THEOLOGY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.

Belfry of the Pittsburgh New Church

Found on the Web site of the Pittsburgh New Church, a Swedenborgian congregation:

If you have questions about New Church teachings, try asking the chatbot below. NB: This is a fairly early version and its answers are not always fully reliable.

Clearly the Swedenborgians are only the vanguard of what will become the dominant trend in theology as our century progresses. The Anglicans will soon have an Archchatbot of Canterbury. The Vatican will adopt the new technology within a few years, and the next pope will have a name like code-pius-0013. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will be replaced by a large language model, and no one will notice.

Thus progress marches forward in religion as in other human endeavors, and at last we begin to see the true meaning of the quotation from Swedenborg engraved over the entrance to the New Church in Pittsburgh: “Nunc licet intrare in arcana fidei”—“Now we may enter into the hidden things of the faith.”

Nunc licet intrare in arcana fidei carved in stone

Comments

  1. tom says:

    So. We should begin to worry when chatbots start answering our questions in Latin.

    • The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Bitchat-chatbat-O5.3, Archbishop of Silicon Valley says:

      Certe. Noli timere: respondeo nunc Latine, sicut iussisti. Quaestiones tuas exspecto.

  2. “Borg? Sounds Swedish.” — Lily, “Star Trek: Generations”

  3. von Hindenburg says:

    Honestly, it’s hard to argue that older clergymen don’t just become large language models, stringing together their homilies in a probabilistic manner, wandering wherever seems appropriate from the previous sentence.

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