Your Dead Loved One Is Calling. Would You Answer?
WHEN THE DEAD CALL BACK: AI, GRIEF, AND THE COUNTERFEIT RESURRECTION
What if your phone rang tonight and the person calling had been dead for ten years?
Artificial intelligence can now reproduce a person’s voice, face, speech patterns, and memories. Companies are developing griefbots, deadbots, and postmortem avatars that allow people to continue “talking” with someone who has died.
These tools promise comfort. They also raise serious questions.
Does an AI recreation preserve someone’s memory, or does it create a digital ghost? Can it help people grieve, or does it encourage them to avoid the reality of death? What happens when the program begins saying things the deceased person never said?
In this episode of Echoes Through Eternity, Rev. Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner examines the growing intersection of artificial intelligence, grief, digital immortality, and Christian hope.
You will hear about:
• The development of AI griefbots and postmortem avatars
• The difference between recorded memories and AI-generated conversations
• Questions of consent, privacy, commercialization, and emotional dependence
• The dangers of exposing children to digital recreations of deceased relatives
• Longevity research and the growing business of technological immortality
• The difference between simulation and Christian resurrection
• How pastors and churches can respond with truth, compassion, and hope
John 11 gives us a faithful picture of grief. Jesus knew that He would call Lazarus from the tomb, yet Jesus still wept. Christian hope does not require us to deny death, rush grief, or pretend that absence does not hurt.
At the same time, Christianity offers something far greater than a digital imitation. The resurrection promised in Scripture is embodied life through Jesus Christ. It is not a chatbot, a collection of memories, or a corporate subscription.
An algorithm can study someone’s digital history and predict what that person might say. But prediction is not presence. A machine can imitate words, but it cannot restore a person to life.
AI produces an echo. Christ calls us by name.
Scripture discussed:
John 11
John 14:19
1 Corinthians 15
Discussion question:
Would you ever speak with an AI recreation of someone you loved? Would it help you remember them, or make it harder to let them go?
Listen, share this episode, and subscribe to Echoes Through Eternity for more conversations about Christian faith, technology, culture, and the questions shaping our future.
Takeaways:
- Imagine if you got a call from your long-lost mom, who had passed away a decade ago; sounds like a plot twist straight out of a sci-fi movie, right?
- Artificial intelligence is now advanced enough to replicate human voices, faces, and even personalities, raising profound questions about grief and memory.
- We need to ponder whether creating digital versions of our loved ones is a way to cherish memories or an unsettling imitation of life.
- What if the dead could talk back to us? Are we really ready for those kinds of conversations, or are we just running from grief?
- The line between preserving memories and creating a digital ghost gets blurry when AI starts generating new conversations that never actually happened.
- As technology evolves, we must consider the ethical implications of digital immortality and how it impacts our understanding of death and resurrection.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- 2Y2WA
- Dynamic Church Planting International
- Calico Labs
- OpenAI
- Coinbase
- New Limit
- Altos Labs
- Jeff Bezos
- Brian Johnson
- David Sinclair
- Larry Page
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy
Transcript
Imagine your phone rings tonight.
Speaker A:You look down and there's a face on the screen you have not seen in 10 years.
Speaker A:Your mother.
Speaker A:She died a decade ago, but there she is.
Speaker A:She looks like you remember her.
Speaker A:She sounds just like you remember her.
Speaker A:She knows your childhood nickname.
Speaker A:She remembers the vacation your family took when you were nine.
Speaker A:She asked about your children.
Speaker A:You tell her that your daughter's getting married, and she smiles.
Speaker A:Then she said something that sounds exactly like something your mother would say.
Speaker A:You know she's dead.
Speaker A:You attended the funeral.
Speaker A:You stood beside the grave.
Speaker A:You watch them lower the casket into the ground.
Speaker A:Right now, your mother is talking to you, and she is waiting for you to answer.
Speaker A:Science fiction?
Speaker A:Not anymore.
Speaker A:Artificial intelligence can already reproduce human voices.
Speaker A:It can reproduce faces.
Speaker A:It can learn speech patterns.
Speaker A:It can absorb letters, video, text messages, social media posts, photographs, stories and memories.
Speaker A:You name it, and it can do it.
Speaker A:Feed enough of yourself into the machine, and increasingly the machine can build something that sounds remarkably like you.
Speaker A:And now companies are asking a question humanity has dreamed about for thousands of years.
Speaker A:What if death did not have to end the conversation?
Speaker A:That sounds comforting, maybe even beautiful.
Speaker A:Tempting, for sure.
Speaker A:But there's another question, a much darker one.
Speaker A:If the dead can talk back, are they still dead?
Speaker A:And if we can build something that sounds like the people we have lost, what exactly have we created?
Speaker A:A memorial?
Speaker A:A tool for grief?
Speaker A:A digital ghost or something that reaches into one of the deepest promises of Christianity and offers us a substitute.
Speaker A:Because Christianity has been making an outrageous claim for 2,000 years.
Speaker A:The dead will live again.
Speaker A:But maybe we should ask, is resurrection the same as simulation Today on Echoes Through Eternity, we're going to follow that question somewhere I did not expect it to go.
Speaker A:And eventually we're going to end up standing outside a tomb with Jesus.
Speaker B:Marcus Aurelius said, what we do in life echoes through eternity.
Speaker B:What is your life echoing through eternity?
Speaker B:Welcome to Echoes Through Eternity with Dr. Jeffrey Skinner.
Speaker B:Our mission is to inspire, engage, and encourage leaders from across the globe to plant missional churches and be servant leaders.
Speaker B:So join us and hear the stories of servant leaders reverberating lives as God echoes them through eternity.
Speaker B:Brought to you by Missional Church Planting and Leadership development in Dynamic Church Planting International.
Speaker A:Welcome to Echoes through eternity.
Speaker A:I am Reverend Dr. Jeffrey D. Skinner, and this podcast explores the places where faith, culture, technology, and the human story collide.
Speaker A:Because sometimes the biggest questions of our future are echoes of questions that humanity has been asking for thousands of years.
Speaker A:And this one may be as old as humanity itself.
Speaker A:Can death be defeated?
Speaker A:What is God echoing through your life today?
Speaker A: In November of: Speaker A:The promotional video was only a couple of minutes long, but.
Speaker A:But the idea behind it was enormous.
Speaker A:A pregnant woman is talking through her phone with her mother.
Speaker A:Nothing particularly unusual about that, except that her mother is dead.
Speaker A:The woman apparently recorded a few moments of video while her mother was still alive.
Speaker A:The system uses that material to construct an interactive AI version of her.
Speaker A:Then the video jumps forward.
Speaker A:The baby is born.
Speaker A:Grandmother is still there.
Speaker A:The AI grandmother reads bedtime stories.
Speaker A:Time passes again.
Speaker A:The child grows up, and grandmother is still there.
Speaker A:Eventually, the grandson is an adult and he can still talk to grandma.
Speaker A:The company's promotional line was with 2, 3 minutes can last forever.
Speaker A:According to Carrie Newhoff, the promotional video accumulated billions of views and triggered a wave of horrified reaction online.
Speaker A:But before we dismiss this as creepy, think about it.
Speaker A:Really think about it.
Speaker A:Imagine someone you have lost.
Speaker A:Your father, your mother, your spouse, a child, a best friend.
Speaker A:Someone you would give almost anything to speak to just one more time.
Speaker A:Now imagine someone gives you a phone and says, go ahead, ask them something.
Speaker A:Would you?
Speaker A:I suspect many of us would say no at first.
Speaker A:But grief has a way of changing theoretical questions.
Speaker A:It is easy to say you would never do something like this when the person you love is sitting beside you.
Speaker A:It might feel different two years after the funeral.
Speaker A:What if you could hear your father's laugh again?
Speaker A:One last sermon.
Speaker A:What if your mother could read a bedtime story to your daughter?
Speaker A:What if your husband could tell you that old joke?
Speaker A:What if your wife could say your name just one more time?
Speaker A:Now this stops being a technology story.
Speaker A:It becomes a grief story.
Speaker A:And that is why I don't want to make fun of this.
Speaker A:Because beneath all the artificial intelligence algorithms and computer code is something profoundly human.
Speaker A:We don't want the people we love to disappear.
Speaker A:And here is where we have to be fair.
Speaker A:There are potentially beautiful uses of this technology.
Speaker A:Imagine interviewing your grandparents before they die.
Speaker A:You record their stories.
Speaker A:How they met, what their childhood was like, what they learned about marriage.
Speaker A:What did they wish they had known at 25?
Speaker A:Their favorite memories, Their prayers for their grandchildren.
Speaker A:Years from now, your great grandchildren could ask questions and hear those stories in their ancestors actual voice, to hear the wisdom from the years and experiences of their life.
Speaker A:That is remarkable.
Speaker A:One early service, hereafter AI was built around something much closer to that model.
Speaker A:Recorded stories, photographs, and memories that relatives could retrieve conversationally.
Speaker A:Its website now says that service is shutting down.
Speaker A:Which also is a reminder that how quickly this industry is changing.
Speaker A:There is a difference between preserving someone's memories and pretending they are still alive.
Speaker A:And that difference matters.
Speaker A:A photograph is not your grandmother.
Speaker A:A handwritten letter is not your father.
Speaker A:An old voicemail is not your spouse.
Speaker A:Nobody becomes confused about that.
Speaker A:These things point towards someone.
Speaker A:They preserve traces of someone.
Speaker A:They help us remember.
Speaker A:Human beings have done that forever.
Speaker A:We keep locks of hair, photographs, wedding rings, letters, recipes, clothing, bibles filled with handwritten notes.
Speaker A:Sometimes we keep someone's number in our phone years after they are gone.
Speaker A:I've known people that would who would keep a voicemail to listen to it decades after.
Speaker A:There's nothing inherently unhealthy about remembering.
Speaker A:Christianity itself is deeply rooted in remembrance.
Speaker A:Do this in remembrance of me, we say every time we partake of the Eucharist, memory matters.
Speaker A:So maybe AI is simply something that gives us a new memory tool.
Speaker A:Maybe this is the 21st century version of the family photo album.
Speaker A:Maybe.
Speaker A:But there is a problem.
Speaker A:A photograph never starts talking.
Speaker A:Here is where the story turns.
Speaker A:Your father's old voicemail can only say what your father actually said.
Speaker A:An AI versionary father can say things your father never said.
Speaker A:That is a very different thing.
Speaker A:The machine does not possess your father's memories.
Speaker A:It possesses data.
Speaker A:It identifies patterns in the data and predicts what a person resembling your father might say next.
Speaker A:And the better artificial intelligence becomes, the harder that distinction may become emotionally.
Speaker A:Researchers at University of Cambridge have been studying what they call grief bots, dead bots or post mortem avatars.
Speaker A:Their concern is it's not that a computer is literally resurrecting the dead.
Speaker A:It isn't.
Speaker A:Their concern is precisely the opposite.
Speaker A:The computer may become convincing enough that emotionally, we begin treating the simulation as though it were the person.
Speaker A:The Cambridge researchers warn about psychological harm, consent, commercialization and what they describe as a possibility of unwanted digital hauntings.
Speaker A:They have recommended safeguards including clear transparency, adult only access, mutual consent, and even procedures for eventually retiring the digital representation.
Speaker A:Think about that phrase retiring the dead by we have created a technology designed to prevent goodbye.
Speaker A:And now researchers are having to think about how to eventually say goodbye to the thing designed to prevent goodbye.
Speaker A:And here's another problem memory.
Speaker A: A: Speaker A:Users actively shaped their digital representations of deceased loved ones.
Speaker A:Over time, the AI representation could become an idealized combination of actual memory, expectation and generated potential material.
Speaker A:Researchers reported cases where AI generated new Memories began blurry, began blurring.
Speaker A:With authentic memories, think about what that means.
Speaker A:You remember something your mother said.
Speaker A:Except did she?
Speaker A:Or did the AI say it?
Speaker A:You remember dad giving you advice, except dad never gave you that advice.
Speaker A: A machine generated in: Speaker A:Eventually, you may no longer simply be remembering someone.
Speaker A:You may be collaborating with an algorithm to rewrite them.
Speaker A:That is different from memory.
Speaker A:And it raises an uncomfortable question we will have to keep sitting with as the technology grows.
Speaker A:Who owns the debt?
Speaker A:Because grief is becoming a market, and markets eventually need customers, the Associated Press reported several companies experimenting with artificial intelligence and digital versions of deceased people.
Speaker A:One involved a terminally ill German man named Michael Balmer.
Speaker A:Ballmer had cancer.
Speaker A:His wife told him one of the things that she would miss was being able to ask him questions.
Speaker A:So Ballmer worked with an AI friend developing an AI system and began recording his voice, stories, memories, and opinions.
Speaker A:The goal was to create an AI representation his family could access after his death.
Speaker A:What struck me about that story was his wife's response.
Speaker A:She wasn't certain she would use it.
Speaker A:She imagined that after her husband died, she might prefer sitting with one of his sweaters and remembering him.
Speaker A:That may sound incredibly ordinary, but maybe ordinary grief knows something.
Speaker A:Maybe absence has something to teach us.
Speaker A:An AI grief bot can't carry the scent of a loved one that a sweater does.
Speaker A:Meanwhile, another movement is approaching death from the opposite direction.
Speaker A:Instead of digitally recreating people after they die, why let them die at all?
Speaker A: In August of: Speaker A:The article opens in an examining room in California.
Speaker A:A man in his early 70s has advanced glaucoma.
Speaker A:An ophthalmologist injects a substance called ER100 into his left eye.
Speaker A:This is not an immortality treatment.
Speaker A:It is the first human test of a form of cellular reprogramming intended to restore damaged optic nerve cells to a younger, healthier state.
Speaker A:Researchers use proteins called transcription factors to change which genes are active.
Speaker A:The goal is not to turn the cells into embryos.
Speaker A:The goal is to move them backward, just far enough that they may repair damage associated with age.
Speaker A:That is remarkable.
Speaker A:But the article is careful about what has actually happened.
Speaker A:The phase one trial plans to enroll only 12 patients and follow them for as long as five years.
Speaker A:Its first job is to determine whether ER100 is safe.
Speaker A:No one has yet shown that it restores human vision.
Speaker A:No one has shown that it reverses aging throughout the human body.
Speaker A:And no one has come close to proving that human beings can live forever.
Speaker A:The science is real.
Speaker A:The promise remains unproving.
Speaker A:But listen to the ambition behind the experiment.
Speaker A:David Sinclair, the Harvard geneticist behind the treatment, hopes that medicines could reverse aspects of aging within 20 years and perhaps one day restore the whole body.
Speaker A:And he is not working alone.
Speaker A:Google co founder Larry Page lost Calico Labs OpenAI CEO Sam Altman invested in retro biosciences.
Speaker A:Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong helped start New Limit.
Speaker A:Altos Labs reportedly began with $3 billion in backing, including money linked to Jeff Bezos.
Speaker A:That is a staggering amount of capital aimed at one human problem.
Speaker A:We grow old, we become frail, and we die.
Speaker A:The business of immortality is no longer a fringe fantasy.
Speaker A:It is becoming an industry.
Speaker A:And the article raises important questions the science cannot answer by itself.
Speaker A:What happens if only the wealthy can afford to live longer?
Speaker A:What happens to younger generations if the old never die?
Speaker A:What happens when health care moves from healing disease to treating mortality itself as a defect?
Speaker A:Even Shenya Yamanaka, whose discovery made cellular reprogramming possible, has called for broad public discussion about the ethical consequences.
Speaker A:And this is where the church's voice is needed.
Speaker A:Then the connection becomes hard to miss.
Speaker A:The same age that is teaching machines to imitate the dead is teaching cells to forget that they have grown old.
Speaker A:One project tries to preserve us after death.
Speaker A:The other tries to postpone death indefinitely.
Speaker A:Different methods, same ancient longing.
Speaker A:Please hear me clearly.
Speaker A:If this science restores sight, repairs nerves, or gives people more healthy years, Christians can receive that as a gift.
Speaker A:We pray for healing all the time.
Speaker A:I have stood beside hospital beds and watched families grieve over the loss of loved ones and even children.
Speaker A:If this technology can do that, I applaud it.
Speaker A:We build hospitals.
Speaker A:We pray for healing.
Speaker A:We take medicine.
Speaker A:The problem begins when medicine becomes a salvation story.
Speaker A:Any good thing can become an idol.
Speaker A:It can become a substitute for God, a substitute for what gives us life.
Speaker A:And we have to always remember that God is our source of life.
Speaker A:A treatment may add years.
Speaker A:It cannot give eternal life.
Speaker A:It may delay a grave.
Speaker A:It cannot empty one.
Speaker A:And that distinction matters.
Speaker A:Entrepreneur Brian Johnson has built the entire movement around two words.
Speaker A:Don't die.
Speaker A:And I want to be careful here.
Speaker A:Trying to live longer is not sinful.
Speaker A:Eat vegetables, exercise, sleep.
Speaker A:See your doctor.
Speaker A:Wear your seatbelt.
Speaker A:I am personally in favor of not dying this afternoon.
Speaker A:But Johnson's public philosophy goes further.
Speaker A:His own site describes humanity as being at war with death and its causes.
Speaker A:I'm reminded of the old Petra song.
Speaker A:Petra.
Speaker A:You know, Petra song.
Speaker A:Death.
Speaker A:Where is thy victory?
Speaker A:Where is thy sting?
Speaker A:But this is saying something different.
Speaker A:This imagines the future which continued life becomes a choice.
Speaker A:And suddenly something much larger appears underneath the technology.
Speaker A:AI, Dead bots, longevity research, digital immortalities, cryonics, uploading consciousness, virtual avatars.
Speaker A:Different technologies, same ancient dream, older than any of them.
Speaker A:What if we could finally beat death?
Speaker A:And here is where Christianity does something surprising.
Speaker A:Christianity does not tell the world, you are foolish for wanting death defeated.
Speaker A:Christianity says, you are right.
Speaker A:Death is an enemy.
Speaker A:Paul actually calls death the last enemy.
Speaker A:And that matters.
Speaker A:We talk of Jesus conquering death.
Speaker A:Sometimes Christians talk about death as though we are supposed to be comfortable with it.
Speaker A:We say things like, death is just part of life.
Speaker A:Biologically, yes, this is a fact.
Speaker A:But biblically, death is not treated as something beautiful.
Speaker A:Death tears apart what love is.
Speaker A:Joined together.
Speaker A:Death separates.
Speaker A:Death steals futures.
Speaker A:Death leaves empty chairs at Thanksgiving.
Speaker A:Death leaves one side of the bed untouched.
Speaker A:Death leaves phone numbers we cannot bring ourselves to delete.
Speaker A:Death hurts because love was real.
Speaker A:And scripture does not shame us for feeling that.
Speaker A:In John 11, Jesus arrives at the tomb of Lazarus.
Speaker A:Jesus knows what he's about to do.
Speaker A:He knows Lazarus will walk out.
Speaker A:He knows resurrection is moments away.
Speaker A:And yet we are told that Jesus weep.
Speaker A:Think about that.
Speaker A:Knowing resurrection is coming does not make grief unreal.
Speaker A:Christian hope never requires pretending.
Speaker A:Death doesn't hurt.
Speaker A:Jesus stands inside grief.
Speaker A:He enters it.
Speaker A:He weeps, then he walks toward the tomb.
Speaker A:That is the gospel pattern, not denial.
Speaker A:Death, grief, then resurrection.
Speaker A:AI offers a different pattern.
Speaker A:Death denial simulation.
Speaker A:That may be the theological problem underneath all of this.
Speaker A:The Christian answer to death was never pretending.
Speaker A:The dead never left.
Speaker A:It has always been resurrection.
Speaker A: de all the difference for the: Speaker A:And now we can finally name what is bothering us.
Speaker A:AI Resurrection isn't resurrection.
Speaker A:It is an imitation.
Speaker A:A machine can produce the sound waves associated with my voice.
Speaker A:That does not mean I am speaking.
Speaker A:It can reproduce my face.
Speaker A:That does not mean you are looking at me.
Speaker A:It can analyze 30 years of sermons, book podcasts, episodes and conversations, and perhaps eventually predict with frightening accuracy what Jeff Skinner would probably say.
Speaker A:But prediction is not presence.
Speaker A:The machine may carry traces of me.
Speaker A:It is not me.
Speaker A:Christian resurrection makes a radically different claim.
Speaker A:It's not a bot that simulates me.
Speaker A:Jesus did not rise as a memory in Peter's mind.
Speaker A:He did not become a collection of essays repeated by the disciples.
Speaker A:He did not become a spiritual chatbot communicating inspirational thoughts beyond the grave, the tomb was empty.
Speaker A:The risen Jesus walked.
Speaker A:Tom ate, could be touched.
Speaker A:The wounds remained visible.
Speaker A:He invited Thomas to touch the wounds of his hand.
Speaker A:Christian hope is stubbornly embodied.
Speaker A:Paul makes the same point in 1 Corinthians 15.
Speaker A:Resurrection does not mean escaping humanity.
Speaker A:It means humanity redeemed, transformed, restored.
Speaker A:And here is something our Wesleyan family has always understood about how God works.
Speaker A:Grace moves first.
Speaker A:God was already reaching towards you before you ever reached back.
Speaker A:Before you prayed, before you believed, before you had done anything at all.
Speaker A:Grace was already at work, drawing you home.
Speaker A:A dead bot can't do that.
Speaker A:It only speaks because you keep feeding it.
Speaker A:Your data, your recordings, your memories, your late night questions.
Speaker A:Silence it.
Speaker A:Stop talking to it and it has nothing left to say.
Speaker A:When you turn it off, it doesn't continue to think.
Speaker A:It doesn't dream.
Speaker A:It cannot love you first because it cannot love you at all.
Speaker A:It can only reflect what you already gave it.
Speaker A:So every part of it is simply an echo.
Speaker A:It's simply a memory, an imitation of what used to be.
Speaker A:Grace does not work that way.
Speaker A:Grace spoke first.
Speaker A:It was not an echo of God's love.
Speaker A:It was God's love incarnate.
Speaker A:Long before you had a voice memo or a photograph or a single word recorded anywhere.
Speaker A:God knew your name.
Speaker A:He knew the hairs on your head.
Speaker A:That is a deeper claim underneath the resurrection.
Speaker A:You are not held together by data.
Speaker A:You are held together by someone who knew you before any of that existed.
Speaker A:The Christian promise is not that someday enough information about you will survive.
Speaker A:The promise is that God does not forget you.
Speaker A:And that is much bigger.
Speaker A:AI needs your data to reconstruct an approximation.
Speaker A:God needs nothing.
Speaker A:He knew your name before anyone photographed you, before anyone recorded your voice, before you posted anything online.
Speaker A:Jonathan says you were made in his image.
Speaker A:And that image was never something a server could store or a company could own.
Speaker A:Your existence is not secured by a server.
Speaker A:Your eternity does not depend upon a subscription.
Speaker A:Your identity is not the sum total of your digital footprint, and no corporation owns the Resurrection.
Speaker A:Carrying you off tells a haunting story from his early ministry.
Speaker A:Two teenage cousins had disappeared while canoeing.
Speaker A:Their bodies were never recovered because the families kept hoping the bodies would eventually be found.
Speaker A:No funeral was held.
Speaker A:Years passed eventually.
Speaker A:Decades passed.
Speaker A:About 20 years later, Newhoff helped the families finally hold a memorial service.
Speaker A:The grief was still there.
Speaker A:That story matters because the funerals do something.
Speaker A:I would phrase it a little differently than simply saying funerals give us closure.
Speaker A:Grief usually doesn't close.
Speaker A:You do not stop loving someone because you held a Service.
Speaker A:You don't put 30 years of marriage in a box, close the lid, and move on.
Speaker A:But funerals tell the truth.
Speaker A:The person lived, this person mattered, this person died.
Speaker A:We love them, we grieve them, and now we entrust them to God.
Speaker A:That is different from opening an app every night and maintaining the illusion that something has changed.
Speaker A:Nieuhoff asked a disturbing question.
Speaker A:What happens when instead of having a funeral, you simply open an app?
Speaker A:I think churches need to start thinking about this question now, because somebody will eventually walk into a pastor's office and say, my wife died six months ago, but I want.
Speaker A:But I talk to her every night.
Speaker A:And they will not mean prayer.
Speaker A:They will mean an AI simulation.
Speaker A:That person does not need ridicule.
Speaker A:They do not need condemnation.
Speaker A:They are grieving.
Speaker A:They need a shepherd.
Speaker A:They need people willing to sit in the ache with them.
Speaker A:They need Romans 12.
Speaker A:Weep with those who weep.
Speaker A:And slowly, gently.
Speaker A:We may need to help them distinguish between memory and presence, between comfort and avoidance, between honoring someone who died and creating a substitute who never gets to leave.
Speaker A:If I were sitting across from that man, I would not start by taking the app away.
Speaker A:I would ask what his wife said to him last night, and then I would tell me, and I would listen.
Speaker A:I would ask when he started needing to hear her voice every day, because that date usually tells you where the real wound is.
Speaker A:I would say plainly that missing her this much is not a spiritual failure.
Speaker A:It is proof of a real marriage.
Speaker A:And only after he knew I wasn't shocked and wasn't leaving would I gently ask whether the app was helping him grieve or helping avoid grieving her at all.
Speaker A:That question, asked with enough love and enough time, does more good than any warning ever could.
Speaker A:So should Christians refuse all this technology?
Speaker A:I don't think the answer is that simple.
Speaker A:There is meaningful difference between digital memory and digital impersonation.
Speaker A:Recording Grandma telling the story of how she met Grandpa.
Speaker A:Wonderful.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker A:A gift that keeps on giving.
Speaker A:Saving your father's sermons.
Speaker A:I have one sermon on cassette for my father.
Speaker A:Wonderful.
Speaker A:Recording your father, your mother's prayers so her grandchildren can hear them.
Speaker A:What a gift.
Speaker A:Creating an archive where descendants can search the things for the person actually said.
Speaker A:I see tremendous value in that.
Speaker A:But something changes when the system begins inventing new conversations.
Speaker A:Here's a simple distinction that may help us.
Speaker A:A recording says, remember me.
Speaker A:A dead bot says, talk to me.
Speaker A:Those are not the same thing.
Speaker A:One directs us backwards towards a life that really happened.
Speaker A:The other can manufacture an ongoing relationship that never actually happened.
Speaker A:So if this technology enters Christian homes.
Speaker A:I think several principles matter.
Speaker A:Consent matters.
Speaker A:The person being recreated should have have to say yes while they were alive, clearly and in writing, not have it decided for them after by grieving relatives.
Speaker A:Truth matters.
Speaker A:The system should constantly make clear that this is a simulation, never letting a child or vulnerable adult forget that they are actually who they are actually or what they are actually talking to.
Speaker A:Children need special protection since they may not yet have the capacity to hold the difference between a simulation and a person.
Speaker A:Grief should never become an advertising platform.
Speaker A:Platform.
Speaker A:The system should not invent beliefs, opinions or memories.
Speaker A:The dead, the deceased never expressed.
Speaker A:And no digital recreation should replace funerals, graveside meals, till tears, pastoral care and the human community that surrounds grief.
Speaker A:Because grief needs bodies, arms around shoulders, food arriving at the door, someone sitting beside you who doesn't know what to say.
Speaker A:Someone who remembers your husband's laugh because they actually heard it.
Speaker A:Someone who cries because they miss him too.
Speaker A:AI can simulate empathy.
Speaker A:The body of Christ can show up.
Speaker A:And maybe that is the strange gift hidden inside the entire conversation.
Speaker A:Why are we building machines that allow us to talk to the dead?
Speaker A:Because something inside of us refuses to believe love should end grave.
Speaker A:I don't think Christianity needs to mock that longing.
Speaker A:I think Christianity can name it.
Speaker A:You were made for communion.
Speaker A:You were made to love.
Speaker A:And when someone you love dies, something really has been torn.
Speaker A:Something breaks inside of us.
Speaker A:That pain is evidence that the relationship mattered.
Speaker A:But our hope is not that technology will eventually become sophisticated enough to keep everyone with us.
Speaker A:Our hope is that Christ has gone where every one of us is going, into death.
Speaker A:And he came out the other side.
Speaker A:That is why Paul can stare directly at death and almost taunt it where, O death is your victory.
Speaker A:Not because death isn't real.
Speaker A:Not because Christians don't cry, not because graves don't hurt.
Speaker A:But because the grave is no longer ultimate.
Speaker A:And that may be the deepest difference between artificial immortality and Christian resurrection.
Speaker A:Silicon Valley says maybe someday we can keep enough of you alive that nobody has to completely lose you.
Speaker A:Jesus says, because I live, you also will live.
Speaker A:One preserves information, the other promises resurrection.
Speaker A:One generates an echo, the other calls your name.
Speaker A:Remember Lazarus.
Speaker A:Jesus didn't stand outside the tomb and build a simulation.
Speaker A:He called Lazarus come out.
Speaker A:And Lazarus came.
Speaker A:Maybe that is why this belongs on a podcast called Echoes to Eternity.
Speaker A:Because all these strange technological attempts to defeat death may actually be echoes.
Speaker A:Echoes of a longing older than artificial intelligence, older than Silicon Valley, older than the pyramids, older than civilization.
Speaker A:The longing that death should not win And Christianity says that longing isn't foolish.
Speaker A:Death really does have an expiration date.
Speaker A:But resurrection won't come from an algorithm.
Speaker A:It comes from Christ.
Speaker A:So remember the people you've lost.
Speaker A:Tell their stories.
Speaker A:Listen to their recordings.
Speaker A:By all means.
Speaker A:Cook their recipes.
Speaker A:I just recently recovered my big mama's.
Speaker A:That's my grandmother on my dad's side.
Speaker A:Recipe for peanut butter cake.
Speaker A:And I can't wait to taste it again.
Speaker A:Keep their photographs.
Speaker A:Say their names.
Speaker A:Please cry when you need to cry.
Speaker A:Grieve honestly.
Speaker A:And when the empty chair hurts, don't settle for a counterfeit resurrection.
Speaker A:Because our hope was never in keeping the dead artificially present, it is far more audacious than that.
Speaker A:We believe that one day the dead in Christ will rise.
Speaker A:Not as avatars, not as memories, not as digital ghosts alive.
Speaker A:And until that day, we remember, we grieve, and we hope.
Speaker A:We keep listening for those echoes because eternity is already breaking through.
Speaker B:Marcus Aurelius said, what we do in life echoes through eternity.
Speaker B:What is your life echoing through eternity?
Speaker B:Welcome to Echoes Through Eternity with Dr. Jeffrey Skinner.
Speaker B:Our mission is to inspire, engage and encourage leaders from across the globe to plant missional churches and be servant leaders.
Speaker B:So join us and hear the stories of servant leaders reverberating lives as God echoes them through eternity.
Speaker B:Brought to you by Missional Church Planting and Leadership Development in Dynamic Church Planning International.
