Dionysus on a Bike

Acts 2:1-11 – 5/21/2026

Christianity proliferates text. Between the oral traditions of the earliest church to the sermons that resound from pulpits every Sunday around the world, the world has resounded for two millennia with words about the Gospel. From the first copies of Scripture written down on papyrus to the endless stream of printed text that spans the range from theological tomes to church bulletins, the world has been inundated with Christian literature. We are swimming in a sea of text about Jesus. When you add the traditions of our Jewish siblings, Torah, Oral Torah, Talmud, Midrash, Mishnah, the words relating to the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob are truly uncountable.

I was first struck by this proliferation of text when I got a job working at Irving Park Lutheran Church in Chicago. Each month we put out four or five Sunday bulletins, a newsletter, letters to donors, a sizable report for the monthly council meeting, not to mention the avalanche of emails that get sent and received in running a medium size congregation. It was amazing to me the number of words that are printed, typed, and uttered. Around the same time I was noticing this mountain of words, a new source of text was coming into existence, Large Language Model AI, generators of human-like intelligible text. As Christians and Jews have been churning out riffs on our Sacred texts for centuries, AI now adds to the human cacophony, often in ways that are indistinguishable from human language.

The Vatican recently announced that the first encyclical of Leo’s papacy will be released next week on the topic of Artificial Intelligence. Until its release, I can only speculate on its contents. Though I imagine it Leo’s pronouncement will be more measured than the complete condemnation of AI I would call for, it will almost certainly call for human society to take a long, difficult look at what we are doing when we add the voice of machines to our own human voices in the unfolding of the text of humanity, the words we send out into the world.

Humans are essentially beings of language, beings of speech, and since its invention, beings of writing. We are beings of text. When Jesus left the disciples to ascend to the right hand of the Father and gave the gift of the Holy Spirit, his presence in his bodily absence, the first thing the disciples did was speak. A cacophony of meaningful sound in a multitude of human languages pours forth when God first resides in the human beings who follow Jesus. Language characterizes what it means to be human. Language is what characterizes God who became human, Jesus the Word made flesh. Language is the primal response of God dwelling in each of us.

We lose something when we give speech to something other than our fellow human beings. Making machines talk and write cheapens our own language production. Never has the written word, the spoken word, the meaningful word been less valued. Never mind the environmental cost. Forget the hallucinations, the mistakes, the dumbing down, and all the other negative side-effects of AI. Even if the only negative of AI was the dilution of human language, the mimicry of human meaning, and the cheapening of art and expression, then AI should be banned and destroyed. AI’s vomiting of an endless stream of seemingly meaningful text will drown out the real voices of human meaning, human value, human creativity. Speech is ours by right as human. The Word is the very nature of our creator. Conversations are the result of every human connection and every experience of the divine. To cheapen these by listening to computers instead of our fellow humans is to negate our very humanity and to negate our access to the divine by the Word. AI will kill our spirit. Speak, write, proliferate texts on your own and listen and read those of others. Let the human conversation continue. Don’t let the machines speak.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.