Make of Him What You Will
Dewey’s doctrine of man reaches artificial intelligence. Jack Miller’s answer, and Romans 1
By Michael A. Graham
Last week I published an essay on Jack Miller’s unpublished three-volume study of American education, Man in Modern Education. Jack wrote it in 1963 and 1964, while he worked as a research consultant at a conservative think tank in California. That was before he became the pastor and Westminster Seminary professor most people remember.
Jack’s thesis was that American schools had no doctrine of man. They had no working answer to the question of what a human being is, and they had adopted a rule against asking. He called the rule the law of the least common denominator. Work only with ideas broad enough that nearly everyone will accept them, and keep the controversial questions off the table. Human nature is a controversial question, so it went off the table. He traced the doctrine that filled the vacuum to John Dewey. Dewey was the philosopher, first at the University of Chicago and then at Columbia, who led the progressive education movement in the first half of the twentieth century, and his ideas shaped American public schools through most of that century. Jack read him at length and dealt with him at length in the book. He put Dewey’s doctrine of man in one sentence: man is what can be made of him.
Since then I have been asked what Jack’s argument says about artificial intelligence. This essay is the answer, and it makes four claims. The fear of artificial intelligence and the hope for it rest on one doctrine of man, and it is Dewey’s. The Christian doctrine of man settles what these systems are before the engineers finish building them. Romans 1 names the condition a society is in when it has made man in its own image, and Jack made that argument himself in 1964. And the answer to the question that comes back whenever this is taught, what do we do, is the answer Jack lived rather than a program. A reader who finishes will have one question to put to any institution or tool, which is what doctrine of man it holds, a basis for judging these systems that does not depend on understanding the technology, and a reason to speak plainly without fear.
A debate with no doctrine of man
The public argument over artificial intelligence has two camps. One says it will surpass man and end him, or rule him. The other says it will surpass man and free him. They agree about almost nothing, and they share one premise. The premise is that man is a bundle of functions, intelligence chief among them, and that whatever performs those functions better has become what man was.
That is Dewey’s doctrine carried one step further than Dewey carried it. If man is what can be made of him, then a thing man makes can become man. The people who fear artificial intelligence and the people who hope for it hold the same doctrine of man. They differ over whether the outcome will be good or bad. The question is already practical. The software that selects what a person sees on his phone is built on the same doctrine, and it is in use now.
The debate will not say what a human being is. The question has been handed to the specialists, in this case the engineers, the way a Supreme Court nominee in 2022, asked by a senator to define the word “woman,” handed it to the biologists. Systems are to be “safe,” “responsible,” “beneficial,” and “aligned with human values.” Each of those words means whatever nearly everyone can accept. None of them says what a human being is. Jack’s description of the education debate in 1964 fits closely. The talk has “a vaguely hollow ring.” It is conducted in “general, contentless terms.”
The neutral tool
The commonest reply is that artificial intelligence is a tool, that a tool is neutral, and that what matters is how it is used. Jack heard the same thing said about the public school, and his answer applies here.
The least common denominator claims to take no position. Refusing to say what man is is itself a position. A school that declines to say what man is has already said it by what it does. It has to teach someone something for some purpose, and the purpose carries a doctrine of man inside it. The same is true of an AI system built to interact with people. Such systems are built to treat the person on the other side of the screen as something: as attention to be held, as preferences to be satisfied, as behavior to be predicted, as a customer to be kept. Those are doctrines of man. A system that treats a person as a bundle of preferences has adopted Dewey’s picture of man, an organism adjusting to its environment, as its picture of the user. The builders chose that picture, and the users were never asked.
The doctrine is inside the system, and it is never asked to defend itself. The people who built it would in many cases be surprised to hear that they hold one. Jack explains the surprise. Professions of neutrality, he writes, “contain a hidden bias, a willingness to blind the eyes.” He quotes Sir Walter Moberly that “the pretense of neutrality blinds us” and is “under its skin, a kind of unplanned hostility” to Christianity. The builders do not see their doctrine of man because they have agreed, with the rest of us, to keep the question closed. The agreement is what keeps them from seeing it. Jack’s sentence about the schools applies with the names changed: this kind of thinking “represents a secret victory for John Dewey because this was the way he wanted the game to be conducted.”
Where the premise leads
Whether the AI debate follows logically from Dewey’s doctrine of man depends on what is meant. The conclusions about man’s standing follow. The events do not.
Take the premise as Jack states it: man has no given nature, and he is what can be made of him. Two things follow. First, man can be remade by whoever holds the means, and there is no fixed nature in man that the remaking could be said to violate. Second, since man’s standing rests on what he does and not on what he is, anything that does what he does has the same claim to his standing. A society that holds the premise and builds a system that performs man’s functions will have no ground on which to deny that system man’s place, and no ground on which to deny the men who hold it the right to remake other men.
What does not follow is that such a system gets built, or that it ends anyone. The doctrine permits those outcomes and removes the means of refusing them. It does not produce them. Jack’s habit, learned from his teacher at Westminster Seminary, Cornelius Van Til, is to follow a presupposition to its consequences and judge it there. He says of the modern idolatries that each one “carries its own consequences.”
Dewey did not see it. He was thinking about schools, social growth, and democracy, and he had no picture of artificial intelligence. But his own vocabulary shows the connection. Dewey’s name for his philosophy was instrumentalism. Intelligence, in his account, is an instrument, a tool the organism uses to adjust to its environment. Once intelligence is a tool, a better tool is a better intelligence, and whatever made man distinctive passes to the instrument. Dewey placed man’s dignity in his intelligence. A made intelligence can claim the same place.
Dewey could not have foreseen artificial intelligence. He did choose the premise, and the premise was a decision to set aside the question of God and the soul. Jack’s judgment on that decision is the Apostle Paul’s: it is a willingness to blind the eyes. A man who has chosen to stop looking at a question will not see what follows from it.
A given image or a made one
What a made thing is
Jack’s doctrine of man is the Christian one. Man is a creature, made in the image of God, with a nature that is given rather than chosen. Put an artificial intelligence beside that doctrine and its standing is settled at once. It is a thing made by the creature. It stands two steps below the Creator, and no increase in what it can do moves it up a step. It does not bear the image. It cannot succeed to man’s place, because man’s place was never a matter of what he could do. Jack writes that “all men in spite of their corruption are invested in worth and dignity because they bear the divine image.” That dignity is conferred by God. A made thing cannot take it and cannot be given it.
Consciousness
This is also the answer to the talk about whether these systems are conscious. Man’s standing was first located in intelligence. When software began to perform intelligence, the standing was moved to consciousness. It is the same argument with a different capacity named, and it works in both directions. If a system is judged conscious, it is granted man’s place. If a human being is judged to lack consciousness, an infant, a patient in a coma, a person with advanced dementia, his standing is put in question.
Jack’s sentence answers this: “Conceptions of man that stress one aspect of human nature and neglect the radical religious unity of man’s personality either fragment the interpretation of his meaning or lead to a deification of some human quality.” The image of God is given by God. It is a relation to the Creator that he bestows, and it does not depend on what a person can do. That is why the infant and the dementia patient are men. A system that imitates human faculties has been given no such relation. It has been built by men.
Creator or creature
The title of Jack’s twelfth chapter asks the question directly: “Man — Creator or Creature?” Artificial intelligence is an attempt to answer “creator” on a new scale. Jack closes his constructive argument with a warning from the novelist James Fenimore Cooper against those who “substitute the voice of the created for that of the Creator.” An artificial intelligence that men consult as an oracle, or fear as a rival god, is an example of that substitution.
The image God gives
The Bible gives the reason. Education forms a child toward something, and the something is a picture of man. Jack makes the content of the Christian picture explicit when he quotes the poet John Milton on the end of learning: “to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.” Paul says the same thing: “conformed to the image of his Son”; “renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” Christian education is conformation to an image, and the image is a person.
The second commandment forbids man to make an image of God. The reason is that God makes his own image, and he made two. He made man, in Genesis 1. He sent the Son, who is “the image of the invisible God” and “the exact imprint of his nature.” The commandment forbids the creature to manufacture what the Creator gives. Israel at Sinai did not deny God. They made a picture of him and formed themselves around it. Psalm 115 states the consequence: “Those who make them become like them.”
The image man makes
Read Dewey’s doctrine against that commandment. “Man is what can be made of him” is the second commandment broken in a new place. Instead of making an image of God, man makes an image of man. The picture of man is manufactured by man, and men are formed toward the manufactured picture. Jack saw this. He writes that modern thought has moved “from one form of idolatry to another; the object of trust in almost every instance has been some aspect of man’s personality or some human function. To bow before human reason or the will of man or the esthetic impulse is basically self worship and carries its own consequences.” The public school did not remove the image from education. It cannot, because formation requires one. It replaced the given image with a made one.
Artificial intelligence makes this plain. In Genesis 1 God says, “Let us make man in our image.” A system built to think and speak is man making something in his own image. Men then ask whether the thing is alive. Isaiah 44 and Psalm 115 describe idols with mouths that do not speak and eyes that do not see, and the prophets aim their scorn at men who make such things and wait for them to answer. We have made an image that answers. The sequence Scripture describes is the same in each case. Men make the image, serve it, and become like it, and God gives them over to it.
The exact imprint
Jack’s doctrine of man is finally a person. The answer to “what is man” is the Son, who is the image of God and the true man. In his thirteenth chapter Jack quotes Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria. When a portrait on a panel has been effaced, “he whose likeness it is must needs come once more to enable the portrait to be renewed on the same wood.” So “the most holy Son of the Father, being the Image of the Father, came to our region to renew man once made in His likeness.”
The picture education requires is one God gave twice, in Adam and in Christ, and renewed in Christ when Adam’s was effaced. The only question is whether the image is received or made. Received, education is the renewal of the portrait. Made, it is an idol, and the makers become like it. Dewey’s schools chose the second. Artificial intelligence is the second choice carried further, to a made image that speaks.
The tools in our hands
Three practical questions follow, and Jack’s argument answers each.
A system that builds itself
The fear under the debate is of a system that builds and maintains itself and passes out of anyone’s control. Its status does not change. A made thing that makes things is still a made thing. Living things have maintained and reproduced themselves since the third day of creation without becoming divine. A self-building system still runs on a physical order it did not make, under a providence it did not arrange, and its claim to man’s place still rests on the functional doctrine of man.
What follows for a Christian is the same in both directions. Because the system is a made thing, he may use it as a tool with a clear conscience. Because it is a made thing, he may stop it when it is dangerous with the same clear conscience. Neither act needs a special justification. What he does not do is treat the made thing as more than it is.
The tutor in the classroom
Jack’s book is about education, and artificial intelligence is entering the schools. An AI tutor is a curriculum that talks with the child. It has a doctrine of man built into it, and it delivers that doctrine to a child one conversation at a time, in private, at scale, with more patience than a teacher can give. Whatever picture of the child the system was built to serve is the picture it will form the child toward. Dewey wanted the school to be the place where society remade man. The AI tutor does that work outside the school building, in every home that has one.
Jack’s argument presses two questions on the public school: what doctrine of man it runs on, and who decided. They are the two questions for the tutor in the classroom. A district that adopts a system it did not build, toward objectives it cannot state, has adopted a doctrine of man and cannot say what it is.
What Jack asked of the state
A reader will hear in this an argument for the state to take control of these systems and put a Christian doctrine of man into them. Jack’s tradition was careful here. He holds two claims and keeps them apart. Neutrality is impossible, for anyone and for anything men build. And the state should establish no religion.
Applied here, the first claim says no regulation can make artificial intelligence neutral, because every rule about what a system may do to a person encodes a picture of what a person is. The second says the state does not get to install a creed in the systems, Christian or otherwise. A Christian who asks the state to do that is using Dewey’s method, which is to form people by state power toward a doctrine they have not accepted.
What Jack asked of the state in 1964 applies here. He asked for honesty, which means saying in public what picture of man each system serves. He asked for alternatives, which means refusing to let one system, one company, or one national regime own the instrument through which people learn and speak. Behind both is a principle Jack took from the Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd: the family, the church, the school, and the state each hold their own authority under God, and none of them owns the others. Even the right doctrine, installed in everyone’s systems by law over people who have not been persuaded, is the wrong means. Say what each system holds about man, in public, and let people choose among systems that say different things.
Given over
Afraid of the wrong thing
People in the AI debate fear the conclusion while still holding the premise that produces it. The fear cannot lead anywhere useful while the premise stays in place. It goes into regulation, into calls for a pause, and into what the field calls alignment, which means aligning the systems to “human values” that no one will define. That is Jack’s least common denominator applied to the technology now being built.
The people frightened by artificial intelligence are afraid of the wrong thing. The premise is what should frighten them. And fear will not produce repentance from the premise. Jack held, with Van Til, that a doctrine of man is a religious commitment, a direction of the heart, and that only God turns a heart. Fear produces attempts at control, and treating man as material to be controlled is what Dewey’s doctrine does.
What Jack saw in Romans 1
Jack made the Romans 1 argument himself, in the thirteenth chapter. “Humanist man,” he writes, “is but a sophisticated version of what the Apostle Paul calls the natural man, and it is this man, according to Scripture, who begins by leveling the Creator to the creature (Romans 1:18–23) and ends with degrading himself and disrupting the human community (Romans 1:24–32).” Then he gives the order of events: “First, man reduced God to the plane of his own consciousness; then having taken this step, there was nothing to prevent man himself from being reduced to the level of the animal.”
Jack wrote that in 1964. Once God was reduced to man’s consciousness, nothing prevented man from being reduced to the animal. The same applies to artificial intelligence. Once man is defined by his functions, nothing prevents a thing that performs those functions from being given man’s place.
What Paul saw
Romans 1 gives a structure. The exchange comes first: “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” That is the reversal of Creator and creature. It is the question of Jack’s twelfth chapter, creator or creature, answered the wrong way. “We will make of ourselves what we will” is the creature taking the Creator’s prerogative.
Then three times Paul says God “gave them up.” The judgment in Romans 1 works in a particular way. God does not intervene. He withdraws restraint and lets the exchange run to its end. The penalty comes from the sin itself: they receive “in themselves the due penalty for their error.” Paul is describing, in theological terms, what this essay has called the logical conclusion of the doctrine. The doctrine has no way to prevent what follows from it, and Paul says that letting it follow is the judgment.
Paul also says they “became futile in their thinking” and were given up “to a debased mind.” The judgment lands on the mind before it lands anywhere else, and the people under it do not know it. They believe themselves neutral, informed, and well-meaning. That belief is the first form the judgment takes. A society that can no longer say what a woman is, that speaks of man in “general, contentless terms,” that hands the definition of a human being to the biologists and the definition of intelligence to the engineers, is showing futility of mind in Paul’s sense. Jack heard the “vaguely hollow ring” in 1964. Paul explains the hollowness as futility of mind.
Romans 1 tells us how God deals with a people who exchange the Creator for the creature. It describes a pattern, and the pattern fits. Whether this year and this technology are that judgment is God’s to say. What is ours to say is that the pattern is in front of us, and that Paul has told us what it means and what to do in it.
The church first
If this is judgment, two things follow, and both are in Jack’s own practice.
The first is that Paul’s argument does not stop at the end of chapter 1. In chapter 2 he turns to the reader who has been agreeing with him: “you who judge practice the very same things.” A Christian who reads “God gave them up” and thinks of the other side is the reader Paul is addressing in chapter 2. If we read Romans 1 as judgment on our society, we have to begin with the church.
Jack called himself the chief repenter, and his ministry rested on this. By his argument, the church holds Dewey’s doctrine of man whenever it treats people as material for its programs, whenever it treats an opponent as an obstacle to be removed, and whenever it uses these tools to hold attention and satisfy preferences. If this is judgment, the church is under it. The first act is our own repentance, and the prayer that goes with it is: God, make of us what you will.
A severe mercy
The second is that God’s giving people over is, in Scripture, a means to an end, and the end is mercy. God gives men up so that the futility becomes visible. Paul’s argument from 1:18 runs to 3:21: “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.” He says in 2:4 that God’s kindness “is meant to lead you to repentance.”
When “make of ourselves what we will” has run its course and failed, the failure is a severe mercy. It removes the illusion that the doctrine works. A society standing in front of a technology it fears and cannot define is a society whose doctrine of man has stopped working in public. That is the moment to make Jack’s argument, and it is the moment to preach the gospel. Paul does both in that order. He shows the futility in chapters 1 and 2 and announces the righteousness of God in chapter 3.
If we turned
Suppose a society did turn from “make of him what you will.” The likeliest thing it would adopt is the least common denominator again. It would affirm human dignity, decline to say where dignity comes from, and put the question back off the table.
Jack’s argument against the critic Mark Van Doren applies here. Van Doren wanted education to rest on a common human nature and would not say whether such a nature is real. Van Doren’s belief, Jack said, rests on “a presupposition about man’s nature borrowed substantially from Christian teaching.” A society living on that borrowed presupposition has no defense against the next Dewey, because it cannot say why man has a nature. A claim that cannot say why it is true dies, in Jack’s phrase, “from lack of checkmate.” Dewey’s doctrine entered the schools through the least common denominator the first time. It would enter the same way again.
There is a further reason the turning is hard. Dewey’s doctrine began as a program offered in place of a received doctrine of man. It has since become a received doctrine of man itself. No one argues for “man is what can be made of him” any longer. It is inherited, taught to children as fact, and protected from question by the same rule that removed the doctrine before it. It has the apparatus of a religion. It has a canon, which is whatever “the science” is said to say. It has commandments: safety, alignment, inclusion. It has its images, its promises of progress and transcendence, its list of sins, and a class of experts who serve as its priests and to whom the hard questions are handed. Jack cites the Reformed writer R. J. Rushdoony’s finding that American education had taken on a “messianic character,” and this is what that finding looks like sixty years on. Dewey rejected a received doctrine of man. His own doctrine is now received in its place, and it was made by men. Scripture describes an idol the same way. An idol does not abolish religion. It replaces the true religion with a counterfeit, and the counterfeit is received as the truth. A society cannot repent of a doctrine it does not know it holds.
Jack’s remedy is honesty: state the doctrine, whichever it is. A society that says aloud, “we cannot say where human dignity comes from,” has admitted the borrowing. The admission is the opening for the argument. It is the opening Jack took with Van Doren when he asked where Van Doren’s belief in human nature came from.
So what if he was right
A reader who has followed this far may ask a hard question. Grant Jack’s premise and his doctrine. Grant that artificial intelligence follows from Dewey’s doctrine and that the fear is misdirected. What difference does it make? No one is listening, and no one wants to. A society given over is hardened, and the truth about man does not stop the technology.
Pilate’s question
“What is truth?” was the question Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who tried Jesus, put to him, and the answer to it was standing in front of him. Jesus did not answer with an argument. He had already said what he came to do: “to bear witness to the truth.” Pilate did not listen. He condemned the witness, and the condemnation was the means by which God saved the world. The crucifixion took place under the same condition the reader’s question describes. Jesus was right, and no one in power wanted to hear it. Whether the truth accomplished its purpose did not depend on Pilate’s response.
Three answers follow from that, and then the practical question.
The consequences follow either way
Being right about man matters because the consequences of a doctrine of man follow whether or not anyone believes it. Dewey’s doctrine produces its consequences without anyone believing it consciously. The Christian doctrine is true without anyone believing it consciously, and the man who holds it can name what is happening, refuse the lie, and act rightly inside it. None of that requires the culture to listen. It requires him to know what is true. Jack’s remedy of honesty and plurality was designed for a church in a society that had stopped listening. Plurality of schools exists so that such a church can teach what is true without the culture’s permission.
The gospel is God’s
The power is in the gospel, and the gospel is God’s. Jack’s own answer to the question was to give the rest of his life to preaching it.
When the Center for American Studies, the think tank where he wrote the book, closed in 1964, Jack went to Westminster to finish his doctorate and join the faculty. While he did, he took a part-time pastorate at Mechanicsville Chapel, a small church in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He left it in 1972, and a small group that met in his home to pray for his daughter Barbara asked him to plant a church in Glenside, outside Philadelphia. By the testimony of the people who were there, New Life Church was built on two things, prayer and the gospel. Jack believed that the gospel can change anyone who takes it to heart, Christian and non-Christian, and that the same message brings renewal to the one and conversion to the other. Out of that conviction came the New Life churches and the Sonship course, a discipleship course on the gospel that was later taught to missionaries and churches around the world. The aim of both was that every person in the church could state the gospel clearly to himself, to other Christians, and to unbelievers.
That answers the question of who the gospel is for. The gospel is for the church and for the world, for the one hearing it and for the one carrying it, and the change it works does not wait on a culture’s attention. Jack’s later adherents and critics turned toward cultural apologetics, or counseling, or systems of justification and adoption. Each of those turns handed the gospel back to a class of experts. That is the same handing of the hard question to specialists that this essay has described in education and in artificial intelligence, with theologians as the specialists.
God did not choose experts to carry his gospel, and Paul says why. He chose the foolish, the weak, and the low, “so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” The treasure goes in jars of clay “to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” Forgiven sinners carrying the message are God’s apologetic to the world. Paul calls them “the aroma of Christ” among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. The choice was deliberate, so that the power would be seen to be God’s. Handing the message to experts hides that power. Jack’s book sat in an archive for sixty years before anyone read it. He did not wait for it to be read. He planted a church.
None of this is against learning. Jack was a brilliant man, and he found that the gospel puts back together what men have taken apart and cannot reassemble. The reason an ordinary Christian can carry the gospel is Christ himself. He is exalted above every name, and no one climbs up to him by intelligence or standing. He also came down. He was born in a stable and ate with sinners, and he said the Father had hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children. God dwells “in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit.” That is where he is found, and a man finds him there once he has come down off his own pedestal. The expert has to come down to the same place as everyone else. Once he is there, he holds the gospel on the same terms as the widow in the pew. She can carry it as well as he can.
Hardening serves God’s purposes
Hardening and abandonment are real. They are God’s acts, and God’s acts serve his purposes. Paul taught us about the giving over, and Paul does not let it be the last word. In Romans 9 through 11 the hardening of Israel is the means of the Gentiles’ salvation, and the argument ends with God having “consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.” Isaiah was sent to a people God told him in advance would not hear, and he went. Ezekiel was told to speak “whether they hear or refuse to hear.” The prophet’s duty did not depend on whether anyone listened.
Sin is eccentricity, a life lived off its true center and against reality, and repentance is a return to sanity. A culture given over is insane in that precise sense. The sane man’s task in it is to keep describing reality plainly and to be present when the Spirit wakes someone. Winning the majority was never his task.
Misplaced faith does have destructive power. Psalm 115 says the makers become like their idols, and it is happening now. But Jack took from Dooyeweerd the principle that an idol produces the opposite of what it promises. The doctrine that promised to free man by remaking him has produced a technology men fear will remake them. The idol destroys itself. The least common denominator is failing in public. It cannot say what a human being is when a technology forces the question. That failure is the futility becoming visible, and Paul says the futility becoming visible is what God’s kindness uses to lead to repentance. We do not know whether it will. We know this is the kind of moment the argument was made for. And we know the church has stood in this place before. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, wrote The City of God in the years Rome was falling. The doctrine of man he set out in it is the doctrine Jack holds, and it outlived the empire by sixteen centuries.
What do we do?
When I have taught this, the question that comes back is the same one: what do we do? People are uneasy, and uneasy people want a task. The question deserves an answer, and the first part of the answer is that the demand for a program is how Dewey’s doctrine got into the schools.
The received doctrine of man asked nothing of the schools except to be received. Dewey offered a program. He believed he was doing good, the people who adopted it believed the same of themselves, and he is honored to this day as a man who wanted to do good. Belief in one’s own good intentions is the form self-deception takes. Sin blinds the sinner to his own sin first, and a man is most ready to believe in his own good intentions. Eve saw that the tree was good. That is the presumption of Genesis 3 at the scale of a nation: we would know good and evil for ourselves, and we would fix the human problem with our own hands. Every generation since has wanted the next program and has believed itself good for wanting it. Artificial intelligence is the latest offer.
The gospel’s answer to “what do we do” is to receive. The image of God is given. The gospel is given. Repentance and faith receive what is given, and the prayer that goes with them is the one this essay has already named: God, make of us what you will. Receiving is not passivity. Faith is active, and it works by love. What follows from receiving is fruit, and fruit is not a program. A man who has received the given image will raise his children on it, say what man is where he lives, treat the person on the other side of the screen as a bearer of that image, and use these systems as the tools they are. He will do those things with all his strength, because they are his duty, and without anxiety about the result, because the result was never his to produce.
The duty is ours, the result is God’s
A reader could take all of this for a familiar error and conclude that the essay means “let go and let God,” about artificial intelligence now as about the schools then. The slogan comes from the Keswick movement, which began at an English convention in 1875 and reached America as the Victorious Life movement, run from Philadelphia by Charles Trumbull of the Sunday School Times. I have written about it before, and it is the opposite of what Jack believed.
Keswick’s error is about the means. It teaches that the Christian’s part is to stop striving and surrender, and that God then does the work without him. It makes passivity the method. The Reformed position, which is Jack’s, is that God works through means, and that the Christian’s whole strength goes into the means. Paul says both halves in one sentence: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you.” He says it again about ministry: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” Planting and watering are full labor. What is God’s is the growth.
Jack’s life is the evidence. He did not let go of the schools. He wrote three volumes about them, drafted a statement of purpose for his employer that got him into trouble, argued at length with Dewey and with the poet and critic Mark Van Doren, whose Liberal Education he read closely, and proposed a program of honesty and alternatives to the state. Then he planted a church and called men to repentance for thirty years. He put the principle in the words of the Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper: a man may lack the power to do a thing and still have the duty to do it, so the preacher must “tell every man that conversion is his urgent duty,” and afterward give thanks to God, “who alone has accomplished it.” The duty is entire, and the result is God’s. Keswick drops the duty.
The same holds for artificial intelligence. A Christian does not let go of it. He says what man is, in public and at cost. He builds schools that know what they are for, and he asks what doctrine of man is running in the systems his children use. He uses the tools and stops the dangerous ones. He argues with the engineer as a neighbor and loves him. All of that is labor, and none of it is optional. What he leaves to God is the growth.
Bear witness
If Jack was right, then you know what a human being is while the people around you have forgotten. You can say it, live by it, love the neighbor who cannot hear it yet, and leave the outcome to the God who used Pilate’s refusal to save the world. That is what Jack’s life after 1964 shows. You are not required to produce the result. You are required to bear witness.
Jack did that at the Center, where no one listened, and then for thirty years at New Life Church, where the Spirit was at work. The answer in the debate over artificial intelligence is the one he gave then. Say what man is. Say it plainly. Say it to a neighbor, and say it with the love of the God who sent it. Do it with your whole strength, and leave the growth to God, who is still at work in what looks like collapse.
The next essay takes up the phone and the social media on it. That is the technology most people use every day, and it carries a doctrine of man too.
Jack Miller’s Man in Modern Education (1964) is an unpublished three-volume typescript held in the C. John Miller Manuscript Collection. Quotations are from the author’s reading edition. Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version. The first essay in this series is The Question Nobody Would Answer (September 8, 2026).