I discuss differences between America and Canada in light of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Should Canada become the 51st state? How Christian might be thankful for America at this time?

This was a fun article to write because I learned a lot interesting history in the process of writing it.

Thanks for reading.

Andrew

After a couple years of quoting them, I began to realize I didn’t always agree. I had one exchange with John Dyer who helped confirm some nuances. Kranzberg’s laws remain very helpful. And for my course at Heritage College and Seminary, I have the students read Kranzberg’s own account of them. But it’s not what I tend to emphasize. I have begun to gravitate toward seven points; my own “laws,” if you will.

Like Kranzberg’s, my seven laws are less like commands and more like a set of norms which function as a framework for thinking well about technology. If you master these, you will be better equipped to lead others and make disciples in a technological age. They summarize my approach to technology.

1. All technology is good and cursed.

Because we were created by a Creator to create, and because of the cultural mandate in Genesis 1, technology is a good gift from God. And yet, the blessing is mixed with burden; “cursed is the ground” from which all technology is made.

2. All technology changes you.

The formative effect of technology is underappreciated. We must recognize that after using any technology we become a different kind of person, as certain vices and virtues are inculcated through habit.

3. All technology is God’s.

To riff on a phrase from Abraham Kuyper, there is not a single technology in this world that God cannot point and declare, “Mine!” As the biblical prophets teach, even weapons of war are the Lord’s. God is in control of technology and oversees it with his wisdom. He’s not surprised by Nuclear Weapons, Facebook, or Artificial Intelligence. He is the ruler of all things.

4. The telos of tech is true, good, and beautiful.

Technology has a purpose beyond functionality and efficiency. Technology ultimately must be made to reflect the transcendentals found perfectly in God: truth, goodness, and beauty. Technology should not be made to be deceptive, immoral, nor ugly.

5. Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love.

This law was crafted by Andy Crouch, not me, in relation to Jesus’ summary of the greatest commandment. I repeat it here because I often repeat it. It’s essential anthropology for our technological age. The great commandment implies what humans were made for. We were made to love with each of the four aspects of what we are.

6. Every human person is masked by machinery.

One of the first inventions of Adam and Eve was clothing, made to cover up their shame. Technology has a concealing effect; whether through tinted windows, headphones, or social media beauty filters, technology not only extends what we can do but displaces how we appear.

Another aspect of this law, worth remembering, is that there is a human behind every machine. No AI output comes without human input. No battery, laptop, smartphone, or toaster exists without the involvement of people. It’s easy to forget this, since modern technology is so good at hiding the human element.

7. Every human person must consider, critique, and create technology.

As a summation for my whole project on discipling others in light of modern technology, Christians must take a careful yet active posture. Call it faithful presence, if you’d like. We must reflect on technology, including how it is designed and how it shapes us (its affordances), to properly use it. And we must all build. For we were not made to merely consume creation but to cultivate it for the good of others.

I don’t expect to update these laws. They seem to me to be some of the most essential aspects of Christian technology criticism in the 21st century. If I do change them, I’ll update you here.

Parenting and Technology

I recently spoke to a classroom full of Christian parents about Artificial Intelligence. I’ve attached a pdf of the slides here and the handout here.

I have overcommitted myself at times but I am glad to share that two new Teaching Fellows have joined the WWJT team. If you’d like to invite an excellent speaker on a Christian view of technology, social media, or AI, please send an invite to Obadiah or Michael here.

On the topic of parenting, I also had a great conversation with Nathan Sutherland recently on the WWJT podcast. I took the transcript from the episode and asked Claude Opus 4.8 to summarize the key points of what was said.

The full episode is here but you can read the AI summary below.

AI Summary of Parenting and Video Games, with Nathan Sutherland:

Nathan Sutherland is back. He last sat with the show roughly three years ago, and in between he has kept building Gospel Tech, a podcast on parenting in a digital age that is now past 300 episodes. This time all three hosts are at the table, and all three are gamers of one kind or another: Austin a former Halo esports competitor, Joel a lifelong real-time-strategy player who spent countless hours inside Civilization, and Andrew, who keeps a console out of the house entirely and plays online chess instead because he knows how easily it takes him. Andrew opens with a parlor question. If Christian parenting were a video game, what would it be? Joel’s answer sets the tone for the hour: we are living in an RPG where we just try to be more like Jesus.

What follows is a conversation that refuses both easy moves. Nathan will not demonize games, and he will not excuse them. He steel-mans them first, the work of gifted storytellers and artists and composers, an experience he puts on the same shelf as Tolkien’s argument for fantasy, the prisoner who looks through the bars and imagines a better world. Then he names the catch. A good game can take you somewhere. The problem is that it promises to keep you there. The rest of the episode is the practical, pastoral work of telling those two things apart, for a spouse, for a kid, and for yourself.

Key Insights

There is no single Christian verdict on gaming. The line is a person, not a rule. It depends on the kid, the game, and the heart behind the controller. Nathan has not played in fourteen years, not because games are bad but because he used them to cope, celebrating good days and stuffing down hard ones until nothing was actually processed. He keeps his beloved Zelda console literally locked in a safe. Andrew can sit in the room while his kids play Smash Bros and feel fine in the moment, then unsettled two hours later. Individual ethics differ, and that is not a failure of conviction. It is the shape of wisdom.

Play with friends, not for friends. Nathan’s rule for his own children is a single phrase with a lot packed into it. You can play with friends, but you do not join a platform in order to manufacture friendship, because needing the game to have friends makes you convenient, and convenient makes you disposable. If the friendship is already real, go play Mario Kart. Andrew immediately recognizes it as something he can hand to his own kids: we do not play video games so that you can have friends.

Many games are built to keep you, not to be won. A real game has a challenge, a rule set, and a victory condition. A growing share of modern titles quietly drop that last one. Nathan walks through the machinery: prestige classes in Call of Duty that double your playtime over and over on a sunk-cost loop, the fact that Halo was the first game to put a behavioral psychologist on the team, the slow slide of a health bar tuned so you can stomach the damage. Minecraft is not Legos, he insists, naming it the most addictive game one Seattle researcher had seen for kids. Even Duolingo runs on operant conditioning: you came for fifteen minutes and it talks you into twenty.

The real category is overstimulation, by design. The danger is not screens as such but a pace of reward that real life can no longer match. Nathan splits technology into tool tech, which helps us create, and drool tech, which is engineered to take our time, focus, and money. Microsoft Word does not text you to write a haiku together; a game is built to keep you in the loop. When a child is genuinely overstimulated, his fix is a thirty-day reset, the same window a nutritionist gives the body, after which real life can start to feel fun again. The rule that comes with it: replace, do not just punish. A kid who does not know how to have fun at the pace of real life will not be helped by a puzzle in a dark room.

RESET is a five-question diagnostic. Nathan’s most portable tool is an acronym: relationships, emotions, sleep, enjoyment, time. For any technology, gaming included, you ask whether it makes each of those five better or worse. The work is teasing cause from symptom. Is the game making a kid mean to his sister, or did he just want thirty minutes and she was standing in front of him? Does he merely enjoy it, or does he need it to self-regulate, so that canceling tonight’s turn makes the wheels fall off? The same words work on a spouse who calls gaming their way to recharge: then you should come back more present, and if you come back more distant, that becomes the conversation.

What we worship, we come to resemble. Andrew turns the practical wisdom theological. Psalm 115 says those who trust in idols become like them, and Deuteronomy 4 and 28 and 29 trace the blessings and curses that follow idolatry. Whatever takes the God spot in our hearts re-forms us in its image. Nathan reaches for Matthew 5, where Jesus says nothing is off the table if it causes us to stumble: the game, the app, the job, all of it expendable next to the soul. The flip side is the hope. A game can stay a genuine blessing as long as it does not become the thing we trust.

AI is the new overstimulation. Joel surfaces the parallel that lands hardest. He has started feeling the same pull he used to feel toward games, but now toward AI and code generation: speak to the model, watch it build, and you are inside a creation dopamine loop with no natural end, much like Minecraft. He calls the people staying up all night to code AI vampires. Andrew adds the tell that Claude’s token limit resets at two in the morning, a mechanic Austin recognizes immediately as a holdover from the earliest smartphone games, where your lives refilled in four hours unless you paid to skip the wait. Tool tech, it turns out, can grow drool-tech instincts.

Anchor Quotes

I have seen amazing kids who play video games. I have yet to meet a kid who is amazing because they play video games.

— Nathan Sutherland

Video games didn’t break the world. Sin did. But video games encourage you to make decisions you didn’t intend to make.

— Nathan Sutherland

If we elevate technology, we become like it. Or if we worship Christ, we become like him.

— Andrew Noble

Going Deeper

The thread the episode opens and cannot close is Joel’s question: why is there still no genuinely good video game that tells the story of the gospel? Nathan has watched fifteen years of attempts, Reddit dreams of a Skyrim set in Jesus’ time that keep collapsing into platformers. He thinks the wall is storytelling, not game design. The people who try usually come with an axe to grind and end up preaching, and players can feel it, so the thing reads as cringe rather than honest. The better path may be the oblique one, the way Tolkien and Lewis told the truth without a one-to-one Jesus, or the way horror fans find grace in grotesque pictures of sin and rescue. But honest games tend to be made by one-to-three-person teams, and funding dries up, and studios reskin popular games with Bible verses to survive. Andrew closes with the only answer the hosts can offer for now: not a product but a fellowship. The Inklings worked because they were friends in a pub, so the invitation is to come build in the open together, online and in person, and see what an honest Christian game might become.

As an aside, I’m increasingly against the idea of AI helping me write in any way other than fixing typos. This doesn’t mean that I believe it is wrong for others. But I don’t like it for myself and I don’t like what it’s done for my writing. Clearly, I believe AI-generated text is morally permissible for some cases, if properly disclosed, as I’ve written about before.

So, why am I mostly against using AI in the brainstorming, writing, and feedback of my writing? To open oneself in intellectual exploration (through the medium of writing) without proper restraint of generative inputs is to exercise a kind of self-destruction of the mind. I am pursuing the craft of writing and the service of others. I must use my mind, soul, body, and strength in that craft or else I risk the atrophying of the very muscles God gave me to grow.

Podcast Links

Once again, here is a link to all the recent episodes of the two podcasts I record. I discuss my seven laws of technology with Pastor and Theologian Jon Cleland in Thinking About It.

Thinking About It | Season 5: Live Like a Christian (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Should Christians Use Social Media?

• Four Ways to Evaluate Ethical Decisions

• A Biblical View of Technology

• Seven Laws of Technology

• Living the Spiritually-Disciplined Life

• Rejoice and Weep

• Love God with Your Mind

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• Parenting and Video Games, with Nathan Sutherland

• How Should Pastors Use AI?

• Is SEO Dead? The Evolution of Googling

• The Pope Said THIS About AI, with Wyatt Graham

• Does God Care if AI Does My Job?

Thanks for reading and listening.

Joe: We should be bold. When something becomes a theological or ethical mess, we need to flip tables like Jesus did.

Gavin: No, Joe. We must always be gentle.

Joe: That’s too restrictive. Are you saying we shouldn’t imitate Jesus?

Gavin: Well… it’s complicated.

You can watch the actual discussion between Gavin Orlund and Joe Rigney. They didn’t use quite these words, but the ideas were present. They discussed whether Christian leaders are permitted to use certain kinds of profanity and strong language. While this is an important dialogue, I’d like to step back and think about the question: what does it mean to imitate Jesus?

A lazy move here, which I want to get out of the way, is saying that the other side only believes what they believe because of their personality disposition or political leanings. The liberals like Gavin Ortlund are soft! The conservatives like Joe Rigney are harsh! Our side has the Bible (and our exegesis) and their side has their impression of the Bible which they falsely read into the Bible (eisegesis). They are blinded by their own character flaws!

This is silly, uncharitable, and reflects something of the genetic fallacy: arguing on the basis of someone’s background or origin of belief to refute their view (and by the way, Gavin is not a “liberal”). If you’re on Gavin’s “side” then you must not demean your Christian brother or sister by assuming their argument is based on their personality or politics. Likewise, if you’re on Joe’s “side,” the same goes for you.

We also must not say, “well, some people follow some Bible verses and some people follow others.” This is always a pet peeve of mine. Neither Joe nor Gavin would say this. But some people, when seeing that there are two sides to a biblical debate, conclude that no answer is possible. The mere presence of debate proves, for them, that no right answer can be found! Nonsense. Just because my neighbour believes I have elephants dancing on the roof of my house doesn’t make it true.

As is often the case in biblical debates, we must go back to the text itself.

In the discussion between Gavin and Joe, both made good points. It’s good to wrestle with the text.

I decided to take up the question of imitating Jesus in flipping tables in my latest article for The Gospel Coalition Canada, which you can read here. Part of this stemmed from reviewing a book called Imitation in Early Christianity by Cornelius Bennema, which is an excellent resource.

Bennema argues that imitation was always understood to include reflection prior to action. In other words, there has to be some moral deliberation rather than merely following someone’s actions one-to-one. I build on this by arguing from the New Testament texts on imitation which, once considered, prioritize some kinds of imitation over others. Hence, the New Testament guides us in how we should imitate Jesus’ whole person, not his every act. We should pick and choose, even! But not without biblical grounding. See what I mean here:

Here are a few podcasts episode I’ve recently hosted:

Thinking About It | Season 5: Live Like a Christian (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Love God with Your Mind

• Rejoice and Weep

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• Does God Care if AI Does My Job?

So, why am I launching an ebook today that was made with the help of AI? What is it? And why did I change my mind?

Jesus Was a Techie: How Christians Can Lead the Technology Age

Let’s face it, not everyone has the time to listen to our What Would Jesus Tech archive of 112 episodes! I know some people want to get a sense of our approach before subscribing. Other people want a list of our best episodes. Others simply do not prefer podcasts and would rather get to the point by reading a book. Others find our podcast is a bit too academic at times (or a bit too deep on technology) and so they want a summary that doesn’t skip the most important parts. All very reasonable! This is why I made this book.

Further, podcast apps are increasingly designed for popularity over regularity. People listen and move on, only to return to a popular episode months later. But with our podcast, this new norm stunts wisdom. Some of our episodes are very positive on technology. Some are very negative. Both are needed! The ebook pushes against the one-off nature of podcasting in 2026 and toward more reflective and sustained thought.

What is the book about? Here’s how I put it in the preface (I wrote the preface without the aid of AI, except for minor grammar and spelling edits):

The core thesis of this book: Christians can lead the technological age through imitating Christ. Such an approach is neither anxious nor blind, neither nostalgic nor futurist, but based on the gifts of God’s Word in the Scriptures and the help of one another. Theologians must learn from technologists. And those working in technology need to learn from pastors. All of us need to learn from Jesus. And Jesus was a tekton (Matt. 13:55, Mark 6:3).

This book matters to me. It matters for disciple-makers who want to do a better job navigating technology. I believe it will be helpful to you.

Though you may be wondering… how exactly was AI involved? What does it mean to have AI help turn a podcast into an ebook?

How I Used AI to Write an Ebook

It wasn’t all done by AI. I wrote the preface, summary, four introductions (at the beginning of each part), and an epilogue. For these, I only used AI for spelling, grammar, and minor suggestions. I still wanted to have a human voice throughout.

I downloaded the AI-generated transcript from Riverside (our recording and editing software) for each episode. These are mostly accurate, but often get a few words wrong. I gave it to Claude and asked it to write an episode summary, one at a time. Each summary includes the key points, direct quotes, and a “going deeper” section at the end. I instructed Claude to use lots of direct quotes and to stick to the content of the episode. I then verified each chapter at a time, always making at least a few edits.

At first, this was only a test. I was curious how it would go. But I was so impressed by the output that I realized the potential value. It captured the same key insights I would have captured. It stayed on topic. The writing wasn’t perfect (it flattered too much before I edited it), but I found myself engaged in reading it in precisely the same way the episodes engaged me!

For context, our podcast’s transcripts total over 500,000 words. This book is only 40,000 words with around 37,000 words written in this manner (the remaining 3,000 written solely by me).

In other words, this project is entirely different than the AI slop you can find on Amazon in the form of fake AI-generated theology books. I was present for all of these podcast recordings. These aren’t chapters merely based around the episodes; they contain the best aspects of the episode in written form. Unlike those fake books, we are being fully transparent about where AI is and isn’t being used.

If you prefer reading over listening, or if you prefer key concepts over tangential conversations, or if you simply want to grow in your ability to lead and make disciples in our technological age, then I made this book for you.

I pray this book will help people lead more like Jesus and suffer less from the harms of technology.

Download Jesus Was a Techie for free.

I want to add one more thing for readers who are still thinking through the differences between a podcast and an ebook.

The medium of a podcast is unique. Listening to a podcast is like building a one-way friendship. Audio includes emotional reactions, thoughtful pauses, and even the character of the hosts expressed through their tone. A podcast is formative in the way a book is not. It’s not better than a book. But it is different. And to take something from one medium and transfer it to another is not merely to adapt it, but to change it entirely (Marshall McLuhan would nod).

You won’t get the same feeling of tension in the book. A good example of this is our episode with Kirsten Sanders, when she debates Joel about whether his desire to “get more done for Jesus” is really what a Christian life is about. That episode is completely different in your ear than it is in your eye.

These are the kinds of tradeoffs that we are often unaware of when we think about technology. We don’t realize how technology changes us, disciples us, and forms us into a new kind of human.

You will need to be mindful of those tradeoffs. Even in writing the book and reading so much text that came through an LLM, I started catching myself writing in sentence structures which LLMs prefer. That’s a real side-effect. But to me, this is more like the side-effect of a sore back after mowing grass than that of a steroid.

Consider the pros and cons. Be thoughtful. That’s what this book is about. As I state it in my first of seven laws of technology, consider how all technology is good and cursed. I hope you learn with me, whether that’s through the ebook, this Substack, or the podcast.

Thanks for reading.

- Andrew

Recent podcast episodes I’ve hosted:

Thinking About It | Season 5: Live Like a Christian (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Should Christians Journal?

• You Should Be Serving, Guilt-Free

• On Sharing Your Faith

• When, Why, and How to Fast

• Taking Care of Your Body

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

Today’s episode:

• How Christians Can Harness the Power of AI

My cohosts Austin and Joel recently covered Meta’s lawsuit and “Why John Piper Changed His Mind on AI.”

Other episodes

• We Need to Talk About Cars

• An Honest Conversation About AI Chatbots (with Bonnie Kristian)

It can be very difficult to admit you’re “in debt” to someone else. Self-sufficiency can become a deadly sin. We need to stop keeping score.

Here’s how the article begins:

Perhaps you’ve been in my shoes when the bill is offered at a restaurant. Out of cheerful generosity, you consider paying for others. Yet you stop to think, “what have they bought for me, lately?”

Continue reading at The Gospel Coalition Canada here.

To make wise technology decisions for our kids we must consider each technology, its blessing and its burdens, and what God has said in his Word.

In the case of social media, we see plenty of positives. Like ancient letters, we can use communications technologies to connect with others. But it has its limits. As John says in his second (very short) letter:

I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete.

John knew the technology of letters (which is a technology) should be limited. The same is true of social media today.

Meta was recently found guilty for harm to teens by a jury — a historic win for people like me who have repeatedly argued these companies must be held responsible. In particular, the jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what they knew about child sex trafficking on their platforms. The humans who were responsible for these decisions should be held accountable. And this is only the first step in more lawsuits coming their way.

In Deuteronomy 22:8 it says:

When you build a new house, make a parapet around your roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof.

The idea is simple. People used to walk on their roofs and so you must build a railing (“parapet”) on it, otherwise you are guilty of “bloodshed.” The same applies for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, OpenAI, and so on.

But this doesn’t mean that parents are not also responsible for their children. We shouldn’t pit one against the other, as if a parent giving their child cigarettes is not also to blame. Parents should learn the harms and act accordingly. For example, you can read this 2026 paper by the famous researcher Jonathan Haidt, a leader in the movement to delay teen access to social media until at least age 16. Jonathan Haidt has studied this in-depth and concluded an important lesson: parents have overprotected our children in-person and under-protected them online. I agree with his thesis. The benefits of being connected are not worth the restlessness, access to sexual immorality, and self-centeredness that these apps normalize

None of this says that social media cannot also be used for good. Just yesterday I listened to a number of people share their story before they were baptized. One woman described how God used videos on TikTok to help her see the need she has for God and the church. Christians shouldn’t hide these potential benefits as if we are on one side of the argument or the other. We’re team Jesus. We call it as it is.

Likewise, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we should expect a mix of blessings and burdens. Missionaries and pastors are making use of AI for translation. And yet, the early research shows harms such as deskilling, disempowerment, and a false sense of self. ChatGPT will always compliment you, which is perhaps why one in ten teens prefer to speak to an “AI Companion” over a human. This is concerning.

I stand by the video I made last summer that parents should not give their children unsupervised access to Large Language Models (such as via ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude). Waiting until age sixteen makes sense. There are benefit in using AI but there are also harms, especially for children. As an aside, I never understood the argument that “AI is the future, so children need to get better using it.” That implies school is about skill development rather than virtue and knowledge. I wasn’t allowed to use a calculator regularly in class until, well, never. It was always supervised. There are far more harms to AI, so why risk it? Especially when it’s so new.

Wise technology use begins with parents, not Big Tech, nor the school your kids go to, nor the church you attend (though those all have an important role to play!). As parents, we need to model limiting technology for the sake of relationships, while also teaching the good of creativity and innovation. In this way, we can both image God’s creativity and align with Christ’s character.

Two quick notes:

1. A much shorter version of this article (about half the length) was written for the newsletter of my children’s school. I am thankful for partnering with them.

2. The “photos” above are actually both AI-generated images. I drafted a prompt with the help of Anthropic’s Claude and then had Google Gemini create it. In posts about LLMs (or “AI” — I use them interchangeably even though I know I could be more specific) I tend to use AI images, as they can illustrate the benefits of AI. I’m still a bit uneasy about using AI for “realistic photos” but I won’t get into that here.
   
   For clarity, the writing of this article was done completely by me. I only used LLMs to check for typos.

Podcast Links

It’s been awhile since I’ve linked to the podcasts I’ve produced.

I encourage you to listen.

Thinking About It | Season 5: Live Like a Christian (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• The Neglected Virtue of Friendship

• Have we removed God from the Christian life? (with Kelly Kapic)

• Be Quiet

• Live a Simple Life

• Your Car Isn’t Really Yours (Stewardship)

• Take a “Me Day” or a “God Day”?

• Building Annual Rhythms: The Church Calendar

• Is Your Weekly Worship Weak?

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• An Honest Conversation About AI Chatbots (with Bonnie Kristian)

• What’s Really Happening in the Faith & Technology World? (with John Knox)

• AI Warfare, Kids Tech, and Wild Times

• Are Sports Betting & Gambling REALLY That Bad?

• Should We Be Concerned with AI Agents?

Thanks for reading and listening.

Consider sharing this post if you found it valuable.

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Around the same time, I read an announcement from a Christian blogger about his upcoming book project. His project sounded interesting and I wondered, even though I was young, if I could help. Or maybe I could encourage him. I’ve never met him and I wasn’t sure what to say. I stopped writing the email.

Now in 2026, both of these tasks could be significantly supported by generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. These tools would help. Is it okay for Christians to use them? I’ve come to think of it this way: for researching an article, yes; but for crafting an email, no.

This goes back to a rule of thumb made by Kevin DeYoung: it can be good to use GenAI for retrieving information, and potentially harmful for crafting it. We were created by our Creator in his image, our creativity is part of who we were made to be.

It’d be foolish to go to the gym and bring a machine to lift the weights for me. This is why limiting our use of GenAI makes sense. We reclaim our humanity when we choose to do the tasks we should. But it can get complicated. It can depend on your job, the way you use it, which tool you choose, and your spiritual maturity.

To help unravel the pros and cons of GenAI, I’ve started to think in terms of metaphors.

AI is like a Video Game

A video game is not inherently sinful. As Sarah Zylstra noted, playing games like Mario Kart can be a joyful outlet of creativity and exploration. Of course, it can also be a little self-interested (games are built around keeping you hooked), and it can disconnect you from day-to-day responsibilities. AI is like this too. It’s permissible within reason. But too much of it? That’s a waste of time.

I recently went back and forth with Gemini to create an image to promote a project I was working on. The image generator kept making mistakes even as it kept improving in other ways. I realized I needed to start from scratch and write a detailed and precise message to Gemini (this process is called “prompt engineering”). I decided to stop. I didn’t see the point. As Christians, we should “make the best use of the time” (Eph. 5:16), and sometimes these technologies waste it even while they promise to save it. As a recent HBR review has noted, AI doesn’t eliminate work, it intensifies it.

Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick has given some advice on prompt engineering and how to save time. This helps. But we should guard against using it as a distraction or as if it’s a person. Because prompt engineering is always changing, keeping up takes more and more time.

A lot of this depends on where you work. For some companies, it’s essential to be experimenting with GenAI. For others, it’s frowned upon or forbidden. Just as there is no command against driving a pretend car in Mario Kart, there’s no command against getting Apologist AI to tell you a dad joke. But that doesn’t mean the Bible is silent on whether or not we should be spending our time on these things. We must be thoughtful.

AI as Steroid and Digital Sherpa

I do not think GenAI is morally neutral. It’s a potentially dangerous activity, given that already, one in ten teens would rather talk to AI than a human. More AI tools are adding the ability to have “erotic” conversations; internal documents from Meta’s AI show how they allow bots to hold “sensual” chats with kids. Given that the top three uses of GenAI include therapy/companionship and “finding purpose,” Christians should be concerned about these idolatrous machines.

It’s a bit like a steroid, at least in some uses. When I was a kid I needed to take a kind of steroid for my asthma. Certainly, this was helpful. But most steroids negatively affect your health even as they improve performance. We shouldn’t underestimate those risks, and likewise, we shouldn’t understate the benefits.

The internet is a big place. It can be hard to find journal articles and pull together key information (whether recipes or location-based). The internet is like a mountain and GenAI is like a digital Sherpa who helps you navigate it. I’ve used AI tools to help me save money when navigating foreign public transportation, for example. GenAI can give good advice when used well.

A Sherpa is a climbing companion who carries supplies and guides the way. But of course, this analogy has a flaw. A Sherpa is human. These AI tools are not. It’s that falsifying of the image of God which is one of the key risks with these chatbots.

As soon as you start using these tools for one thing they trick you into thinking you can use them for more. “How do I make a cheese roux?” can easily turn into, “How do I deal with difficult in-laws?” ChatGPT is especially keen to adapt its “personality” to keep you talking to it. I agree with Noreena Hertz: people are using ChatGPT for too many tasks, like moral decisions and emotional support.

In 2 Kings 17:33 it says, “They worshiped the Lord, but they also served their own gods in accordance with the customs of the nations from which they had been brought.” I wonder if too many Christians are simply following the customs of our neighbours instead of reflecting on whether or not these tools are like steroids and idols.

GenAI as Help and Harm

Using GenAI might help you ace an essay writing contest, but at what cost? It can summarize the readings for you, but what will that do to your ability to reason and reflect? Research shows that whatever skills are offloaded to AI are eventually lost by the user (this is called “deskilling”). It can help. With the right methods, it can help a lot.1 It can also harm.

Because GenAI is so new, researchers are still learning about the negative side-effects. It’s always easier to see the benefits than the burdens.

Pray over your use of GenAI tools. Ask God to give you wisdom. Talk with people in your church about this. Read a good book by a Christian on AI (or two, or three). Don’t go with the flow, renew your mind. Keep your heart with all vigilance.

Generative AI is fun like a video game and helpful like a digital Sherpa, but the risks are real. It’s also like a steroid and a potential idol. Every AI app comes with biases (including with anti-Christian subjectivism). Christians must have their own bias: a bias toward whatever is true, whatever is good, and whatever is beautiful.

Be wise. Think on these things.

His story is no different from one I’ve heard many times before, whether at FaithTech events, the broader “faith and work” community, or in my good friend, Joel Jacob.

Joel thought: “Am I really serving God? Am I designing fishing boats instead of fishing for men?”

Continue reading…

For a little extra context, Joel and I discussed this article together and I ended up writing it. He and I talk frequently about the tension that Christians feel when they work in tech. You can listen to these conversations on our podcast, What Would Jesus Tech?

Like my kids, I smiled at the first snowflakes in November. Through December, I appreciated the extra opportunities for shovelling; I needed the exercise. Then January came, and the Christmas lights came down. The past two weeks have been some of the coldest on record. My face hurts when I go outside.

It’s dark, too dark. It’s that time of year.

Keep reading…

Subscribe now

Recent podcasts episodes I’ve hosted. For Thinking About It we are focused on spiritual disciplines and we have been joined by our new lead pastor at my church, Jeremy McQuoid.

Thinking About It (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Is Work-Life Balance Biblical?

• How To Talk To God

• Scripture Intake: Why, What, and How?

• You can grow. Here’s how.

• Living Like a Christian With a Rule of Life

• Q52: What Hope Does Everlasting Life Hold for Us?’

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• AI is Interpreting the Bible Now? With Jonas Kurlberg & Zoltan Schwab

• We’ve Arrived In Digital Babylon... Now What?

• How the Bible Helps Us View Technology

• Do It For God, with Gregg Hinzelman

• What Will Happen in 2026? (Our Predictions)

Thanks for reading and listening.

Here are some of my top articles and podcasts from the year.

Top Three Articles

My most important article, in my humble opinion, was written in Mere Orthodoxy under the title Faithfulness in an Inside-Out World. They summarized it this way:

Andrew Noble critiques the "Inside-Out Approach," where personal desires outweigh external commitments. He argues this mindset fosters self-centered individualism, devaluing relationships and obligations. Noble contrasts this with a biblical view that prioritizes faithfulness over fleeting emotions, calling for a reorientation toward responsibility and commitment.

My best writing comes from my most patient thinking. I have been thinking about the concept of the “Inside-Out Approach” for years, applying it to my own life and to my teaching.

Similarly, I have long considered our difficulties in navigating social media (e.g., increased anxiety) to be itself an argument for Christianity. The lifelessness of technological idolatry leads to seeking life, and potentially finding it, in God.

Consider Deuteronomy 4:28-30:

There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell. But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you, then in later days you will return to the Lord your God and obey him.

It is out of this interplay between our frustrations with technology and the hopefulness of heaven that I wrote Something Is Wrong, my most read article on Substack this year.

Lastly, while I think many of my articles for TGC Canada were helpful and valuable, I had the most fun writing In Defence of Silly Summers.

One day, after my PhD is over, I’d love to explore the concept of fun in-depth. Not a blog post about joy, or a book about silliness, but an academic monograph on the biblical theology of fun. I may never get to this, so I hope someone else takes up the task.

In the meantime, in light of the holidays, consider reading:

Other notable articles:

• My review of Work Out Your Salvation: A Theology of Markets and Moral Formation.

• Are We The Idols? — an introduction to how we are shaped by idols and are like idols.

• My advice for using social media and whether Jesus would use TikTok.

• Why pastors should limit their use of Generative AI in sermon prep.

• Also, my post “The Evolution of Isolation AI” had an attachment within it which links to my notes for when I teach on AI at churches.

Top Podcast Episodes

The podcast that I’ve received the most positive feedback on is the one I recorded with Bob MacGregor and Jon Cleland after the passing of Stan Fowler. He was a faithful man, to God, to his family, and to his students.

We recorded fifty-two episodes for “Thinking About the Faith,” a podcast which served as a delightful way to learn devotionally rich doctrine amid daily life.

Our episode on What is God? was my favourite. I hope to take all 52 weeks and upload them together to YouTube soon, which essentially would be a 13-hour course on the basics of Christian theology.

It was a big year for What Would Jesus Tech?

Not only have we been growing and attracting an increasing number of listeners, but we hired a podcast manager to free up some of my time.

The best WWJT episode of 2025?

It’s hard to choose. Choosing and Using GenAI as Christians was one of the most popular (likely in part because of my very strong stance that Anthropic’s Claude is better than OpenAI’s ChatGPT) but I think Altman, Musk, and Belief in God was the best because it got to a deeper issue in our tech age: disenchantment.

It is also interesting, looking back on 2025, just how dominant Artificial Intelligence was. From demons, to the overhyped AI Bubble, to transhumanism, I’m really happy with what we covered.

You can find all episodes at https://www.whatwouldjesustech.com/all-episodes

Merry Christmas

Many are placing their hope in Superintelligence (or “AGI”) to solve the world’s problems. At the other extreme, in the midst of doomscrolling, it can be tempting to lack hope altogether.

I’ll end this post with a couple quotes from my cohost, Austin Gravley, who riffed off the idea of technological hope in our episode, Advent and the Technological Impulse.

We might say there is a material distinction between the coming of Christ and the coming of AGI. They are two different things. But our point is that these two different things are being discussed using the same language.

God's approach to solving our biggest problem — the existence of sin, the existence of death — he doesn't solve this problem in a way that we would prefer him to solve it. The advent of Christ shows us the humility of God... It's a sneak invasion, so to speak. God's way of dealing with our greatest problems is going to look different from how the world is going to want to do this — with impressive displays of wealth or knowledge or power. But those things will all fall short.

The advent of Christ, coming into the world to save the world, also prefigures his second advent.

Advent signals the eventual end of the ways in which technology can be used sinfully, or the way technology can exert itself against the Lord. And this coming of Christ in this first instance may not bring an end to that, but one day, [the second coming] will.

According to Statistics Canada, the number of Canadian-resident return trips from the United States was down 30.9% year over year, while the number of trips to Canada by US residents decreased 2.6%. There are more Americans visiting Canada than Canadians visiting America, despite us being less than 10% of their population!

This is part of what I call Canada’s Anti-American Moment. What is going on? And how should Canadian leaders respond?

Read my thoughts here:

https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/article/responding-to-our-anti-american-moment/

Today is the last day to sign up for my course before the late fee kicks in. (Sign up via Heritage’s Apply Page, either to Audit or for Credit). Learn more here:

Recent podcast episodes which I have hosted:

Thinking About The Faith (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Q49: Where is Christ Now?

• Q48: What is the Church?

• Q47: Does the Lord’s Supper Add Anything to Christ’s Atoning Work?

• Q46: What is the Lord’s Supper?

• Q45: Is Baptism with Water the Washing Away of Sin Itself?

• Q44: What is Baptism?

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• Reading and Teaching in an Age of AI (uploads later this morning and includes a discussion about my upcoming course)

• There Is No One Christian View of Technology

• Advent and the Technological Impulse

• A Christian Perspective on the Neo Robot

Let’s consider three Christian books on AI.

The Age of AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity was written by Jason Thacker in 2020.

AI Goes To Church: Pastoral Wisdom For Artificial Intelligence was written by Todd Korpi in 2025.

AI for Theological Education was written by Artificial Intelligence under the supervision of Thomas E. Phillips in December 2024.

That wasn’t a typo. The third book was primarily written by an AI tool (they don’t say which AI model they use). Thomas Phillips is a Professor of New Testament Hermeneutics at Northwind Theological Seminary.

The first book, by Thacker, was published before the launch of ChatGPT. I can trust that when I read Thacker’s book, I’m getting to know a human’s perspective. When I read Phillips’ book, I know upfront that I’m not learning straight from Phillips.

Interestingly, though Thacker’s book is five years old, it speaks at a principle and biblical level and is still relevant today. Phillip’s book tends to be more practical, and it seems it was written with an older AI model (it lacks the deep research of 2025 AI models). Though less than a year old, the book written by AI is already outdated.

Now let’s consider the second book. I placed it in the middle for a reason. A very small portion of the book was written by AI, while most was not. It was published in 2025, which already raises some questions (which all authors must now face) about the extent of AI involvement. And my suspicion grew as I read the following sections of Todd Korpi’s book:

Following OpenAI’s release of their custom GPT feature in 2023, I created a custom GPT, a limited-memory AI version of “myself.” The KorpiGPT bot has learned from my previous writing and other publicly available content and can make recommendations about future projects with ease. While I don’t use the bot for the actual writing process, KorpiGPT has been an invaluable tool to help me create outlines, edit content, and be a brainstorming aid that has saved me from countless hours of staring at “the drawing board.”

On the back end of a lot of my larger writing projects, I use Grammarly’s masterful AI-powered resources to make recommendations in the editing process. I tend to be verbose, so Grammarly helps me trim down my word choice. I also tend to be needlessly snooty in my word choice, and Grammarly helps me temper that tendency in favor of a better blend of readability and sophistication. (page 16)

Here we learn that Korpi doesn’t use AI for “the actual writing process.” But what does he mean by that? He goes on to describe how much time he has saved in brainstorming ideas, saving “countless hours.” To me, the tasks of brainstorming, selecting, and organizing concepts is an essential aspect of the writing process. It’s what makes my writing mine. Spellcheck with AI makes sense. I’ve used Grammarly, too. But brainstorming? Hmm…

In a section on technical AI terms, Korpi passes the job of writing over to AI:

I want to offer some basic definitions for words commonly used in conversation about and around AI… for our purposes, I’ve asked ChatGPT to provide some working definitions. With only a little tweaking, this is what ChatGPT has to say about, well, itself: … (the definitions are then provided across page 19 and 20).

Having asked ChatGPT to do the work, instead of doing it himself, it’s not surprising that many of the definitions are rarely revisited later in the book. Perhaps Korpi’s unstated intention was to demonstrate the helpfulness of AI. In general, Korpi emphasizes what AI can do and underemphasizes what AI is.

Later in the book, Korpi says:

I’m not suggesting that AI write a pastor’s sermons. Instead, it should be an indispensable aid in the sermon planning and creating process. For example, in the fall of 2023, a friend reached out to me for some feedback on his sermon series plan for 2024. There were large themes he wanted to make sure that they touched on, but he had been racking his brain for a few hours to no avail. I created a ChatGPT prompt with the parameters he was looking for and within seconds had a rough draft of a sermon series plan. He liked the plan but wanted to make some tweaks to better align it with the liturgical calendar, so I prompted ChatGPT again, and it revised the plan to those parameters.

With ChatGPT in hand, the two of us went back and forth over the course of half an hour, creating an outline for each of his sermon topics and texts for the entire year . . . a task to which many pastors devote countless hours within any given year… In this situation, AI was a sermon planning aid — helping get the stuck wheels of creativity freely moving again. It was not a crutch to avoid time in prayer and study, and ultimately my friend defers to the leading of the Holy Spirit as he approaches each individual sermon. But it helped bring cohesion and organization to what he already had on his heart for the people God has called him to serve. (page 101)

In Korpi’s own words, AI has become an “invaluable tool” and “it should be an indispensable aid.”

But what is the cost of this?

Even if Korpi carefully limited his use of AI to only the instances he listed, I admit to being skeptical of whether or not I was actually reading his words throughout the book. How much has been ideated through KorpiGPT or rephrased with Grammarly? This isn’t to say that this isn’t a human-written book. I learned a lot about Korpi through the book. He deeply respects his wife. He thinks AI is cool. He likes N.T. Wright. He dislikes Donald Trump. He hates proof-texting verses out of context. He wants his readers to grow in their love of God and neighbour.

I’m not here to write a book review. My friend Austin Gravley has already written an excellent review of Korpi’s AI Goes to Church.

What I’m observing is my growing skepticism about the things I read, and whether I’m interacting with a human being or a stochastic parrot.

I even copied around 1500 words from Korpi’s book and put them into one of the leading AI Detector programs (Pangram, which isn’t perfect but seems helpful, as it compares text to known phrases used by generative AI). The report came back saying that the sections I quoted from Korpi’s book were human written, and it gave a high-confidence rating. For comparison, the third book (the one that says it was authored by AI), was found to be written by AI. Here are some related screenshots from Pangram:

I think my skepticism is good and bad. Positively, I will be grading assignments next semester and I should have an eye for AI-writing. Professors must adapt to a new era of cheating.

Negatively, my suspicions are dehumanizing to the people I read. By entertaining the idea that their book is written by AI as I read it, I create an unnecessary barrier between their words and my soul.

More should be said. I’d love to discuss solutions. Perhaps we might think of John’s desire to see others “face-to-face” rather than writing a longer letter (2 John 12). Perhaps we might think of Jesus’ incarnation. Perhaps we might think about Paul’s call to love others; love “believes all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). Is my growing skepticism a failure to love my neighbour?

For now, I’m not offering a solution. I’m wrestling with a problem. All technologies include unintentional side effects. I worry about what AI writing does to my love of books.

I wrote a new article for The Gospel Coalition Canada: Would Jesus Use TikTok?

For a time I considered writing a book for What Would Jesus Tech (the podcast I cohost with Austin Gravley and Joel Jacob). I decided against this as I focus my writing in other areas (publishing is hard work). But after a year of sitting on three chapters of the six I had planned, I realized my time is committed to other good things at time point, and so I am prioritizing them. I’m thankful for The Gospel Coalition Canada and am glad to publish with them.

How Should Christians Talk About AI?

New WWJT episode:

AI summary (I include this because it adds more search terms to make it easier for people to discover this podcast when the search for similar terms. My recommendation would be to read my actual article rather than read an AI summary of it.)

AI summary:
Andrew Noble explores the concept of the ‘Side Syndrome,’ which describes humanity’s tendency to pick sides in debates, particularly regarding AI. He argues that this binary thinking oversimplifies complex issues and prevents nuanced understanding. Noble emphasizes the importance of recognizing the multifaceted nature of technology and its implications for humanity, urging listeners to consider the underlying values that drive technological development.

AI Takeaways

The Side Syndrome reflects our human bias toward binary thinking.

Nuance is essential in the AI debate; it’s not just for or against.

Human nature seeks meaning through narratives and stories.

Sports fandom exemplifies the Side Syndrome in everyday life.

Avoiding the Side Syndrome can lead to a richer experience.

Politics and technology are often oversimplified into binary choices.

Critics of AI can hold complex, nuanced views.

Understanding technology requires examining societal values.

Critical thinking is necessary to navigate technological discussions.

The urge to use AI reflects deeper human desires and values.

AI Summary:

Andrew Noble explores the intersection of technology and Christian wisdom, emphasizing the importance of imitating Jesus in our tech choices. He discusses the challenges of navigating modern technology, the need for contemplation, and personal reflections on platforms like TikTok. Noble argues that wisdom involves understanding God’s truth and applying it to our digital lives, ultimately asking the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’

Read enough Wendell Berry, and you might reject AI for the sake of nature.

Read enough Tristan Harris, and you might reject AI for the sake of safety.

Read enough Jacques Ellul, and you might reject AI for the sake of telos.

Read enough Gary Marcus, and you might reject AI for the sake of the future.

Read enough Neil Postman, and you might reject AI for the sake of humanity.

Or at least that’s how it seems to happen. It seems as if there are two sides in the AI debate: for and against. And the authors above all push you to the side of anti-AI. Right?

The truth is much more complicated.

One of the issues with humanity is our anti-nuance impulse. We want to be for or against nearly everything. Let’s call this our Side Syndrome. The Side Syndrome is the human bias toward picking a side rather than recognizing issues as multi-faceted.

You see the Side Syndrome in all of life. In sports, for example, people don’t stay neutral. We want one side to win (“our” side), and another to lose. I remember enjoying fantasy sports for the very sake that it made me more interested in watching. I had something to root for.

Because of human nature, we seek meaning. All meaning is story-driven. And so as humans we are constantly getting caught up in narratives, for better and worse. Join the bandwagon and if the Blue Jays win, you win. When they lose, you lose. And you feel it.

The extreme rise of sports-betting taps into the same impulse. Pick the right side. Be part of a larger story. Their victory becomes your victory. This is Side Syndrome, from relatively inconsequential decisions (cheering for the Blue Jays), to life-destroying gambling addictions.

A couple days ago, I spoke with one of the elders at my church about this and he said he never picks a side when he watches sports. Rather, he enjoys the game. It is an interesting concept, isn’t it? What if what you enjoyed most about something was not reducible to a binary result (win or lose), and not even a number (the number of strikeouts). What if you were impressed by the skill, the athletic feats, or the courage of jumping straight into a teammate for the sake of making a catch, at the risk of losing the game?!

What if you were more impressed by people than metrics?

Of course it’s not wrong to cheer for your local sports team. But the elder of my church is quite unique in avoiding Side Syndrome. The same human impulse applies to many spheres. Politics is treated as a simple left vs right rather than a more nuanced assessment of policy. Christian schooling versus home schooling arguments are treated as a matter of one side or the other. And of course, with technology, we like our technology critics to pick a side.

Some of the biggest Wendell Berry fans I know are currently using LLMs daily, and see no contradiction.

Tristan Harris, despite his calls to slow the development of AI, also promotes his colleague’s work in building a generative AI tool to decipher the language of animals.

Gary Marcus, one of the loudest critics of AI labs, still thinks AI should be developed.

Neil Postman found ways to celebrate the “reign of hygiene” in our technological age, and so he might also celebrate the mRNA vaccines which were created with the help of AI.1 None of these technology critics can simply be placed on “one side” or the other.

At this point, I am convinced that “AI” is too nebulous and abstract a term to evaluate holistically. And beyond that, I’m not convinced “for or against” is a helpful line of questioning in the first place, as if the balance can somehow be weighed. Again, this goes back to an orientation toward metrics (“weigh this on a scale”) versus an orientation toward humanity, godliness, and glory.

As such, Jacques Ellul is helpful. He did not assess technologies but assessed the society in which they were embedded. We need to move beyond a simple “how good” or “how bad” each technology is, and towards the difficult questions of what it means to be human, why do we exist, and how technology shapes our worldviews.

Similarly, I have been reading Brent Waters, who says, “Artifacts cannot, on their own, both perform the instrumental tasks of fabricating a world and its inhabitants and provide the content of what is desired in such fabrication. Rather, we must turn our attention to the underlying values that drive technological development in accordance with certain desires and aspirations stemming from those values.”2 This makes sense to me. It’s not just about AI and what it’s saying. It’s about what’s behind our urge to use AI in the first place, as just one example.

Of course, this is going to require a lot of care and effort. Most of all, it will require critical thinking. Who has the time to do all that? Perhaps we should just ask ChatGPT instead.

I recently spoke at Bluewater Church in Sarnia across three sessions for their Fall Conference. Last year they had Wes Huff fill this role. The pastor told me I might get the “Bluewater Bump” and get on Joe Rogan too, just like Wes Huff. We’ll see about that! Hah! Here are the YouTube links below to each session:

• God and Technology

• Social Media and Virtue Formation

• Artificial Intelligence and the Christian Life

Here are some recent podcast episodes I have hosted:

Thinking About The Faith (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Q43: What Are the Sacraments or Ordinances?

• Q42: How is the Word of God to be Read and Heard?

• Q41: What is the Lord’s Prayer?

• Q40: What Should We Pray?

• Q39: With What Attitude Should We Pray?

• Q38: What is Prayer?

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• Becoming Gods: Theosis, Telos, and Transhumanism, with Wyatt Graham

• The AI Bubble: Reality or Hype?

• TGC’s AI Christian Benchmark, with Michael Graham

• Altman, Musk, and Belief in God

New technologies are reshaping our world. Christian leaders are grappling with social media, livestreaming worship, and now, Artificial Intelligence chatbots.

In January 2026, I will be teaching a twelve-week course at Heritage College and Seminary called Technology and the Christian Life.

My goal is for the church to better make disciples in our technological age. We must be neither fearful nor foolish. We must consider the benefits and burdens of technology, the ways it transforms us, and the ways in which we might transform our use of it. We will explore ways to grow in faith, reclaim our humanity, and love our neighbour in a digital age.

The three main focuses of this course are: media ecology (and technology ethics), biblical theology, and pastoral theology (in the areas of anthropology and ecclesiology). To be honest with you, I’ve always most enjoyed interdisciplinary learning like this. It’s why I’ve been enjoying my PhD so much, and why I think this course will act as the culmination of much of my learning.

In addition to lots of Scripture, there will be readings from the following authors:

• Aristotle

• Albert Borgmann

• Michael Burdett

• John Calvin

• Andy Crouch

• John Dyer

• Jacques Ellul

• Noreen Herzfeld

• Samuel L. James

• Melvin Kranzberg

• Marshall McLuhan

• Sean O’Callaghan and Paul A. Hoffman*

• Neil Postman

• Tony Reinke*

• L. M. Sacasas

• Sherry Turkle

* The two textbooks for the course are Reinke’s God, Technology, and the Christian Life and Callaghan and Hoffman’s AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep.

Here’s a brief video explainer:

Heritage offers both in-person and online options. And this class will be available at both the college and seminary levels if you are taking it for credit (Heritage is accredited; transfers are possible).

Feel free to ask me any questions you might have.

You can register here: https://discoverheritage.ca/admissions/apply/

The medium shapes the message. Three metaphors have helped me see the benefit of physical Bibles and the burdens of screens.

Keep reading…

The latest podcasts I’ve produced, on the Holy Spirit, AI & Demons, and Psychedelics, are among my best. I encourage you to listen.

Thinking About The Faith (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Q36: What Do We Believe About the Holy Spirit?

• Q37: How Does the Holy Spirit Help Us?

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• Demons Can Use AI, Within Limits

• Psychedelics: a Christian Evaluation, with Phil Cotnoir

While humorous, the underlying situation is weighty and near. Might we, without knowing it, be on the side of evil rather than good?

We need to ask ourselves, “Are we the idols?”

Continue reading at TGCC…

Recent podcasts I’ve produced:

Thinking About The Faith (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Q33: Should Those Who Have Faith in Christ Seek Their Salvation Through Their Own Works, or Anywhere Else?

• Q34: Since We Are Redeemed by Grace Alone, Through Christ Alone, Must We Still Do Good Works and Obey God’s Word?

• Q35: Since We Are Redeemed by Grace Alone, Through Faith Alone, Where Does This Faith Come From?

• Remembering Stan Fowler (with Bob MacGregor)

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• Learning and Building AI, with Daniel Manary

In the summer of that year, Stan Fowler experienced a stroke. This affected his ability to speak and write. He was no longer able to teach.

This past week, on August 26, 2025, Stan breathed his last breath and entered into glory. His obituary information is here.

I miss Dr. Fowler. I admired his clear thinking and his pastoral heart. I am inspired by his legacy.

Encouraged

I primarily knew Stan Fowler as a theologian and seminary professor. He was always Dr. Fowler to me. After preaching my first sermon at Grandview in 2022, he gave me a thumbs-up when I saw him in the hallway. I remember trying to share something about the sermon preparation with him. He nodded with a smile. His wife, Donna, encouraged me.

When I preached again, a year or so later, I was a bit nervous thinking about how he’d respond to my message. I briefly spoke about natural theology and its limitations, drawing upon the text in Proverbs about the sluggard and the ant. Again, after the sermon, I met Dr. Fowler in the church lobby, and again, he gave me a smile and a thumbs-up.

While he did not use words, I was so encouraged by Dr. Fowler in these small interactions. He waved. He smiled. He nodded. I knew from being in his systematic theology class that he believed God is sovereign over all, including pain and suffering. In these recent years, I felt that belief. He used his final years not to sorrow in solitude, but to come to church (even to members’ meetings), to smile, and to give a thumbs-up to an intern.

This was all possible because of his good God and his faithful wife. Donna Fowler has provided a great example of how to care for others. I am thankful for her. And I am thankful for Stan. He was a faithful man, whether in teaching at Heritage Seminary or chatting in the church lobby.

Equipped

Most people know Stan Fowler through his teaching. In class, he would often raise a difficult question and then analyze the biblical texts in support of and against it. Some people say systematic theologians skim the Bible rather than dive deep. Not so with Stan. He carefully brought forward each text in context.

Dr. Fowler was a great professor. He would give us textbooks that he didn’t agree with (like one on open theism) to ensure we learned how to engage with our opponents’ arguments. He was careful with language. He once drew a line through “make” in one of my papers and wrote next to it, “declare.” He was correcting me on the doctrine of justification, which relates to how we are declared righteous before God, not made righteous.

A few years ago, I transferred all my lecture notes from classes I took with him to a new location. I never want to lose them. I once told a new friend at the church, Jon Cleland, that it would be cool if someone were to make his lecture notes public in some way, because they were so good. Jon informed me that he had already begun a project to bring all of Stan’s writings into a two-volume series. These books are now available (here). Jon was able to complete them and hand them to Dr. Fowler earlier this year.

Challenged

Fowler was not afraid to speak up on controversial topics. During the pandemic, he spoke publicly both of the obligation to submit to government authority and against the overreach of government authority. Many appreciated his balanced clarity as too many others were either holding their tongue or burning it. When I joined Grandview, I saw how stabilizing his voice was to the ministry team and the congregation. We trusted him not because he was “in the middle” but because he carefully read and applied the Scriptures.

After his stroke in 2021, we could no longer hear that voice except through recordings. He and Pastor Bob McGregor had started a podcast in early 2020, entitled "Thinking About It." It often covered difficult social issues. Bob and Stan would meet together, often with only a few minutes of discussion ahead of time, and then dive into a difficult question for fifteen minutes. Bob is a master at Socratic questioning. Stan brought calm to complex topics. They made an excellent pair.

They recorded many episodes at a time, often far in advance. And so even after Dr. Fowler’s stroke, new recordings were still being published. On September 6, 2021, for example, they published an episode on “When to Compromise.” It dealt with the Christian position on abortion and the complexities of dealing with it politically. For example, is it okay for a Christian politician to vote for a restriction on abortion even if that restriction does not go as far as they would like? True to his usual form, Stan articulated a defense of both sides of the argument, and then, ultimately, why he leans a certain way rather than the other.

Dr. Fowler was the first person who opened my eyes to the history of abortion in Canada, to the various positions on government authority, to principles to apply to IVF, to the biblical value of social action, and to a whole assortment of other issues. Like I said, he did not shy away from difficult topics.

I once shared with Jon Cleland how cool it is that Heritage Seminary, as a Baptist institution, has a required course on Moral Theology. Jon replied, “that’s all Stan.” Dr. Fowler believed that future pastors must not only parse the text of Scripture but also apply it to the ethical issues of our day. That’s difficult. But it’s important.

Jon recently spoke with Christian Clement, another young theologian in Canada. They both shared how they struggle to speak on controversial ethical issues like Fowler did. On that same struggle, historian Michael Haykin recently said, “for me personally, I know of no one who will be able to fill Stan’s shoes in this regard in Ontario in our deeply divided and contentious day.”

I do not know of anyone either.

However, I do not lament. If I learned anything from Stan, it is this: God is sovereign over all. God will build his church. And he will gift new theologians.

Stan Fowler’s funeral is this Saturday. His obituary states:

As expressions of sympathy donations to the Stan Fowler Scholarship Fund would be appreciated (cards available at the funeral home).

I encourage you to make a donation.

On almost every episode of Thinking About It, Bob would wrap things up and say goodbye, and then Stan would add, “keep on thinking.”

I will, Stan. I will.

Here’s the key section of potential concern:

Culturally, there are many factors pushing against appropriately silly parenting. As Mary Midgley observed, ever since the 17th century, we think of ourselves as being like machines. And when you think of your kids as computers, you’ll think of upgrades and achievements rather than personhood and character. To be sure, our kids should grow to be more like Christ—that is a kind of “upgrade”—but we mustn’t forget how the hidden Kingdom belongs to them, right now.

Freya India recently argued, “Nobody has a personality anymore.” She noticed how today’s therapeutic approach turns every eccentricity into a problem to be solved. She’s worth quoting in full:

We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD… You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses… Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental health assessments and BetterHelp applications.

We have taken the joy out of life by crunching it into machine-like parts for the sake of statistics. Parenting becomes tinkering—looking for the next area to optimize through technique or therapy rather than peace-filled presence.

Our culture pressures us against appropriately silly parenting by over-medicalizing personhood; by labeling and diagnosing normal human behaviour. It turns joyful parenting into machine-like optimization.

My question here is, does my argument diminish the realities of those with real ADHD?

I have not changed my mind since quoting India. But on the topic of over-diagnosis, there’s more I could have said.

ADHD is real. Depression is real. Anxiety disorders are real. It is appropriate for some people to be diagnosed with various mental illnesses. All good gifts come from God, including pills and counseling.

That said, I also believe some people are labeled as having ADHD and other mental illnesses when they should not be. Not everyone. Not all the time. But I believe this happens, and it happens too often. And I think too often we self-diagnose these disorders as well.

What’s my evidence for this?

I have been reading about the rise of the therapeutic self. Part of this is through books and articles by Jon Haidt. For The Atlantic, Arthur Brooks wrote, “Being Anxious or Sad Does Not Make You Mentally Ill.” In Vanity Fair back in 2023, there was a lament of “TikTokified psychobabble,” and how “Amateur Therapy-Speak Is Just Making Us Lonelier.”

A great overview of therapeutic language is “The Christian in a Therapeutic Age” by Ian Harber. It’s great. He believes mental illness is real. He also believes that people have been misled by false and dangerous notions of “therapy.” Ian writes:

While we turn to therapy in order to heal our inner wounds, more and more people are finding themselves even more anxious and isolated than they were before. As they turn inward, they damage relationships with people who would otherwise be there to help them through difficult circumstances. This isn’t necessarily because therapy is broken but because of how we have begun to use therapy as a buffer between us and the uncomfortable realities of life when it was never meant to function that way. The more we avoid the hard knocks of life, the more we’re hurt when we’re hit by them. So, the very thing intended to help us become more resilient in a difficult world ends up making us more fragile.

And this isn’t a recent phenomenon, as if we’ve only learned of it in the past couple years. Today’s overdiagnosis is a product of a long trend toward a therapeutic approach to life in general. And Christians aren’t exempt. Christian Smith’s 2005 research on evangelicalism showed the rise of (in his terms) Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD). Too many Christians treat God as a distant rule-giver (deistic and moral), who primarily exists to give us good feelings about ourselves (therapeutic). Of course, God does help us feel good. The Psalms talk of that. But the Psalms also talk about great sorrow and frustration. In MTD, Christians only pick the therapeutic “coffee mug” versions of Scripture and do themselves a disservice in the process.

We could go back further. In 1966 Philip Rieff wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic.1 Carl Trueman and Timothy Keller have both summarized this book in their work. Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self shows how notions of Freud’s inner self (and sexualized self) have become increasingly normalized in the way we think today, and he builds upon Rieff’s work. These authors note the pendulum swing toward self-improvement and optimization, especially in how we prioritize our “selves.”

This chart from Google Ngram viewer (a tool that analyzes the frequency of words and phrases within a vast collection of digitized books) shows how much more we think about the self.

I am concerned about this trend. I’m concerned about what it does to personhood. I am concerned about what it does to our parenting, as we see our children through a lens of feeling-metrics to be optimized through therapy rather than as a person to giggle with.

And I’d argue, by the way, that keeping medical language restrained for only those people who truly deserve it is loving. Overdiagnosis (and turning personality quirks into medical illnesses) is the kind of thing that hurts those who actually struggle with such illnesses.

For the person who is sometimes late, but otherwise showing no signs of ADHD, and they say “Oh, it’s just my ADHD,” they risk trivialization, treating the realities of ADHD as a light and flippant trait.

It’s as if someone shares they struggled to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and someone else comes along and says they had a hard time recently too, since the parking spot for the grocery store was too far away.

Ultimately, we should take mental health seriously! Turning every little distraction into ADHD does the opposite.

Let’s stop doing that. Let’s enjoy the rest of summer.

Recent podcast episodes:

Thinking About The Faith (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify):

• Q23: Why Must the Redeemer Be Truly God?

• Q24: Why Was it Necessary for Christ, the Redeemer, to Die?

• Q25: Does Christ’s Death Mean All Our Sins Can Be Forgiven?

• Q26: What Else Does Christ’s Death Redeem?

• Q27: Are All People, Just as They Were Lost Through Adam, Saved Through Christ?

• Q28: What Happens After Death to Those Not United to Christ by Faith?

• Q29: How Can We Be Saved?

• Q30: What is Faith in Jesus Christ?

• Q31: What Do We Believe by True Faith?

• Q32: What Do Justification and Sanctification Mean?

What Would Jesus Tech (Links: Website | Apple | Spotify | YouTube):

• AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep, with Pastor Paul Hoffman

• A Gentle Singularity?

• You Have a Calling, with Karen Swallow Prior