An essay
faith4future
There's a fear going around among faithful people, and I don't think it's silly. It goes something like this: this AI thing is different. It's not just another gadget. It's powerful in a way that feels spiritual, almost rival. Maybe the holy thing to do is to keep our distance.
I want to take that fear seriously before I take it apart, because the people who feel it are usually not fools. They're sensing something real — that a technology this capable can become an idol, can hollow out human dignity, can be the tower of Babel poured into silicon. That instinct is not ignorance. It's discernment. So I'm not going to tell you to stop being careful.
I'm going to tell you a story about roads.
The road was built for taxes.
Two thousand years ago, the most powerful nation on earth built the most advanced infrastructure the world had ever seen: a network of stone roads stretching across three continents. Rome did not build them for God. Rome built them for legions and tax collectors — for moving armies fast and moving money faster. The roads were imperial muscle. War and commerce, paved.
And then a handful of unarmed men walked out onto those roads and used them to carry a message the empire never authorized.
Paul of Tarsus covered something like ten thousand miles on Roman roads. His letters — half the New Testament — moved through the imperial postal arteries, on the same stone laid for soldiers and silver. The gospel spread across the known world at the speed of Rome's own engineering, riding infrastructure built for the exact opposite purpose. The empire built the road for taxes. The good news walked it anyway.
That is not a one-time accident. That is a pattern. And once you see it, you see it everywhere.
The pattern.
The common language of that same empire was Koine Greek — a flattened, practical trade-tongue imposed for administration, so a merchant in Antioch could do business with a clerk in Corinth. It was the bureaucratic Esperanto of its day. And it became the language the New Testament was written in — because a message meant to cross every border needed a tongue that already had. The empire standardized the language to run its accounts. The gospel used it to run past every wall.
Fast forward fourteen centuries. A goldsmith in Mainz builds a machine with movable metal type, and the educated world panics. The printing press will destabilize everything. It will rot the memory — why remember anything if it's all written down? It will spread error and heresy faster than any authority can correct it. It will put dangerous ideas in the hands of people who can't be trusted with them. The fear was loud, and some of it was even right.
And the first great work to roll off Gutenberg's press was the Bible. The very technology the cautious feared became the technology that put Scripture into ordinary hands for the first time in history — and lit a reformation that remade the faith. The disruption was the distribution. The thing they were afraid of was the thing God used.
It kept happening. Radio was going to coarsen the culture; it became a pulpit that reached more souls than every traveling preacher in history combined. Television, the internet — each one arrived under a cloud of religious suspicion, and each one became a carrier of the message to more people than the generation before could have dreamed. Every single time, the same two things were true at once: the fear was understandable, and the repurposing was coming.
Why the fear keeps misfiring.
Here is the uncomfortable thing I have to say to my own people, gently. The fear of powerful new tools is not a Christian instinct. It's a human one, and the faith has spent its whole history overcoming it, not obeying it.
The same dread aimed at AI today was aimed, almost word for word, at every tool before it. The printing press would rot our memory. The novel would corrupt the young. Electricity was the devil's current. The fear feels new each time because the tool is new each time — but the shape of the fear is ancient and unchanging, and history's verdict on it is brutally consistent: the ones who feared the press too much missed the chance to print the Bible first. Their caution, which felt like holiness, was just a slower way of handing the future to whoever feared least.
Because that's the part the fear never accounts for. Refusing to build doesn't keep the world safe. The road gets built whether or not you walk it. The press gets invented whether or not you print on it. AI is being built right now, at enormous scale, by people — many of them brilliant, some of them reverent, plenty of them indifferent to anything past the curve. The question was never whether this technology would shape the spiritual life of humanity. It will. The only question is whether anyone who loves God and loves people will be among the ones shaping it.
A faith that trembles at a tool has, for a moment, made the tool bigger than God. And the God of the Roman roads is not nervous about server racks. The same Lord who was unthreatened by Caesar's empire, by Gutenberg's machine, by the radio tower and the fiber-optic cable, is not pacing the floor of heaven over a language model. "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and love, and a sound mind." The caution is wisdom — keep it. But the dread is not from Him.
AI is the newest road.
So here is where it lands. AI is this generation's Roman road. Its Gutenberg press. It is the most powerful infrastructure for reaching, reasoning, and carrying a message that human beings have ever built — and it was built, like all the others, mostly for empire and commerce. For compute and profit.
Which means we are standing exactly where Paul stood, looking at a road the empire paved for its own reasons, deciding whether to walk it.
If the pattern of all of history holds — and I'd bet my life it does — this road will carry the message too. The good news will move on it, faster and farther than any road before. But that part isn't automatic, and here's the catch that should get a faithful person off the sidelines and onto their feet: the gospel only walked the Roman road because someone actually walked it. The infrastructure doesn't carry the message by itself. It carried it because Paul put his sandals on the stone. The press didn't print the Bible on its own; someone set the type. Every time the empire's tool became God's carrier, it was because a person of conviction picked it up and pointed it.
So the road is here. It's the most powerful one ever laid. And the faithful are standing at the on-ramp, and some of them are afraid, and I understand why.
But I keep thinking about the believers who looked at Gutenberg's terrifying machine and stepped back to keep their hands clean — and how the first thing it printed was the Word of God anyway, in someone else's hands. I don't want to be the one who feared the road. I want to be the one who walked it.
Don't fear the road.
Walk it.
— faith4future
This essay is part of a forthcoming book on building, and keeping faith, in the age of AI.
Originally published at dont-fear-the-road.pages.dev.
