A False Pentecost and Babel's True Reversal
The false promise of AI is a reversal of Babel without the gospel and Pentecost. We need the real thing.
I read a lot about AI this week, with the release of startling new Barna data, the Pope’s book-length encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, and the conservative public intellectual Yuval Levin’s response to the Pope.
Surprising Data and The Pope’s Encyclical
First, the Barna data is shocking to me. Professing Christians are adopting and trusting AI for the deepest things in life at higher rates than others. Many Christians are outsourcing discipleship and spiritual growth to Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. Yikes.
Second, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas was both wise and frustrating, as Levin noted. An encyclical is a long publication that a Pope releases on a pressing theme of the cultural moment, and I’m glad Leo decided to tackle AI for his first one. He uses the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem to envision two different ways to approach technology. These images are helpful and interesting, and he wisely points out that humans aren’t machines to optimize. We are persons designed for relationships and love.
The risk of AI is that it will “weaken personal creativity and judgment,” says Leo. And, “When AI systems present themselves as neutral and objective, they end up reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers.” We aren’t dealing with merely neutral tools, but systems with flawed, biased, and inconsistently well-meaning and not-well-meaning humans at work on them.
Again, “When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion….the very essence of our humanity” is “the capacity for relationship and love.” As John Piper has pointed out, AI can write a prayer, but it can’t pray. It can create love songs, but it can’t love you back.
On the other hand, I think Leo is overly optimistic about what people can do when they work together for good. The encyclical felt too much like a collectivist vision that acknowledges the importance of individuals, but it seems overly confident in the ability of humanity to figure out its own problems.
In other words, I don’t think the Pope takes the reality of sin seriously enough. Sin is not just a systemic and social problem, but an individual and spiritual reality. We are both created and fallen, thus so is AI.
What’s more, the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem is the work of the covenant community, not the world. We don’t just need togetherness, we need covenant repentance, renewal, and defense. The work of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem likewise isn’t just constructive, but defensive. Israel under Nehemiah didn’t just work together to build, but also took up arms to defend against its enemies. The workers were soldiers with a shovel in one hand and a sword in the other.
From that day on, half of my men did the work while the other half held spears, shields, bows, and armor. The officers supported all the people of Judah, who were rebuilding the wall. The laborers who carried the loads worked with one hand and held a weapon with the other. Each of the builders had his sword strapped around his waist while he was building, and the one who sounded the trumpet was beside me. (Nehemiah 4:16-18)
We need to embrace our limits as a gift, like Leo says, but we don’t need to just accept our limits. We also must repent of our sinfulness, and watch over our souls and communities.
The Danger of Idolatry
Third, Yuval Levin has a profound reflection on the Pope’s encyclical called “Idols of the Valley.” Levin argues that the Pope misses an opportunity to truly dig into the metaphor of Babel, because the heart of AI models is language-based: “At its deepest core what we now call AI is a linguistic breakthrough….AI has essentially broken all language barriers,” and “The achievement of AI is as something like a reversal of God’s edict to the builders of the Tower of Babel in Genesis.”
The promise of AI at its worst is a false promise of deliverance from judgment, and a temptation to worship the creature instead of the Creator. Levin argues that the best biblical text for engaging the AI question is Psalm 115 and its reflections on idolatry:
Their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
They have mouths but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk.
They cannot make a sound with their throats.
Those who make them are just like them,
as are all who trust in them.
(Psalm 115:4–8)
Levin says of this text: “The idols are made to seem human but do not partake of genuine embodied human experience. And both their makers and those who trust in them are destined to become like them—and so less than human—because they elevate them.”
The risk of AI is that we will end up experiencing less than God’s design for our humanity and lives. The risk is that we will gain the world but lose our souls. As I said, my own takeaway was that the Pope’s encyclical doesn’t have a strong enough view of sin. So I think Levin’s point about idolatry is on the right track.
And along these lines, I think that Levin opens the door (though doesn’t walk through it) for a more helpful theological view of AI.
The Reversal of Babel at Pentecost
While the Pope envisions rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem as opposed to building Babel, I think it’s more helpful to consider the New Testament’s own picture of the reversal of Babel at Pentecost in Acts 2.
Pentecost shows that reversing Babel isn’t a technological problem, but a spiritual one. Because language problems aren’t just mechanical, but a result of the judgment of God against presumption and rebellion. True salvation requires Spirit-indwelling, renewing of the mind, repentance, and forgiveness of sin through the cross of Christ.
The promise of Pentecost offers visions and dreams for old and young, in line with God’s truth.
And it will be in the last days, says God,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all people;
then your sons and your daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
and your old men will dream dreams.
(Acts 2:17)
This promise of God-inspired visions and dreams makes the tendency of AI to “hallucinate” and simply make stuff up all the more haunting. AIs hallucinate, but humans dream.
Levin notes that AI can take an input or prompt and turn it into a better output than a human can, but he argues that the space between inputs and outputs is where the difference between AI and humans shows up. We reflect on something, and that thinking, reflecting, contemplating, relating, loving, repenting, or worshipping is where we are embracing our embodied humanness.
The bridge between input and output, the “in-between,” is where humanness is located in a lot of ways. What we take in and what we do are not all that makes us human. We are made in the image of God, body-soul persons, and the things we experience and do aren’t the sum total of who we are. We aren’t productivity machines. We are persons, humans, made in the image of God and, for those in Christ, being remade in holiness.
No one seems to really understand exactly how AI does its thing completely, not the Pope, not Yuval Levin, not Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI. There’s a weird “in-between” space where the AI models take data and turn them into more data.
For human beings, that intermediate space is the space where there is a need for personal and spiritual connection, renewal, repentance, and regeneration. We require the reversal of Babel, and that reversal must be Pentecostal in the true biblical sense—the Holy Spirit invading our hearts and lives.
This makes me wonder (as have others) if the intermediary process of AI might have a spiritual, even demonic component to it. After all, demons can speak every language. Many have pointed to C.S. Lewis’s novel about the demonic possession of technology in That Hideous Strength. When no one seems to know exactly what AI is or how it works, the idea that it is purely technological is as much of a faith proposition as the idea that there may be a spiritual reality unlocked within it.
That possibility doesn’t mean that Christians should reject AI, any more than Jesus rejected a demonized person in the gospels. Instead, we need the power of Jesus in the Spirit to tear down strongholds.
As Ed Stetzer has repeatedly pointed out, a big part of the need for Christians in the AI moment is embodied community and communities of discernment. When the apostle John wrote to a church he loved, he acknowledged the limits of the technology of the age: “Though I have many things to write to you, I don’t want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to come to you and talk face to face so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12). Literally, face to face is “mouth to mouth,” the place where words cross paths, intangible words passed through bodies and sound waves.
Technology can’t replace face-to-face, embodied fellowship, whether that technology is ancient ink and paper or cutting-edge pixels and prompts. This is where I think the Pope helps us, by pointing us to the face of Jesus at the center of all reality: “Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history. This human face is the fullness toward which history is moving.”
Even better, Paul reminds us:
In their case, the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we are not proclaiming ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’s sake. For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor. 4:4-6)
And this vision only comes from the renewing, regenerating work of the Spirit:
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. We all, with unveiled faces, are looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory; this is from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Cor. 3:17-18)
The Spirit given at Pentecost is the only one powerful enough to reverse the curse of Babel, the only one powerful enough to topple the idols of the age. No AI can ever come close.