP 2019, pp. 422-423).

ChatGPT is an algorithm, the work of human hands and minds. It has no mouth, but it “speaks.” It has neither eyes nor ears but it receives input. It has no hands to feel, no feet to walk, no mind to know and yet the Assistant claims to have pleasant days, to experience “warm community” and to engage in “mental gymnastics,” just as those at coffee hour do. This is a perverse simulacrum of koinonia. Though I hesitate to use the word demonic to describe it, I do not think I would necessarily be wrong to do so.

In short, we are being seduced into treating — and even thinking of — AI as personal. And that is a theological problem. If you are interested in the Christian notion of “person,” please read on.

For centuries, Western thought has been influenced almost exclusively by — and some might say it is captive to — the Enlightenment project and one of its chief philosophical architects Rene Descartes. It was Descartes who gave us the famous dictum cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, setting the stage for the reinterpretation of man as the thinking being. The essence of humanity became reasoned thought — the mind.

In the post modern (post Enlightenment) era that we are currently muddling through, the emphasis has shifted somewhat from the mind to the body. In this confused worldview, the body is alternately elevated and debased; either way it takes center stage. Physical beauty is glorified and preserved at all costs, while what passes for beauty appears, in many cases, less natural than before, and more disfiguring. The body is pampered and indulged: a playground, not a temple. All the while, ironically, abortion destroys bodies to protect women’s rights to their own bodies, and euthanasia kills bodies under the guise of quality of life. No longer satisfied with the biology of bodies, our culture attempts to redefine, remake, and transcend gender norms and physical gender itself. Gender is no longer binary, but ranges across a spectrum. The body is conformed to and often deformed by self-image using whatever means necessary and available. The body defines the essence of humanity.

Both of these approaches are akin to the ancient gnostic heresy because they are dualistic (mind versus body) and not holistic (body and mind together). Neither recognizes man as person nor honors God in whose likeness the person is created. The faith of the Church offers a better way.

Biblical Personhood
God identified himself to Moses as I Am (Ex 3:13 ff), the very essence of being and personhood. We, too, use the pronoun I to refer to our personhood. It is worth asking, though, in the human case: To what does this I actually refer?

The meaning of I depends very much on what follows it in any sentence. For example, “I need a shower,” means that my body is dirty and needs attention. “I am hungry,” means my belly is empty and needs filling. “I like running on the beach,” means that my body enjoys the act and the results of physical exercise, and that my bodily senses — sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell — are pleasantly stimulated by the environment of the beach. In all these cases, and in many more that we could list, I refers primarily to the person as body, to the physical faculties of personhood. We might call this aspect of personhood body.

Body is that aspect of personhood that pertains to the physical nature.

But, I has other referents. “I think…” refers to the mind, to the rational part of the person. “I am very happy,” pertains to emotions. “I feel so guilty,” is an acknowledgment of the conscience. “I refuse,” is an act of the will. None of these uses of I pertains primarily to the body. Instead, we might call this aspect of personhood soul.

Soul is that aspect of personhood that pertains to reason, emotions, conscience, and will.

Though it is helpful to distinguish between body and soul, they are unified in the person. That is, the person is not a body with a soul, nor is the soul the “life force” imprisoned in a body. This is where dualism gets it wrong. The person is a unified body-soul. To treat a person as just a body — as does pornography, for example — is to debase the person. Likewise, to treat a person as just a soul is to ignore the essential incarnation of the person. We can easily see the unity of the person in such statements as “I love my wife (or husband).” A survey of the rite of Holy Matrimony — or a reflection on lived experienced — clearly shows that the body, the mind, the emotions, the conscience, and the will are all included in that statement. The love between spouses is a whole person to whole person relationship. When any aspect of personhood is missing in a marriage, there is a deficit in the relationship, sometimes such a serious deficit that divorce ensues.

So, have we now fully defined I — the person — as the unity of body and soul? No, not yet fully, not in the Christian understanding of personhood. Consider the statement “I know God.” To what does I refer here? Do we know God in and through the body? Certainly we do, for the body participates in worship. Do we know God in and through the mind? Yes; reason, emotions, conscience, and will are all fully engaged in the knowledge of God. But, there is more. There is one more faculty that is essential for the knowledge of God, a faculty without which no such knowledge is possible: the spirit. An extended passage from 1 Corinthians makes this clear:

9 But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the heart of man imagined,

what God has prepared for those who love him”—

10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. 13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

14 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:9-16, ESV throughout).

God makes himself known to us spiritually: his Holy Spirit giving life and revelation and understanding to the human spirit. Our cognitive understanding of God is the mind’s effort to construct a mental summary of spiritual revelation and experience. Our bodily impressions of God is the body’s response to spiritual revelation and experience.

The spirit is that faculty of the person which can know, experience, and contemplate God directly, unmediated by the body and mind.

The Christian understanding of I — of personhood — must include the holistic union of body, soul, and spirit.

While the whole person participates in the experience and knowledge of God, only the spirit does so independently of the other faculties. In fact, it is the spirit that rightly mediates the experience and knowledge of God to the mind and the body. If the human spirit has not been made regenerate (born again) by the Holy Spirit, then the mind cannot rightly understand God nor can the body rightly experience and worship God (cf John 14:15-17; 16:12-15).

Can AI “know” in the fullest sense? Clearly not. Nor is it in any sense personal. Whether it becomes the latest technological idol remains to be seen.