AI, Authority, and Revelation

Sola Scriptura in the Cloud Age

The January wind rattled the stained-glass windows of St Mark’s Presbyterian just as the Thursday sermon-writing group settled into the fellowship hall. Pastor Elaine, fresh from hospital visits, opened a battered leather Bible and found her place in First Peter; beside the Scriptures, her laptop purred in sleep mode. A deacon poured coffee. A seminary intern unfurled a rainbow of commentaries across the table. Then, with a half-apologetic shrug, Elaine tapped her trackpad, woke the screen, and typed a prompt into a generative-AI assistant: “Craft a sermon outline on 1 Peter 2 : 9–10; include historical context, three application points, and a closing illustration about adoption.”

Within seconds the pixels glowed with a neatly ordered outline—Greek word study, patristic quotation, nod to the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and a modern story about foster care. The group blinked, half-impressed, half-unnerved. The machine’s confidence felt almost pastoral; its prose required only a few tweaks. Yet something in the room shifted: authority—the quiet weight that rests upon the open page of Scripture—seemed to hover, momentarily displaced, over the silver hinge of the screen.

No heresy had appeared, no scandalous deviation from orthodoxy. And yet. The Reformers once risked life and limb to insist that the living God addresses His people through the written Word, illumined by the Spirit, tested in the communion of saints.¹ What happens when the first voice to answer the preacher’s cry for help is an algorithm trained on billions of documents but tethered to no church, no creed, no Spirit-breathed canon? Does sola Scriptura survive the age of predictive text, or does the cloud reshape our sense of what counts as revelation at all?

Those questions do not belong only to pastors scrambling for outlines; they belong to every believer who has ever typed a spiritual query into a search bar. “What does the Bible say about anxiety?” “Is universal basic income biblical?” “How do I forgive someone who will not change?” Each query now returns synthetic paragraphs wrapped in an authoritative voice. The temptation is subtle but pervasive: we begin to trust the swiftness of the answer more than the slowness of prayer; we treat probability as prophecy.

To meet that temptation with more than a shrug, we must revisit not only the Reformation slogan but the deep biblical conviction that sustains it: authority flows from God’s own self-disclosure; human words, whether printed in sixteenth-century folios or generated in twenty-first-century servers, are true only insofar as they echo that living speech.² In this first section, we linger with Luther and Calvin, we stand again at Sinai and the Mount of Transfiguration, and we trace how Sola Scriptura emerged as a safeguard against counterfeit revelation—and why that safeguard still matters when sermons can be drafted by code.

Long before Google indexed a single verse, the medieval Church navigated a dense hierarchy of voices: Scripture, to be sure, but also papal decretals, conciliar canons, canon-law glosses, monastic rules, scholastic quaestiones, legends of saints, and embroidered folk piety.³ Authority resembled a choir in which Scripture sang the cantus firmus, yet the surrounding polyphony could sometimes drown out the melody. When indulgence preachers rattled coin boxes, promising fewer years in purgatory for every florin, Johann Tetzel could quote papal bulls to justify the trade. The chorus had slipped off key.

Luther’s protest at Worms—“My conscience is captive to the Word of God”⁴—did not reject tradition tout court, it re-ranked it. Commentaries, creeds, and councils retained value, but only as faithful echoes of the prophetic-apostolic witness. Calvin’s Geneva followed suit, insisting that “Scripture has its authority from God, not from the Church,” while conceding that the Church’s testimonies help believers recognize inspired books.⁵ The principle was diagnostic, not destructive: measure every voice against the canonical chorus; silence those that croon a different gospel.

The Reformers could not foresee processors humming beneath Arctic ice, yet they understood a perennial human weakness: the allure of surrogate revelations. Whether parchment scrolls promising alchemical secrets or viral TikToks decoding Daniel, counterfeit oracles flourish wherever the heart hungers for certainty without obedience. Sola Scriptura emerged, then, not as bibliolatry but as covenantal fidelity—an anchor in the storm of competing claims.

Authority in Scripture never begins with syllogism. It begins with encounter. At Sinai, fire licked the mountain, and a voice thundered commandments.⁶ Israel did not deduce Yahweh’s will, they received it. Centuries later, atop another mountain, a cloud overshadowed three bewildered disciples, and the same voice declared, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”⁷ Revelation is event before it is archive; it is the living God breaking silence.

Yet the archive matters. Moses chiseled tablets. Prophets penned oracles. Evangelists compiled memories. Apostles wrote letters. The Spirit, hovering over composition and canonization, safeguarded the witness so that later generations might hear the same voice. The written Word mediates the living Word. Authority remains derivative yet dependable, like moonlit waves reflecting a hidden sun.

Server “clouds” mimic Sinai’s awe—vast, invisible, rumbling with energy—but they lack the voice. They assemble, sort, predict; they do not reveal. To confuse collation with revelation is to bow before a silent mountain, awaiting a word that will never bear covenant weight. The church may, and should, use algorithmic tools, but it must never grant them the thunderclap prerogative that belongs to Scripture alone.

When ancient Israel recognized certain scrolls as Scripture, they were not merely listing books; they were confessing a storyline. Creation’s goodness, covenant’s summons, exile’s grief, Messiah’s promise—these themes form a canonical grammar. Jesus Himself read within that grammar, announcing fulfillment in Isaiah and Moses.⁸ Authority, therefore, is narrative before it is proposition.

Algorithms know patterns, not promises. They can map which verses co-occur with “forgiveness,” but they cannot feel the ache of Joseph weeping over estranged brothers or the shock of Saul blinded on Damascus dirt. They can paraphrase Paul’s argument in Galatians, yet they cannot hear the quiver in his voice as he writes in large letters with tired eyes. The Spirit, not statistical proximity, knots such threads into the fabric of revelation.⁹

To say Sola Scriptura in 2025, then, is to confess trust in a canon whose shape and story the Spirit has forged for Christ’s glory. It is to welcome commentaries, councils, and yes, even code, as handmaidens so long as they serve that story, never rewrite it. The preacher in St Mark’s fellowship hall may well print the AI outline—only to hold it beside the text, praying: “Lord, shine your light; show what rings true; burn away the chaff.” A humble but relentless filtration of every secondary authority through the sieve of Scripture becomes an act of worship.

Sociologists of knowledge note that authority often shifts not by argument but by convenience. When the mail-order encyclopedia entered middle-class parlors in the early twentieth century, parents soon deferred to its gilt-edged volumes as if the embossed spines conferred infallibility.¹⁰ Likewise, when handheld calculators arrived, students abandoned mental long division. Tools glide from help to hegemony; efficiency becomes magisterium. In pastoral ministry the pace is faster: the sermon outline appears in seconds; hermeneutical muscles atrophy. Left unchecked, the assistant becomes an oracle and the oracle, in time, begins to sound suspiciously like the voice of God.

Yet the Spirit invites resistance—not Luddite fear, but re-enchanted discernment. Imagine Pastor Elaine reading the algorithm’s tidy exposition that Believers are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood,”¹¹ then feeling an inner prick: the outline had missed the exilic backdrop of First Peter, the ache of Christians displaced, maligned, scattered. She turns to a worn commentary by Karen Jobes, reads of Asian-minor colonial politics, and senses the text deepen.¹² The AI draft, far from heresy, simply lacked pathos; it lacked exile’s dust. Scripture, breathing through scholarly toil and the Spirit’s flame, corrects the glossy synopsis. Authority returns to its rightful throne.

The first Reformers never imagined their slogans would fossilize into mere slogans; they aimed at ecclesial renewal—hearts aflame, minds instructed, injustice confronted, idols toppled. Five centuries later, the church stands at another threshold, with new idols glittering in server racks. The call is not to preserve a Latin phrase but to let its gale-force wind blow through our neon sanctuaries.

Re-formation begins with wonder: the God who spoke light into being still speaks. It matures into vigilance: every other voice, however smooth, must bend below that speech. And it flowers in mercy. Scripture’s authority is not a cudgel but a balm, freeing captives from counterfeit gods—whether indulgence hawkers at medieval fairgrounds or algorithms promising frictionless wisdom today.

What will happen, then, in that tiled fellowship hall next Thursday? Perhaps Pastor Elaine will begin, laptop shut, by reading First Peter aloud—twice, slowly—until the group senses exilic hope rise from the page. Then, maybe, they will open the machine, ask it fresh questions, sift wheat from chaff, and in so doing teach a watching world that tools can serve when hearts stay tethered to the thunder of a speaking God.

The snow had just begun to fall outside Zürich’s Grossmünster when Ulrich Zwingli climbed the pulpit on the first Sunday of 1519. He set aside the medieval lectionary, opened Matthew at the genealogy, and began to preach line by line—an act that shifted the city’s center of gravity from papal decrees to canonical text.¹³ Five centuries later, a Methodist pastor in Lagos opens a livestream, selects the same Gospel on his phone, and watches as an AI plug-in flashes an exegetical outline across the screen. Preparation time is halved; the homiletical quandary remains. Tools that once magnified Scripture’s voice can slowly muffle it if convenience replaces discernment.

Digital convenience is never neutral. Gutenberg’s type made Bibles portable; radio piped revival meetings into parlors; television reframed sermons as performances. Now the cloud delivers instantaneous commentary—at a cost that is not monetary but hermeneutical. To keep Sola Scriptura from sliding into sola algorithmus, the church must cultivate counter-formations of mind, heart, and communal practice.

Luke’s portrait of the Bereans is a study in balanced posture: they “received the word with all eagerness” yet examined the Scriptures daily “to see if these things were so.”¹⁴ They did not outsource discernment, nor did they spurn fresh proclamation; they held enthusiasm and scrutiny in creative tension.

A Lutheran congregation in Minneapolis seeks to mimic that rhythm. Members gather midweek, read the upcoming lectionary text aloud in three translations—ESV, NLT, and an Ojibwe New Testament—then pray in silence. Only after that lingering do laptops open. An AI tool is asked to summarize the passage’s historical context. The group highlights the output, disputes its dating of the Edict of Claudius, and consults a printed volume of the Anchor Bible commentary. Laughter accompanies correction; the machine becomes foil, not oracle. The Berean instinct lives on, chastening speed with fidelity.

History warns of revelations untethered from canon. Montanus and his prophetesses thundered ecstatic utterances in second-century Phrygia, claiming to surpass apostolic teaching.¹⁶ Gnostic teachers offered esoteric codes for spiritual elites.¹⁷ In each case, bishops answered with rule-of-faith boundaries and public canon. AI revives those temptations in digital costume. A query about Revelation’s seven bowls can yield numerological schemes indistinguishable from ancient Gnosticism. The algorithm is indifferent; discernment is left to the church. Whenever a synthetic paragraph strays from the biblical metanarrative, the Irenaean reflex must return: weigh, test, discard if necessary.

Confessions guard the canon’s cadence. The Nicene Creed compresses Scripture into Trinitarian music; an AI can recite it but cannot believe. Yet users can embed that music into queries: “Summarize Romans 5 in language consistent with the Nicene Creed.” The output improves—atonement anchored in Christ, not self-help. The church becomes prompt engineer, framing the conversation with creedal rails. The authority, however, still belongs to Scripture; the creed and the code are servants in its household.

Calvin likened Scripture to spectacles but insisted only the Spirit grants sight.¹⁸ Pentecost, not printing, makes the church. In our age, praying the text must again outpace scanning the summary. Followers who first internalize John 15—“I am the vine; you are the branches”¹⁹—may then consult digital cross-references, turning each link into intercession rather than trivia. Thomas Merton’s warning endures: one can read about prayer and never pray.²⁰ Digital abundance intensifies that risk; rule-of-life guardrails—fixed hours, screen sabbaths—become spiritual essentials.

Reformation polemics targeted the economy of indulgences. Today’s battlefront is data monetization. YouTube’s recommendation engine prizes controversy over fidelity. Churches must therefore disciple media literacy: trace citations, interrogate sensational thumbnails, prefer long-form commentary to viral snippets. Resources help. Anglican Compass hosts publicly available Spotify playlists that weave Daily Office readings with seasonally appropriate hymns, each list annotated by clergy editors who flag doctrinal integrity.²¹ Such ministries model how digital curation can serve, rather than subvert, canonical devotion.

The Word became flesh, not code. When believers gather at the table, bread and wine rebuke the fantasy of disembodied wisdom. An AI might chart the chemical structure of gluten but it cannot feed the soul. Yet technology can still serve sacrament: a Nairobi Baptist church projects a QR code during communion, linking to multilingual liturgies prepared by local translators and lightly edited by AI. The digital bows to the tangible and authority remains in the hands that break bread.

Revelation concludes with a wedding, not an archive: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ ”²³ Algorithms may expand our research yet cannot hasten nuptials. Habakkuk’s promise—earth drenched in the knowledge of God’s glory²⁴—frames every digital experiment within an eschatological humility. We see in part; we prompt in part; the perfect Word will one day render all models obsolete.

And so Pastor Elaine closes First Peter, thanks God for electronic aids, and prays that every outline—whether mined from servers or scribbled by hand—be judged by the thunder that once shook Sinai and forever shakes complacent hearts.

The final ember of any theological argument should warm the hands, not merely illuminate the mind. After tracing how Reformation accents tremble beneath digital overtones, we arrive at a final movement—practical, pastoral, and eschatological—asking how believers might inhabit an algorithm-saturated world without surrendering the primacy of God’s Word. The task is neither nostalgic retreat nor breathless embrace; it is patient apprenticeship to a voice that still divides soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart.²⁵

A generation ago, homileticians warned against “sermon mills,” subscription services mail-ordering outlines to busy pastors.²⁶ Large-language models make those mills look quaint. Why spend hours wrestling with 2 Timothy when a model distills Greek nuance, literary structure, and contemporary anecdotes in forty-five seconds? Because, Karl Barth reminds us, the preacher must first be struck by the text before daring to speak it.²⁷ Barth’s image of the Bible as a “strange new world” cannot be toured by proxy.

The solution is not technological abstinence but a re-ordering of labor. At several mainline seminaries, homiletics professors now require students to prepare two sermons from the same passage: one produced through traditional exegesis, the other initially drafted by AI but revised in conversation with the text. Class debriefs, described in a Religion News Service report, reveal that the AI version often sparkles with fresh allusions—yet the manually wrought sermon carries a deeper tremor of conviction.²⁸

Pastors outside academia can mirror that discipline. Keep a log. Record where the instance of illumination occurred—during prayer walk, commentary reading, or prompt tweaking. Over months, patterns emerge. If 90 percent of homiletic insight originates in code, the preacher must ask: Am I still Jacob limping away from Peniel, or have I become Balaam’s parrot reciting blessings I never wrestled into being?

Authority in Scripture never travels solo; it rides the caravans of koinonia. When the Ethiopian eunuch puzzled over Isaiah, Philip climbed into the chariot; illumination arrived in dialogue.²⁹ Digital platforms risk replacing caravan with cocoon—each user alone with a curated feed. Churches can resist by turning Sunday worship into a school of shared interpretation.

At Iglesia de la Resurrección in Austin, the sermon concludes with ten minutes of “table talk.” People cluster around café-style tables, answering a guided question: How did today’s text confront or comfort you? Phones are allowed, but with a twist: any AI query must be projected on the table’s shared screen for collective vetting. Sometimes the room erupts in laughter when a model mislabels Hagar as Egyptian royalty; other times the query supplies a cultural insight the preacher missed. Either way, authority remains communal, not algorithmic.

James calls hearers to become doers of the Word.³⁰ Table talk embodies that imperative: interpretation converges toward embodiment—budget decisions, neighborly reconciliations, ecological practices. The algorithm might supply context, but only the Spirit, moving through gathered bodies, births obedience.

“We become what we behold,” Augustine said in another context;³¹ Nicholas Carr updated the aphorism for the internet era: neural pathways bend toward the habits of attention we practice.³² A church that preaches sola Scriptura yet habitually consumes Scripture through twenty-second clips will soon forget how to dwell in narrative depth.

Monastic wisdom offers scaffolding. At Saint Anselm Abbey, monks follow a rule that limits screens to designated hours. The bells, not push notifications, govern attention. Borrowing that logic, several urban Anglican parishes created a “Digital Rule” for Advent: no biblical queries to AI before thirty minutes of unmediated reading; phones silenced during corporate prayer; weekly debrief where members confess both victories and lapses. Testimonials suggest that after initial discomfort, many experience a widening of interior space—a rediscovery of lectio’s pregnant silences.

Douglas Rushkoff warns that technology accelerates faster than moral adaptation.³³ A rule of life slows velocity long enough for metanoia—mind-renewal—to happen. Romans 12:2 becomes not motto but metabolized rhythm: screens conformed to gospel pace.

Algorithms, for all their perils, also gift unprecedented access. The reach is astonishing: YouVersion announced in 2021 that its Bible app had been installed on 500 million unique devices worldwide, representing every nation on earth.³⁴ Faithlife’s Lexham suite places lexical tools once monopolized by German universities onto rural Kenyan laptops. These developments echo William Carey’s nineteenth-century missionary press in Serampore, where steam-driven type spread Bengali Bibles faster than scribes could copy.³⁵

Yet access does not equal authority. A pastor in Manila tells of parishioners quoting AI answers as if they outranked pastor and Bible alike. He responded by launching “Scripture DigLabs”—open-air workshops where teenagers compare the AI’s Tagalog paraphrase with four printed translations, then debate nuances over street-vendor halo-halo. Through shared taste—sugared ice and Scripture—authority recenters on the text.

Meanwhile, the Bible Society of Brazil has partnered with technologists to develop an open-source model that flags potential mistranslations before human reviewers go to press—an initiative profiled by Evangelical Focus in 2024.³⁶ Their guiding principle is missional: let technology serve the canon’s mission but never dictate it.

Authority has legal faces. Church councils once censured heretical pamphlets; today, denominational bodies draft AI-usage guidelines. The Church of England’s 2024 “Digital Ethics Charter” advises clergy to disclose any sermon content generated by AI and forbids models from offering pastoral absolution.³⁷ The Presbyterian Church (USA) now requires seminaries to teach algorithmic literacy alongside Greek. Policies are imperfect, but they remind congregations that authority is guarded not only in hearts but in bylaws.

Theologian Oliver O’Donovan insists that authority in the church is always service bent toward the neighbor’s flourishing.³⁸ Policies, therefore, must weigh power disparities: who controls the datasets? who profits? who is surveilled? When a small-group app stores prayer requests on third-party servers, leadership must ask whether data could be weaponized against vulnerable users. Canon law for the cloud age may sound unspiritual, yet it enacts Christ’s command to guard the least of these.

Pope Benedict XVI argued that the deepest response to revelation is not analysis but wonder—verbum Domini manet in aeternum, the Word of the Lord endures forever.³⁹ AI tempts us to treat Scripture as content to be extracted rather than mystery to be adored. Counter-pedagogy begins early. At a Reformed day-school in Cape Town, fourth-graders memorize Psalm 8 under the night sky; telescopes follow Jupiter’s moons while verses declare, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers…”⁴⁰ No screen can rival a chill wind and starlight for cultivating awe. Children later use tablets to annotate the psalm’s Hebrew parallelism, but the order is crucial: first the wonder, then the worksheet.

Adults, too, need re-enchantment. A Methodist retreat center in Wales organizes “slow pilgrimages” where participants hike ancient footpaths, pausing hourly to hear a passage read twice—once by a human voice, once by a synthesized AI voice in Welsh. The juxtaposition provokes reflection: technology can translate tones, but the wind in gorse bushes translates longing. Participants report renewed gratitude for embodiment.

Paul tells Philippians that Christ “emptied himself” (ekenōsen) and took the form of a servant.⁴¹ Authority in Christ is cruciform, not coercive. When the church wields Sola Scriptura kenotically, it resists both technocracy and bibliolatry. Bibliolatry freezes the text into marble law; technocracy melts it into algorithmic paste. Kenosis holds the middle: Scripture bows not to human cleverness yet stoops to human frailty, speaking child-language to wandering hearts.

A kenotic hermeneutic in the digital age might look like this: scholars admit the limits of historical criticism; programmers acknowledge biases in training data; pastors confess sermons where AI patched laziness. In the confession, authority is purified. Bonhoeffer called the Bible “a book that is written for us and against us.”⁴² AI may help us parse the “for,” but only humility can receive the “against.”

Hebrews declares that God’s Word is living and active.⁴³ Living organisms resist domestication; they grow, surprise, heal, and—yes—judge. Servers cool in Arctic lakes will fade; the Word will not. To plant confidence there is to live with both courage and curiosity, unafraid of tools yet unmoved by their boasting.

Imagine, then, a future Sunday: Pastor Elaine steps into the pulpit. She thanks the congregation’s tech team for the new AI study aids released that week. She also recounts how Tuesday’s prayer walk unlocked a sermon insight no software suggested. The congregation smiles, not in Luddite scorn but in chastened joy: coded helps, Spirit reveals. As Scripture is read—First Peter’s exile-laced encouragement—listeners hear more than syntax; they hear thunder echoing across centuries, now gentle as rainfall on modern rooftops.

What chapters still unfold? Only the Author knows. But the last page is glimpsed already: a city whose light needs no lamp, whose residents walk by a Word so radiant that explanations fall silent into song.

Notes:

1. Formula of Concord: Epitome, §1, in The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 486.

2. John Webster, “The Dogmatic Location of the Canon,” in Word and Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 13 – 34.

3. Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050 – 1300 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 101 – 25.

4. Martin Luther, “Luther at the Diet of Worms,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 32, ed. George W. Forell (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1958), 112 – 13.

5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.7.5, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 95.

6. Exodus 19:16 – 19.

7. Matthew 17:5.

8. Luke 4:17 – 21; 24:27.

9. Ben C. Ollenburger, “Canon and Theology,” in Biblical Theology: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Scott J. Hafemann (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2002), 18 – 22.

10. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 197 – 205.

11. 1 Peter 2:9 (ESV).

12. Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 26 – 30.

13. Bruce Gordon, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 55 – 58.

14. Acts 17:11 (ESV).

15. 1 Corinthians 1:12; 3:4 – 7.

16. Eusebius, Church History 5.16 – 17, trans. Paul L. Maier (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2007), 176 – 80.

17. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.4.

18. John Calvin, Institutes 1.7.4; 1.9.3.

19. John 15:5.

20. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1949), 22.

21. Joshua Steele, “Listen to the Daily Office on Spotify,” Anglican Compass, November 18 2019, https://anglicancompass.com/listen-to-the-daily-office-on-spotify.

22. John 1:14.

23. Revelation 22:17.

24. Habakkuk 2:14.

25. Hebrews 4:12.

26. William H. Willimon and Richard Lischer, Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 491–92.

27. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936), 109.

28. Yonat Shimron, “Seminaries Grapple with AI in the Pulpit,” Religion News Service, March 18 2024, https://religionnews.com/2024/03/18/seminaries-grapple-with-ai-in-the-pulpit.

29. Acts 8:30–31.

30. James 1:22.

31. Augustine, Confessions 10.6.8, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: OUP, 1991), 196.

32. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 116–20.

33. Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 45–47.

34. YouVersion, “Bible App Reaches 500 Million Installs,” press release, November 11 2021, https://blog.youversion.com/2021/11/bible-app-reaches-500-million-installs/.

35. Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), 264–66.

36. “Brazilian Bible Society Pioneers AI-Assisted Translation Review,” Evangelical Focus, April 22 2024, https://evangelicalfocus.com/world/2024/04/22/brazilian-bible-society-ai-translation.

37. Church of England, “Digital Ethics Charter,” GS Misc 1331 (July 2024).

38. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 215–18.

39. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2010), §24.

40. Psalm 8:3–4.

41. Philippians 2:7 (NRSV).

42. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 34.

43. Hebrews 4:12.