The battle for rhetoric in the pulpit

Yes, AI can arrange words, but it cannot suffer with a congregation, nor can it offer comfort from on high.

The one thing Al is doing is cheapening language faster than a Twitch streamer. Artificial intelligence can now produce whatever you need in speed-like fashion, which means that it can organize thoughts faster than the prodigy kid you knew in high school.

But the one thing you can't replicate with prompts is rhetoric. It's an art that must be developed. This requires work and fervor in language. A good rhetorician is also a good reader. Good rhetoric is not something you can manipulate. It requires pathos and human creativity. It's not something you can stutter your way into.

So, as the AI maximalists continue to produce entire news-journal cycles completely out of nothing, the church will not need fewer rhetoricians; we will need more. We will need men who know how to speak because they have first learned how to listen, men who can distinguish between borrowed eloquence and embodied/enfleshed conviction.

Yes, AI can arrange words, but it cannot suffer with a congregation, nor can it offer comfort from on high. It cannot bury the dead, baptize the infant, rebuke the wayward son, or stand before the saints with tears when a prodigal returns home. It can mimic urgency, but it cannot possess the burden of the ministerial presence.

This means we are going to need to test rhetorical skills a lot more. We will need to ask not merely, “Did he produce good content?” but “Can he speak with judgment? Can he comfort without mechanical sentimentality? Can he answer objections in real time? Can he take a doctrine and make it sing before the people of God?” I can assure you that it must come from the man himself and the Spirit who indwells him.

The next generation of pastors, teachers, and leaders can't be judged simply by polished manuscripts. A polished manuscript may now prove very little. Anyone can prompt what they will into existence. God made men creative, but the manipulation of language, or the contradiction between the language written and the language spoken, is a reversal of the co-creative powers from the dominion mandate.

Ultimately, we will need to know whether a man’s words come from formed affections or from the arrangement of machines. In my estimation, the renewal of rhetoric is the next pastoral warfare.