Theologia et Vita

  The Ordering Intelligence: What Heidegger Would Say About the Machine That Thinks Sparked by my weekly phone call with my father The temptation, whenever a genuinely new technology arrives, is to reach for the nearest available category and stuff the thing inside it. Artificial intelligence gets called a tool, a mirror, a threat, an assistant, a calculator with pretensions. None of these quite fit, and the misfit is not accidental. It points to something Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) diagnosed about technology in general: that the essence of a technological development is never captured by describing its mechanism. What matters is what it does to the world that receives it, to the minds that come to depend on it, to the kind of perceiving and valuing that it trains into human beings over time. That is where the interesting and uncomfortable questions live. Heidegger's 1954 essay "Die Frage nach der Technik" (which my father first translated into English, before William L...

“These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.” (Psalm 50:21) That verse may be one of the most penetrating diagnoses of the human condition in all of Scripture. The problem in David's day was not merely open wickedness. It was something deeper. People assumed that because God had not acted immediately in judgment, He must approve of their conduct. They mistook divine patience for divine indifference. Worse still, they imagined God to be just like them. In a sense, this is the story of humanity from Eden onward. The serpent's temptation rested on the idea that God was not who He revealed Himself to be. Since then, fallen men have continually reshaped God into their own image. We prefer a deity who shares our priorities, excuses our sins, applauds our preferences, and never confronts us. The golden calf was not merely an idol; it was an attempt to make God manageable. That same im...

What Hath Silicon Valley to Do with Jerusalem? Introducing Image and Artifact: A Statement on Artificial Intelligence Whatever the evangelical church has made of artificial intelligence so far, it has not made much theology out of it. Or at least much good theology. Responses have sorted into alarm and enthusiasm. The doctrines that actually govern the questions have mostly stayed off the table: the image of God, the nature of the soul, the limits of human making, the idolatry that crouches at the door of every technology we fashion and begin to trust. That absence is what prompted Image and Artifact . The structure follows the three confessional documents produced by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy between 1978 and 1986: the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Application. Each uses the same architecture: a preface, a condensed summary, definitional groundwork, and a series of ...

When Christians talk about the gospel, opinions often multiply quickly. Is it the kingdom? Salvation? Justification? Discipleship? All of those themes matter, of course, but when we ask where the New Testament itself comes closest to defining the gospel, one passage towers above the rest: 1 Corinthians 15:1–5. New Testament scholar Scot McKnight puts it bluntly: “The best place to begin is the one place in the entire New Testament where someone actually comes close to defining the word gospel. First Corinthians 15 is that place.” Paul is reminding the Corinthians of the very message that brought them to faith, the message in which they now stand, and the message by which they are being saved. There is a fascinating detail in the Greek text that gets lost in translation. Paul writes to euangelion ho euangelisamēn humin —literally, “the gospel that I gospeled to you.” English versions smooth this out as “the gospel I preached to you,” but Paul intentionally piles up gospel language. His ...

A poem (using a cascading litany form), based on my recent post, “The Carrying”: He carries. Not merely sustains, as though the universe were a clock and He its distant keeper. Not merely upholds, as though existence balanced itself upon borrowed momentum. He carries. The atom and the archangel, the whale-road and the wandering star, the dust mote adrift in a shaft of morning light, the fire of a thousand suns. Every electron circling its hidden center. Every photon crossing impossible distances. Every breath drawn by every creature from Eden until now. He carries. The dice tumble across the table, striking wood, bouncing, turning, their final resting place already beneath His hand. The clouds gather over thirsty fields. Rain falls upon furrow and forest. The earth drinks because He visits it. What we call weather, Scripture calls God. He carries. Two sparrows flutter in a market cage, worth scarcely more than a laborer's hour. One falls. Not beyond His notice. Not outside His decr...

 There is a temptation, when you have found a theological home, to let it do all the work. Penal substitution explains the cross, the logic goes, so we are finished. And penal substitution does explain the cross, in ways that are central and indispensable, more thoroughly developed in the New Testament than anything else on offer. But the New Testament itself refuses to stop there. It reaches for law-court language, then temple language, then the slave market, then the battlefield, then the family. Five semantic fields, each distinct enough that no single model can hold all of them at once. That multiplicity is not a sign of theological confusion in the biblical authors. It is a sign that the event they are describing exceeds every individual framework brought to bear on it. This is something I work through in considerable detail in All Things in Christ , my larger works-in-progress systematic theology, and what follows is a compressed summary of the argument. The short version: th...