I. The Commandment

“You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3)

The Westminster Shorter Catechism addresses the first commandment in three questions.

Q46. What is required in the first commandment?

The first commandment requireth us to know and acknowledge God to be the only true God, and our God; and to worship and glorify him accordingly.

Q47. What is forbidden in the first commandment?

The first commandment forbiddeth the denying, or not worshipping and glorifying the true God as God, and our God; and the giving of that worship and glory to any other, which is due to him alone.

Q48. What are we specially taught by these words “before me” in the first commandment?

These words “before me” teach us that God, who seeth all things, taketh notice of, and is much displeased with, the sin of having any other God.

II. Biblical Context

The ten commandments open with a preamble, a declaration of who God is and what he did for Israel.

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” (Exodus 20:2)

Edmund Clowney observes that the commandments “are written to establish the separate and unique identity of the people with whom God established a covenant agreement.”1 The preamble follows a pattern similar to a suzerain-vassal treaty: the ruling king declares his name and acts, and the vassal is bound exclusively to that king. However, the suzerain who gave this covenant is not simply a king among kings. When Moses asked his name at the burning bush, God responded: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). YHWH is self-existent. YHWH does not derive his being from anything outside himself. Instead, every created thing exists because YHWH brought it into being.

The context of the commandment begins in Egypt, the most polytheistic civilization in the ancient world. The Egyptians organized life around a pantheon of gods: the Nile, the sun, the harvest, death, and kingship. Every deity had its domain. Pharaoh himself was considered divine. Israel had lived in that world for four hundred years.

God answered Pharaoh’s refusal with a systematic verdict against Egypt’s gods. Moses went before Pharaoh with a single demand: “Let my people go” (Exodus 5:1). When Pharaoh refused, what followed was judgment. Through ten plagues, God dismantled the Egyptian pantheon one domain at a time. YHWH showed, plague by plague, that every god Egypt trusted was no god at all. Israel had watched the gods of Egypt fail.

“You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3)

Though the Israelites had seen YHWH dismantle every god Egypt trusted, they built one of their own, a golden calf. The phrase before me carries the full weight of the commandment. It means before my face, in my presence, under my direct watch. The impulse to rebel against God was as old as the rebellion in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve, surrounded by God’s provision, reached for the one thing forbidden, not out of need but out of the desire to be their own authority. At Sinai, Israel did the same. They rebelled against the revealed law of God.

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III. Theological Significance

The first commandment corresponds to God’s supremacy. Vern Poythress, in Making Sense of the World, expounds on a framework he calls Lex Christi, the law of Christ.2 It begins with the Decalogue. Each commandment specifies what human beings do to obey God. Each one also reflects an attribute of the God who gave it. The first commandment reflects God’s supremacy. God alone is ultimate. God alone is self-existent. Every other thing that exists derives its being from God and is contingent on him.

God’s supremacy governs not only worship but also extends to his lordship. In his work on the doctrine of God, John Frame identifies three inseparable attributes which together define God’s lordship: authority, control, and presence.3 God’s authority means he alone has the right to speak finally on any matter. His word is the ultimate standard, and no external measure stands above it. God’s control means he governs all things. As demonstrated in Egypt, nothing occurs outside his sovereign direction. God’s presence means he is never absent. He is near to every creature, aware of every thought, engaged during every moment of history. The first commandment is not God staking a claim among rivals. Rather, God is declaring that no rivals exist. To place another creature before God is to deny his lordship.

In the New Testament, God’s supremacy and lordship reach their fullness in Christ. Paul writes that in Christ the fullness of deity dwells bodily, and that Christ is the head of all rule and authority (Col. 2:9-10). The God who declared his supremacy at Sinai took on flesh, bore the curse of the broken law, and rose as Lord over all. Every claim to authority, whether human, institutional, or technological, stands beneath Christ’s headship. The first commandment was fulfilled in Christ.

IV. Ethical Application

In a world of multiplying authorities, to whom do we turn? The first commandment presses the question with urgency in the age of large language models. A professional faces a legal question and asks the machine for guidance. A pastor faces a theological question and asks the machine. A parent poses a medical question to the model. The machine answers fluently and confidently. The answer arrives in seconds, asks nothing, and requires no relationship. For a growing majority, the AI has become a first resort for ultimate authority.

What is AI, exactly? The previous essay in this series responds with a framework to help understand: math, not magic; model, not mind; machine, not image of God. As compelling as an AI response may seem, there is no consciousness behind the output, no covenant standing, no orientation toward truth, and no love. The scientific description is that it is the product of an optimization process encoded in mathematical weights, returning a probability distribution over language. The theological perspective is that, though it is built by engineers in a fallen world with fallen assumptions, it functions within a universe that exists only because God sustains it, subject to his creative order, governed by his laws, and incapable of transcending the creature it is.

In today’s context, the sin the first commandment names is replacing God’s authority with AI’s. Egypt structured its entire civilization around a pantheon of gods, each assigned a specific domain of life, each available to be approached, appeased, or consulted when needed. Generative AI, deployed without theological discipline, reproduces Egypt’s structure. There is a domain for every question and an answer for every need. It draws on a dataset of a fallen world, formed by assumptions that do not begin with the fear of the Lord (Prov. 9:10). Without theological and ethical guardrails, AI stands to usurp the authority, control, and presence that belong to God alone.

The creation mandate calls God’s people to cultivate, build, and develop — to exercise dominion over creation with skill and wisdom. AI is a technology in that service. Use it to accelerate medical research, assist with engineering designs, manage crops, and evaluate complex data. That is a legitimate gift of God’s common grace. Rightly ordered, AI serves the mandate. Wrongly ordered, it has the potential to become an idol. The moment it displaces God’s lordship and becomes the first resort for truth, the final word on ethics, or the theological authority consulted before Scripture, it violates the first commandment.

The apostle John reminds us, “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). Those who have been redeemed have the motive, the means, and the capacity to wield AI as a tool rather than bow to it as a god.

A flight data recorder is opened only after a crash to find out what went wrong and who was responsible. It records everything but reveals nothing until someone reads it. The machine we call artificial intelligence (AI) is the same. We built it, deployed it, and stopped asking questions concerning its internal structure. It’s a black box.

It is time to open the box.

The thought of wrapping our heads around AI is intimidating. To be sure, fully comprehending the intricacies of AI would require deep immersion in mathematics, statistics, computer science, linguistics, and some philosophy at the university level. However, for this essay, three simple concepts will reveal the fundamental mechanics of AI. What we find when we open the box is math, not magic. A model, not a mind. And a machine, not an image-bearer. Three concepts cannot do justice to the full complexity of AI. But they can do something more useful: replace speculation with understanding, and redirect misplaced awe toward the God who ordered creation.

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Math, Not Magic

AI is not magic. It is applied mathematics, elegantly sophisticated, but mathematics nonetheless. A language model is designed to predict: given text, it calculates the most probable next word based on patterns from billions of documents. Repeated billions of times, the outputs feel coherent, sometimes uncanny, but it’s still math at work. Three types of mathematical operations do most of the heavy lifting and they are worth knowing by name.

The first is matrix math.1 A matrix is a rectangular array of numbers, each one assigned a position by its row and column. These grids can represent almost anything: the brightness of pixels in an image, the frequency of words in a document, or the connections between concepts in a sentence. When AI systems process language, they convert words into vectors, ordered lists of numbers that capture each word’s meaning and relationship to other words. They then manipulate those vectors through layers of matrix multiplication, combining and transforming the lists in a structured way. The meaning of a word, to a model, is positional. Think of it as a coordinate in a vast multi-directional space, with millions of possible axes.

The second is probability and statistics.2 The model generates answers by calculating likelihoods. Given everything it has seen and the current context, what is the most probable next token? A token is simply a piece of text, a word or part of a word, that the model predicts one step at a time. This is a statistical operation. The model is, at its core, an extraordinary probability distribution over language. It has internalized the statistical shape of how humans write: which words follow which, how ideas group together, and which sentence patterns feel native to a given subject area.

The third is gradient descent — calculus applied to learning. During training, the model makes predictions and checks them against known outcomes. When it is wrong, and at first it usually is, it calculates a loss function and adjusts parameters incrementally for better predictions. The optimization is applied across billions of examples, and the model slowly refines a configuration of weights that minimize the error. Gradient descent is pure optimization at a massive scale.

These three ideas combine in training a large language model (LLM). The network is a deep stack of layers, each a matrix. When a word enters, matrix multiplication carries it forward, transforming it at each layer into something richer and more abstract. The network predicts the next word and checks it against the real text. When wrong, gradient descent calculates the error and adjusts the matrices, billions of parameters at once. Repeating across hundreds of billions of words, the matrices slowly encode something resembling grammar, fact, reasoning, and style.

What makes all of this possible is the order God designed into creation, not human resourcefulness alone. He built laws into the framework of reality: physical, mathematical, and linguistic laws. Human beings, made in His image, have the capacity to discover and deploy them. In his book Redeeming Mathematics, Poythress reminds us that arithmetic itself confronts us with the Trinitarian God. When we do math, we think His thoughts after Him. The Graphics Processing Units (GPU) does operations inside a universe God holds together. This is math, not magic.

Model, Not Mind

Every model is a reduction of reality, compressed into a mathematical form we can manipulate. A weather model does not contain weather. Nor does a financial model contain money. And a language model does not contain language. A model is a practical mathematical tool, not a mind. It cannot contemplate what it represents.

Models did not originate with AI. They started with observation. The simplest statistical model is a histogram. We collect data, the heights of a hundred students, the daily temperatures of a Virginia summer, and sort it into buckets. What we get is a picture of distribution. Where does the data cluster? Where does it thin out? A histogram does not predict anything. It describes. But description is where all modeling begins. Before we can build something useful, we have to see the shape of what is actually there.

From description, we moved to prediction. Machine learning is the discipline of building models that learn to predict from data without being explicitly programmed with rules. Regression fits a mathematical function to historical data and uses it to estimate unknowns. Decision trees ask yes-or-no questions and branch toward a classification. Clustering finds hidden groupings in data without being told in advance what the groups should look like. These methods are still in use because they are fast, interpretable, and effective for structured data. But they have a limit and require humans to identify training features in advance.

A neural network takes this further. It is a layered structure of computational units called neurons, loosely inspired by the brain but implemented in software as mathematical functions. Each neuron takes inputs, processes them, and passes the results to the next layer. The network learns by updating its weights by gradient descent. What distinguishes neural networks from earlier machine learning approaches is that they discover their own features. A classical model requires the designer to specify what to look for. A neural network is fed raw data, and it finds the patterns on its own. This switch from selected features to learned ones revolutionized modern AI and its application.

Stacking enough layers yields a deep neural network.3 With sufficient data and compute, it learns representations of astonishing complexity: edges in images, sentiment in sentences, syntactic structure, and conceptual relationships. This is what drives modern AI: a deep, learned function with billions of parameters that encodes patterns no human explicitly designed. Generative AI, the kind that writes, draws, and speaks, sits at the leading edge of this progression.

What made generative AI possible is a particular innovation: the transformer, a neural network that learns which parts of the input to attend to when making each prediction.4 When scaled to hundreds of billions of parameters and trained on diverse human writing, it produced systems able to generate language, reason across contexts, translate, summarize arguments, and produce coherent prose, giving us ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

This is the progression of models in the black box. Histogram to regression to neural network. Description to prediction to generation. Each step reflects our capacity to find structure in creation and build tools from it.

However, despite their complexity, these models have limits. They are not equivalent to the human mind. In Minds, Brains, and Science, John Searle draws the same conclusion: computers have limits and cannot think.5 They are syntactical, not semantical. Minds are more than syntactical. To illustrate this, Searle designed the Chinese Room thought experiment: a person locked in a room follows rules to manipulate Chinese symbols, producing answers to questions that are indistinguishable from those of a native speaker, yet without understanding the semantics of the responses. This is syntax without semantics, like a model that encodes the form of words without knowing their substance. It produces sentences about grief without having grieved, and describes courage without having feared anything.

Searle names the philosophical limit; Genesis names the theological origin. Language was created by God for communication, the means by which he draws His creatures into covenant relationship with himself and with one another. Poythress argues in In the Beginning Was the Word that human language images the eternal Word, the second person of the Trinity, through whom all things were made (John 1:1–3).6 We speak because God speaks. And we speak because we think. Language is the outward expression of an inward mind: a soul oriented toward truth, capable of meaning, accountable for what is said. This capacity belongs to image-bearers alone. Though the model produces language-shaped outputs, it is not a mind.

Machine, Not Imago

A machine bears the fingerprint of man in the form of innovation. God’s image is reserved for those he breathed life into. A GPS navigates without knowing where it is going. A search engine retrieves without understanding what it finds. A language model answers without knowing what was asked. The machine is a second-order creation. It is advanced technology created by man to fulfill the mandate. It is derivative.

Start with the hardware. The cloud is a metaphor for data centers: enormous, climate-controlled, power-hungry buildings full of networks of specialized processors called GPUs, drawing electricity at an industrial scale, consuming more power than small towns. Though the model seems alive in our browser, it resides in the cloud within a vast system of concrete, steel, silicon, and software. The machine’s responses are compelling enough that we forget who built it, how it was trained, what it cannot do, and what happens when power fails. The abstraction is so animated and compelling that the notion of machinery working in the background disappears entirely.

Next, the software. Workflows that build large language models in stages.

The first is data curation. Before the model learns anything, someone decides what it reads. Trillions of words scraped from the web, digitized books, academic papers, code repositories, and legal documents, filtered, cleaned, weighted. Every inclusion and exclusion is a choice. The design choices and biases of the people who built the dataset are embedded in the model before a single parameter is trained.

The second is pre-training. The model is trained on that corpus to predict the next token, billions of times across billions of documents, using gradient descent at a massive scale. This is where the weights are formed: the numerical parameters that encode everything the model knows: its fluency, its conceptual associations, its range of reference. The process takes months, requires thousands of GPUs running without interruption, and costs tens of millions of dollars. What comes out the other side is a base model, extraordinarily capable but raw and without direction.

The third is fine-tuning, and it is here that the moral stakes become most visible. The engineers who shape the model’s behavior decide which topics it will engage, which it will refuse, what counts as a helpful response, and whose standards of fairness become the default. These are ethical decisions. They draw on a combination of Aristotelian, Kantian, and utilitarian frameworks, applied by committee, but without theological grounding. Those decisions are then embedded in a system that behaves accordingly, without conscience, without accountability, and without any awareness of what it is enforcing. For example, LLMs like ChatGPT can be used to generate disinformation at scale. Outputs appear authoritative but are entirely fabricated, because the model has no capacity for distinguishing truth from plausible-sounding text.

Then comes inference: the moment we engage the machine buried in the cloud. We ask the question and hit send. The model executes. The neural network, the same one built during training, runs a forward pass on our input with its learned weights frozen in place. Every layer fires in sequence, applying its matrix multiplications and activation functions, until it produces a probability distribution over likely next tokens and returns a result. During training, the network updated its weights for each example. During inference, it does not. The weights are fixed. The network simply executes. What we see is fluency. What is happening underneath is computation, algorithms processing data, driven by a model, governed by man-made policies, indifferent to the result.

At every stage, hardware, data, training, tuning, inference, the machine bears the vestiges of man: his choices, his biases, his frameworks, his values, embedded at every stage of its construction. A tool is only as ordered as the hands that hold it. The concern with AI is not so much the machine but the technique and the telos, the how and the why, answered by men who are themselves fallen.

A Theological Perspective

Math, not magic. Model, not mind. Machine, not imago. Three concepts. Enough to understand AI with a little more clarity. Enough to resist the hype that substitutes speculation in place of understanding.

Creation has structure because the Creator is orderly. We can do mathematics because God built patterns into reality. We can build models because the world holds structure worth capturing. We can engineer machines because we were made to make things, to take the raw material of an ordered world and develop it. This is the creation mandate (Genesis 1:28). It is the Christian account that explains why science works. Common grace distributes this capacity broadly so that the engineer who does not confess Christ still discovers real patterns in a creation God holds together.

And yet, we are all fallen creatures. Our datasets reflect this. The engineers who shape the model, the companies who deploy it, the users who trust it without question, all of us bring the distortions introduced by the antithesis (Genesis 3:15) east of Eden. This is not a limitation of the machine since it has no mind or moral responsibility. It simply executes. The machine has no conscience. God gave man the law precisely for this reason, to order human life, human work, and human tools toward justice and truth, and ultimately to His own glory.

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Through Christ’s redemptive work, the antithesis has a resolution. Christ restores what the fall corrupted and completes what the mandate began. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, in whom all things were created, things visible and invisible, and in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17). The mathematics, the models, and everything in the black box fall within His lordship. As creative beings, we continue to live and build, between the Fall and the New Creation, sustained by grace, and oriented toward human flourishing until His return.

Conclusion

AI is not going away. With a better understanding of what is in the black box and the inherent risks, Christians are called to shape AI's future, not surrender it to others. That calling falls on every sphere of life. The academy, the church, the state, the marketplace, each carries its own God-given authority. AI does not belong solely to the tech industry. In the academy, it shapes what is taught. In the church, how it is understood. In the state, how it is regulated. In the marketplace, how it is built. Each sphere answers to God. Therefore, when it comes to AI, we should design guardrails that reflect the law of God. We should write policies that name accountability clearly. And we should develop applications that promote flourishing. The time to open the black box is now.

S.D.G.

Is technology neutral?

Most people assume it is. A technology is a tool. A wheelbarrow moves stones. A wrench tightens the drain plug of an engine. A multimeter measures voltage across a circuit. What matters is how you use it. That sounds reasonable, but it reduces technology to one dimension. Technology is more than a tool. Until we see what else it is, we will keep endorsing what should be questioned, fearing what we should embrace, and never asking about purpose.

A theological understanding of technology begins with foundational doctrines taught in Genesis. The first is the image of God. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). The image of God is the whole person, constituted to know God, represent God, and relate to God in a way no other creature can. Image-bearers are appointed by God to stand before Him in covenant, to reflect His character into creation, and to exercise dominion on His behalf. Reason, creativity, language, and moral agency all flow from this. Only image-bearers receive the mandate. Therefore, only image-bearers are accountable for how they fulfill it.

The second is the creation mandate, also called the cultural mandate. "Fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28). "The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15). God commanded humanity to build, cultivate, and exercise dominion over creation, not after Eden but in Eden. Making is a pre-Fall calling, a vocation, patterned after the Maker, and it is intrinsically good. The creation mandate implies progression: from garden to city, from raw potential to realized cultivation, from the first man tending a single plot to a civilization that fills the earth. Technology is how image-bearers fulfill that calling. It is a cultural endeavor, developing creation under the mandate God gave.

The third is the antithesis. The consequence of Adam and Eve's rebellion was enmity. God spoke to the serpent: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel" (Genesis 3:15). Here God declared war between two seeds: the seed of the woman, which leads to Christ, and the seed of the serpent, which leads to rebellion. Two lines. Two directions. Every human endeavor falls on one side or the other. Augustine traces the antithesis in City of God: two cities, two loves, building side by side from the beginning. The City of God is built by love of God. The City of Man is built by love of self. The antithesis divides them. Yet God did not abandon the world. His common grace restrains sin and continues to distribute the blessings of the creation mandate across human endeavors such as making, art, and science.

The image of God establishes who is making. The mandate declares what image-bearers are called to make. The Fall did not revoke the mandate. But the antithesis runs through it, pulling image-bearers toward the City of God or the City of Man. From image, mandate, and antithesis, three questions emerge for a theological understanding of technology. Tool: What are we making? Technique: By what standard are we making it? Telos: Does it glorify God and advance the creation mandate? Each question reveals a perspective the others cannot provide. Each can be rightly ordered under God or disordered in rebellion against Him. Every technology is a cultural endeavor building toward one city or another. The Decalogue sets the direction.

Tool: What Are We Making?

The tool perspective is existential. It concerns the maker's identity before God, who is making, and why. The image of God establishes his identity. The creation mandate establishes his calling. Before he asks what a technology does, he must know who he is.

God entrusted the development of creation to those made in His image. The plow breaks ground that hands cannot. The wheel moves what backs cannot carry. The infrared sensor detects what the eye cannot see. Each tool extends the capacity of the image-bearer in the direction the mandate points, from garden to city, from raw potential to a creation developed for the glory of its Maker.

When the image-bearer picks up a tool, he exercises dominion by extending his God-given capacity to develop, order, and cultivate creation. The farmer, the engineer, and the programmer all do the same thing at different scales: taking what God embedded in creation and drawing it out. These capacities did not disappear at the Fall. God preserved them. Augustine marveled at this in City of God XXII.24, cataloging the arts of weaving, building, agriculture, navigation, and medicine as blessings God did not withdraw even under the curse. He marveled because these gifts testify to the dignity of the image-bearer even under judgment. The tool reveals the maker's God-given nature, whether the maker acknowledges God or not. The Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck refers to this as common grace. In Reformed Dogmatics, he argues that grace restores nature. The creation mandate is not corrupted beyond use. It is preserved.

But not every tool simply extends the maker outward. Some tools reshape the maker. A plow may not reshape the farmer's judgment. But, an algorithm trained on the behavior of millions reshapes the attention, desire, and reasoning of everyone it touches. The existential question is not only who is making, but what making does to the maker. When a tool begins to reform the image-bearer rather than serve him, the existential question becomes urgent.

The image-bearer who knows his own identity fulfills the mandate with intention. That is what existential means here: the self before God, accountable for what he builds. He asks what he is making before he asks how. He asks whether the tool serves the mandate or himself. He asks whether the tool is forming its users into more faithful image-bearers or less human ones. He builds with accountability to the One who gave the calling: not a refusal of technology but a technology ordered under the lordship of Christ.

On the contrary, the believer who fears technology and refuses to engage does not honor the mandate. He abandons it. Tool disordered is abdication. But tool rightly ordered is vocation. He knows whose image he bears, and he builds accordingly.

Technique: By What Standard Are We Making It?

A technology is more than a tool. It encompasses a technique, and technique is normative. It concerns how the work is done, under what conditions, and by what standard. These are the norms and constraints that govern making. The method always serves some master. The standard that should govern technique is God's law.

A farmer uses satellite data to manage crop health. An engineer models wind loads to strengthen a bridge. These techniques are examples of stewardship: doing the work well because the One who gave the work deserves excellence. The apostle Paul reminds us, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23).

The first commandment means no method, no system, no optimization framework occupies the place that belongs to God alone. Technique under the Decalogue serves the mandate. Technique without it becomes a rival to the Maker. Scripture shows the contrast. At Babel, the builders said, “let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4): brick for stone, tar for mortar, but the standard was themselves. At Sinai, God said, “let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Exodus 25:8). The standard was God’s own specification, executed in obedience. Sinai follows the exodus. God redeemed Israel first, then gave the standard. At Babel, the standard was self. At Sinai, it was God.

Jacques Ellul saw what happens when technique loses its governing standard. In The Technological Society (1954), he defined technique as the pursuit of absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. When efficiency becomes the standard, technique becomes its own law, replacing the mandate. The AI industry is its purest contemporary expression. The governing question for the largest labs is not “What does human flourishing require?” but “What is the fastest path to artificial general intelligence?” By every indication, efficiency is the reigning standard. Humans are inputs, not ends in themselves. When profit depends on the speed of technological advancement, efficiency becomes the governing logic with no consideration for human flourishing. Ellul warned that technique “cannot be otherwise than totalitarian” (125).

But technique was never meant to govern itself. When God gave the instructions to build that tabernacle, He filled Bezalel with His Spirit and wisdom to cut stone, work metal, and weave fabric (Exodus 35:31-35). The One who gave the mandate gave the skill to fulfill it, and the wisdom to govern it. Solomon declares, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). Technique rightly ordered submits to God’s law. Technique disordered becomes its own law.

Telos: Does It Glorify God and Advance the Creation Mandate?

A technology is more than a tool governed by a technique. It embodies a telos, and telos is situational. It concerns the purpose of a technology and whether that purpose aligns with the one God assigned. The creation mandate has a direction: from garden to city, from raw potential to a civilization that fills the earth with the glory of its Maker. Telos asks whether a technology advances that direction or bends away from it.

The Technique section asked about the method. Telos asks about the destination. Ellul saw that the modern world has lost both questions, but the second is worse. In The Presence of the Kingdom, he observed that the world no longer debates whether ends justify means. It has abandoned the question of ends altogether. For the Christian, telos is not optional. Ellul insisted the end is the Kingdom of God.

Now it is clear that technology is never neutral. Every technology encodes a direction: toward the flourishing of image-bearers or away from it. A recommendation algorithm engineered to harvest attention, a weapons system designed to circumvent human accountability, a platform built to manufacture desire. Each encodes a purpose. The question is whose. The plow serves the mandate. A social media platform that treats image-bearers as data to be harvested does not. The difference is not efficiency. It is whether the technology serves the God who gave the mandate or substitutes another end in His place.

Augustine saw it clearly. Two loves produce two cities, and only one of them is building toward the glory of God. Augustine’s framework endures because it is not about ancient empires. It is about directed love. Every act of making serves one love or the other, and technology is no exception.

The City of Man builds toward the self: security without God, significance without worship, civilization as its own justification. Cain built the first city after being cursed by the ground. He built because God's provision was no longer his. Every technology the City of Man produces carries this logic forward. The algorithm that harvests attention builds toward a world ordered around human appetite and the suppression of the need for God. Its telos is Babel: make a name for ourselves, reach the heavens on our terms, construct a human order that needs no Lord.

The City of God builds toward the glory of God reflected in the flourishing of everything He made. It builds because the mandate is real, the calling is good, and the Builder who gave it will bring it to completion. Its technology serves image-bearers rather than consuming them. It tells the truth rather than generating plausible falsehoods. It cultivates contentment rather than manufacturing desire. It builds toward the New Jerusalem, the city whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:10).

Telos rightly ordered glorifies God and advances the civilization He intends. Telos disordered builds toward something less. This is how the Decalogue orients. The ninth commandment forbids lying and points toward a civilization built on truth. The tenth forbids covetousness and points toward a civilization built on the sufficiency of God. Technology oriented toward divine glory advances the creation mandate. Technology oriented toward self advances the City of Man. The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks the most important question a human being can ask: “What is the chief end of man?” The answer: “to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” That is the goal. Rightly ordered telos honors the One who gave the mandate.

Conclusion

Theological evaluation begins and ends with the sovereignty of God. A technology is more than a tool, more than a technique, more than a telos. It is all three, and all three must be asked together. The maker is an image-bearer under a mandate. The method is stewardship under a standard. The end is the glory of God and the flourishing of all He made.

Collapse any one of the perspectives and a theological understanding falls short. Technology without telos has tools and technique but nothing to anchor them to. Theological pessimism sees the antithesis and prescribes withdrawal, abandoning the mandate God never revoked. The mandate compels the image-bearer to build. Common grace equips him to do so. The antithesis reminds him to discern.

So is technology neutral? No. Every tool serves a calling, every technique serves a standard, and every telos either honors God or rivals Him. The technologies we develop, AI above all, are now shaping all of us at a scale no previous generation has faced. Every technology is a cultural endeavor building toward one city or another. The image-bearer who knows this builds under the lordship of Christ. The one who does not is building for a different city. The Decalogue reveals the path.

S.D.G.

References

Augustine. The City of God. Abridged. Translated by Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel J. Honan. Edited by Vernon J. Bourke. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1958.

Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Ethics. Vol. 1, Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity. Edited by John Bolt. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019.

Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 1, Prolegomena. Edited by John Bolt. Translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964. Originally published as La Technique ou l’Enjeu du siècle (Paris, 1954).

Ellul, Jacques. The Presence of the Kingdom. Translated by Olive Wyon. New York: Seabury Press, 1967. Originally published as Présence au monde moderne (Geneva, 1948).

Poythress, Vern S. Making Sense of Man: Using Biblical Perspectives to Develop a Theology of Humanity. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2024.

Poythress, Vern S. Making Sense of the World: How the Trinity Helps to Explain Reality. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2024.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism. Q. 1. In The Westminster Standards. 1647.

The Westminster Confession of Faith. 7.2. In The Westminster Standards. 1646.

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).

AI systems increasingly influence decisions about hiring, lending, medical diagnoses, and military targeting. The emerging field of AI ethics typically focuses on applied questions: fairness, transparency, and accountability. But applied ethics rests on normative commitments, and normative ethics requires a foundation. The deeper question is: What grounds moral obligation? This essay contends that the answer is found in God's self-revelation as expressed in the Decalogue.

Historically, three schools of thought have attempted to provide that foundation: Kantian deontology, virtue ethics, and utilitarianism.1 Each offers insights. Kantians focus on what rules should guide AI. Virtue ethicists consider what character developers should have. Utilitarians look at which outcomes AI should aim for. But why start with one rather than another? The choice itself requires justification.

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The Need for Prolegomena

A theological ethics for AI requires a foundation. Kant recognized this need in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.2 Theologians proceed the same way. Before doctrine comes prolegomena: How does God reveal Himself? How do we reason from revelation? Without answering these first, we build on assumptions we have not examined.

For Christians, ethics begins with God.3 Herman Bavinck frames the central question: “what it is that God now expects of us when he does his work in us.”4 Our aim is to understand what God asks of us in light of his work through Christ. The church has long based its teaching on virtues and duties on the Ten Commandments. From Augustine to Luther, Calvin, and the Westminster divines, moral instruction has centered on the Decalogue. John Murray, in Principles of Conduct, calls it the permanent standard for ethical life.5 Most importantly, the New Testament affirms this pattern. Jesus summarizes the law in terms of love for God and neighbor (Matthew 22:37-40). Paul declares “the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Romans 7:12). James calls it “the perfect law, the law of liberty” (James 1:25). Moreover, the New Testament cites specific commandments: Jesus recites “Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal” (Luke 18:20), and Paul writes, “The commandments... are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Romans 13:9).

However, not all Christians agree on how the Decalogue applies today; some view the commandments as superseded by the new covenant. I cannot address all these disputes here but will proceed with the Reformed tradition, which holds that the Decalogue remains applicable because it reveals God’s unchanging character (see WCF 19.5; Heidelberg Catechism Q. 115). A Decalogue for AI proceeds from this conviction.

Still, while the Decalogue of AI is meant for those who affirm the Trinitarian God of the Nicene Creed, those who don’t may find it useful. Paul tells us that God’s law is written on human hearts, so that even those without Scripture show the work of the law (Romans 2:14-15; cf. Romans 1:32).6 A theological approach to AI ethics often aligns in practice with Kantian, virtue, and utilitarian conclusions. The difference is the foundation, not always the outcome. I invite these readers to consider whether ethics grounded in divine revelation can offer the unity that other approaches lack.

The Failure of Autonomous Ethics

Why does foundation matter? Because worldview shapes ethics. As Herman Bavinck argues in Christian Worldview, how we see reality determines how we act within it.7 A materialist worldview yields one set of ethical commitments; a Christian worldview yields another. If the universe is impersonal matter in motion, then ethics becomes a human construction, useful perhaps, but ultimately arbitrary. If the universe is the creation of a personal, triune God who speaks, then ethics is grounded in His character and revealed in His word. Autonomous reasoning, rooted in natural philosophy and revived by the Enlightenment, makes human reason its own starting point, independent of divine revelation.8

For example, Kantian ethics focuses on rules and duties: AI systems should respect human dignity. But Kant does not explain why dignity matters. He bases it on rational autonomy: humans deserve respect because they are rational. But reason justifying itself is circular. Only a self-existent God can be self-grounded. As Frame observes, God is “the inescapable norm for human reason.”9

Alternatively, utilitarianism looks at outcomes: AI should increase well-being and reduce harm. This approach is common in the tech industry, where algorithms are judged by metrics and A/B testing shapes features. “Responsible AI” has become an industry term for AI that brings measurable benefits. Utilitarianism cannot explain why flourishing matters, whose well-being counts most, or how to weigh present costs against future benefits.

Finally, virtue ethics asks what kind of people we should be. Applied to AI, virtue ethicists would have developers cultivate wisdom, justice, and prudence. But which virtues matter most? For Aristotle, the person of practical wisdom serves as the standard (Nicomachean Ethics VI.5): What would the phronimos do? But who qualifies as phronimos? Virtue ethics relies on tradition and community for answers. Silicon Valley and the Amish would value different virtues. Without a higher standard, virtue becomes whatever a community values.

These frameworks share a common failure: they presuppose what only revelation provides. Utilitarianism assumes flourishing matters. Deontology assumes duties bind. Virtue ethics assumes character has a telos. But no one can say why. Moreover, each taken by itself becomes truncated. Deontological ethics, for example, can reduce to mere rule-keeping with no attention to human flourishing, the very thing Jesus rebukes in Luke 13:15-17. The proliferation of competing "AI ethics principles" confirms the absence of shared ground. The foundation is missing. What would it look like to begin with God's self-revelation?

The Glory as Foundation

Christian ethics offers a foundation that secular approaches lack. At Sinai, God makes the foundation explicit. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, he made the boldest request in Scripture: “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). This came after Israel’s catastrophic failure with the golden calf. At the burning bush God revealed His name; at Sinai, thunder and lightning revealed His majesty. But here, in the wake of Israel’s betrayal, God reveals His covenant character. God’s response was a proclamation of His name and character:

Israel obeys not to earn God’s favor but because God has shown who He is. This pattern begins in Exodus 20:1-2, where God’s self-identification grounds the commands that follow. After Israel’s covenant breach, the glory theophany of Exodus 33-34 deepens and renews that foundation. God reveals His kavod, His weight and substance, as the basis for renewal. The same God who judged their idolatry now proclaims Himself merciful and gracious, abounding in covenant love. The indicative grounds the imperative. We obey because God has made Himself known.

The glory and the law are inseparable. The law is the glory made ethical: the divine character rendered as moral instruction for image-bearers (Psalm 119:137). Each commandment reveals something essential about who God is:

1. “You shall have no other gods before me” reflects God’s sole deity.

2. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image” also reflects His exclusivity: God alone determines how He is represented.

3. “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain” protects His sacred name, because His name is His character.

4. “Remember the Sabbath” reflects God’s creative rhythm and lordship over time.

5. “Honor your father and mother” reflects God’s authority, granted subordinately to human authorities.

6. “You shall not murder” reflects God’s nature as the author of life.

7. “You shall not commit adultery” reflects His covenant faithfulness.

8. “You shall not steal” reflects His justice.

9. “You shall not bear false witness” reflects His truth.

10. “You shall not covet” reflects His sufficiency and goodness.

We are called to reflect the character of the One whose image we bear. The Decalogue shows us what that reflection looks like: a portrait of divine character, not merely a list of prohibitions. To violate the commandments is not merely to break rules but to contradict the character of God himself.

Doxological Ethics

I call this framework doxological ethics: the conviction that moral obligation is grounded in God’s character, governed by God’s law, and aimed at God’s glory. This is the Decalogue.

The term derives from doxa, the Greek word for glory, weight, and radiant self-manifestation. Reformed theologians have long recognized that ethics is oriented toward God’s glory. But here I use the term to name a specific framework: ethics rooted in the glory-law connection that runs from Exodus 20:1-2 through the glory theophany of Exodus 33-34. Not ethics constructed by humans, negotiated among competing preferences. But ethics as disclosure: who God is and what He requires of creatures made in His image.

The Westminster Larger Catechism grasps this. Its preface to the commandments (Q. 101) teaches that obligation flows from identity: “because God is the Lord, and our God, and Redeemer, therefore we are bound to keep all his commandments.” This alludes to the covenantal self-identification of Exodus 20:1-2, the same divine character that Exodus 33-34 reveals in its fullness. The indicative grounds the imperative. We obey not to earn God’s favor but because He has revealed who He is.

The Decalogue’s very structure confirms this. It follows the pattern of ancient covenant treaties: preamble (”I am the LORD”), historical prologue (”who brought you out of Egypt”), and stipulations (the commandments). In Hebrew thought, the law is not abstract philosophy but covenant language: the terms of loyal love between Lord and people.

Doxological ethics offers what theologian John Frame calls a triperspectival approach, theological ethics in three dimensions:10

• The goal is God’s glory. Ethics aims at reflecting the One in whose image we are made. For AI, this means human flourishing is not the ultimate end but a means to a greater one.

• The standard is God’s law. The Decalogue reveals what God requires. For AI, this means ethics has content, not just procedure.

• The motive is love for God and neighbor. Moral obligation is personal, not mechanical. For AI, this means technology answers to persons, not abstractions.

Goal, standard, and motive correspond to the situational (what goal are we pursuing), the normative (what standard governs us), and the existential (what motivates us). God’s character grounds all three. In God, the three coalesce: His character is the standard, His glory is the goal, and His nature is the motive from which all His acts proceed.

The Logos as Confirmation

Doxological ethics finds its ultimate confirmation in the New Testament. The apostle John’s Prologue declares that the glory Moses saw finds its fullest expression in Christ. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). The phrase “grace and truth” directly echoes Exodus 34:6: “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” These are covenant terms describing God’s character. John uses the Greek equivalent to signal continuity: the God who revealed His glory to Moses has now revealed it fully in Christ.11

The Logos who spoke at Sinai is the Logos who became flesh. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him” (John 1:1-3). The Logos grounds each perspective of doxological ethics: situationally, He is the source of all being, so we cannot answer “What is AI?” without considering the Creator. Normatively, He is "the true light that gives light to everyone" (John 1:9), the source and standard of knowing. Apart from Him, knowledge has no foundation. Existentially, the Light shines in the darkness and demands response (John 1:12). Practitioners, developers, and users remain morally accountable. Responsibility cannot be deferred to algorithms.

Applying the Triad

The Westminster Larger Catechism teaches that “the law is perfect” (Q. 95; cf. Psalm 19:7) and that each commandment contains both prohibitions and positive duties (Q. 99). What is forbidden implies what is required; what is required implies what is forbidden (WLC Q. 99, Rule 4). This hermeneutical principle allows the Decalogue to address situations far beyond Sinai: in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and now in the age of artificial intelligence.

The triad (goal, standard, motive) keeps us from treating technical, business, and ethical concerns as separate silos. This is why the essays that follow in this publication will apply each commandment to AI ethics.

Turing’s Theological Objection: A Case Study

Alan Turing’s 1950 paper anticipated what he called “The Theological Objection” to machine intelligence: “Thinking is a function of man’s immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines.”12 Turing was a principal contributor to the theory of computation, and his brilliance reflects gifts of God’s common grace. Yet even the brilliant can mistake a part for the whole. Turing’s approach was heavily situational and pragmatic: if a machine can perform the same tasks as a human, it is functionally equivalent. Yet technical mastery is not the same as wisdom.

Turing’s dismissal was swift: the objection “implies a serious restriction of the omnipotence of the Almighty” by suggesting God cannot grant souls to machines if He wishes. But his response reveals the very fragmentation it ignores: he separates what machines are from the ethics of building them.

How would doxological ethics respond?

Situational: The question is not whether God could give a soul to a machine as a theoretical possibility, but what machines actually are within the created order. God’s character as Creator establishes a clear line between Himself and creation that technology cannot cross. Machines are made by humans and are twice removed from the original source of being. Humans alone bear the imago Dei, a status conferred by the Creator, not a capacity that can be engineered.

Normative: God’s law reveals what Turing’s test cannot measure: humans bear His image through capacities such as language, conscience, communion, and moral accountability before God. The key question is not whether machines can pass behavioral tests but whether their processes truly share in divine rationality or merely imitate its outward signs. The Decalogue, which reveals God’s character, provides the standard for evaluating what we make and why.

Existential: The motive for making must be love for God and neighbor, not technological ambition. Making machine “intelligence” raises questions about our accountability before God. Not everything that can be built ought to be built. The secular mind assumes that capability implies permission. Doxological ethics asks the prior question: What forms of making honor the Creator?

Doxological ethics holds together what Turing’s response fragmented. The question is not “Can machines think?” but “What does faithful making look like in light of God’s glory?”

Turing dismissed the theological objection and asked whether machines can think. But the question cannot be isolated from the foundational ones: What exists? How is knowledge possible? What should we do? These three are united in the glory of God revealed at Sinai and incarnate in Christ.

Doxological ethics provides what secular approaches cannot. The goal is God’s glory. The standard is God’s law. The motive is love for God and neighbor. And God’s character grounds them all. The Decalogue applies to AI not because we are proof-texting ancient commands but because it reveals the unchanging character of God. All technology exists in His world. And every user is made in His image.

Turing asked whether machines can imitate humans. Doxological ethics asks whether humans, in their making, honor God. The first question is fascinating. The second requires accountability.

With this foundation, we can address AI as what it truly is: technology made by image-bearers, under divine sovereignty, subject to divine law, and accountable to the God whose glory the Decalogue reveals.

S.D.G.

Herman Bavinck, a Dutch Reformed theologian, taught that God reveals Himself in three ways: through truth, goodness, and beauty.[1] Whether in Scripture or in creation, God’s self-revelation displays these three characteristics. Truth shows us reality as it is. Goodness guides how we should live. Beauty reflects God’s glory in what He has made.

This matters for Artificial Intelligence (AI).

I believe, right now, we’re asking the wrong questions about AI. We’re asking: Can it replace us? Will it take our jobs? Is it conscious? These questions miss the point. They start with fear instead of wisdom. They start with us rather than with God.

Better questions to ask are: What is AI, really? How should Christians think about it? How can we use it in a faithful way?

The Decalogue of AI project aims to answer these questions.

Two Audiences

This project is meant for two groups of people.

First, this is my final project for a Master of Arts in Theological Studies at Westminster Theological Seminary. It builds on work I started in AP 562 Christianity & Culture with Dr. Nathan Shannon. That course explored how Christians should engage with culture. Here, I extend and apply that question to one of the most important emerging technologies of our time.

Second, this project is for people who work with AI, use it, or are Christians trying to make sense of a world where AI is now part of everyday life. You do not need a theology degree or a computer science background. You just need to care about clear thinking and faithful living.

Why the Decalogue?

This project is organized around the Ten Commandments as explained in the Westminster Larger Catechism. Hence the name; this choice is not random. The Decalogue is more than a set of rules; it reveals God’s character and offers a guide for human flourishing.

Each commandment teaches us how to relate to God and to others. Each one protects something important. Each calls us to wisdom in a different part of life. Each also gives us a way to think about artificial intelligence.

Three Objectives

This project has three main objectives.

First, we need to build a foundation. Before we can think clearly about AI, we must understand what it is and what it is not. AI is not magic, alive, or conscious. It is computer science at a large scale, algorithms backed by sophisticated math and statistics. Knowing this is important. If we misunderstand AI, we may respond with fear or treat it as something greater than it is. A clear understanding leads to wisdom.

Second, we need a theological framework. Christians should approach technology differently from the rest of the world. We do not start by asking if something is possible or profitable. Instead, we ask if it is faithful. We consider what it shows about God, people, and creation. We also ask how it helps us love our neighbors and support human flourishing.

Third, we will offer practical guidance. While theory is important, so is practice. We will develop a question-and-answer format to help work through real AI challenges. We will also create an ethics code based on the Ten Commandments interpreted through the lens of the Westminster Standards. The goal is not to provide every answer, but to provide guidance.

Who Am I?

I am a technologist, not a pastor. I have started three technology companies. I have degrees in computer science and computer and systems engineering. I also served in the Marine Corps, working in signals intelligence and cryptology. For twenty-five years, I have built a career building solutions with advanced technologies.

I am also a theology student (yes, at the age of 62, it’s never too late), finishing an MA in Theological Studies at Westminster Theological Seminary. I serve as a lay leader in my local church. I believe that to think faithfully about technology, Christians need both sound theology and technical knowledge.

This project brings those two areas together. It offers theology for people who build and use AI, and technical explanations for Christians who want to think theologically.

What to Expect

Over the course of several months, twelve essays will unfold in two parts. First, we will reflect on the true, the beautiful, and the good of AI from a Trinitarian theological perspective. Then we will work through the Ten Commandments one at a time, asking what each teaches us about God, people, and creation, and how these truths relate to artificial intelligence. Together, we will build a framework for engaging with AI grounded in Scripture and helpful for everyday life.

Each essay can be read on its own, but together they create a framework. By the end, you will have a way to think about AI that is rooted in Holy Scripture and useful in practice.

An Invitation

This project is meant to explore, not to give final answers. I do not claim to know everything. I believe the Christian tradition helps us ask better questions. I believe Scripture speaks to every part of life, including technology. Faithful thinking about AI needs both theological wisdom and technical understanding.

If you are trying to understand AI in your work or daily life, this project is for you. If you work with AI and want a deeper framework than what companies offer, this is for you. If you are just curious about how theology and technology connect, this is for you too.

Today I received approval from the seminary to proceed with this project. So let the conversation begin.

Herman Bavinck wrote that the thinking mind “situates the doctrine of the Trinity squarely amid the full-orbed life of nature and humanity.” A Christian’s confession, he said, “is not an island in the ocean but a high mountaintop from which the whole creation can be surveyed.” He understood that it is the task of thinking Christians “to present clearly the connectedness of God’s revelation with, and its significance for, all of life.”[2]

Bavinck makes a call to action with a profound statement, “The Christian mind remains unsatisfied until all of existence is referred back to the triune God, and until the confession of God’s Trinity functions at the center of our thought and life.”[3] This is what we aim to do here. Artificial intelligence is not separate from God’s world. It is part of creation that calls for faithful thinking.

Let’s think clearly and faithfully together. Let’s ask better questions about artificial intelligence.

Notes

[1] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 25-31, 151-167.

[2] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 330.

[3] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 330.