Posted on by Dustin Ellington

AI in Theological Education: Saving Time but Stifling Growth?

“This is the moment to reevaluate what you do and how you do it,” wrote a dean at Princeton University to its faculty this past summer about artificial intelligence. Though he was addressing a secular university, not a seminary, his words resonate deeply with me. Something very big is happening, like I’ve never seen in 20 years of teaching as a New Testament professor. Much student writing has suddenly become near professional quality, yet more and more students’ assignments sound similar in both style and content. It is becoming difficult to hear students’ distinct voices or to see what they themselves can do in interpretation. Genuine assessment has become almost impossible. I wonder if AI, instead of only being a powerful tool, is taking over.

While I recognize that other aspects of my work, such as mentoring and encouraging students, remain stable, I suspect that the academic training which I’ve been doing with students is now threatened.

At ABTS and other seminaries, we are finding our way in this new world – between AI’s efficient access to vast amounts of information and the slow, sometimes messy, formation of people’s character and skills for ministry.

This blog is not about policy but a reflection on what AI means for our work of teaching students in a formative way, a way that shapes them holistically – who they become as believers and as ministers. I am not a technology expert. I speak from my experience of teaching students toward becoming mature interpreters of the Bible. How do we help them practice and build interpretive skills instead of letting AI offer shortcuts which compromise growth and learning? How do we guide students toward maturity as interpreters of the Bible when they already use AI?

Many assume that AI simply makes learning more efficient. Let me share why it is not so simple. Seminary is not about speedy access to a wealth of information. When I first began teaching, I filled lectures with information. But over time I realized that while students could repeat facts, it did not mean they were growing as interpreters of the Bible. I saw that students need the experience of discovering for themselves what is present in Scripture; and they need to describe what they see with their own voices. I had to shift my approach. So I learned to ask open questions with students, opening the text of Scripture with them, and sending them to the text, where they could see things for themselves.

There’s a world of difference between reading about the Bible and encountering the Bible itself. When we meet God in Scripture, and are confronted with truth from the Bible about ourselves, the content sticks with us. When we read the Bible for ourselves, and struggle to understand and apply what’s there on the page, the biblical text becomes our own. It is more convicting and more inspiring when we discover truth for ourselves in Scripture itself. Second-hand interpretation, whether from a commentary, a professor, or AI, lacks the same transformative power.

I once asked a class why we spend so much time learning to interpret different kinds of books in the Bible. A student replied, “Because once you get the skills, you’ve been empowered.” Exactly. Our goal is not to prepare students to depend on experts but to form them with skills to interpret the Bible faithfully. The interpretive instincts they develop will stay with them, shaping their relationship with God and positioning them to share truth with others in a way that draws them also into a deep relationship with God through Scripture. What’s at stake is genuine preparation for ministry.

So theological education is not mainly about transmitting lots of correct information but forming and shaping believers with certain skills and relationships, including a vital relationship with the Bible.

Now, however, the world of technology has given a research assistant to our students without regard for where they are on their journey toward becoming mature interpreters of the Bible. In my courses, I tend to assign open-ended questions: What does Mark teach about the kingdom of God and its relationship to Jesus? How does Acts connect the Holy Spirit and the spread of the gospel? What does 2 Corinthians reveal about suffering and authentic ministry? Answering such questions has required careful reading, reflection, and struggle. Now, AI can answer such questions quickly and rather accurately. But when students rely on it without wrestling with Scripture itself to develop their answers, they bypass what could have been a powerfully formative encounter with God’s written word. Students save time, and they find information, but they miss a transformative experience.

I too use AI tools in my study, and I’m excited by how helpful and efficient they are. Yet they work best when used by someone already shaped by years of training, when one’s skills and relationship with the Bible are essentially in place.

Today, if our students wish, they can delegate close reading of the Bible to an AI assistant. Students win time but they lose a chance to grow toward becoming someone with a first-hand relationship with the Bible and instincts for interpreting it with discernment and wisdom. I’m left wondering how this might affect their ministry and their relationship with God.

So I’m asking anew: what exactly am I doing as a teacher, and how should I be doing it now?  What do students need in order to use AI wisely? How can we help students supervise this powerful assistant so it plays a productive role in their growth instead of allowing it to take over and do more than it should?

To use AI responsibly, students need a deep familiarity with Scripture, a love for it, a sense of how to interpret the texture and flow of its various forms of literature, and even a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and their own contexts as they interpret. They need the ability to describe what they find in their own words. If they rely too heavily on AI, they hand over more and more interpretive agency to it and thus miss the genuine education that could shape them into mature interpreters. Then, ultimately, they don’t get the skills, they lack self-confidence that they can understand the Bible, and they don’t quite feel at home with the Bible. A great loss.

When I shared such thoughts with ABTS faculty colleagues, one responded: “An additional long-term question I’ve been wrestling with is not just how will this impact our students’ personal growth and relationship with God through his word, but what will be the impact on the next generation if they are trained by people who didn’t adequately form these skills and relationships?” Yes, indeed.

Perhaps, with time, we can train AI tools to assist in student formation – to behave like patient teaching assistants prompting students to observe the goals of a given course, prodding them to observe Scripture directly and reflect personally, rather than doing the work for them.

For now, though, I am exploring how to reshape assignments. Instead of writing polished essays, students might narrate their interpretive process with passages of Scripture. Like when math teachers require students to “show your work”. This puts students in more touch with their thinking processes, and slowing down like this can also help them make additional connections along the way. What they write might look like a lab report or journal: what they noticed, what questions arose, how their understanding developed as they studied the passage. That shift could preserve the struggle and discovery that foster genuine growth.

I recently read that a Cornell University professor said that he has a hard time prioritizing his long-term interests over his short-term interests, so he doesn’t blame students for using AI. Yet he also said: “I do think that over time, people are going to have to figure out that it’s actually better for them not to use AI in ways that replace practicing hard skills, because that’s the only way you build them.” I agree.

How do we help students value long-term growth over short-term efficiency, even though it involves much more struggle? How do we help them care more about stewarding their skills, and developing such character qualities as patience and perseverance, than about saving time? How do we help students see that the trade-off of saving time ultimately undermines the very goal they’re striving for – to serve God and others well?

Interpreting the Bible and learning to think theologically has little relationship to efficiency. These have to do with our relationship with Scripture and with God. Trying to save time tends not to be what most helps our relationships with other people; why would it be any different with God and the Bible?

Paul told the Galatians he was in the anguish of childbirth until Christ would be formed in them (Gal 4:19). For all of us who train others for Christian ministry, may we not lose heart but keep striving to learn together what genuinely formative theological education should look like in the current era.

I have shared where I am in my process of dealing with AI as a teacher. What has this brought to your mind? 

The blog above was first shared on the faculty blog of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary. https://abtslebanon.org/2025/11/20/ai-in-theological-education-saving-time-but-stifling-growth/

For the quotations above from the Princeton dean and the Cornell professor, see:

https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2025/10/princeton-news-broadfocus-artificial-intelligence-humanities-professors. Accessed Oct 6, 2025. 

https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2025/10/ai-won-t-replace-the-university-what-cornell-professors-have-to-say-about-artificial-intelligence-on-campus. Accessed October 28, 2025.

Posted on by Dustin Ellington

Invitation to Hope: De-Mystifying Eschatology in the New Testament

I’ve always been a future-oriented person. I had thought it was a strength to be able to look ahead, articulate long-term goals, and connect those with my present steps: That is, until I moved to Lebanon. For many living in Lebanon and several other countries in this region, it’s easy to get shaken off balance and frustrated because the future seems so unpredictable and outside our control. It can seem like setting goals involves too many variables. One can get discouraged and wonder if a good future is even possible.

When my wife suggested that, instead of giving up my “future-orientation” in frustration, I apply it to an even longer-term view—such as eternity—it got my attention.

In fact, a light went on for me, as I recalled noticing in the past, and even teaching about, how central eschatology (beliefs about “the last things”) is for the apostle Paul. He returns to it so often that he doesn’t seem to have been able to think about other topics without doing so. Much of this was because, for Paul, Christ’s death and resurrection signaled the end of the old age and the beginning of the new. So, eschatology includes and impacts our present life, in addition to the future.

I have sometimes encountered fellow believers who see Christian teaching about the future as mainly speculative or arcane—mysterious and perhaps understood by only a few. Many see eschatology as something believers easily disagree about, and thus not something that deserves much attention. I have been one of those Christians as well, but I see it rather differently now.

I’ve come to realize that I need to digest a larger measure of biblical affirmations about the future; maybe other believers living in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond do also. The Bible points to a path that can transform our orientation toward what is ahead. Throughout Scripture, we find a truly hopeful and practical theology of the future, which is what I wish to explore in this blog post.

I won’t deal with the whole New Testament in this one post; I’m going to focus on the letters of the New Testament. (Sherri Ellington deals more with sayings from the gospels in a recent blog post about awaiting Christ’s return.) It’s generally acknowledged that the opening section of each New Testament letter, from Romans through Revelation, introduces that letter’s particular vantage point. (I consider Revelation to be one long letter; see Rev 1:4-5; 1:9-11; and 22:21.) Each biblical writer’s introduction gives insight and something of a basis for interpreting the rest of the letter that follows.

So, as an experiment, and to write this blog, I closely read the opening section of each of the New Testament’s 22 letters, to see what they say about the future. I found that the introductory sections of all these letters, except tiny Philemon and 3 John, include an eschatological aspect. (And, though not in his introduction, Paul does eventually offer an eternal perspective in Philemon, as well, in verse 22). I also found that these statements about the future are normally linked with implications for the practical Christian life.

Indeed, much of what strikes me when I come across statements about the future in the New Testament is the great extent to which they are part of the foundation and framework for how we are to understand our lives as Christians. Our present is intertwined with our future.

Paul affirms: “Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil 1:6; see also 1 Cor 1:7-8).

Christ’s death and resurrection begin “the end of the ages” (Heb 9:26) and give us hope for today and tomorrow: “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…” (1 Peter 1:3b).

The New Testament also presents the giving of the Holy Spirit as a present eschatological reality, and thus a source of hope: “In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory” (Eph 1:13-14).

As we read the openings of the New Testament’s letters, we find a sense of security and safety as we face the future. We have an “inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven” for us (1 Peter 1:4; also 2 Tim 1:12). And we ourselves are being “kept for Jesus Christ” (Jude 1; and see verse 24).

These and other statements we find about the future in the New Testament’s letters tend to be general, not highly detailed or difficult to understand, and not particularly controversial. Too often, we believers have been mystified about eschatology, as though it’s a historical blueprint written far in advance, or an enormous, esoteric, and detailed system which only a few can figure out by comparing various biblical passages.

Certainly, we find some statements that are debatable and difficult to understand. Revelation 1:1-3 for instance, says the content of this book of prophecy will happen “soon,” and “the time is near.” And some of Revelation’s images are tough to decipher (though it sometimes interprets its own images, as in 1:20; 12:9; and 17:15, 18).

In contrast, the apostle Paul doesn’t typically use much detail when speaking of end-time events, confessing, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:12). Admittedly, he does go into detail when he responds to concerns and false statements about Christ’s return (1 Thess 3:13-5:2; 2 Thess 2:1-16), and when he responds to those who deny the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor 15:12-28).

We also find complexity when Paul deals with the future of his fellow Jews in Romans 11. Despite the unbelief of most, Paul states: “all Israel will be saved” (11:26), and “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (11:29). However, Paul, like the rest of those who wrote the New Testament’s letters, never shows concern for or makes a clear statement about the future of the land of Israel.

Eschatology’s complicated aspects are more the exception than the norm. Controversy is mostly absent as we study what the New Testament’s letters say about the future. New Testament writers desired believers like us to be at home with eschatology, owning it for our lives, so that it doesn’t feel strange or scary.

Thus, the biblical writers tend to stick with a few key convictions that they repeat over and over in various ways:

  • We believers await the future coming of Jesus Christ, which gives us a measure of accountability (there will be a judgment) but also genuine hope.
  • God will make all things new.
  • We will be with him forever.
  • In the meantime, we also have hope for this present life because we get a taste of the future now, through the power of the resurrection and the Holy Spirit renewing and transforming us in the image of Jesus (Rom 6:4; 2 Cor 3:18).

The New Testament’s statements about the future give us a narrative to live by. We come to own these words when we learn to understand the story of our lives as taking place between Jesus’ resurrection and his coming again. Wherever we are, this gives us an orientation of trust and resilience as we face the future.

From the perspective of the New Testament’s letters, it’s difficult to imagine the Christian life apart from integrating it with convictions and hopes about the future. The future is always in view. By choosing to study passages on the New Testament’s eschatology, and reflecting on them with other believers, we can practice paying attention to them and can digest their affirmations for our lives. Thus, we can learn to be at home with the Bible’s statements about the future, and shift from fear and frustration to confidence and hope.

This blog post originally appeared on the faculty blog of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary: https://abtslebanon.org/2025/01/30/invitation-to-hope-de-mystifying-eschatology-in-the-new-testament/