Chao, David C. “Artificial Theological Intelligence: Doctrinal Adequacy, Contextual Disambiguation, and Catholicity.” Modern Theology, 2 Mar. 2026, https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.70076.

Abstract

This essay develops a social-practical account of Christian doctrine: theology is adequate when, under Scripture’s authority and the Spirit’s work, ecclesial speech proves semantically and pragmatically fitting, pastorally fruitful, and doctrinally answerable. Contemporary theology needs disciplined disambiguation more than doctrinal differentiation, since shared confessional sentences and infrastructures can be deployed toward divergent, even harmful, ends across racialized and global contexts. Against a Christendom reflex for doctrinal differentiation, the essay proposes artificial theological intelligence, a Spirit-formed competence for contextual discernment, catholic learning, and answerable judgment. Recent multilingual large language model AI research serves as a heuristic. Two Korean American case studies test the proposal.

Introduction

On paper, the two congregations were difficult to distinguish.¹Riverdale Community Church and New Life Chinese Church both described themselves as Bible-believing communities and affirmed the same doctrinal statement drawn from a prominent evangelical network: the necessity of personal conversion, the authority of Scripture, the centrality of the cross, and the urgency of mission.² Their pastors moved within overlapping professional circuits, attended some of the same conferences, cited the same authors, and led worship with a shared repertoire of songs. Judged by overlapping confessional content and by the shared institutional networks that authorized that content, they appeared to inhabit a common ecclesial and confessional world. That appearance did not always survive disruption by racial difference.

On the Sunday following a national election, the shared confessional and network surface gave way to sharply different forms of theological enactment. At Riverdale, a predominantly White suburban congregation, the senior pastor opened worship by thanking God for a leader who would restore Christian values. The prayer that followed named concerns about illegal immigration, law and order at the borders, and resistance to Marxist ideologies in public education—each met with audible affirmation from the congregation. In this setting, the invocation of the “sovereignty of God” over the nations functioned less as a confession of divine transcendence than as reassurance to a community unsettled by the erosion of its cultural dominance. The declaration that “Jesus is Lord” acquired a distinctly national inflection, carrying with it the hope that a familiar moral and political order might yet be secured.

Ten miles away, at New Life Chinese Church, the doctrine of divine sovereignty inhabited a markedly different social and pastoral register. This congregation gathered in Chinese and English to pray for aging grandparents who hesitated to take public transportation after a week marked by anti-Asian harassment. Members spoke of being told to go back to China, of children taunted at school as “the virus,” and of small businesses defaced with racial slurs. When the pastor proclaimed that “our citizenship is in heaven” and that “Jesus is Lord,” these affirmations were not received as assurances to a community anxious about the loss of cultural authority. They functioned instead as words of consolation and moral grounding for a racialized minority whose presence within the nation was experienced as contingent and exposed. Shared biblical themes of exile, pilgrimage, and holiness oriented this congregation toward endurance, vigilance, and the pursuit of safety and dignity under conditions of threat.

Viewed through the dominant classificatory lenses employed in much US public discourse and survey-based analysis, these differences readily recede from view.³

An external observer using standard category labels would likely identify both congregations as evangelical. They affirm familiar markers, uphold some overlapping moral values, practice evangelism, and support mission. Instruments designed to sort communities by doctrinal identifiers and network affiliations would place them within the same social group and proceed to correlate that shared profile with familiar patterns of socio-political behavior. From this vantage point, Chinese Christians at New Life risk being rendered an ethnic subpopulation within a larger evangelical aggregate—their experiences treated as an inflection within a presumed norm.

From the vantage point of Chinese American believers who quietly leave congregations like Riverdale for churches such as New Life, doctrinal sameness cannot bear the weight of identity claims and instead functions as a site of disambiguation. They do not abandon their doctrinal commitments; those convictions travel with them. What they leave behind are social worlds in which those commitments are routinely enlisted in the service of ends they no longer recognize as consonant with the gospel. This movement is neither a theological conversion from evangelical to mainline Christianity nor merely a matter of cultural comfort or ethnic preference. It is better understood (implicitly or explicitly) as practical judgment about doctrinal use. The same confessional language is taken up within different racial formations, functioning in one context to stabilize grievance and partisan moral imaginaries and in another to sustain immigrant families navigating xenophobia and economic precarity. The propositions remain unchanged. What shifts are the inferential pathways and social practices through which those propositions acquire normative force.⁴

These vignettes bring into focus the problem that animates this essay, and they do so by reversing a familiar ecumenical anxiety about church-dividing doctrinal difference: Christians can confess identical doctrines while inhabiting markedly different theological worlds. Shared propositional content can be mobilized toward divergent ends and can authorize distinct—even conflicting—forms of power, depending on the racialized and global circumstances of its enactment.⁵When Riverdale and New Life are subsumed under a single Christian identity label, or when doctrinal similarity is presumed to account for social and political convergence, doctrine’s operative life is obscured rather than clarified. Such descriptions confuse verbal agreement with inferential alignment and allow racially dominant patterns of life to set the horizon within which doctrinal meaning is presumed.⁶

Yet the predicament here is not adequately described by the familiar ecumenical worry that doctrinal difference divides the church. Much modern theology, because, in part, it inherits a Christendom imagination in which Christian belonging was organized through confessional differentiation, is trained to treat doctrine as an identity marker where a basic problem is disagreement across traditions.⁷

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Read the complete article at https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.70076.

Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash

1. The opening vignettes are composite constructions rather than portraits of particular congregations. While fictive in form, they are empirically grounded, drawing on recurring patterns observed through participant observation, oral history interviews, and sustained conversations with faith leaders through the research of the Center for Asian American Christianity (Princeton Theological Seminary) from 2019–2025. They function as aggregate representations meant to illuminate how shared confessional language and networked affiliations can underwrite divergent social uses of doctrine under conditions shaped by migration, political economy, and intergenerational family life.
2. David W. Bebbington famously defines evangelicalism by four characteristic emphases: conversionism (the necessity of personal transformation), biblicism (a high regard for the authority of Scripture), crucicentrism (the centrality of Christ’s atoning work on the cross), and activism (the expression of faith in evangelism and social engagement). David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1989), 2–3; repr., 2005.
3. For a representative example of how dominant classificatory frameworks constrain what can be described in survey-based analysis, see the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, which renders racial and ethnic difference legible only after sorting respondents into inherited Christendom categories such as Protestant and Catholic, and, within Protestantism, Evangelical and Mainline. Asian American Christians thus appear primarily as derivatives of these taxonomies, with intra-Asian, transnational, and intergenerational differences treated as analytically secondary. Pew Research Center, Age, Race, Education, and Other Demographic Traits of U.S. Religious Groups, Religious Landscape Study (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, February 26, 2025), https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/age-race-education-and-other-demographic-traits-of-us-religious-groups/.
4. By “social-practical” I mean an account of meaning and normativity that locates doctrine within learned, public, and coordinated patterns of action through which communities authorize reasons for belief and practice. On social practices as structured yet revisable forms of collective activity, see Sally Haslanger, “Practical Reason and Social Practices,” in The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason, ed. Ruth Chang and Kurt Sylvan (London: Routledge, 2020), 74–75. I extend this account theologically by arguing that Christian doctrine functions as a socially mediated grammar whose authority and intelligibility emerge through ecclesial practices of recognition rather than context-free propositional correspondence.
5. Jonathan Tran argues that the meaning and authority of theological utterances are not secured by shared propositional content abstracted from practice, but by the concrete “use” of words within particular communities and the broader social, political, and embodied agreements that render those uses intelligible and forceful. His opening catalogue of the idiom “This is my body” across contexts including race, gendered embodiment, abortion advocacy, and the Eucharist thereby illuminates how identical Christian formulations can be inhabited within markedly different moral and theological worlds and mobilized toward divergent (even coercive) ends; on this account, Eucharistic disputes cannot be resolved simply by recovering a single, context-free intention in the words of institution, since competing sacramental grammars attached to the same idiom can “break fellowship between Catholic and Protestant Christians.” Jonathan Tran, “Linguistic Theology: Completing Postliberalism’s Linguistic Task,” Modern Theology 33, no. 1 (January 2017): 48–55.
6. Ross Kane shows how “syncretism” (cultural mixture) functions in modern missionary and theological discourse as a racialized diagnostic applied primarily to Christianity beyond Europe and North America, thereby shielding Western Christianity from scrutiny. As a result, cultural mixture is misrecognized as deviation elsewhere, while white Christianity’s own racial-ethnic particularity passes as the gospel itself. See Ross Kane, Syncretism and Christian Tradition: Race and Revelation in the Study of Religious Mixture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 52–54.
7. Modern ecumenical theology often treats doctrinal differentiation as a basic problem because it inherits a Christendom imagination in which Christian identity was organized through confessional division within Anglo-European societies. As I argue elsewhere, the Protestant Reformation inaugurated a framework in which competing confessional systems claimed catholicity while also functioning as markers of regional political and cultural belonging, rendering doctrinal disagreement a principal organizer of Christian identity within state-sponsored ethnic churches. See David C. Chao, “The 1517 Project and World Christianity: Migration and the Uses of Doctrine,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 48, no. 3 (2024): 400–418. Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine operates within this ecumenical horizon by framing doctrine around historically church-dividing disputes between Catholic and Reformation traditions. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 25th anniversary ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 1, 127–28. In many Asian and majority-world contexts, by contrast, Christianity develops under conditions of minority status and religious pluralism, where Christian doctrine functions less to differentiate confessional identities than to sustain communal belonging and moral and familial formation.