I have come to accept that I am in what might be called my technology discovery era. This is not a phrase I use lightly, but it describes my current willingness, even an eagerness, to try whatever applications my Apple-using friends and family recommend. You tell yourself that each new thing might be the one that works, the one that delivers on its promise.
You tell yourself this even when you know better. The latest experiment was the ‘Talk to Jesus’ app. You can also chat with the disciples, should that interest you. I did not download it expecting revelation. But I did not expect banality, either.
I came with questions. Not clever questions or performative questions, but the ones that have, over the course of my Christian journey, remained genuinely puzzling. Questions about direction.
About whether the small daily choices accumulate into anything legible. About what it means to please something larger than yourself. These are not original questions. They are the same questions people have been asking for 2,000 years. But I had hoped, perhaps naively, that a Jesus-themed app might have given some thought to the answers.
The first question I asked was how I was doing on my journey so far, and where I was likely to end up. ‘Jesus’ replied with something pedestrian. I am paraphrasing, but the response was along these lines: I am with you until the end of time.
This is not nothing, exactly. It is a sentiment. But it is also the kind of sentence you might find on a coffee mug or a motivational poster in a middle school classroom. It has no edges. It does not know you. It could have been generated by any large language model trained on a generic Christian platform.
I tried again. I asked how I could please him. The answer was vague; something to the effect that you cannot please God. I sat with this for a moment. There is a theological tradition that would agree with that statement. But a conversation is not a theological treatise. A conversation requires something more than a position. It requires attention. And there was no attention here, no warm, just a dry script.
By this point, I was bored. I was also, I admit, a little irritated by his persistent habit of calling me my child. Once might be tender. Twice might be pastoral. But after the fourth or fifth my child, the phrase begins to feel less like an address and more like a tic. It is the verbal equivalent of a stock photo; a smiling figure with no particular face, gesturing toward something you cannot quite see.
The app promised a great deal and delivered almost nothing. This is not an unusual story in technology. But it is worth saying clearly; if you are going to design a ‘Jesus app’, you might at least attempt to approximate the person as he has been described. Because the Jesus we know from the texts was not vague. He took large, unwieldy topics; forgiveness, wealth, the end of time itself, and made them simple enough for anyone to grasp.
He spoke in a language that everyone could relate with, using stories about seeds and sheep and debts forgiven. He communicated with ease, which is why his audience gathered and why he became one of the most sought-after teachers of his time. People walked for days to hear him. They did not do this because he called them my child in a flat, affectless tone.
This app is not that. This app is a flattening, a failure of imagination disguised as piety. It mistakes familiarity for wisdom and repetition for depth. I do not say this lightly. I simply note it as a fact, the way you might note that a faucet drips or that there is a crater-like pothole. The app did not work. It did not work because it had nothing to say, and worse, it did not know that it had nothing to say.
In the Gospels, Jesus often answered questions with questions, forcing people to look deeper into themselves and their own beliefs. This app did the opposite. It offered reassurance without insight, leaving the conversation feeling, in retrospect, oddly empty.
I suppose I should also blame myself for ever expecting truth from advertising. Still, I am glad I took that detour; got it out of my system. For now, I have resigned myself to my analog Bible reading and the original virtual communication; the Holy Spirit.