Should Christians Use Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of everyday life. Students use generative AI to explain difficult concepts. Businesses use AI to organize information and automate work. Writers use AI tools to develop ideas. Search engines and software increasingly place AI-generated material directly in front of their users. Artificial intelligence is no longer a technology Christians can consider only as a possibility for the future.
That raises an important question: Should Christians use artificial intelligence at all?
Some Christians approach AI cautiously because of its potential for error, deception, and misuse. Others embrace it quickly because it is useful. Both responses are understandable, but neither usefulness nor danger provides a sufficient foundation for deciding what to do with a technology.
Christians belong to Jesus Christ. The better question, then, is not simply whether AI is good or bad. It is how this technology should be approached by those who belong to Him.
More Than a Good Tool or a Bad Tool
Artificial intelligence can serve worthwhile purposes. It can summarize information, assist research, organize ideas, explain unfamiliar concepts, and help people communicate more clearly. Christians already use many kinds of technology as they work, learn, teach, create, and serve. AI adds new capabilities to that familiar pattern.
Christians have always used tools to help gather and organize information. A deeper concern appears when a generative AI tool that provides information begins to function as though it also provides wisdom.
An AI chatbot can give a clear explanation and still be wrong. It can help complete a legitimate task while encouraging a poor habit. It can save time while allowing someone to avoid work that should have been done personally. The technology cannot decide whether any of those uses are wise or faithful.
Generative AI also communicates differently from many other tools. It speaks in complete sentences. It explains, recommends, and answers questions. Its responses can sound thoughtful and confident, making it easy to give an answer more weight than it deserves.
God’s Word tells Christians where wisdom begins: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). More information does not necessarily produce more wisdom, and receiving information faster does not change where wisdom begins. Christians need more than a list of acceptable and unacceptable uses for AI. They need the same foundation that governs every other part of Christian life.
Jesus Christ Is Lord
That foundation is Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead. The One who was crucified lives and reigns. The risen Christ told His disciples, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18). His authority establishes the starting point for the Christian response to artificial intelligence.
Jesus does not possess authority only over prayer, worship, church gatherings, or Bible study. God’s Word says that all things were created through Him and for Him and that all things hold together in Him (Colossians 1:16–17). His authority extends over the whole of life because the whole of life already belongs to Him.
That includes the way Christians work and learn. It includes the way we reason through difficult questions, decide which voices to trust, and use the abilities God has given us. Technology does not sit outside Christ’s authority simply because the technology is new.
AI has entered Christ’s world.
Neither fear nor enthusiasm should govern the Christian response. Greater technological capability does not diminish Christ’s authority, nor does it give the tool an authority it does not possess.
The technology is new. Christ’s authority is not. If all authority belongs to Jesus Christ, faithful use begins under His reign. We should approach this technology as people who belong to Him.
A Servant Under Christ
Christians may use artificial intelligence to assist legitimate work. Generative AI can help gather information, organize material, explain difficult ideas, develop a rough draft, or explore a problem from several directions. The tool can be useful precisely because it can do some of these things quickly.
But assistance and authority are different.
An AI chatbot cannot take responsibility for what a Christian believes, says, or does. It cannot decide when its own answer should be trusted. It cannot determine when using it becomes a shortcut around work that should have been done personally. AI can produce an answer, but the Christian using that answer remains responsible before Christ.
Christians must therefore remain active thinkers rather than passive consumers of AI output. Generative AI will sometimes provide false information, but there is a subtler danger as well: the convenience of receiving an answer can begin to replace the work of understanding it.
How Should Christians Discern AI Answers?
God’s Word does not give Christians a separate calling for technological life. Paul writes, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The ordinary work of following Christ extends even to the ordinary decision to open an AI tool and ask for help.
Faithful use may mean allowing AI to assist with a task. It may mean checking an answer against a more reliable source. At times, it may mean setting the tool aside because using it would surrender responsibility that should remain with us. The particular decision may change, but the authority governing it does not.
Artificial intelligence can serve Christians. It cannot decide what is true simply because a generative AI system can produce a convincing answer. It cannot determine what faithful obedience looks like.
That authority belongs to Christ.
What Should Govern the Tool?
Once that foundation is clear, the discussion moves from the Christian using AI to the tool itself. If artificial intelligence should be used under the authority of Christ, should that conviction shape only the person using the tool? Or should it also shape how a generative AI tool is instructed to approach the questions it receives?
Not every question asked of an AI chatbot is the same.
What year did this happen? primarily asks for information. What makes a successful life? asks something more. An answer to the second question depends upon what success means, what human life is for, and ultimately who has the authority to define either one.
General-purpose AI chatbots are built to serve people with many different beliefs. That is understandable for a general-purpose tool. But when a question moves from organizing information toward interpreting life, the question of authority comes with it. Jesus Christ does not become one possible authority among many simply because a chatbot can generate several perspectives.
The LoCK plugin grew from that concern. LoCK stands for Lens of Christ’s Kingdom, a Christian framework for discernment. The plugin packages instructions and supporting references intended to guide an existing generative AI system through that framework.
The AI remains capable of error. It does not possess spiritual wisdom, and it cannot replace God’s Word, prayer, careful thought, or Christian community. The LoCK plugin is not the authority. Its purpose is to serve under an authority outside itself.
The question behind the LoCK plugin is straightforward: What would it look like for a generative AI tool to be intentionally governed under the authority Christians already confess in Jesus Christ?
That question takes the discussion beyond whether Christians should use artificial intelligence. Christians can use AI, but Christian use cannot be separated from Christian discipleship.
Jesus Christ was crucified and raised. He reigns. New technologies do not require a new foundation.
The next article turns to what that foundation changes when a generative AI system answers.