Handing It On
By Michael A. Graham
The Gospel Coalition published its policy on AI this week, with an essay by Brett McCracken explaining it. The policy tells contributors that written content should be the original work of its author, and that writers should not use AI for ideating, researching beyond a basic fact search, organizing, writing, or editing beyond a basic spelling check. Any publication may set the terms of what it prints. I do not write for TGC.
I am writing this down to find out what I think.
How I work
I use Claude Cowork every day.
Tomorrow morning I preach Luke 24. That sermon came out of a series I have been working through since the spring, out of Jack Miller’s booklet, out of my own work in the Greek, out of sermons I have preached on that chapter before, out of a library I have been building for twenty-five years, and out of a dissertation on Jack’s life. All of it went in. The essay behind the sermon went through sixty-seven versions.
A detector scored that essay at about seventy percent AI. That is roughly right about the sentences.
For years I wanted two things I could not do. The first was to take Jack’s A New Life booklet and make it into something a person could use to walk somebody else through the Five Facts of the gospel, with help for adults, for small groups, and for children, and with aids for memorizing Scripture, praying, and telling your own story. The second was a navigable timeline of Jack’s life, ministry, relationships, and writings, built from the research behind Cheer Up!, that a scholar and an ordinary reader could both use and that other people could add their own accounts and documents to.
I worked on the first one for two years, alone, with no money and no one to help me. I got nowhere. Both of them are now on this site. You can go use them.
I have ADHD and I think in circles. The circling is where I find things. Getting what I find into a line another person can follow has been hard for me my whole life. I am sixty-one and still taking preaching courses.
I wrote something for TGC once, in early 2021, about my work on Jack Miller. No machine was involved, because there was none to be had, and they turned it down. That was five years before this policy existed. A man should say out loud where he might be tempted to defend himself.
Writing is how I come to know
Michael Polanyi said we know more than we can tell. We attend from particulars we have taken into ourselves toward the thing we are actually looking at, and the taking-in can never be fully spelled out.
If that is how knowing works, then writing is not a report of a finished thought. Writing is where the thought arrives. I write in order to come to know, and afterward I find out whether I can be questioned on it and answer.
The arguments against these tools assume a man thinks first and writes second, so that help with the writing is help with the packaging. For me the writing is the thinking, put into a form somebody can examine.
What the essay says
McCracken writes that it is “an offense to the word ‘writing’ to apply it to AI-arranged words and sentences,” and that what these tools produce is “soulless slop that can mimic and masquerade as brilliant writing.” He writes that “for Christians, writing is a holy calling and an act of worship (worship is something AI cannot do).”
I want to be exact. He does not say that a man who uses these tools has failed to worship. Those parentheses are claims about the machine. The verdict on the man is an inference: writing is worship, words arranged with AI are not writing, so words arranged with AI are not worship. The policy invites the inference by reaching to work “generated wholly or in part by AI” and by naming organizing and editing. Most readers will draw it. I am calling it an inference because that is what it is.
The arguments in the essay are aimed at outsourcing. Farming it out, giving it up, letting the appetite atrophy. Against a man who types a prompt and publishes the result, they land. The policy governs something else. Organizing and editing beyond a spelling check are assistance, and the case against assistance is never made.
What no one can see
Two claims carry the weight, and neither one can be observed.
The first is about the future. Our abilities will atrophy. The evidence is thinner than the confidence. In a controlled experiment with about a thousand high school students in Turkey, students given an unrestricted chatbot did better while they had it and about seventeen percent worse than the control group once it was taken away, while students given a version that offered hints instead of answers scored the same as the control. Same tool, opposite results, and the difference was whether the thing made them work. Most of what gets quoted beyond that is survey data that cannot establish which way the causation runs.
The second claim is about the inside of a man. Whether he did the thinking. Whether his work is worship. An editor cannot see that from a submission, so the rule runs on what is visible, which is the surface of the prose. The policy says a piece will not be published if it is suspected. Suspicion is enough, detection is unreliable, and a well-organized paragraph is the tell.
Both claims are held by faith. So is mine. I cannot see the future either, and I have no proof that God will use this well. The difference is what gets attached. I am not telling anyone his work fails as worship.
This is a justification question
Ask what makes a man’s labor acceptable to God and there is one answer. Peter says we offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Our Confession says the good works of believers are accepted in Him, not as though they were unblameable in God’s sight, but that God, looking upon them in His Son, is pleased to accept and reward what is sincere, though it comes with many weaknesses and imperfections.
On that doctrine nobody’s writing is acceptable worship on its own terms. It is accepted in Christ or it is not accepted. A claim that some method produces work which fails as worship has to locate the failure somewhere other than in Christ’s acceptance of the worshipper, and the only place left is the man’s own performance.
Justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, as revealed in Scripture alone. If Scripture alone is the rule, a requirement Scripture does not make cannot become a condition of acceptable worship.
Paul settles the rest. He says he cares very little if he is judged by any human court, and then he says he does not even judge himself. His conscience is clear and that does not make him innocent. It is the Lord who judges. Judge nothing before the appointed time. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and expose the motives of men’s hearts. I have spent several days trying to work out whether I am after the truth here or after my own vindication. Paul says I cannot settle it, and that I am not required to settle it before I speak.
Jack
Jack Miller gave credit three times, and after that the material was his. He held the rule for other men’s work and for his own writing, and a man could take what Jack had written and use it and Jack would let it go. The reason was doctrinal. The gospel is God’s gospel, and his arrangement of it was not a possession to guard.
Writing was hard for him. He was an English professor with a doctorate. Sue Lutz edited his books for years, and Barbara told Sue that Jack would come home from those sessions and say to Rose Marie and Barbara that it was another opportunity for humility. Sue thinks he never wrote the book on Sonship because he was energized by the back and forth and could not sustain the solitary work of a long book. Her word was that he withered. The Sonship course we have was assembled from his lectures by other people while he had cancer.
In 1988 his mission began carrying that material by mail, cassette, and telephone. Men who had gone out from New Life worked through a chapter at a time and met with Dave McCarty or Paul Miller over the phone. People asked then whether the most interior work the church knew how to do could be carried on a wire, and whether it should be. They did it in the open and watched what happened. Lives were changed. The phone mentoring also did real damage to some people, which I documented in my dissertation.
I do not know what Jack would say about this. He died in 1996. Ron Lutz warned me that the second generation runs past where the teacher intended, and that they watched it happen with Sonship almost at once. I am the second generation here. What I can say is that he did not treat writing alone as the honorable form, and he did not think help with his own sentences compromised the work.
What I grant
Embodiment matters. God did not reveal Himself as a concept. He took on flesh, and there is no version of this where a machine is a friend across a table. Anyone looking for companionship there is being deceived, which I wrote about at more length in January.
Showing a draft to another person costs something and forms you. A man who has readers and stops using them has given something away.
McCracken writes that he wants writers to care enough about a piece for it to cost them something. That is a good standard.
What I would say back is that we are limited. None of us can sit across a table from most of the people we are trying to reach. That limitation is why the epistles exist. John writes that he has much to write and would rather not use paper and ink, that he hopes to come and speak face to face so their joy may be complete, and then he writes the letter anyway, twice, because he cannot get there. Paul longs to see the Romans and sends Romans. The incarnation is God closing a distance, not a rule against closing distances.
And I am thinking about the church planter with no staff, the bivocational pastor with fifteen hours a week for study, and the man on an island who has never had one person willing to sit and think a thing through with him. He is not giving anything away when he takes help. He is receiving, for the first time, a version of what other men have always had.
Whose gospel is it
I keep asking what original thing I have ever said. I do not want to be original. I am trying to know God and Jesus Christ whom He sent, and to say it in as many ways as I can, first to myself.
Jack corrected D. T. Niles on this. Niles said evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. Jack said not quite. It is a beggar eating the bread and sharing the bread he is eating. The Lord has purchased our sins and our failures and our unbelief. He holds the copyright to all of it. And He has ordained to reach other sinners through people who are still eating. What we bring is the sin and the weakness. He brings the righteousness. That is why the invitation is never come up here and join me. It is come down here and join me at the foot of the cross.
Which is where I land on the gatekeeping. John told a man to stop driving out demons in Jesus’ name because he was not one of us, and Jesus told John to leave him alone. Joshua asked Moses to stop Eldad and Medad, and Moses said he wished all the Lord’s people were prophets. Paul, in chains, wrote about men preaching Christ out of envy and rivalry to make his imprisonment harder, and said it did not matter, because Christ was preached, and he rejoiced. Elders are charged to guard the deposit, and I would defend that with everything I have. Guarding the tools by which a man comes to understand and hand on the deposit is a different office, and I do not find it given to us.
This will be abused. Every renewal in the history of the church has come with counterfeits, which is why Jonathan Edwards had to write about distinguishing the marks of a work of God while the Awakening was still going on. He would not let anyone judge the work by its abuses, and he would not let anyone excuse the abuses by appeal to the work. God is sovereign over all of it. The chief priests handed Jesus over, and Peter preached at Pentecost that He was handed over by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge. The worst thing men ever did was the salvation of the world.
Handing it on
I have been working on The Jack Miller Project since 2015. Jack Miller is among the most important theologians of the twentieth century, and outside a small circle he is largely unknown. If I had held to the standard in that essay, the work would have stopped where I could carry it by myself, which was not far.
As it stands, I can die tomorrow and the material is there. The timeline, the booklet, the dissertation, the essays. Free, and reachable from anywhere in the world.
That is what the work is for. Jack gave credit three times and then let a thing go, because the gospel is God’s gospel and his arrangement of it was not his to guard. The question he cared about was whether a man had been taken hold of by the gospel and could hand it on. I would rather be judged by that question than by which instruments were on my desk.
I write to understand something, and I share a portion of it when it seems it might help somebody. I use Claude Cowork to do it, and I have said so since January. If knowing how I work means you would rather not read me, I understand that, and I would rather you knew.