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Every medium is a formation program, and the theological question about artificial intelligence is not whether it is good but what mediation does to persons.
Every medium is a formation program, and the idea is older and stranger than the current argument about artificial intelligence. I will argue that the theological question is not whether AI is good but what mediation does to persons, and I will show it by running one pastoral task through Ong, Borgmann, Song, and Herzfeld.
Ong's Orality and Literacy (1982) is genuinely unsettling. Writing, he argues, is a technology: artificial, learned, tool-dependent. Arriving in an oral culture it hands people no new container for the same thoughts; it changes what thinking is. His fourth chapter is titled, flatly, "Writing restructures consciousness." Writing separates the knower from the known, and suddenly you can have analysis, abstraction, a solitary author, where oral knowledge had to stay memorable or die. Take Ong seriously and the question about generative systems is not output quality. It is this: what consciousness does a culture grow when composition itself, the labour of finding out what you think by writing, can be delegated?
Albert Borgmann gives the sharpest tool here, the "device paradigm" of Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984). A device delivers a commodity, whether warmth, music, or an answer, instantly and easily, hiding the machinery behind it. Against it he sets the "focal thing" and its practices, his example being the hearth. A wood stove gave you heat, and it also demanded splitting wood, hauling it, tending the fire; it disciplined a household's rhythms and pulled the family into one room. Central heating supplies the same commodity with none of that. Borgmann is no Luddite. He is not asking you to reinstall the stove. His point is that focal practices survive only where somebody protects them, and that the goods they carried, skill, patience, presence, do not come bundled with the commodity.
Felicia Wu Song brings this into the digital economy in explicitly Christian terms. In Restless Devices (2021) she argues that our routine, unreflective digital habits are "secular liturgies," practices that do not occupy time so much as train desire. Her fifth chapter names the diagnosis: "Created for Communion, Settling for Connection." Communion is embodied, particular, costly; what the digital economy offers instead is connection, frictionless and metricized and industrialized into engagement. Her answer is counter-liturgy, not deleting the app but filling the cleared space with something generative.
Noreen Herzfeld's The Artifice of Intelligence (2023) asks what it means to be made in the image of God and then to make AI in our own image. Her answer runs through the relational reading of the imago Dei associated with Karl Barth. The image is not a property we possess, not reason or intelligence, but a capacity for relationship. Genuine encounter, on Barth's account, requires four things: you look the other in the eye (embodiment), speak to and hear the other (communication), aid the other (agency), and do it gladly (emotion). A machine approximates the second impressively, cannot supply the first, and renders the third and fourth. The limit is not intelligence. It is relationship.
Now the task. A pastor has to write to a family after a funeral that went badly. That letter used to cost two hours of rereading, praying, drafting, deleting, and discovering in the writing what she owed these people. A model now produces something pastorally competent in nine seconds. Run Borgmann on it: the commodity is the finished message, and the displaced focal practice is the deliberation itself, the labour in which her compassion and self-knowledge were formed. The letter was never only an output; it was a discipline that made a person. Then run Song, and ask what liturgy daily use installs. Something like this: when relational difficulty appears, offload it. Discomfort is a defect. Fluency is faithfulness.
So here is the practice, a design decision rather than a mood: engineer friction. Draft one honest paragraph by hand before you touch any assistance, impose a hold of a day, and use the model only after your own draft exists. Robert Bjork's "desirable difficulties" offer a partial ally: conditions that make learning feel harder while improving retention. But Bjork can tell you only that friction deepens retention, not why the person on the other side of it is worth forming. For that you need theology.
The Postmodern Terminal >_