A Theological Framework for the Use of Artificial Intelligence

Discussed with faculty at Concordia Academy – Wichita, 2026

Preface

This framework exists to give the faculty of Concordia Academy – Wichita a common mind, rooted in Scripture and in the tradition of classical learning, for judging when the use of artificial intelligence serves the formation of our students and when it does not. It is not a technology policy first and a theology second. It is the reverse: a theology of tools, of the curse, and of the inner man, out of which particular judgments about particular assignments follow. Faculty should read Part One before consulting Part Three, since the specific rulings in Part Three are worth nothing to a teacher who has not first understood why they were made.

Part One: Theological Foundations

I. The Tool and the Curse

Since the sons of Cain began making tools, since the earth turned against man after the fall, tools have belonged to the vocation of man in his making of his bread. It was Cain’s line, not Seth’s, that first hammered bronze and iron, that first plucked the lyre and pipe (Genesis 4:20–22), even as it was Seth’s line that first called upon the name of the LORD (Genesis 4:26). Craft and cultus have run alongside one another from the beginning, and the church has never been permitted the luxury of separating them cleanly. The ground was cursed for Adam’s sake; only by the sweat of his face would he eat bread, and thorns and thistles would contest every furrow (Genesis 3:17–19). The tool, then, is not an innocent invention standing outside the fall, admired from a neutral distance. It is itself a child of the curse, an instrument raised by fallen hands against a hostile ground, useful precisely because the ground fights back.

This is the first thing to say about artificial intelligence: it is not a new kind of thing in the world, exempt from the categories that governed the plow, the printing press, and the pocket calculator. It is one more tool raised against a cursed ground, this time against the ground of ignorance, tedium, and the labor of thought itself. Like every tool before it, it eases a burden that the fall imposed. And like every such easing, it must be received with the same discernment that Israel was asked to bring to Canaan’s plenty: “when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:11–12).

II. The Constancy of Human Nature

Time will change, but human nature does not, and is indeed known fully only by God. “O LORD, you have searched me and known me… you discern my thoughts from afar” (Psalm 139:1–2). The boy who used a wax tablet in Quintilian’s Rome and the boy who opens a laptop in Wichita share the same fallen, image-bearing nature; the same capacity for diligence and for sloth; the same temptation to let the tool do the work that the soul was meant to do. We should therefore resist two errors that AI tempts us toward in equal measure: the alarmist error, which treats this tool as an unprecedented threat to human nature itself, as though nature could be altered by an instrument; and the credulous error, which treats it as an unprecedented aid to human flourishing, as though this tool, unlike every other, might finally spare us the discipline that virtue has always required. Neither is true. Only the LORD knows fully what is in man (John 2:24–25), and it is to His Word, not to the pace of technological change, that we look for an unchanging account of what a student is and what a student is for.

III. False Gods in the Garment of Ease

Every new blessing of ease comes wrapped in the framework of the curse, and this means we are constantly in danger of erecting false gods, false hopes, and false reliances out of the very things given to relieve our labor. Israel’s manna could not be hoarded against tomorrow’s trust in the LORD (Exodus 16:19–20); Israel’s kings were warned not to multiply horses for themselves, lest they trust in Egypt’s cavalry rather than in the LORD their God (Deuteronomy 17:16). “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the LORD” (Jeremiah 17:5). He who relies on the arm of flesh (2 Chronicles 32:8) is not looking to the hills from which his help truly comes (Psalm 121:1–2). Artificial intelligence, precisely because it is fast, fluent, and tireless, is fertile ground for exactly this kind of misplaced reliance — not idolatry in the crude sense of bowing before a machine, but the subtler idolatry of trusting an instrument to do for the soul what only discipline, grace, and the ordinary means of grace can do. A student who outsources his thinking to a tireless servant has not sinned by using a tool; he has sinned, if he has sinned, by preferring the ease of the servant to the labor that was forming him.

IV. AI and the Progress of the Logos

Let us understand AI as the latest iteration of a long progress in how the Logos — the reasoned, spoken, and now generated word — is mediated to us, of which books themselves are a predecessor. Speech gave way to writing; writing to the copied manuscript; the manuscript to the printed page; the printed page now to the generated text. Plato has Socrates warn, in the Phaedrus, that writing itself is a pharmakon — a remedy that is also a poison — because it offers the appearance of wisdom without its substance, and because it will “introduce forgetfulness into the soul” of those who cease to exercise their own memory, relying instead on external marks. The church did not, on this account, forbid writing; she inherited it, sanctified it, and copied the Scriptures onto it with reverence. But Socrates’ warning was not wrong for being about a technology that Christians came to bless. Each new stage of this progress has genuinely helped us come into contact with truth — more people can read the text of Scripture today than could hear it read aloud in any single generation before Gutenberg — and each new stage has also made it easier to possess the truth outwardly, in a device or a database, without keeping the Word in our hearts, “that you may not sin against me” (Psalm 119:11). AI inherits both halves of this legacy at once. It can put a student in contact with more truth, more quickly, than any tool before it. It can also, more efficiently than any tool before it, let a student pass an assignment without the Word — or the argument, or the text — ever having entered his heart at all.

V. The Inner Man, Not Knowledge for Show

Let us therefore look to the inner man and his improvement, and not to knowledge held merely for show, to impress other men. “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1). Our Lord warned against practicing righteousness “before other people in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1), and this warning extends without difficulty to learning practiced merely to be seen as learned. A polished paragraph that a student did not compose, a proof he did not work, a speech he did not truly deliver from a mind he had stocked himself — these may satisfy a rubric and impress a reader, but they do not renew the inner man, and Concordia Academy – Wichita does not exist to produce students who appear learned. It exists to produce students who are being formed — in virtue, in wisdom, and above all in the fear of the LORD, which is the beginning of both (Proverbs 9:10). Every judgment in Part Three of this document follows from that single distinction: does this use of AI serve the formation of the inner man, or does it merely furnish an outer man for display?

Part Two: Definitions

The classical rhetorical tradition — Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and the Christian schoolmasters who received them — gives us the categories by which to judge any aid to speech and writing, AI included. We define our terms here, first according to the canon, and then according to what AI characteristically threatens or offers within each.

Invention (inventio). The discovery of arguments, evidence, and matter proper to a subject — the work of finding what may truly be said, before any word is chosen to say it. Invention is an act of the mind meeting reality: observing, reading, questioning, and drawing out what is there to be found. AI is, at present, uncannily good at simulating invention: it can produce arguments, evidence, and matter on demand. This is precisely why it is the canon most dangerous to a student’s formation. A student who lets AI invent for him has not been helped in his thinking; he has been replaced in it. Invention is the canon a Concordia student must do himself, nearly without exception, because it is the canon in which the mind is actually exercised in meeting the world.

Arrangement (dispositio). The ordering of invented material into a coherent whole — exordium, narration, proof, refutation, and peroration in the old scheme; thesis, development, and conclusion in the newer. Arrangement is a judgment about proportion and sequence, and it can be taught, discussed, and even diagrammed with a tool’s help without the student ceasing to be the one who decides. AI may licitly assist a student in seeing arrangement modeled or in checking whether his own arrangement holds together, provided the arrangement offered for evaluation is the student’s own.

Elocution (elocutio), or Style. The clothing of invented and arranged thought in fitting words — diction, sentence rhythm, figure, and trope. Style is the most personal of the canons; it is, in a real sense, the voice of the inner man made audible. For AI to supply a student’s style is for it to ventriloquize him. A tool may be used to name a style (“this is periodic,” “this is asyndeton”) or to show examples of a style at work, but it may not write the sentences a student then submits as his own.

Memory (memoria). The internalizing of one’s material so thoroughly that it may be spoken or written from within, without dependence on the page in hand. This is the canon Socrates warned writing itself would erode, and it is the canon most directly at stake in the keeping of Loci Communes (see Part Three). AI cannot memorize on a student’s behalf in any way that transfers; memory is formed only by the labor of retaining, which no tool can perform vicariously. AI’s chief danger here is not that it memorizes for the student but that it removes his motive to bother, since retrieval is now instantaneous.

Delivery (pronuntiatio, or actio). The voice, gesture, timing, and presence with which a speech is actually given before an audience. Delivery cannot be delegated even in principle; a machine cannot deliver on a student’s behalf while the student stands in the room. It remains the canon least threatened by AI and, for that reason, one of the surest tests we retain of whether the invention behind a speech was truly the student’s own — a point developed under Impromptu Speech in Part Three.

Ethos. The credibility a speaker earns by his demonstrated character, competence, and goodwill toward his hearers. Ethos cannot be manufactured by a tool; it is earned over time and is, in fact, damaged by the discovery that a student’s apparent competence was borrowed from a machine and passed off as his own. Concordia’s students should understand that unacknowledged AI use is not merely an academic infraction but an offense against their own ethos — a small, repeated dishonesty about who they are.

Pathos. The appeal to the legitimate affections of an audience — moving hearers rightly, in proportion to the truth, rather than manipulating them out of proportion to it. Because AI-generated prose can imitate the surface features of pathos (a stirring phrase, a rhetorical question) without any true feeling behind it, it is capable of producing a hollow pathos — words that move a reader on behalf of a writer who felt nothing himself. This is a species of the false witness the ninth commandment forbids (Exodus 20:16): to represent an affection as one’s own that one did not, in fact, have.

Citation and Allusion. The deliberate, marked use of another’s words or ideas (citation) and the unmarked but recognizable echo of another’s words or ideas, trusting the hearer to catch it (allusion). Both practices depend on the user actually knowing the source well enough to deploy it rightly — a dependence AI can counterfeit by generating citations and allusions to texts the student himself has never read. A citation a student cannot explain, or an allusion he could not identify apart from the tool that supplied it, is not a citation or an allusion at all; it is a costume.

Part Three: Ranges of Use — A Practical Schedule

The rulings below apply Parts One and Two to the specific contexts of a Concordia classroom. Four categories are used throughout: PROHIBITED (not permitted under any circumstance for graded or credited work), RESTRICTED (permitted only in the narrow way described, and only when disclosed to the teacher), PERMITTED (allowed as a normal aid, with disclosure expected as a matter of course), and PROTECTED PRACTICE (a practice the school deliberately preserves free of AI by its very design, because the practice’s whole formative value depends on its remaining untouched).

Context	Ruling	Rationale
Research	RESTRICTED	AI may locate sources, generate a starting bibliography, or gloss an unfamiliar term. It may not summarize, characterize, or write about any source the student has not personally read. All AI assistance must be disclosed; every source used in written work must be traceable to the student’s own reading of it.
AI-only projects/presentations	PROHIBITED as graded student work	A project wholly produced by AI contains no invention, elocution, memory, or ethos that belongs to the student, and cannot honestly be submitted as evidence of his learning.
AI-only projects/presentations (as an object of study)	PERMITTED, narrowly	A teacher may assign an AI-generated text as a specimen for the class to analyze, critique, or compare against a classical model. Here AI supplies raw material for the student’s invention rather than substituting for it.
In-class discussions	PROHIBITED during the discussion	Discussion is a live exercise of memory and invention; a device consulted mid-discussion defeats the exercise. Preparation beforehand follows the Research rule above.
The keeping of Loci Communes	PROHIBITED	A commonplace book is the record of what a student’s own memory and judgment selected from his own reading. An AI-populated commonplace book is a contradiction in terms; it preserves nothing the student’s own mind has actually done.
Impromptu speech	STRUCTURALLY EXCLUDED	The exercise permits no preparation time by design, and so admits no opportunity for AI consultation. This structural safeguard is a feature to be preserved and, where useful, extended to other exercises as a check on students’ unsupervised work.
Progymnasmata — in class	PROHIBITED	Composed under supervision, without devices, as a direct drill of invention, arrangement, and style in the student’s own hand.
Progymnasmata — cooperative	RESTRICTED	Collaboration stays among students. A group may consult AI only after producing its own joint draft, and only to check that draft against a model form (e.g., the structure of a classical fable or chreia) — never to generate content on the group’s behalf.
Progymnasmata — at home	RESTRICTED	Same standard as cooperative work: the exercise must be composed first by the student alone; AI may afterward be used only as a self-check against the classical models taught in class, and such use must be disclosed.
Logical proof production	RESTRICTED	A proof is the demonstration of the student’s own reasoning, step by step. The student’s own attempt must be produced first and is what is graded; AI may be used afterward only to check the validity of a completed proof, never to generate one.
Demonstration vs. proof — teaching the distinction	PERMITTED as material / PROHIBITED as the student’s own account	AI-generated examples may be used as specimens for students to sort into demonstration (apodictic, geometric necessity) and proof or argument (dialectical, rhetorical persuasion toward the probable). An AI-generated explanation of the distinction itself may not be submitted as the student’s own understanding of it.
The encounter with books in the library (supervised research)	PROTECTED PRACTICE	This remains a deliberately AI-free block: supervised, physical, device-free time among real books. Its value lies in patient, serendipitous encounter with the text and the shelf — a formation no search function can replace — and the school commits to preserving it as such.

Part Four: A Closing Charge

None of the rulings above should be enforced in a spirit of suspicion toward our students or fear of the tool itself. The tool is a tool, one more instrument raised, like the plow and the press before it, against a ground that still fights us. It may be received with thanksgiving, the way every good gift is received (James 1:17), so long as we remember what it is for and what it cannot do. It cannot search a heart; only the LORD does that (Psalm 139:23–24). It cannot renew an inner man; only the Spirit does that (2 Corinthians 4:16). It cannot store up the Word in a heart; only long obedience, line upon line, does that (Psalm 119:11; Isaiah 28:10). Faculty are asked to hold this framework not as a fence built out of anxiety, but as a rule of formation, built out of love for the students entrusted to us — that they might not merely appear learned before men, but might in truth grow up into the wisdom that begins in the fear of the LORD (Proverbs 9:10) and is completed in Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise indicated.