Is AI Useful For Bible Study? – Proclamation! Online Magazine

DEB PRATT | Life Assurance Ministries’ Online Moderator |

This article began forming in my mind when a friend sent me a YouTube video short by The Biblical Roots YouTuber Dr. R. L. Solberg, an apologist who teaches generally on the truth in Scripture versus the Hebrew Roots movement and others such as Seventh-day Adventism. His focus is on groups that “claim biblical authority but deviate from core Christian doctrine.”¹ My friend had been chatting with me about an Adventist friend of hers who uses ChatGPT to do Bible study, and my friend shared GotQuestions.org with her as a different option offering human/non-AI (so far as I know) research answers to biblical content questions. The friend indicated a preference for the ChatGPT method, nevertheless.

Dr. Solberg and a guest, whose name and affiliation I could not find in the show notes (probably a Logos sales rep), were lauding the benefits of using Logos, a well-known Bible software, and its new elements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) components included. The Logos company periodically creates sales commercials using well-known Bible teachers to generate sales. They tend to rave about the strengths of the program but in my experience are not very transparent about costs and “curated book sets.”

[Well-known Bible teachers] tend to rave about the strengths of the program but in my experience are not very transparent about costs and “curated book sets.”

So, I decided to do a bit of background research on the Logos company first, which proved to be eye-opening. (Note: I use Logos, having downloaded a free version about ten years ago, which really was free at the time. Mine is not a subscription, and I only have the books I have specifically chosen, in addition to a dozen or so books, most of them not very useful to me, that came with the free version. I use it for comparing Bible versions, referencing, and note-taking, which are very basic functions compared to how a Bible professor or pastor might use it. Also, the “free” version now is not what it was when I got it.)

Non-Christians Producing Christian Study Tools

Andrew Case, John Here, and Conley Owens publish a website named “Selling Jesus” at sellingjesus.org. Their primary focus is fighting against the commercialization of Scripture. According to John Here, many purchase Logos software thinking it is owned by Christians because it has a Greek name and presents its parent company as Faithlife. Apparently, though, Logos is not.

Here states that Logos and Faithlife were sold in 2021 to a secular private equity firm called Cove Hill Partners, despite Logos’ selling Christian products, employing some Christian staff, and stating a mission of equipping the church. However, all profits from the sale of Logos products go to secular investors (who may or may not be Christian).

According to Here, the most recent (as of 12/10/25) three job postings for Logos mention nothing about anything Christian-related such as church attendance, faith, or Christian values. Being a Christian is not required for employment. Along with this, the company does not claim to be Christian, nor does it commit to practicing Christian values. Former employees noted that there were no prayers at meetings, no emphasis on the Gospel mission, and rare conversations about faith. As the company does not present a Christian identity, their mission of equipping the Church is a business strategy rather than a faith strategy; Bob Pritchett, an original founder of Logos, clearly notes it as a business strategy.

Logos was originally started by two Christians who worked at Microsoft. Pritchett became Logos’ CEO and later wrote about business success strategies he practiced at Logos. He explains some of these in his book Fire Someone Today: And Other Surprising Tactics for Making Your Business a Success, and he has a chapter labeled “Profit Is Why You Are in Business.” He originally held mission as a priority, but he began reprioritizing the business as first profit and then mission, after some difficult financial issues arose. His definition of business success is profit, even if mission suffers as a result. His book lacks any Christian content and assumes readers will value its pragmatism instead.

Current and former Faithlife staff have presented concerns over what is seen as profiteering and common marketing tactics such as their “free” version. On the company review website, one person noted, “The dollar is the top line, the bottom line, and everything in between.” Other reviewers note that the business encourages salespeople to use deceptive marketing techniques to “sell up,” to encourage purchasers to buy products they do not need or will not use. I have personally seen this in the marketing for “specially curated book sets” which may have one or two books I will use but twelve I will not. Their definition of what I want is very different from my own. One can purchase curated sets through Logos based on any denomination as well as cult “churches,” including Seventh-day Adventist!

Here also notes that fundamental problems in Christian publishing in general are major reasons for the profit-geared nature of many Christian products and companies.

Here also notes that fundamental problems in Christian publishing in general are major reasons for the profit-geared nature of many Christian products and companies. He notes that Bible publishers insist on royalty payments (not just cost of production) for selling God’s Word—in direct opposition to 2 Corinthians 2:17: “For we are not like many, peddling the word of God, but as from sincerity, but as from God, we speak in Christ in the sight of God.” Here states, “In fact, if it weren’t for Bible publishers insisting on royalty payments, the creators of Logos would have published the original version as shareware.”

Acts 8:18-24 tells about Simon the Sorcerer, who was accustomed to the praise of people who marveled over his magic. After hearing the gospel from Philip, many in Samaria were believing and being baptized. Simon himself believed, and after being baptized, followed Philip, and was repeatedly amazed by the miracles and signs he witnessed. Peter and John came and began laying hands on new believers to receive the Holy Spirit, so:

“When Simon saw that the Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money, saying, ‘Give this authority to me as well, so that everyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’

But Peter said to him, ‘May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could acquire the gift of God with money! You have no part or share in this matter, for your heart is not right before God. Therefore, repent of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intention of your heart will be forgiven you. For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bondage of unrighteousness.’ But Simon answered and said, ‘Pray to the Lord for me yourselves, so that nothing of what you have said may come upon me.’”—Acts 8:18–24

Jesus also speaks to this in Matthew 10:5-15, when He sends His disciples out initially only to the Jewish towns. He tells them specifically in verse 8, “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give.” But Jesus also addresses righteous payment in verse 10, “Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts, or a bag for your journey, or even two coats, or sandals, or a staff; for the worker is worthy of his support.”

Discovering that Logos, and other Bible software companies and publishers, are in fact not Christian but are profit-first ventures that cave on doctrine and content (there are some notable exceptions such as the Literal Word app and Blue Letter Bible) dismayed me and put me more on guard than I was before (because of sketchy sales tactics), especially because these for-profit Bible software companies are now pushing AI elements in their software.

AI For Bible Study?

The video by Dr. Solberg and guest uses a sneaky tactic by advising Bible students to stop using public AI and use Logos AI. Now, given that Logos is a secular business, there is a logical problem here. How much do I trust a secular business to tell me what is important, and how much control do I have over the content on my Logos bookshelf? If I cannot pick and choose, do I want to use a Logos AI that will pull from untrustworthy source material? Will I do due diligence and examine all the sources to be sure they are reliable? Is the secular Logos company AI any different in reality from “public AI”?

Wesley Huff, a Canadian apologist and ancient Biblical manuscripts expert, did one of these Logos commercials about ten months ago. I was initially disappointed, but fortunately, he also did a short video afterward explaining how he would use it, AI and all.² Despite my distrust of the Logos organization, I found Huff’s comments helpful because he clearly emphasized the individual responsibility each of us has to examine all the sources supplied in the AI responses to determine their trustworthiness, comparing them to Scripture.

Huff commented about ChatGPT searching the whole internet, regardless of sources, and while a searcher can specify some parameters (like mining just from Ellen White’s writings), that still does not guarantee results that are Biblically supportable. AI will “happily” confirm someone’s bias if prepped to do so. The integrity of the search process using AI heavily depends on the study integrity of the user.

As a test, I did a single Google search asking, “What proportion of US citizens is biblically literate?” Seven sources (only seven) were summarized. Five of the seven acknowledged recent surveys citing widespread Bible illiteracy, while one cited a resurgence of Bible reading in Gen Z and Millennials, and one source stated that nearly half of all Americans read their Bibles. (Wonder how often, and how many of those are The Passion Translation (TP)?)

Interestingly, a Barna survey³ noted that they found that belief is not equivalent to practice and vice-versa. The AI summary combined the Barna research with research from a site called Small Groups;⁴ when I examined each resource separately, I noted that the Barna research found that 42% of the population is reading the Bible weekly; Google’s result cited Smallgroups.com in stating that “actual comprehension, doctrinal accuracy, and comprehensive scripture retention remain historically anemic across the country.”

In a Google search now, its sources for its summary are listed on the right side of the page. Further gathered resources are provided below the summary and look like the old Google search results. In this very small example of an AI process, each resource provided much more in-depth information and specific perspectives than the resource summary. There was one resource I did not trust because of its historical and doctrinal underpinnings, so I needed to understand what part of the summary that resource contributed. I would have blindly accepted that information if I had not examined the sources more closely. This would absolutely happen if someone trustingly purchased a “curated” collection of electronic materials from which Logos AI compiled search results, if that someone does not do the follow-up comparison against Scripture, thoroughly.

So, what did students of the Bible (students, not casual spot-readers or verse cherry-pickers) do in all the centuries since the printing press and before the internet, word processors, search engines, and now, AI? When I began to do serious Bible study before the eruption of AI, not just a morning devotion with one line of Scripture, I invested in some specific Bibles, reference tools, and Christian classic books to develop a solid anchoring in God’s Word, not what everyone else thought it said:

Two or three solid Bible translations with cross-references and basic notes; one of these was a Thompson Chain Reference Bible (very helpful in my early study life, now in several good translations!!)
A well-respected Bible dictionary
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance
A well-respected Bible encyclopedia
A book of Bible maps (in addition to what was included in my Bibles)
A well-respected Bible history book
A good Bible atlas
Access to a resource for Biblical Archaeology such as Bible Archaeology Report (BAR) website: https://biblearchaeologyreport.com/about/ and Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) https://biblearchaeology.org/
Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
Knowing God by J. I. Packer
The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer
The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer
The Sovereignty of God by Arthur W. Pink
The Attributes of God by Arthur W. Pink
I avoided study Bibles and commentaries until I recognized and understood the perspectives they came with; I’ve found this most noticeable because study Bibles typically present favored perspectives on eschatology and other secondary issues. For example, a confessional Lutheran study Bible will generally follow an amillennial approach to end-times theology, while a John MacArthur study Bible will generally follow a pre-millennial approach. These differences often extend into positions on baptism and the Lord’s Supper. If you are young in Bible study and you directly run to study Bible notes or commentaries, you rob yourself of the depth of understanding reached only by chewing on a text, its context, cross-references, and clarity from the Holy Spirit. A Bible study ministry called Precept Ministries provides in-depth study manuals with questions designed to take the student more deeply into sections of Scripture and advises students to wait until they have done all the homework before they run to a commentary.
Last but not least, I practice extra discernment with social media; YouTube is not a not-for-profit venture. Content creators have to spend money to put their content out there, yet there is a huge difference between those who make money on clicks, ads, controversy, and high visibility versus voluntary support to continue a ministry grounded in biblical truth.

In addition to good Bibles, reference tools, and maps, Bible study needs to be undertaken with the historical, grammatical hermeneutic that consistently applies to the text as normal literature, read in context. If one uses AI or ChatGPT for Bible study, there are many parameters that need to be set in order to be able to trust the results. And still, one needs to examine the sources for the summary has used to be sure errors have not crept in. Way back in the beginning of the easily accessed computer age, programming teachers used to say, “Garbage in, garbage out.” It is no less true with using AI as a study tool.

While I do make use of some electronic copies of my study tools because of the ability to mark text, make notes, and quickly access cross-references, I am grateful I grew up learning to study the Bible without the shortcuts and potential misdirection of AI. For me, all the double checking and sifting time I would have to put in with the results of an AI search far exceeds the time I would invest with simple resources such as those listed above.

No Shortcuts

One last thing—there is no shortcut to the kind of study that helps us deeply absorb the truths of God’s word. As a teacher, I learned critical differences between the kind of study that resulted in long-term retention and the kind of study that stores what we are trying to learn in short-term memory, only to drain away within hours. In many ways, our education system encourages the latter rather than the former. In order to retain and build on what we are trying to learn, repetition, making connections across books, chapters, and verses, and using the cross-references and text notes all help us remember the truths we are learning. The Holy Spirit does not function as a magician. This repetition and transfer to long-term memory is what helps someone even with dementia remember God’s words, in memorized verses or doctrinally rich hymns.

Tim Challies writes,

“The fact is, we are forgetful people and often need not just to learn what we believe but to re-learn it. There are exams we might pass at one stage in life but fail in another, not because our doctrine has changed or because we have apostatized, but because we have become forgetful. It’s not that we are ever likely to forget the fundamental doctrines of the faith like the inspiration of Scripture or the divinity of Jesus, but we can certainly grow hazy on some of the lesser matters and waver on some of the secondary issues.”⁵

Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533-1556 and a martyr in the Church of England, wrote in the 16^th century, “Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Deb Pratt

Non-Christians Producing Christian Study Tools

AI For Bible Study?

No Shortcuts

Endnotes

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