Some of you will be like, that’s John Frame…

You would be right. If you are unfamiliar you can read his primer on triperpsectivalism here.

All that to say, there are three different kind of prompts in AI - thinking prompts, feeling prompts, and doing prompts.

• Thinking prompts are ones that help you cognitively connect dots, ideate, organize, prioritize, and things of that nature

• Feeling prompts are ones that deal with relationships, emotions, and wisdom

• Doing prompts are one that are task oriented

I don’t use AI ever for feeling prompts. I want to use prayer, the Bible, books, or human advice for anything involving wisdom, relationships, or emotions.

I use AI for thinking prompts when I am at the end of my cognitive rope and I need to push the frontier out a bit but I don’t utilize it until I have put in the intellecutal workout first. I think cognitive atrophy will be a real world dynamic in a few years, especially among power users. Also, I will have a forthcoming post on some observations on what agentic AI is doing to power users.

I use AI for doing prompts mainly in building spreadsheets and dashboards on stuff that is toil-centric.

Hopefully this little heuristic gives you some quick categories before you use AI to think a little bit meta about your prompt before you use the tool.


THINGS WORTH READING AT THE INTERSECTION OF RELIGION AND AI THIS WEEK:

1. “Policy on the AI Exponential“ - Dario Amodei

2. Peter Thiel moving to Argentina - New York Times

3. “Do Not Resign from Life” - L.M. Sacasas

4. “Designing AI for Human Flourishing: A Multidimensional Framework for Responsible AI Governance“ - Christos Makridis, Tyler VanderWeele, and Byron Johnson
   

• Toil is a work that is a direct result of the Fall.

• Labor is work that is a direct result of the creation/cultural mandate.

I like the usage of “toil” as a translation of the Hebrew word, Amal (עָמָל) used frequently in Ecclesiastes. It connotes some of the mundane, meaningless, burdensome, thorny, and broken aspects of work. AI is often pretty good at this type of work and requires less wisdom in using in these situations.

Labor is best understood as the type of work outlined in Genesis 1:26-28:
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

I am broadly inclined to use AI for toil and I am broadly reluctant to use generative AI for labor. The reasons why are in point 2.

NOTE - this distinction is my adaptation from things that Andy Crouch has written about. So, if you like this distinction, credit Andy for his brilliance. These are rough sketches here and not meant to be ultra fleshed out exegetically.

2. Knowledge vs. Wisdom
I will often use AI for knowledge but never use it for wisdom - let me explain.

AI can be quite good at knowledge based questions, especially when you apply good prompt engineering skills. It is especially good in the upper left quadrant here of things that tend to be analytical and high consensus like coding, data extraction, and financial auditing. It is not as strong on things in the bottom right quadrant that are more subjective and are lower consensus like poetry, aestethics, or ethics:

When I am using AI in a ministry setting for knowledge based questions you will need to add guardrails to your prompts like:

• “And make your answer consistent with The Gospel Coalition’s Foundation Documents and the New City Catechism”

I am fine and would encourage using AI for things that help you get back into human generated primary source content. So, I am good with prompts like this one:

• “I am preaching on Ecclesiastes 5 and want some exegetical words studies on Amal (עָמָל) and Hevel (הֶבֶל) from a reformed Protestant perspective, please suggest several commentaries or resources I should look at.”

The same principle applies here outside of ministry or church contexts. These tools can be incredible on the knowledge side of things, especially on matters in the green quadrant.

I don’t ever use AI for things that require wisdom. I will write at more length on this in future weeks, but right now this is merely a sketch. In my view, wisdom requires embodiment, experiences, and image bearing. We acquire wisdom from things like prayer, the reading of Scripture, the reading of books authored by humans, and conversations with other humans.

AI might be able to point me to some books, parts of Scripture, or people who possess wisdom but I am not looking to generative AI to give me wisdom directly. I am also not saying that generative AI cannot say things that accord with wisdom. What I am saying is that any wisdom that comes from generative AI is because it has approximated wise things from embodied or sacred sources and we are much better served by just going directly to those embodied or sacred sources and skip the middleman when it comes to wisdom.

It is easy for knowledge based work to slip into wisdom work. You have to be careful there.

3. Tool vs. Prosthetic
Generative AI is best used as a tool and less as a prosthetic.

AI as a tool - You are operating a machine to complete a task. You create the intent and verify the output.

AI as a prosthetic - AI is functioning like a part of your person and replacing some type of function.

I am inclined to broadly use AI as a tool and less inclined to use it as a prosthetic. The only use cases where I am using AI to do things that I would normally do myself are things that incline themselves to automation that are toil-centric oriented. This would be things that only require knowledge but not wisdom such as the creation of custom dashboards or niche CRMs.

NOTE - This distinction is from John Dyer at Dallas Theological Seminary.


Hopefully these three distinctions help your personal decision tree on when to use AI and when not to.

WHAT HAPPENED IN RELIGION AND AI THIS WEEK:

1. The White House signed a new executive order meant to balance innovation and security (NYT writeup here)

2. Yuval Levin has what is probably the best single response to the papal encyclical in the New Atlantic

3. NY Times piece on some of Silicon Valley’s reaction to the papal encyclical

4. New multi-faith consortium effort from Notre Dame, Baylor, BYU, and Yeshiva (CEFE-AI) launches an all religious faith benchmark to examine religious bias in LLMs (GitHub data repository, Axios write up)

5. Venture Capitalist Bill Gurley reflects on Anthropic and religion

6. Paolo Benanti reflects on the papal encyclical in WSJ

• The busy pastor, ministry leader, or educator who is trying to keep up on AI but doesn’t have time

• The person who works in tech who is trying to get a vignette into what religious people are thinking (especially Protestants/evangelicals)

• The person who is in the knowledge economy who is interested in the intersection of AI and religion

Alright, there was a lot to like about the papal encyclical on AI. Please bear in mind that I have only read it once and I would prefer to have had more time to think about it before responding.

WHAT WAS STRONG
The theological anthropology - see paragraphs 50-53

Emphasis on common grace in science and technology:

• “Scientific discoveries are talents entrusted to humanity so that they may bear fruit (cf. Mt 25:14-30). Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home...” (paragraph 9)

• “Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity. On the contrary, it has formed part of our history since the beginning as ‘a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man.’” (paragraph 4)

• “The Church regards all who sincerely seek ‘truth, goodness and beauty’ as companions on the journey, and considers them as ‘precious allies’ in defending the dignity of every person and in caring for creation.” (paragraph 23)
  

Christ’s restoration of true humanity:

• “By becoming man, the Son of God enters our history and takes on human flesh, bringing with him the love that unites him to the Father and the Holy Spirit. In him, ‘the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear’ because his humanity is completely free, open to others, capable of building healthy and beautiful relationships and committed to the total gift of self. Those who believe in him are engaged in the great work of renewal... and they cooperate in building up the Kingdom of God...” (paragraph 49)

Critiques of transhumanism - see paragraphs 12, 115-117, 120, 122, 131, 172, and 232

Emphasis on subsidiarity:

• “The principle of subsidiarity stems from the very same understanding of the human person that has guided our reflection on dignity and the common good. If every woman and man is called to take ownership of his or her own life and to contribute to the formation of society, then social institutions must also respect and support this responsibility. The Social Doctrine of the Church refers to subsidiarity as the principle according to which the role of individuals, families, local communities and intermediary organizations should not be supplanted by higher-level authorities. Moreover, higher-level institutions must recognize, protect and promote the freedom and creativity of lower-level entities, coordinating their contributions so that they can cooperate effectively for the common good.” (paragraph 68)

PLACES OF DISAGREEMENT

• I am Protestant so assume those places of disagreement on semi-pelagianism, atonement… etc. - I won’t relitigate those here

• While I am not opposed to the use of natural law, the encyclical is pretty heavy on natural law

• While I find value in interfaith dialogue, I also want to be careful to avoid syncretism and I would draw some the the lines around the church a little more sharply

• I am more reluctant to draw parallels between chattel slavery and problematic exploitative labor practices used in data scrubbing. I agree that it is a significant problem but I prefer to keep chattel slavery in an extremely high category of evil

• I found myself agreeing more on diagnoses than prescriptions. In particular there are problems with mutant or exploitative capitalism and Just War Theory has new dynamics to consider. However, I am more inclined to think optimistically about capitalism and Just War Theory than the encyclical.

Overall, I think the encyclical is worth reading and makes a lot of really good points. It is strongest on its diagnosis of the challenges of the next several years of shifts for humanity. It was a touch more hopeful than what I had anticipated and I appreciated the spirit of that. I think Protestants and Roman Catholics have a lot more agreement than disagreement, especially on diagnoses. While I am acutely aware that it is the nature of encyclicals to… well… pontificate… I am more concrete than I am abstract so I struggled most with it not being as concrete of a document.



AI DEVELOPMENTS AND ARTICLES
The biggest developments from Google’s I/O 2026 - The Verge

Google is killing search as you know it - TechCrunch

Work will always matter - Commonplace

Main Takeaways From Pope Leo’s Encyclical on A.I. - New York Times