Epiphany’s primary engagement around artificial intelligence centers on issues of human values and what it means to be human. That’s how Epiphany’s statement on AI begins, and it reflects a theological perspective on a rapidly-evolving technology that grew out of Epiphany’s aphorisms and interpretive frameworks, applied with fresh urgency.
The Royal Priesthood: A Foundation Years in the Making
The conversation began in 2023 with a sermon series that gave the framework its full shape and its lasting vocabulary, with the concept of the Royal Priesthood as its foundation—first preached in 2017 as our cruciform, or cross-shaped, identity: i.e. the sign of the Cross’s horizontal stroke represents our royal obligation to care for creation and one another, while the vertical stroke names our priestly duty to commune with God.
As Doyt put it:
“That is the point of being human; to align our choices, our heart, with God’s unmitigating, constant, and equitable love for all human souls. And so, we must not miss the moment to be people of great courage. To demand that this stunning new technology be used for the benefit of all people. This is our duty. You and I have been chosen by God to be alive right now. God made us to lead as the Royal Priesthood.”
From Pulpit to Practice: The Episcopal Parish Network and the AI Church Summit
A year later, the parish put this call into practice, first, when Doyt took this message out to the wider church at the Episcopal Parish Network conference, and then, when we hosted the very first AI Church Summit on our campus. This conference brought together a cohort of theologians and thought leaders—fifteen each from The Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the ELCA, as well as featuring a keynote by Fr. Paolo Benanti, the AI ethics advisor to Pope Francis—and was the first time such a diverse group of mainline denominations had convened specifically on AI’s ethical, moral, and spiritual implications.
Begotten, Not Built: The Royal Priesthood in the Age of AI
In September 2025, a twelve-week Bible Study called The Royal Priesthood in the Age of AI deepened the conversation that the summit had started. A core concept that emerged was what Doyt called the bright line between humans and any artificial intelligence: humanity is begotten, not built. The Book of Genesis tells us that God forming the first human from dust and breathing divine breath into it—not manufacturing a function, but making a personal investment in one particular life, at one particular time, in the way that Psalm 139 describes God knitting each of us together in the womb. That “begottenness” is what makes the body itself a temple, capable of housing God’s presence, offering itself as a living sacrifice, trained toward holiness through disciplines like fasting, chastity, and mercy.
AI is incapable of any of that. It has no body. It is neither dust, nor breath. It is assembled, programmed, optimized, and so, it cannot be reconciled to God or to a neighbor, cannot extend mercy, cannot see a soul rather than a data point, because it operates by design on exactly the transactional logic the spiritual exercises allow us to transcend. However convincingly AI learns to simulate us, it remains built rather than begotten—a tool rather than a temple, an assignment rather than a calling. This is a difference that makes a difference, and, when applied to how we approach this tool, has practical applications as well. Some of these applications have been worked out in Sunday Forums led by guests or members of the parish.
Sunday Forum Speakers on AI
The Rev. Dr. Andy Morgan talked about faith-informed AI ethics; a few months later, Jon Roberts brought C. S. Lewis into the conversation, thinking through this convergence of disruptive change with an already fractured society. Jon weighed AI’s real promise (education, scientific discovery) against its real danger (economic upheaval, eroding critical thinking, machines acting beyond human understanding), and critiqued secular writing about AI for correctly diagnosing the crisis of human identity while offering very little ground for what makes us human. As AI commoditizes intelligence itself, Jon concluded that it is the heart, not the mind, that shapes our humanity, with the Church being designed perfectly as the place for heart-formation.
AI Demystified from the Inside
Most recently, Jim Marlow—a longtime software industry professional and AI practitioner who now serves as the parish’s own AI consultant—presented “AI Demystified from the Inside,” a forum that cut through both the hype and the fear in favor of clear thinking, ethical discernment, and practical understanding. Jim framed his talk as deliberately non-theological and non-apocalyptic: he explicitly set aside Artificial General Intelligence, consciousness, “does AI have a soul,” and end-of-humanity scenarios to focus on what AI actually is and how it can actually be used.
His main demystifying move was technical: AI is just a statistical engine predicting the next most likely word based on patterns in its training data—nothing magical, and with no actual understanding underneath, which was why chatbots sound so confident even when they are wrong. From there, he walked us through where AI is already embedded in daily and professional life, using illustrations from his own coding, brainstorming, writing, and research practices.
Jim was equally direct about the real issues with AI: hallucinations, bias, garbage training data, massive power and water consumption, junior professionals losing the entry-level work they need to develop expertise, algorithmic manipulation, and business models built on harvesting attention and data. And he offered a practical framework for using it responsibly: ask what it’s doing, where it can be wrong, who benefits and who’s harmed, and what judgment still belonged to the user. In this way, Jim translated Epiphany’s theological perspective on AI into a practical ethic: tools don’t remove moral responsibility or human discernment, they intensify it.
The Takeaway
As Epiphany’s staff begins to more intentionally engage with AI in parish ministry, the biggest takeaway that sums up Epiphany’s applied theology is this: AI may supply insights by extending our capacities to absorb vast sets of data and navigate complex webs of relation, but it can never provide wisdom. That remains the Royal Priesthood’s vocation as cross-shaped soul sensates stamped with the Image of God.
Curious for more? Visit epiphanyseattle.org/ai for Epiphany’s full statement on AI.
You can also read the proceedings from the August 2024 AI Church Summit in the AI & the Church Summit Journal at trytank.org/aigathering.html.