ChatGPT Can't Read the Bible

Plus, weaving home and work back together again.

Saving the Commons

Jack Bell on living in the world without mistreating each other

Can we live on the earth without mistreating it, or each other? This is one of the most pressing question for the twenty-first century, but we needn’t rely on ourselves alone to answer it. One purveyor of wise answers is eighteenth-century journalist William Cobbett, who rode around England on horseback witnessing both the dignity and destruction of rural economies.

Until the late 1800s, English peasants and labourers had access to common land. This changed when farmers and landowners ‘enclosed’ the commons, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution. In his journalism, writes American farmer Jack Bell, William Cobbett

documents the social consequences of enclosure and the centralization of agriculture. It tells us of workers’ habits of dress, the state of their farms, the condition of the cottages they lived in. It also describes how enormous damage to the natural world impoverished the people who depended upon it. Long before more recent calls to return to indigenous methods of agriculture and land stewardship, Cobbett perceived the significance of farming with nature rather than against it: hedge-laying, tree-planting, coppicing, and other aspects of mixed, small-scale agriculture. This longstanding cottage economy not only encouraged enclaves of wildness in a landscape dominated by increasingly centralized agricultural systems, it had long helped the rural poor avoid dependence on parish relief or the chance of having a benevolent landlord. Cobbett called for his country’s ruling classes to give back the common land they had stolen from their own people.

There’s a revolutionary air to Cobbett, but not the kind we’re conditioned to expect. It’s a revolution of vision that enables us to see “the dignity, thrift, and productivity” of the household economy.

Read Saving the Commons over at Plough. For a provocative take on how the process of enclosure continues today in global form, read Paul Kingsnorth’s essay A Monster That Grows in Deserts.

ChatGPT Reads the Sermon on the Mount

John Boyles on how AI mirrors back our bad reading

When ChatGPT hit the internet earlier this year, one of our intrepid subscribers submitted an innocuous question to the all-knowing bot: “What is Three Things newsletter?” The response began:

Three Things is a newsletter digest of three resources to help readers better engage with the Christian faith. It is curated by Phillip Johnston, a former staff member at L'Abri Fellowship and graduate of Covenant Theological Seminary.

Other than no mention of our gracious Instigator (sorry,

Andy Patton

), it’s factual enough. But then the bot attempted to reach inside my brain:

Johnston believes that the best way readers will grow in their faith is to read good books, listen to good sermons, and watch good interviews with Christian leaders.

“Johnston believes”? What omniscience! But it’s not true. (Johnston actually believes that the best way readers will grow in their faith is by active participation in the life of a good local church and committed apprenticeship to older, wiser Christians.) The chatbot’s response is just one example of the folly of relying on large language models to teach us meaningful things. More often than not, what we get in response is “wrong, ridiculous, or both.”

Those three descriptors come from theology professor John Boyles, who recently spent time asking ChatGPT to interpret Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). His findings are deeply instructive:

In my conversations with the bot, I was struck by the fact that ChatGPT holds up a mirror to the North American church, as well as to the broader Western scholarly community, sharing three major shortcomings with us as we have been shaped by the spirit of our age.

First, the responses from ChatGPT metaphorize and individualize Scripture without a clear method for when and why, without warrant, and often in direct contradiction to the text itself. Second, the bot’s interpretations are ignorant of the interpretive tradition(s) that produce them. And third, as a disembodied bot, the interpretations themselves are necessarily disembodied and thus unable to recognize the realities of Scripture and interpretation.

For more, see Reading the Sermon on the Mount with ChatGPT over at The Biblical Mind. For an entrée into the teachings of Jesus from a real human being, check out our course on The Beatitudes: An Invitation to the Good Life.

Pursuing the Reunification of Home and Work

Erika Bachiochi with new options for the household

Once upon a time, work and family were woven inextricably together. The Industrial Revolution (see Thing 1) severed them, creating two creatures previously unknown in human history: the breadwinning husband and the homemaking wife. Since then, most of us assume only two options for our households: separate spheres for men and women, or both spouses out in the workplace.

We need more options, writes feminist legal scholar Erika Bachiochi:

For decades, we’ve been stuck at an impasse in which the right assumes the separate spheres model in which all workers have someone at home to care for young children and the left pushes institutional childcare so parents can be free of caregiving and both can work. These long-standing solutions on right and left surely speak to those constituencies whose experiences mirror the breadwinner-caregiver or breadwinner-breadwinner archetypes. But for the majority of families, especially among the poor and working classes, neither solution quite fits their circumstances or needs. Both left and right tend to work from models that prize individual preference and economic efficiency above all. They each in their own way believe their model is what people really want and that enabling individuals to pursue it will optimize welfare, properly defined. Meanwhile, today’s parents are overworked and stressed, and fertility rates are dropping. 

What can be done? Bachiochi has many practical proposals: the Pregnant Worker Fairness Act, ending employer discrimination on the basis of "caregiving responsibilities", babies at work, and more. In any proposal, however, the end needs to be kept in sight:

The aim is not national prosperity, economic efficiency, or equality of the sexes as measured by the market. We have pursued all of these goals in turn for decades and left families raw. Rather, our starting point must be the natural and laudable undertaking of adult human beings to become parents. 

Read Pursuing the Reunification of Home and Work over at American Compass. For more from Erika Bachiochi, listen to an interview about her book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision.

June brought two parenting rites of passage to the Johnston household: chickenpox (times two) and bunk beds. The latter will be much more tolerable than the former, but only when the novelty wears off. For now, it’s a danger zone. Phillip is also looking forward to a London journey this week to celebrate Christa’s birthday with a visit to the Saint Francis of Assisi exhibition at the National Gallery – plus much more!

Reading: Phillip just finished what will likely be the best new book he reads this year. Now, Watership Down is on the nightstand for a maiden stroll. The St Bernard Psalter from Nashotah House has also been a tiny revelation.

Watching: ‘Tis the season for church exposé documentaries. Phillip dipped into Shiny Happy People, but found it dull. The Way Down, on the other hand, drew him in immediately. Could there be anything more quintessentially American than a Christian weight loss guru turned cult leader? Straight out of Flannery O’Connor. Docs aside, Phillip is looking forward to greener cinematic pastures this month: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Oppenheimer and Barbie.

Andy spent the weekend packing up his family’s things in Nashville in preparation for a move to St. Louis. The year and a half in Nashville has been filled with richness and now Andy + fam are uprooting and re-planting (for the first time in 14 years of a globe-trotting marriage) in a house of their own. Working for the Rabbit Room has been part of the richness of Nashville and now Andy is taking his Rabbit Room show on the road and going remote from St. Louis, which will mean—among many other exciting new projects—more Substacks.

Listening: Glass Animals’ album, Dreamland, was released in the midst of the pandemic in 2020. It is neon hip-hop poetry that sounds like a bad dream of one’s own childhood (if you grew up in the 90s) that you weirdly want to dance to. Past the boppy beats, the lyrics are dealing with some pretty heavy stuff: reckoning with childhood pain, trauma, family, love, and the confusing thrill of growing up amid the cultural flotsam that is modernity.

Reading: Andy re-read The Institute and Doctor Sleep in preparation for his Stephen King lecture at Hutchmoot UK. They are a little spooky, but fun if you are into that sort of thing. He is also reading A World Without Email in a futile attempt to reimagine the modern email-based working life. And, he finally read Grace Olmstead’s profound memoir about what modernity has done to life and community in her small hometown, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind.

New from Pattern Bible: (Andy’s new Bible + theology Substack): Biblical Imagery Starts With Biblical Cosmology and Should We Read the Bible Literally?

New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s poetry and Psalm project): A translation of Psalm 90 paired with a new poem.