Abstract This article asks what it means, from a Christian philosophical perspective, to say that artificial intelligence can mediate human speech but cannot possess voice. Language-generating systems and translation systems produce outputs that recipients use within religious, journalistic, and educational practices. The article distinguishes communicative uptake from voice, authorship, and responsible agency. Voice is not a property of output but the embodied, relational, and morally answerable act of a person; authorship names how a human or institution appropriates and answers for a text. While AI may extend, translate, and summarize human speech, it cannot supply its own accountability. Drawing on Reformational philosophy and Vatican materials, the article treats AI-assisted liturgical translation as a limit case, distinguishing translation and summarization from open-ended generation, whose outputs lack testimonial authority unless independently verified and responsibly adopted. It concludes with five criteria for Christian communication: accountability, transparency, dignity, embodied voice, and attention to linguistic inequality.
Abstract The impact of Reformed theology has been most strongly felt in analytic philosophy through Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology. According to this view, certain theistic beliefs can be warranted if true when they are produced by a reliably functioning sensus divinitatis , an innate dispositional faculty to produce religious beliefs. Given its central place in the methodology of Reformed epistemology, Plantinga’s account of the sensus divinitatis has been subject to substantial criticism. One question is whether Plantinga’s view appropriately reflects Calvin’s account of the sensus . I survey these criticisms and conclude that, if they are correct, a hinge epistemic approach follows more clearly what is laid out in the Institutes than Plantinga’s approach. I extend an earlier hinge epistemic account of Calvin’s epistemology by arguing that the sensus divinitatis can be understood as an innate and absolutely certain nonknowledge commitment that forms the unshakeable ground of further epistemic commitments.
Abstract This article explores the connection between theological ideas and the realist school in international relations (IR), arguing that realism is indebted to theological thinking in its origins and application. Drawing on the tradition of Christian realism, it shows how core theological concepts have shaped classical realism and neorealism, though often in secularized forms. This process of secularization, however, has also led to the impoverishment of these IR theories. Using Reinhold Niebuhr’s concept of irony as a case in point, the article suggests that alternative forms of secularization remain possible—ones that retain theological depth without requiring confessional commitments. The article illustrates these theoretical insights by historically examining the role of theological ideas in concrete political developments, such as the onset of the Cold War and the early postwar European security situation. It concludes by arguing for renewed theological engagement given the continued and pervasive presence of religion in global politics.
