Jason Mandryk (Operation World)
For Christians in the 21st century, Pentecost offers a richness derived from the resonating notes accumulated over its long history. As an event celebrating the wheat harvest, it naturally brought profound joy to the entire community; in agrarian societies, a successful harvest could literally mean the difference between life and death. It was referred to as the Feast of Weeks, as it fell “a week of weeks” after Passover (Exodus 34:22), and as the Day of Reaping (Exodus 23:16). Beyond its agrarian origins, it grew to commemorate the giving of the Torah as well.
As Second Temple Judaism took shape, Pentecost became—alongside Passover and the Feast of Booths—one of the three pilgrim festivals in the Jewish calendar. By the time of Christ, it was widely known as Pentecost (derived from the Koiné Greek for “fiftieth”), indicating that it fell on the 50th day after Passover. On the day of Pentecost that Christians now regard as the Birth of the Church, Jerusalem would have been filled with devout Jews from a host of different nations—a result of the already formidable Jewish diaspora. In Acts 2:5, Luke masterfully sets the scene, describing them as being “from every nation under heaven.”
While Luke provides a rich seam of theological insight, what does Pentecost have to do with artificial intelligence? Rather than exhaustively detailing the technical mechanics of AI, this short article will briefly examine two points of resonance and two of dissonance between the impacts of AI and Pentecost.
Communication Breakthrough
Through the power of God at Pentecost, crowds heard the gospel in their native languages from speakers who did not know them. The gift of tongues—given for the edification of the body of Christ—overcame the ultimate communication barrier. Those who would otherwise be deaf to the message could now hear and understand through a means that would be impossible without the work of the Spirit. As many have noted, Pentecost acts as the reversal of Babel: from the confusion of languages emerges a unified communication that leads to worshipping the Most High.
One of AI’s most immediate and beneficial impacts is also linguistic. Large language models (LLMs) and neural machine translation (NMT) are proving increasingly effective—and remarkably fast—at complex translation. The ease with which we can now use computers to translate languages is revolutionizing global communication.
The Great Disruption
Luke frames these early chapters of Acts to convey an intensifying contrast between the old, physical temple in Jerusalem and the new temple that is the people of God. God’s physical presence was previously centred in the temple—the Holy of Holies in particular. But, as the rushing wind and tongues of fire indicated, God’s presence was now upon and among His people, who were no longer confined to one location. The centripetal force of the temple complex was supplanted by the centrifugal force of Spirit-empowered evangelization. While the death knell of Second Temple Judaism was, of course, the destruction of the temple by Roman legions, the New Testament epistles indicate that Pentecost had already set the complete disruption of that system in motion.
Artificial intelligence is likewise proving to be a profound disruptor. A foundational new verb of the 21st century—“to google” something—will soon mean exclusively using agentic AI. Globally, hundreds of millions of jobs will be made obsolete or transformed in the coming years. Entire industries will rise or fall based on whether AI renders them essential or redundant. Technology has always been a fast-moving, innovation-driven sector, but AI accelerates this exponentially. Just as the Sadducees soon found themselves without a raison d’etre, the elite institutions that act as gatekeepers of knowledge are facing existential crises.
There is no going back to how things were before these Great Disruptions.
The Great Equalization
“When the day of Pentecost came… they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit…” (vv. 1-3). Gathered in the Upper Room were twelve apostles and over a hundred others: fishermen, tax collectors and Zealots, men and women, wealthy and poor. The Holy Spirit came to rest on each of them and filled every one of them.
Gathered in Jerusalem were faithful Jews from “every nation under heaven” (v. 5). And yet all of them, from Mesopotamia to Pontus, from Egypt to Rome, heard the wonders of God in their own tongue (vv. 8-12). Later in Acts, we see this same Holy Spirit bestowed on Samaritans (8:15-17), on Judaism-adjacent God-fearing Gentiles (10:44-46), and even on those far off in pagan, cosmopolitan Ephesus (19:6).
Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin were no longer limiting factors for the transmission of the good news. Living in Jerusalem, Judea, or even Galilee was no longer a requirement. God was thrusting out the evangel to be heard by all nations, and by all kinds of people in every nation!
The promise that artificial intelligence offers is, at least theoretically, that it can be accessible to virtually anyone. One does not need to be a computer scientist or engineer to harness what AI can do. A child on a mobile phone, a student in a PC café, or a farmer using even the most basic AI model has access to a level of information, analysis, and problem-solving that the most brilliant minds at IBM in the early days of microcomputing could not have fathomed. That is the dream being sold to us.
A New Kind of Kingdom
One can read the second chapter of Acts as the answer to a question posed in the first chapter. The disciples ask the risen Jesus, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (1:6). His response is that it is not for them to know times or dates: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8).
Peter’s sermon in chapter 2 can be regarded as an announcement of this anticipated Kingdom. He points to Jesus as the heir to David’s throne—a resurrected, ascended-to-heaven messianic King, rejected by Israel but vindicated by God. “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah” (v. 36). As we know from Jesus’ own teachings, this Kingdom is not of this world. It is a Kingdom where the last shall be first, where the meek shall inherit the earth, and where anyone, bad or good, is invited to come in. Everyone has dignity and worth in Christ’s Kingdom because everyone is an image-bearer of the Creator.
Artificial intelligence, however, is creating a kingdom very much of this world. It hearkens back to a prescient cartoon by Tom Toro published in The New Yorker in November 2012. An older man sits by a campfire surrounded by children in rags. The caption reads: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
Data centres are ruining neighbourhoods. Electricity prices are rising. Water is in shorter supply. Entire industries are being gutted, and “AI slop” is flooding the realms of artistry. All this occurs while wealth, power, and data—now the key to the first two—concentrate into the hands of a tiny, ultra-rich elite. The AI revolution is widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots faster than ever before. Just ask SK Hynix employees about their bonus, or anyone who bought the right tech stocks five years ago.
The economic reality is that 26% of the world’s population does not even use the internet; in low-income countries, that number rises to 77%.[i] Rural populations are 40% less likely to use the internet, and women are 10% less likely.[ii] If you consider the standard $20 USD/month subscription price for mainstream AI platforms, you are pricing half the world out of access.[iii] Those outside the global consumer class simply do not have that discretionary income, even if they possessed the devices and data connections to use AI in the first place.
We hear tragic stories of lonely people driven to suicide by chatbots; we read of tech moguls unable to affirm that human survival is inherently good; and we witness a fundamental degradation in the dignity of work. We must ask whether we truly want to live in the kind of kingdom that AI predominance is building, where humans are not so much image-bearers as commodified data.
A Quantum Spiritual Leap
Jesus told his disciples, “…you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses…” (1:8). He spoke truly indeed. Peter transforms from a snivelling denier to a bold preacher before a crowd of thousands, rejoicing that he was privileged enough to suffer for the Name (5:41). Signs and wonders accompany the evangelism of the apostles, so much so that they are accused of “turning the world upside down.” (17:6, ESV) None of this would be possible without the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and none of it would have been possible had Jesus not ascended to send his Spirit to us (John 16:7).
It is through the Holy Spirit that spiritual transformation happens. Paul claims that we are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18). We are told that “those who belong to Jesus Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal. 5:24-25).
The personal transformation associated with those driving the AI revolution is a very different one. It sounds more like a sci-fi version of apotheosis than sanctification, loaded with far-out terms such as transhumanism, longevity escape velocity, whole brain emulation, exocortices, and the technological singularity. None of this is intended to make those privileged enough to benefit from such advances better people morally—only more powerful and more long-lived (or immortal, ideally). The more one is exposed to the ideologies and ethics of those at the heart of these technologies, the more chilling the prospect becomes. Personal transformation according to the gospel of transhumanism is just about as far from Christian sanctification as one could get.
There is no returning to a pre-Pentecost world, and there is no reversing the advent of artificial intelligence. Both events herald profound, unimagined changes for humanity. One is, at best, a valuable gift (with titanium strings attached) and, at worst, a poisoned chalice. The other remains the means by which the gospel of the Kingdom reaches the world, bringing the possibility of true flourishing for all of humanity.
All Scripture quoted is from the NIV unless otherwise stated.
[i] https://policycommons.net/artifacts/1434503/a-demand-side-view-of-mobile-internet-adoption-in-the-global-south/2055618/
[ii] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25-internet-use/
[iii] https://ayec-wp.worlddata.io/external-how-the-world-consumer-class-will-grow-from-4-billion-to-5-billion-people-by-2031/
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