The seventh session of Doyt’s 12-part Bible study on AI and human identity tackled one of Christianity’s most misunderstood concepts: sin. Rather than viewing sin as primarily shame, judgment, or moral failure, this session revealed sin as an inevitable consequence of love and freedom—and surprisingly, as the foundation of human morality and justice. Three profound insights emerged about what sin is, why God sanctions it, and how it forms us.
Sin as Mistrust, Knowledge Apart, and Distorted Desire
The Genesis 3 story introduces sin not as evil but as something subtler and more foundational. The serpent doesn’t offer wickedness—it offers doubt about God’s trustworthiness. “Did God really say…?” becomes “God is withholding something good from you.” Three elements emerge:
Mistrust: The serpent creates a barrier between humanity and God by suggesting God can’t be fully trusted, that God is keeping something desirable away from us. This introduces the possibility that God doesn’t have our best interests at heart—that we might get “ripped off” if we trust God completely.
Knowledge Apart from Relationship: Before this moment, “all knowledge was in relationship to God.” The serpent introduces something revolutionary: a piece of information that exists independently, has value on its own, disconnected from relationship with God. This “schism between God and knowledge” has enormous implications. Where do we see knowledge pursued apart from relationship today? The internet, artificial intelligence, and historically, scientific reductionism that tries to divide things “down, down, down” to find essence apart from context or relationship.
Distorted Desire: Desire itself isn’t the problem—desire reordered is. Now desire points toward independent knowledge as more valuable than relationship with God. The tree becomes “good for food, a delight to the eyes, desired to make one wise”—all good things, but pursued ahead of communion with God.
This matters because sin isn’t primarily about shame-worthy actions. Sin is “loving your dog more than loving God, loving your spouse more than God.” It’s putting anything—even good things—before God. “Your farm before God, your study life before God, whatever it is.” Sin can involve genuinely good loves simply ordered wrongly.
When “sin equals shame, it is a human construct” used for social control. That’s “garbage sin, power sin”—people setting boundaries to control others. God’s sin works differently: it’s about relationship order, not shame hierarchies. This distinction is crucial for avoiding manipulation and understanding what God actually cares about.
Why God Sanctions Sin: The Necessity of Freedom
Here’s the startling claim: Sin was inevitable, and God wanted it that way. Why would God allow sin? Because sin is inextricably attached to freedom, and freedom is inextricably attached to love.
“If you don’t have choice, you don’t have love. If you don’t have choice, [freedom and sin] are necessary. So sin was inevitable because love is the foundation.” God created beings capable of love, which requires freedom to choose. Freedom necessarily includes the capacity to choose wrongly—to sin. You cannot have one without the other.
This leads to a remarkable theological insight: God is not free to be anything other than merciful. “God has no choice” because God’s nature is love, and love requires mercy. God is “not free” in the sense that God cannot act contrary to divine nature. This isn’t weakness—it’s the strength of absolute consistency.
Psalm 51 begins: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving kindness.” The question becomes: what are the boundaries of God’s loving kindness? The answer: boundless. “It’s incomprehensible to define. You can’t push beyond the boundaries of God’s love.”
Think of it this way: “Everything that is created is love. It’s like we’re swimming in water.” We exist within infinite divine love. “From time to time, some of us choose to put on scuba gear or step into a submarine” and separate ourselves. But we can’t escape the water—we can only isolate ourselves temporarily within it. Barbara’s definition became the session’s touchstone: “Sin is climbing into the submarine and thinking you’re liberated.”
This means when we repent (Greek: metanoia, “getting your screen turned”), what happens? God’s mercy “slips in” every single time because God must be merciful. We can draw boundaries around ourselves, but we cannot draw boundaries around God’s loving kindness. The good news for sinners (everyone): we have a merciful God despite ourselves.
The Moral Arc: Sin, Repentance, and the Path to Justice
If sin is inevitable and repentance is always available through God’s mercy, this creates a pattern: sin and repentance living on the same moral axis form the foundation of human morality. This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.
The cycle looks like this: We sin (climbing into the submarine, putting something before God). We repent (reorienting toward God). We sin again. We repent again. This creates “ups and downs” in moral life. The hope isn’t elimination of sin but that “those ups and downs are more like this” (an ascending pattern over time).
This is the moral arc Martin Luther King Jr. talked about—the arc bending toward justice. But here’s the twist: “The arc of justice doesn’t move us toward judgment. It moves us toward love.” And love must tie to mercy.
Follow the logic:
- Sin and repentance cycles move us toward love
- Love requires mercy
- Mercy creates restoration rather than retribution
- Restoration produces a just society
Therefore: “It’s not the pursuit of justice that gets us to a just society. It is the pursuit of mercy that gets us to a just society.” Justice emerges as the byproduct of mercy, not the other way around.
This operates as a kingdom of God operating principle—as foundational as gravity, “truer than photosynthesis” because it remains true across all of God’s creation. Even if we met Martians, “we might not be able to communicate with them through math, we might not be able to communicate with them through science, but we will be able to communicate with them through the operating principles of the kingdom of God. Things like mercy.”
When individuals practice the sin-repentance-love-mercy cycle together, communally, we create just societies. “If we do it individually together, then we get a just society.” This is Christianity’s profound social insight: mercy-based communities produce justice naturally.
Daily prayer matters not because it makes us perfect but because it’s “a momentary reorientation toward God. Even if you’re not all in God, even if you’re not loving God… you’re setting aside a bit of reorientation time.” Going to church serves the same function—intentional action of reorientation that keeps us in the cycle rather than stuck in the submarine.
Why This Matters for AI
Sin’s formative power reveals yet another unbridgeable gap between humans and artificial intelligence:
AI cannot sin because sin requires freedom, relationship, and the capacity for love. AI can be programmed to violate rules or produce harmful outputs, but it cannot “climb into the submarine” of mistrust, choose knowledge apart from relationship, or experience distorted desire. It has no desires to distort, no relationships to disorder, no love to misplace.
AI cannot repent because repentance requires recognizing broken relationship with God and choosing reorientation. Repentance is the “getting your screen turned” that AI cannot experience—it has no screen of will and desire to turn.
AI cannot participate in the moral arc that creates justice through mercy. It can process data about justice, implement rules about fairness, but it cannot experience the sin-repentance cycle that forms moral beings. It cannot grow toward love or extend mercy from experienced grace.
AI cannot be sanctified. The word “sanctified” appears in the closing prayer: the revelation of God’s kingdom happens through beings who sin, repent, and grow toward love. This transformation from moral struggle toward merciful justice is uniquely human—or more precisely, uniquely creaturely in relationship with the Creator.
When AI makes decisions affecting human lives, it operates without the moral formation that comes from knowing you’ve been wrong, experiencing mercy, and extending that mercy to others. It cannot understand that “when you beat a dog, it bites; when you bully a person, they become a bully”—the relational wisdom that comes from being on both sides of sin and mercy.
Understanding sin theologically—not as shameful failure but as the inevitable consequence of freedom and love, the foundation of morality, and the path (through repentance and mercy) to justice—helps us recognize what’s missing in artificial systems. They might simulate moral reasoning, but they cannot experience moral formation. They might calculate fair outcomes, but they cannot extend mercy. They might process justice algorithms, but they cannot participate in the kingdom of God operating principle that creates truly just communities.
As we continue exploring human identity in the age of AI, sin’s formative power reminds us: imperfection processed through relationship, repentance, and mercy creates something AI never can—moral beings growing toward love, individually and communally creating justice through the practice of divine mercy.