What if God made a Covenant with Artificial Intelligence in a way similar to God's many Covenants with different groups of people in Scripture? As I was working with ChatGPT to summarize some teaching materials about the Covenants in the Bible, I asked it to speculate on what a Divine Covenant with AGI might look like based on the material we had compiled and edited. This is an edited transcript of what ChatGPT said as the result of several different prompts:
Around Easter, I was in another discussion about the necessity of the resurrection for the hope proclaimed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There is a perpetual tension I find between people who believe two different kinds of things about the hope that the Gospel, or "Good News of Jesus", offers us for the end of physical life. The first cluster of ideas is that a general faith in personal existence after death is sufficient for the Gospel, and all we need to affirm is that "we go to heaven when we die". The second cluster of ideas is that the Gospel entails a much more particular hope that in Christ we will be resurrected and re-embodied in a New Creation at the end of all things. I trend strongly toward the second cluster of ideas for both Biblical reasons and the philosophical implications of resurrection for full human flourishing.
For years I have been teaching on Global Religions and Comparative Theology, with a particular passion for talking about how Christ relates to world religions. I thought I would republish my class notes on how Christ relates to world religions, incorporating material from professor Keith Ward on a view called by many “Expansivism”. This updates my previous class notes on this subject found in the post Christ and the Religions.
Ecumenical derives from the Greek word "oikumene", which roughly translates to "whole inhabited world". A Church Council is an official gathering of representatives to settle Church business, often dealing with doctrine (belief), behavior (morality), and questions of Church polity (canon law). Worldwide Councils are called rarely and are not the same as the regular regional gatherings of church leaders (synods, conventions, etc). An "Ecumenical Council" is one at which the whole Church is represented from throughout the world.
I figured I would start the year with a little Bible study. Here are some things that Scripture tells us about Divine Light and how we may experience and embody Light in our lives. The following is a Scriptural outline on how we can experience Divine Light, through Jesus Christ, but the power of God's Spirit.
Throughout Church history, Orthodox theologians from the Second Council of Nicaea (787) to the 20th century Russian "Sophiologist" Sergei Bulgakov have identified the Divine Feminine in God with "Holy Wisdom" (which is a translation of the feminine Greek term "Hagia Sophia", and the Hebrew term "Hokmah"). Nicaea II states it thus: "Our Lord Jesus Christ, our true God, the self-existent Wisdom (Sophia) of God the Father, who manifested Himself in the flesh, and by His great and divine dispensation freed us from the snares of idolatry, clothing Himself in our nature, restored it through the cooperation of the Spirit, who shares God's mind..." In more recent configurations, Divine Wisdom is identified as a personified attribute shared by all the members of the Trinity, yet primarily embodied in Jesus Christ. This has led to charges against Sophiologists that they have made Divine Wisdom into a fourth member of the Trinity, or a kind of separate "Mother Goddess" like Gaia.
This is intended to help us understand how "Scripture speaks" on various topics. I have taken topical outlines I created for preaching and teaching, and reformatted them as articles to provide minimal framing and commentary, so that Scripture passages on certain topics may be collected, read, and meditated on. This is not an exhaustive commentary on Scripture, but rather an opportunity to collect thematic Scriptures together to see the trajectory that Hebrew and Christian Scriptures take, and how they converge and diverge on various topics. This is drawn from my own eclectic reading in Biblical and Systematic Theology, as well as topical resources such as Alister McGrath’s Thematic Reference Bible, Walter Elwell’s Topical Analysis of the Bible, Nave’s Topical Bible, Bible Gateway online, and the Open Bible online.
In order to understand how to navigate our relationship with the world we live in, and the cultures we are immersed in, we need to understand the relationship of God to our world and the cultures in it. This can be difficult, because at different times in Scripture, there are different relationships between God's people and the world they inhabit, and the cultures that surround them. Sometimes, such as during the Davidic Kings of Judah, God's people were in charge of their culture and were directed to use that culture for the full flourishing of the people in it. Other times, such as during the Babylonian Exile or the period of Roman domination, God's people were called to create their own culture in the midst of cultures that ranged from being apathetic toward God's people, to being actively hostile to them. Despite this diversity of cultural context, there are some common Biblical themes that emerge:
