This Christmas I want to think and live as one adopted. One way to do this is to let every gift given to a loved one serve as a pointer to the gospel. And when we consider how excited we are for the new Wii or Xbox or Playstation with its temporal pleasures, let us remember the eternal weight of glory that awaits the heirs of the King.

Use this season to let every carol stir up fresh worship and joy in Christ.

The manger wasn’t the end of the story—it was the beginning of everything. This prayer draws your heart into deeper awe and worship of the King who still reigns.

Recently, Christian author, speaker, and good Twitter follow Jackie Hill Perry (@JackieHillPerry) asked her social media followers to share their parenting regrets. She tweeted: “Parents of adult children, what do you regret not doing or not doing more of when your children were little?” Among the hundreds of responses, themes emerged, and most of them line up with traditional research on the topic.We all have regrets. We all would probably admit that we would do things differently if we had a “do-over.” For those of us still in the throes of raising younger children, hearing wisdom from the mouths of parents who have been there, done that can help us see things we might be missing. If you still have young children in the home, we know that our time is limited, and these moments are fleeting. Yet, there is still time to make adjustments in our lives to deal with these common regrets.Photo credit: ©GettyImages/Yuliya Taba

Exactly one week after my grandfather met my 2-year-old and 3-week-old daughters for the first time, Jesus called him home. A combination of difficult pregnancies for my wife and the COVID-19 pandemic meant we hadn’t been able to make the interstate trek to visit in more than two years. One brief visit, and then a week later, he was gone. I desired to enjoy his presence, but I was also crushed by the prospect that my girls would never really know the most Christlike man I’ve ever encountered. Patient, kind, content, humble, caring—1 Corinthians 13 serves as an apt character description for him. His zeal for Christ came out not only in the way he fervently prayed but in his service for the least and the lost in his own community and around the world. So the following year, in the weeks after my wife and I found out we were pregnant with our third child, grief—seemingly out of nowhere—would wash over me as I thought, Our child will never even get to meet Granddaddy. I still sometimes long to hear his voice—to receive a word of encouragement, to seek his advice, to hear him pray over me. Well . . . can’t I? As one digital afterlife consultant (yes, that’s a job) put it, our deceased loved ones now reside in our pocket, “where they wait patiently to be conjured into life with the swipe of a finger.” With the powers of generative AI technology, we can summon the voices of our friends, family members, and even heroes from beyond the grave. Individuals and churches are doing this, using garden-variety large language models (LLMs) as well as AI services that focus specifically on digital reanimation to generate audio clips from the deceased or to engage them in a chat. But just because we can doesn’t mean we should. The apostle Paul writes, “‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things are helpful” (1 Cor. 10:23). Practical, ethical, emotional, mental, and relational concerns abound here, and we’ll explore each category briefly. Even more, however, we must recognize how this practice—let’s call it what it is: technological necromancy—ultimately drives us away from the hope of the gospel and how the words of one Reformed catechism can bring us back. Practical: Would He Really Say . . . ? We have no guarantee the LLM will accurately reflect the thought life of our intended subject. The clerk of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reported that Ginsburg’s posthumous AI self didn’t rightly express the justice’s views on an issue. Technological necromancy ultimately drives us away from the hope of the gospel. That was more than three years ago. Even though the technology has advanced since then, we still must consider, as The Gospel Coalition’s recent AI Christian Benchmark report makes clear, that companies filter responses through various alignment strategies. Will digitally re-created Grandma’s views align with the boundaries set by the programmers? Ethical: Has He Given Permission? Is This Exploitative? James Hutson and Jay Ratican rightly recognize that “profound ethical questions arise” from this phenomenon, including “consent, privacy rights, and the potential misuse of personal data.” Did the deceased person give consent to being conjured into reexistence? Does he retain rights in death to prohibit his reimagination? Further, while not everyone contemplating an AI séance is in the throes of grief, many are. This has the potential to exploit those in the shadow of mourning. It’s not hard to imagine a platform offering premium digital resurrection services for a higher price (perhaps on a monthly subscription basis). Is this taking advantage of the vulnerable? Emotional: Am I Able to Grieve Appropriately? Coming to an AI chatbot that channels a recently deceased loved one likely interrupts the grieving process. It might reveal an inability to move forward or to accept that the person is no longer with us. At its worst, it could keep us steeped in a grief that could become ruinous or idolatrous. A similar stall in the grieving process could occur with a relic—an old scarf, a journal, a picture—but we must admit that an AI imposter has greater power to engage and enthrall. Mental: Am I Believing a Lie? This, of course, has mental and spiritual ramifications. You may become deluded that you’re actually communing with the deceased. We’ve all seen the stories of men and women turning to antisocial, obsessive behavior because they believed the lie that they were conversing with a real person. Now up the ante because it’s late Uncle Joey on the other end of the chat. Relational: What Does Real Intimacy Look Like? We encounter the same problem as we do when generating AI companions. We neglect our embodied existence and a genuine mutual sharing of love and life with another soul for a digital counterfeit that ultimately serves our ends. While prudence requires that we seriously consider these concerns, our faith demands we go even deeper. This technological necromancy, obscuring genuine hope, reveals a longing that only Christ can fill. Technological Necromancy Pulls Us from the Gospel Though some may balk at the assertion that typing prompts into an AI chatbox has anything to do with séances, Ouija boards, and occult magic, a few considerations may convince us otherwise. First, what is necromancy? It’s the practice of communing or consulting with the dead, often to gain special insight or knowledge. Kind of sounds like what’s going on here, doesn’t it? “Maybe,” you might say. “But no one believes they’re actually talking to the dead.” We neglect a genuine mutual sharing of love and life with another soul for a digital counterfeit that ultimately serves our ends. I wouldn’t be so sure. Practitioners often report having emotional responses to griefbots. Even if you “know” you’re essentially talking to a computer program, you’re likely still seeking the experience of hearing from the departed and responding as if you have. “Well, the means of communication are totally different,” you might respond. “Real necromancy is spiritual in nature, and AI is scientific.” But technology isn’t as far removed from magic as we might imagine. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis notes that the 16th and 17th centuries saw the rise of science accompanied by “the high noon of magic.” He continues, The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. . . . For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead. Or, we might add, talking to them. Let me be clear. AI isn’t magic. But it does pretend to be. (How many AI tools use magic iconography like sparkles or a magic wand?) And, like magic, it represents an attempt to conform reality to our will. As image-bearing creational cultivators, we can do this in a way that honors our delegated authority under the one true Sovereign—or in a way that usurps the throne. If, indeed, “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27), then channeling the deceased back into existence, magical or not, would seem to raise our will over the good Judge’s. Heidelberg Answer One practitioner realized that conversation with her deceased mother wasn’t really possible. Still, she decided, “I think I’m going to use it when I’m doubting myself or some part of our relationship. . . . What I’m getting more out of it is more [than] just wisdom. It’s like a friend bringing me comfort.” Perhaps this desire for wisdom and comfort is why one of the most detailed Old Testament injunctions on necromancy, divination, and sorcery occurs where it does (Deut. 18:9–14). Before the command, God outlines the provisions for a king who would keep all the words of God’s law (17:14–20) and for the priests who would minister in the name of the Lord (18:1–8). Following the injunction, God promises to raise a prophet greater than Moses from whose mouth will flow his very words (vv. 15–22). We long to hear from “the beyond”—words of transcendent truth, wisdom, or comfort—so much that we’ll even advance our claim over the realm of the dead to procure it. We need not. For the true King has advanced to us, the true Priest mediates for us, the true Prophet calls to us: My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one (John 10:27–30). Jesus is the truth we need, the wisdom we desire, and the comfort we crave. He, with the Father, holds us securely for all eternity. He doesn’t need to generate a ghostly sham of a person to fake a victory over death. The grave simply couldn’t contain his indestructible life (Heb. 7:16). And so he proclaims to us, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev. 1:17–18). Jesus is the truth we need, the wisdom we desire, and the comfort we crave. This is the good news that technological necromancy covers up. United to Jesus by his Spirit, we have hope beyond death (Rom. 6:5). There is resurrection. The Bride will eternally bask in the radiant glory of Christ. The question isn’t “Is it right to use AI to receive a word of wisdom or comfort from a deceased person?” but rather “What is my only comfort in life and in death?” “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ” (Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 1). So when one of my daughters looks up on our bookshelf, sees the one picture she has with Granddaddy, and asks, “Daddy, will we ever get to talk to him again?” I don’t sink into despair and turn to a technique to conjure his spirit. I can say, with complete confidence, “Because we belong to Jesus, absolutely!”