Reason the Path to Freedom

In my previous post I tried, however artlessly, to make two points. First there is no freedom in a church that manipulates its members. Secondly if the church is in the business of  manipulation it will, if it hasn’t been already overwhelmed by the superior ability of artificial intelligences. 

In making the first point my linking of emotions with manipulation was rightly challenged  by the fact (which I accept) that appeals to emotion are a necessary part of any kind of motivation. Put another, motivation isn’t necessarily manipulation. Further, an emotional experience may be an entry into a genuinely spiritual experience.

Or it might not. The problem is that emotions are notoriously non-discriminative and easily misled. Take, for example, the way that natural feelings of love for and pride in one’s family, clan, tribe, and nation can be turned to hatred for strangers and foreigners. There is a reason that right in the heart of the formation of the nation Israel was God’s command to love the foreigner and sojourner. The birth of a nation inevitably sows the seeds of xenophobia. 

More importantly, as the church has always taught, love, caritas, is not a feeling. It is an act of the will guided by reason. This is why this particular love is the only kind of love that is both free and is liberating. 

It may be a good thing to be freed to fully express ones feelings of devotion to God, particularly in the cultural detritus of an overly intellectualizing enlightenment. But being freed from emotional constraints isn’t the same as being freed from sin, and a confusion between the two is deleterious to the faith. Nor is the feelingof being set free the same as actually being set free to love as Christ loves. 

Or as scripture teaches, true love, the love of Christ, is shown by the fruit we bear, not our feelings.

Without intellectual discipline, without the discipline of testing the feeling of a spirit’s presence against the Spirit of God alive in scripture, it is easy for every kind of spirit to masquerade as the Spirit of Christ. And without the discipline of the will toward doing good, feelings of compassion quickly dissipate before any fruit is born.

For this reason a church that wishes to lead its members to freedom in Christ must attend to the development of the intellect and the will. It is an endeavor threatened by the emerging culture of the 2nd machine age. 

Threatened first because the rise of artificial intelligence makes it easier to abandon natural human intelligence. Thinking about God is necessarily abstract, and developmental psychologists tell us that that even when we humans are mature enough for abstraction we fall back to concrete thinking. We’d rather do math on our fingers than remember the laws of math, just as we’d rather assign migrants the concrete status of “illegal” or “victim” than contemplate who they really are for God. 

In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus takes the easy “count your fingers” concept of neighbor and makes it hard. He pulls the rug from under a falsely concrete concept of neighbor and expands into an abstraction with no geographical or legal reference. A concrete act of love alone gives substance to a concept of neighbor that has no boundaries. 

Our problem is that Christians used to asking Siri or Alexa or Google for answers are losing their capacity for such difficult questions. Nor are they helped by already existing AI controlled Bible studies that short circuit the intellectual process of reading scripture for one’s self. The “chain reference Bible” was perhaps the earliest subversion of the human capacity to engage scripture for ideological purposes. It isn’t the last. The proliferation of such studies as apps and online can readily be misused to undermine the capacity of Christians to think freely about God’s Word and thus test the spirits in their midst.

The second threat to loving God with the mind follows naturally: congregations and church leaders dependent on these AI powered apps can easily be manipulated by their effectively anonymous authors. Indeed mass manipulation becomes possible as preachers and churches subscribe to studies, sermon outlines, and all sorts of related material in a complete package for managing the intellectual (more properly anti-intellectual) life of the congregation. 

And this is taken even further when worship is effectively taken over by AI as churches subscribe to so-called worship resources that dictate everything from songs to prayers to sermon outlines and illustrations. Buy a package and you have an instant church, and a pastor and congregation freed from engaging in critical thinking and intellectual discernment. As a seminary professor I sometimes wonder why we bother to educate students when all that we train them to do may be farmed out to a for-profit publishing house whose true values and intentions are hidden from view. 

In the coming 2nd machine age real leadership will be exercised in the kind of spiritual discernment which scripture advises to the then nascent Christian community. And at the core of that discernment will be reason and observation. Leaders for the coming age must realize and teach that when the Spirit sets us free it is to love God with our minds, for only then are we free indeed. Nothing will do more to confirm the freedom won for us by Christ than a church that teaches its members how to think.