Date: January 20, 2026
For the month of January, the Dean’s Commentary will feature text by VTS & GTS faculty members writing about what they are currently teaching, reading, or writing about.Â
Over the past decade, artificial intelligence has moved from the pages of science fiction into the everyday life of the church, shaping how intelligence, authority, creativity, and even personhood are imagined and negotiated.
Much of my current scholarly work has grown out of this shift. I am completing a book, Theology and Technology: After Intelligence, which develops directly from my teaching at GTS and from ongoing conversations with students, clergy, and church leaders about how AI is reshaping ministry and theological imagination. AI now drafts sermons, mediates moments of pastoral care, and quietly recalibrates expectations about knowledge and expertise. Yet the theological conversation around these developments often remains thin—either overly anxious or naively instrumental.
This project argues that Christian theology brings deeper resources to these questions than is often assumed. Rather than treating technology as a neutral tool or an inevitable force, the book situates AI within the long history of Christian engagement with technology—from Roman roads and handwritten letters to printing presses, broadcast media, and digital platforms. The church, I argue, has always been technological, and each medium has reshaped how faith is taught, practiced, and authorized.
At the heart of the book is a constructive framework I call Grounded Critical Use Theory: a theological posture that resists both technological determinism and uncritical enthusiasm, and instead cultivates faithful, discerning, and creative engagement. An intentionally interdisciplinary project, the book places theology in dialogue with cultural studies, anthropology, cybernetics and information science, and the philosophy of technology, exploring what AI reveals about human vocation, the imago Dei, and practices such as preaching, leadership, pastoral care, and justice-making.
At GTS, where hybrid learning and digital ministry are now part of ordinary formation, these questions are not abstract. They belong at the center of theological education—and of the church’s witness in a rapidly changing world.
The Rev. Michael W. DeLashmutt, Ph.D.
Dean of The Chapel of the Good Shepherd, Senior Vice President, and Asst. Professor of Theology
The General Theological SeminaryÂ