By Oyewole Sarumi
A quiet tremor runs through our age. It is not seismic in the geological sense, yet it shakes every institution, every profession, and every assumption about what it means to be human.
That tremor is artificial intelligence. With every passing month, new models emerge that compose symphonies, diagnose diseases, write legal briefs, and converse with an unsettling fluency.
Commentators speak of a coming singularity, a moment when machine cognition surpasses our own and the creature becomes the curator of his creator. The world is, to borrow a colloquialism, going gaga over AI.
The possibilities appear boundless, and the horizon of human achievement seems to recede before a tsunami of algorithmic power. Yet for those who stand in the stream of historic Christian faith, this moment requires something more than either breathless enthusiasm or reactionary fear. It demands a return to first principles, a sober taxonomy of intelligence itself.
For decades I have opened the sacred text with congregations, walked with the dying, counselled the perplexed, and watched empires of ideology rise and crumble.
Through it all, the Scriptures have proven themselves a lamp that illumines every dark corner of human culture, including this one. What the Bible presents to us, and what the current frenzy so often obscures, is that human intelligence (HI) is not the only intelligence in play.
The sacred page speaks of a spirit intelligence (SI) that can mimic the divine even while it enslaves, and over and above all it exalts a divine intelligence (DI) that is the uncreated fountain of all wisdom, hidden in Christ and made accessible by the Holy Spirit.
It is this fourfold awareness that must shape the church’s witness in an age of intelligent machines. Without it, we will mistake novelty for truth, simulation for personhood, and spiritual counterfeits for the voice of God. With it, we may navigate the age of AI with the calm confidence that the Lord who founded the earth by wisdom still holds the ages in His hands.
The Spectacle and Limits of Human Intelligence
Human intelligence is a splendour borrowed from the divine nature. When the Almighty stooped to form Adam from the dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, He conferred upon humanity a rational soul capable of language, logic, love, and worship.
The cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28 implies an intellectual enterprise: subduing the earth, naming the animals, cultivating gardens, building cities, and composing metallurgies and musical instruments.
All of this flows from HI, the God-given capacity to observe, abstract, pattern, and create. Artificial intelligence is the latest, most dazzling fruit of that capacity. It is, in one sense, a tribute to the image of God still glimmering in fallen humanity.
Yet we must be precise. AI is a product of HI, not its peer, and certainly not its superior. The machine processes symbols, but it does not know. It can optimise for a goal, but it cannot love the goal. It can simulate empathy, but it does not suffer with the sufferer.
Consciousness, that irreducible first-person awareness of being a self, remains a mystery that materialist science cannot explain and silicon cannot replicate.
A recent analysis by neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist underscores that the brain is not a computer, and the mind is not an algorithm; intelligence is embodied, relational, and rooted in a right-hemisphere attention that grasps wholes before parts.
The biblical anthropology echoes this: humanity is not a ghost in a machine but a living soul, a psychosomatic unity destined for resurrection. A 2024 Barna Research study found that 61 per cent of practising Christians believe AI will never replicate human consciousness, a conviction that aligns with the theological truth that the breath of God is not a code that can be written.
Nevertheless, HI left to itself becomes idolatrous. The tower of Babel in Genesis 11 stands as the archetype: a united humanity deploying its formidable intelligence to reach the heavens and make a name for themselves. God’s response was not admiration but confusion.
The same pattern repeats wherever human reason enthrones itself as the final arbiter of reality. The Enlightenment promised that rational thought would banish superstition and usher in utopia; it gave us the guillotine and the gulag. In our own day, the myth of artificial general intelligence as saviour or destroyer is but the latest chapter in the long story of humanity’s tendency to worship the work of its own hands.
The Puritan pastor Richard Baxter, in his monumental Christian Directory, warned his flock against the “idolizing of wit and learning” which, divorced from the fear of the Lord, becomes “a polished dagger in the hand of a madman.” Baxter did not despise learning; he was a prodigious scholar. But he knew that human intelligence, like every other faculty, must be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
The Counterfeit Light of Spirit Intelligence
If AI represents a horizontal challenge to human uniqueness, spirit intelligence presents a vertical one. The Scriptures are unequivocal that there exists a realm of intelligent, non-corporeal beings. Some of these beings are holy, ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation. Others are fallen, malevolent, and possessed of a cunning that dwarfs human scheming.
The apostle Paul, writing to Timothy, recalls the names Jannes and Jambres, the Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses before Pharaoh (2 Timothy 3:8). These were not stage illusionists; they replicated, by some demonic enablement, the first three signs of the living God.
Staffs became serpents, water turned to blood, and frogs emerged from the Nile at their command. Spirit intelligence, in that moment, produced a counter-narrative so convincing that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. It took the finger of God, the third plague of gnats, to leave the magicians confessing, “This is the finger of God” (Exodus 8:19). They could mimic, but they could not create life from dust or halt the advance of divine purpose.
The New Testament scene in Philippi is equally instructive. A slave girl possessed by a spirit of divination, literally a “python spirit,” followed Paul and Silas for many days crying out, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation” (Acts 16:17).
What could be more theologically accurate? Yet Paul, greatly annoyed, turned and commanded the spirit to leave. Why? Because not every supernatural utterance is of God. The source matters eternally more than the syntax.
A true statement from a lying spirit is a Trojan horse designed to blur the distinction between the holy and the profane. John the Beloved, who leaned on the Saviour’s breast, would later command the church, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). The testing is not optional; it is the survival instinct of the regenerate soul.
The early church lived in a world saturated with oracle shrines, Gnostic seers, and ecstatic cults. The Didache, one of the earliest church manuals outside the New Testament, gave careful instructions for discerning true from false prophets: not merely by their words but by their ways, their fruits, and their willingness to submit to apostolic tradition.
A prophet who asked for money, or who stayed more than two days, or whose “spirit” contradicted the received faith, was to be rejected as a charlatan. The Apostolic Father Ignatius of Antioch, marching to his martyrdom in Rome around AD 107, wrote to the Ephesians urging them to hold fast to the teaching about Christ’s true incarnation, because deceptive spirits were already whispering a docetic Jesus who only seemed to suffer.
“For there are some who make a practice of carrying about the Name in wicked guile,” Ignatius warned, “even while they do other deeds unworthy of God. You must flee these as wild beasts; for they are mad dogs, biting by stealth.” Spirit intelligence was not a distant theory for Ignatius; it was the palpable force behind the heresies that threatened to devour the flock.
The Puritans, those spiritual physicians of the soul, grasped the nuances of SI with a precision born of bitter experience. Thomas Brooks, in his classic Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, catalogued the ways in which the enemy “transforms himself into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).
One of his chief devices, Brooks observed, is to “present the bait and hide the hook,” to wrap a destructive suggestion in the garb of spiritual zeal. Another is to counterfeit the witness of the Spirit, giving a false peace to the unrepentant and a false terror to the broken.
Brooks’s counsel was never to exploit the people with a manipulative emotionalism, but to lead them to the objective anchors of Scripture and the cross.
John Owen, the prince of Puritan theologians, devoted a profound treatise to The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded. There he wrote, “If we are spiritually minded, we shall be able to discern the things that differ, and not call darkness light, nor light darkness; we shall not mistake the operations of our own minds, or the suggestions of Satan, for the consolations of the Spirit.”
The vast, unregulated interiority of the charismatic movement of Owen’s day, and ours, requires precisely this rigorous, Word-saturated discernment. AI may dazzle the mind, but spirit intelligence can damn the soul, precisely because it wears the livery of heaven while serving the interests of hell.
Christ, the Treasury of Divine Intelligence
Above the noble, flawed heights of human intelligence, beyond the seductive mimicry of spirit intelligence, towers the unapproachable light of divine intelligence. DI is not a scaled-up version of HI; it is the ontological source of all that is, the eternal Logos in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.
The apostle Paul, writing to a Colossian church threatened by a syncretistic mysticism that promised access to higher spiritual planes, made a statement of breathtaking finality: “In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). The verb is in the present tense, and the adjective “all” leaves no room for a supplementary, esoteric deposit awaiting us in dark matter or quantum computing.
Everything that can be known, everything that constitutes true wisdom, is already located in a Person, not a principle. The search for ultimate intelligence, therefore, ends at the feet of Jesus or it does not end at all.
This Christocentric intelligence is not a private novelty of Paul’s later letters. It is the deep structure of the entire canon. Solomon, in the book of Proverbs, speaks of a personified Wisdom who was beside the Master Craftsman at creation: “The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding He established the heavens” (Proverbs 3:19).
That Wisdom, the early church unanimously confessed, is none other than the pre-incarnate Son. John’s prologue identifies Him as the Logos, the eternal Reason and self-expression of the Father, through whom all things were made.
The Christ-hymn of Colossians 1:16-17 expands the horizon: “For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”
The principalities and powers that seek to enslave humanity through occult knowledge or technological tyranny were themselves created by and for Christ. Their intelligence, however formidable, is derivative and ultimately answerable to His throne.
The Apostolic Fathers drank deeply from this Christological well. Clement of Rome, in his epistle to the Corinthians written around AD 96, exulted that “by Him the Master has willed that we should taste of immortal knowledge, who, being the brightness of His majesty, is by so much greater than the angels as He has inherited a more excellent name.”
Clement understood that the mediation of all knowledge is the work of the exalted Christ, who opens the eyes of our hearts to a divine light that not only surpasses but transfigures human reason.
Irenaeus of Lyons, a generation later, would famously declare that the Son is the “visible of the Father,” the one who makes the unknowable God known. Divine intelligence is not an abstract attribute; it is the face of Jesus of Nazareth, the One who spits on the ground, makes mud, and heals blind eyes, and in so doing demonstrates that the wisdom of God is simultaneously humbler and higher than the grandest philosophy the Greeks could imagine.
What this means for access is revolutionary. Paul does not tell the Colossians to enrol in a mystery school or master a code. He tells them that “in Christ you have been made complete” (Colossians 2:10). The Spirit of God who indwells every believer is the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Christ (Ephesians 1:17).
The treasure is hidden, but it is hidden in Christ for those who are in Christ. Access to DI comes not through intellectual exertion or initiatic rites but through union with the One who is the Wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24).
This is the genius of the gospel: the illiterate slave girl and the Cambridge don kneel on level ground at the cross, and the Spirit pours the same unsearchable riches into both. It is a profoundly humbling reality for an age that prizes data accumulation and machine learning. God knows stuff—infinitely, effortlessly, and personally—and He gives wisdom liberally to all who ask in faith without reproaching (James 1:5).
Living by Divine Intelligence in a Technologically Intoxicated World
How then shall the church live, and how shall she lead, when the algorithms hum with a voice that sounds so human? The answer lies not in a retreat into obscurantism but in a radical re-centering on the font of all intelligence.
The Puritans, for all their reputation as killjoys, were among the most pastorally sensitive and practically wise guides in Christian history. They knew that a truth not applied is a truth wasted. Richard Baxter, in The Reformed Pastor, pleaded with his fellow ministers to do the hard, personal work of catechising families, not to build their own empires but to see the knowledge of God cover the land as the waters cover the sea. “See that the work of saving grace be thoroughly wrought in your own souls,” Baxter exhorted, “lest you perish while you call others to the feast.”
A minister who does not himself feast on divine intelligence will soon resort to manipulating human intelligence and, God forbid, spirit intelligence to create a veneer of success. The history of revivalism, for good and ill, is littered with examples of techniques that stirred the passions without informing the conscience, leaving congregations as vulnerable as the swept house of Jesus’ parable, ready for seven worse spirits to enter.
This is the moment for a recovery of what Owen called “spiritual mindedness,” a habitual orientation of the affections toward the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Spiritual mindedness does not despise the body or technology; it relativizes them.
It refuses to be impressed by the merely novel. When we stand before a machine that can produce a passable sermon outline or a theologically fluent chat response, spiritual mindedness asks first: Where is the Spirit of Christ in this? Does this tool serve the building up of the body in love, or does it subtly train us to be content with an unanointed simulacrum of ministry?
The early church, as the Didache testifies, evaluated prophets not by the eloquence of their oracles but by their conformity to the humble, self-giving way of the Lord. An AI that “preaches” might tick the box of homiletical correctness, but it cannot weep with those who weep, nor can it be indwelt by the Comforter. It has no cross from which it died and rose. The servant of the Lord must never outsource the sacred calling of soul-care to a system that has no soul.
At the same time, a robust doctrine of divine intelligence liberates us to engage AI without idolatry or anxiety. If Christ is the source of all wisdom, then every true insight in computer science, every mathematical elegance, every breakthrough in neural networks is ultimately stolen fruit from His treasury, discovered by creatures made in His image.
We can celebrate the common grace of technological advance, just as we celebrate the advances in medicine that heal the body, while insisting that no algorithm will ever mediate the knowledge of God. The Holy Spirit, who searches the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:10), alone illuminates the page of Scripture and the person of Christ for the believer.
The word “illuminate” here is not mere metaphor; it is the ongoing, personal work of the Third Person of the Trinity, who takes what is Christ’s and declares it to us.
No amount of natural language processing can duplicate that epistemic bridge. A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center noted a growing unease among Americans about AI’s role in spiritual and ethical decision-making, with 72 per cent of respondents saying they would not trust an AI chatbot for religious guidance. That instinct, while culturally inarticulate, gestures toward the biblical reality that divine things are spiritually discerned, and the unspiritual person, whether carbon or silicon, cannot understand them.
The pastoral implication is clear. Our churches must become communities of such palpable, supernatural wisdom that the world’s best AI appears as the wooden idol it is. This will mean a recovery of the prayer meeting where the Spirit’s leading is discerned corporately, a renewed commitment to expository preaching that unwraps the mind of Christ from Genesis to Revelation, and a tenderness of pastoral care that reflects the Shepherd who knows His sheep by name.
When the slave girl of Philippi was delivered, the text does not record that she was given a platform to discuss her experience; she was set free from exploitation. The charlatans of Paul’s day and the wolves in sheep’s clothing that Baxter so fearlessly opposed all had one hallmark: they used spiritual things to exploit the people of God for gain.
The apostolic and Puritanic way, by contrast, was to labour night and day so as not to be a burden, to give freely what had been freely received, and to present every person mature in Christ. That remains the standard for every steward of divine intelligence.
Conclusion
We stand at a crossroads where four intelligences intersect: the human, the artificial, the spiritual, and the divine. To mistake any one for another is to court disaster.
To elevate AI to a demigod is to repeat the idolatry of Babel with shinier tools. To dismiss the reality of spirit intelligence is to play into the hands of an enemy who prefers to operate undetected. But to cling to Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, is to possess a kingdom that cannot be shaken, a wisdom that confounds the best algorithmic prediction and silences the most plausible demonic whisper. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in the believer, transforming the mind, illuminating the Word, and leading into all truth.
My four decades of opening the Book have taught me this: every generation faces a unique test of trust. Ours is the temptation to trust the screen, the simulation, the statistical inference. The ancient remedy remains the same. Let us not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Let us test the spirits, hold fast to what is good, and fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.
When the machines have run their last algorithm and the counterfeit spirits have been cast into the lake of fire, the face of Christ will still be the light of the new creation. In Him, the divine intelligence that spoke the galaxies into existence will be our eternal study, our endless delight, and our perfect peace. That is wisdom. That is life. And that, beloved, is the gospel.
Prof. Sarumi, a pastor and teacher of the Word, write from Lagos. Tel. 234 803 304 1421 Email: oyewolethecoach@gmail.com