Preached at Holy Cross, Seend
Readings – Romans 5. 1-5; John 16. 12-15
“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.”
Why is it that every couple of months, one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence research pops up in the news, to tell us it could wipe out the human race?
Gethsemane by Mark Rothko (1944). In a private collection.
On Newsnight last week it was Yoshua Bengio, whose research is cited more often than any other computer scientist in the world. Sometimes called ‘one of the three godfathers of AI’, Professor Bengio told Faisal Islam bluntly that “the worst case scenario is human extinction”.
It turns out that Bengio is based at the University of Montreal. Coincidentally, I had one of the most interestingconversations of my life on a bus to Montreal airport two years ago this month. I started talking to an American in his fifties, in town to attend an industry conference for people working in quantum computing, and a woman of about twenty who was studying computer science at one of the local universities. When he outlined that the first thing functioning quantum computing would do would be to instantly render all existing cybersecurity obsolete, the young woman was wide-eyed – and so was I. He smiled and shrugged and said, “It’s just like when the Iron Age arrived. Up until then, anyone who had bronze weapons and armour ruled the roost. Then all of a sudden they were obsolete and people needed steel. It’s just what human beings do; we advance.”
We advance—to restoring sight to the blind and killing one another with drones; to conquering cancer and poisoning the planet. In recent decades, technology that changes what it means to be human has started becoming especially problematic, whether creating machines smarter than we are, or viruses more dangerous than nature would produce, or simply driving ourselves crazy with smartphones that follow us everywhere, constantly buzzing and demanding attention.
“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.” The idea of gradual progress is hard-baked into the DNA of Christianity. In this morning’s Gospel reading, Christ tells the disciples at the Last Supper they cannot yet take on board everything that must be revealed to them; the Holy Spirit will later guide them towards greater truth. Today is Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate the great mystery that is the Christian doctrine of the Godhead, ever Three yet ever One. But that doctrine is not in the Bible; foreshadowings of it are, but not the doctrine as such. It took three hundred years for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as nearly all Christians now accept it to emerge, and that only came after much debate and squabbling. So the idea of Christians gradually moving towards greater truth really is central to our story.
Beyond Christianity, all of us who were formed by Western cultures are children of the Enlightenment. We take it for granted that the story of the human race is to gradually learn more, understand more, to make things better. Not necessarily in every respect, certainly not all the time – we all accept that there are false steps and moments when things go backwards – but we do seem to take it as read that the arc of history bends from ignorance and crudeness towards knowledge and justice. In our time, that is most visible to us in scientific and technological progress.
Yet what if progress goes wrong? Greater knowledge doesn’t necessarily make us better people. It just gives us more power. It amplifies our power to do good; and it amplifies our power to do wrong. Power can be an idol.
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling utterly powerless in the face of a world where power and the will to abuse it seem to be spiralling out of control. I feel powerless in the face of the grim events in Ukraine and the Middle East, where human ingenuity is put to building ever more ingenious ways for people to kill other people. I feel powerless in the face of the galloping ahead of Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Modification despite the risks either could go catastrophically wrong. The brute logic outlined by the American gentleman on the bus in Montreal remains in play—we may wish for the pace of technological development to be slowed in the face of grave risks, but our opinion counts for little on the planetary stage. If the USA doesn’t develop these technologies, then China will. If China also refrains from exploiting them, then other states and even private actors wait in the wings to win the race for progress.
Since Hiroshima, the human race has lived with the grim knowledge that we have the power to destroy ourselves. For eighty years, we have been lucky, despite a number of close calls during the Cold War. But we only need to be unlucky once. During the optimistic era that is now passing, we were always told: ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’ But in the face the logic of a planet-wide race for power, which I have no means to slow, there is nothing I can do.
Writing a time when the Church was tiny, powerless, and bitterly divided, St Paul wrote to the small community of Christians in the great imperial capital of Rome, telling them to “rejoice in hope of the glory of God”. These people with little in this world had faith that God had prepared something much greater for them, and for us.
And he told them that they had peace with God, not because they were powerful and successful, but through their faith in Jesus Christ. These ancient Roman Christians were bound for heaven, but not as a result of their actions, which just like ours were often wrong, but because of the faith they had in Christ’s promises.
Heaven is a strange business, and so is the Holy Trinity. Judged by the standards of our materialistic, over-rational, age these beliefs make no sense. None! We live at a time when people seek truth in spreadsheets rather than sonnets. Yet human beings are more than rational creatures. We are made not for power, which often brings out the worst in us, but for beauty, truth, goodness, and love.
We cannot reduce the many things that God is to any formula; but one of the many things that God is, according to the doctrine of the Trinity, is circulation of love within the godhead, a love that spills out into all the universe. The Holy Spirit is the love that passes between the Father and the Son, God every bit as much as them; love itself a divine person in its own right equal with the Father and the Son. God the Father is the eternal creator of the universe who before anything was, already is. God the Son was made human in Christ, and yet was also in the beginning with the Father. If the Son is God made human, the Holy Spirit seems to be the corresponding principle, God as non-human – wind and fire and bird; God a consuming love that burns and topples and soars and dives where it wills. You can’t really understand this. There is no end to the mystery, to the awe.
What grounds the mystery is love and truth. Yet we can never consistently live according to their lights. We often wish to do so, but when the world overwhelms us, as it often does for very good reasons, we tend to retreat into hard-heartedness and lies.
We are not saved by doing good but by trusting that God loves us even though we often do things that very much aren’t good. We are not saved because of our power but by understanding our lack of power to save ourselves. In a world where the idolisation of human power could be the undoing of our whole species, the knowledge of our powerlessness to save ourselves could be Christians’ greatest gift to others.
And now to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Domenico Beccafum, Trinity Triptych (1513), hangs in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena.
