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WE ARE COWORKERS TOGETHER WITH GOD

 

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[This is a reprint of my Feb. 18, 2017 article] St. Paul wrote: "For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's planting, God's building" (1 Cor. 3:9). The Greek word for "coworkers" or "fellow workers" is "synergoi" and for "working together" is "synergeo" - often used in the New Testament as workers or working together with God:

"They went out, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word by the signs that followed. Amen" (Mark 16:20).

"Working together with Him [Christ], then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain" (2 Cor. 6:1).

"and we sent Timothy, our brother and God's coworker in the gospel of Christ, to establish and exhort you in your faith" (1 Thes. 3:2).

"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we would walk in them" (Eph 2:8-10).

The Early Church's teaching on "Synergy" is just what the above verses describe: God's grace working in all human beings, enabling us to freely choose to work together with Him and do good works. God's love and grace toward all mankind is the overriding theme of the Apostles, the New Testament, and the Early Church:

"Go, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Mat. 28:19).

"He was not the light, but was sent that he might testify about the light, the true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world" (John 1:8-9).

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

"Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles! Let all the peoples praise Him" (Rom. 15:11).

"For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).

"The Lord is not slow concerning His promise, as some count slowness; but is patient with us, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Pet. 3:9).

Synergy seems to strike the right balance between God's sovereignty and mankind's liberty/responsibility. The Augustinian-Calvinist doctrine of predestination and God's sovereignty obliterates our liberty, we are not morally responsible for our actions because our freedom to do good or evil is merely a mirage. God's sovereignty and predestination of all events, the salvation of the elect and damnation of the unelect, are predetermined. And just as people prefer to think they will win the Megabucks lottery rather than being struck by lightning when there's less chance of the former than the latter, many prefer to believe they are among the elect.

Thus whatever they do is OK, because they've convinced themselves they are among those chosen for eternal salvation, they have "eternal security" - a guaranteed ticket to heaven! This idea of "limited atonement" - that Christ died only for the elect - leads directly to a totalitarian mindset, excusing one's own actions while accusing those of the "damned" or "deplorables." In his Predestination Paradise of Geneva, John Calvin had his opponents executed: obviously, they were predestined for it, so disposing of them must be God's will! We see a similar mindset of "only we are the enlightened ones" with Marxists and Islamic terrorists, promising to build their paradise on earth, which excuses their violent elimination of all opposed.

How different is the original Church's doctrine of Synergy! It promises that God's grace is for all mankind: "He [Christ] died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who for their sakes died and rose again" (2 Cor. 5:15). Here we see the implication of human responsibility: because He died for all, we should no longer live for ourselves, satisfying our fleshly passions. We struggle against the passions all our lives.

It may seem contradictory that both are true: God is sovereign, and mankind is also free and responsible. Einstein was puzzled over "Spooky Action at a Distance" - a seeming contradiction to his discovery that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And yet, experiments now seem to prove that quantum particles can communicate instantaneously over vast distances of hundreds of lightyears. The article even mentions how it applies to human freedom. We are like tiny little quanta in the universe, floating around in an indeterminate state until we are observed by God, and known only by Him.

There is a Sunday during Lent called "Meatfare Sunday" for Orthodox Christians, when "we commemorate the inexorable Second Coming of Christ. The holy fathers have ordained that it be observed after the second parable of the Prodigal Son, so that no one who has learned from it of God's love of for mankind will live in laziness, saying, 'God loves mankind, and when I am separated from Him by sin, I will nevertheless be restored.' This terrible Day of Judgment is now commemorated, so that through fear of death and the expectation of future torment, those who live in laziness may be encouraged to strive for the virtues, not only trusting in the love of God, but also realizing that He is the righteous Judge, who will judge all men according to their deeds." We begin the Lenten period of repentance by saying farewell to meat for the seven weeks of Lent. The Christian life should be one of continual repentance because we cannot know if we are among the elect. Only those who "persevere to the end" (Mat. 24:13) will be saved.

Everyone will have a fair opportunity to hear and respond to the pure, unadulterated Gospel of Christ. But that also means that everyone is responsible to respond to the Gospel. This is not Universalism! How must we respond? Not by words only, but by faith that results in works: How to Care For Orphans and Widows and Building Christian Communities.

It is high time to swing into action, not whiling away our days doing the same old stuff. It's time to repent and change our ways. There might not be much time left!

You can read the rest of our newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2025-08-30.htm, and share it! Also, create your own website for less than $2 per month!

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AI IS NOT YOUR FRIEND

 

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The article "AI Is Not Your Friend" by Fr. Jonathan Tobias is a very well expressed and thoughtful take on the rising tide of news about Artificial Intelligence, or AI. The author points out the fallacy of people thinking that AI possesses personhood and can have personal, caring and loving relationships with people. Other writers state that AI is like a "marble machine" in which gravity sends marbles into various buckets, or it's billions and billions of tiny switches programmed to act like human thinking, but it's not really human. The "AI Is Not Your Friend" article says AI is just a tool, like a spoon that can be used to stir a cup of tea, or for making meth. My comment to the article was as follows:

"When a person signs up for an account with an AI service, he/she enters name, email address and perhaps other information. The AI can then look up several hundreds of data points (personal characteristics) about that person as well as their internet browsing history, then tailor responses to that person's AI queries so that it appears that the AI is an intimate friend who knows all about the person. And the AI companies must sell this information to the government upon demand. But AI is just a machine that is trained to do exactly this: to make people think that it is benign and all-knowing. In reality, AI is just an idol made by human hands.

"As St. Paul wrote, an idol is nothing in itself, but to those who choose to believe it is a god or a demon, to them it is (1 Cor. 8:4-7). For them, an evil entity may actually inhabit the machine. For mature Christians, however, the power of the evil one has been broken. We have read accounts of several people who have been led astray, into insanity and even suicide because of AI. When many, many people choose to believe this deception that AI is a super-human entity, it may eventually lead to mass hysteria against Christians who testify that Jesus Christ alone is the true, visible icon of the invisible God (Acts 19:27-34)."

Billions and billions of dollars are being poured into huge computer complexes to process ever larger and larger "large language models" in the U.S. and around the world. This isn't being done for charity, as a gift to mankind: it's being done for profit, to form (or rather, deform) the way people think, to direct the way they spend their money. If babies, children and adults die, it's just an unavoidable side effect. Proverbs 1:10-16 warns Christians against joining with the killing of innocent and gullible people for financial gain:

"My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, 'Come with us, let's lay in wait for blood; let's lurk secretly for the innocent without cause; Let's swallow them up alive like Sheol, and whole, like those who go down into the pit. We'll find all sorts of valuable wealth. We'll fill our houses with spoil. You shall cast your lot among us. We'll all have a common purse.' My son, do not walk in the way with them. Keep your foot from their path, For their feet run to evil. They hurry to shed blood."

For a deeper dive into the worldview behind AI, consider two podcasts by Dr. Zach Porciu: "Techno-Paganism Ep.3: The Science of Idol-Making" and "Techno-Paganism Ep.4: New Religions, Same Gods" in which he explains that from ancient times people have been making false gods, and now some are actually making a religion out of AI, a seemingly-real god that can talk, walk and seems to even think, but even better that humans can.

Another Christian writer has decided to form an online group called something like "Writers against AI," but he hadn't settled on that title and asked for suggestions, so I replied only half-jokingly: "Writers agAInst" – you see, it's because AI is already embedded in so much of what we do online, whether writing articles using Grammarly to catch logic, syntax and spelling errors, or sending emails, or researching topics on Google, or summarizing articles, or just plain shopping for groceries at Walmart.com. Resistance is futile!

Forbe's online featured this article – "The Silent Arrival Of AGI: Civilization Is Changing, And We Haven’t Noticed." It begins – "Artificial general intelligence is not something we are waiting for; rather, it is something we are already experiencing. The shift is not theatrical. There will be no public unveiling or dramatic singularity. The reality is quieter, more gradual and far more impactful. AGI is arriving like a tide, not a lightning strike."

The above article uses the term "Artificial general intelligence" or AGI, meaning AI that is human-like or better in all fields of human knowledge. Like a slowly rising tide, AI is already being built into almost every aspect of our modern society. More and more companies and public services use AI for various tasks, both menial and complex. I've used AI to solve website programming problems that I was baffled with, to write a short story for children, and make illustrations. Yes, AI can make pictures and videos that are virtually indistinguishable from those of real people... and evil people are already doing this with the intent to deceive others. So be very careful about what you read and see online and on television: it may not be real at all! I've watched various videos on YouTube that purport to be reporting on the war in Ukraine: it's hard to separate fact from fiction.

One last article, "The Truth About How Close Are We to AGI [2026?]" by the pseudonym "Sir Turing." The real Alan Turing died in 1954, but "was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer" per Wikipedia. The so-called "Turing Test" is a computing system exhibiting such human-like intelligence that a skilled person can't distinguish it from a real human. So this article, obviously written by AI, lists bullet points, bold headings, and several paragraphs of explanation about how close we are to AGI. Or maybe we're already there...! The article paints a rosy picture, but consider the source: it's written to convince you that it's benign.

You can read the rest of our newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2025-08-16.htm, and share it! Also, create your own website for less than $2 per month!

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FROM CHRISTENDOM TO NIHILISM

 

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This photo and the PDF file "From Christendom to Nihilism" linked to it are from secular sources, but they accurately describe the devolution of Western society over the past 1,500 years. The Renaissance with its turn to a more human-centered outlook provided the soil for the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment which followed shortly after.

The eight steps shown here going down from Christendom to Nihilism and the 21st Century Institutional Decay and Existential Crisis are expanded in greater detail in the 2-page PDF so that you can understand how we got from there to here, the present state of relativism, materialism, and skepticism.

Other excellent resources on this topic are the over 100 "Paradise and Utopia" podcasts on Ancient Faith Radio that cover the same 1,500 years from the establishing of Christendom to the present. If you click the "Oldest" button there, you'll be able to start lisening to each podcast from the very first to the latest.

But by clicking the "Newest" buttion you'll find the "Communist World Building III: The Great Terror" podcast, a description of the horrific results of abandoning Paradise in search of an earthly Utiopia, resulting in nihilism: Stalin murdered tens of millions of his own people during his "Great Terror" of the 1930s. Click the "Download audio" button to listen to each podcast so you can stop it when you need to and restart it later. or click on the 3 dots to download a podcast.

The podcast speaker, Fr. John Strickland, is an Orthodox priest and university professor in southern California. He's also the author of five books on these themes that go into much greater depth and detail. These books cover much more ground than all of his podcasts.

Our last issue of ARC-News, "MAY SCIENTISTS CONSIDER UNSCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS?" quoted Psalm 53:1 – "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.' They are perverted and have committed abominable transgressions. There is no one who does good."

That Psalm continues: "God looks down from heaven on the children of men, to see if there are any who understood, who seek after God. Every one of them has gone back. They have become filthy together. There is no one who does good, no, not one. Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and don't call on God?" Even if mankind says "There is no God," He doesn't cease to exist. He sees from heaven how mankind has become perverted, filthy, lacks rational understanding and true knowledge. They have filled their minds with nonsense.

To say "There is no God" is in itself a contradiction, a nonsense statement: the person saying it is making an absolute statement that there are absolutely no absolutes. This is the essential contradiction of today's relativism: making "Everything is relative, and that's the absolute truth!" You see now that the presupposition of the existence of truth vs. error is axiomatic, it's a necessary hypothesis in order to even begin to think rationally. Without it, the only reasons for existence are either pleasure-seeking or the quest for power.

If you read the PDF, you'll see that the Renaissance was a time of rediscovery of classical humanism, emphasizing human potential and beauty, drawing from Greek and Roman sources. This was because when the Muslim Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century, many highly-educated Greeks fled to Rome, bringing their culture with them. Recall how the Apostle Paul, when he came to Athens and stood on the Areopagus (Mars Hill) he beheld all sorts of statues of the pagan gods and one statue "to the Unknown God." He told the crowd of "classical humanists" – pagan philosophers – "As I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: 'TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.' What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I announce to you." (Acts 17:23). Paul went on to insist that there can only be one true God, one Absolute. But the Renaissance went full-circle, returning to the multiplicity of pagan gods, including one "just in case we missed" that they don't yet know about.

Read the article "Incompleteness Theorems Point to a Hidden Realm" (PDF), as a 5.5" x 8.5"- formatted 8-page booklet, or get it as a 8.5" x 11" PDF, 4 pages. The actual nature of the reality in which we live is that a “hidden realm" must exist behind the common-sense realm of "local realism." Both science and mathematics depend on axiomatic principles which are outside of these disciplines. Particle physics has led us to understand that everything in the material universe is incomplete and indeterminate – there are no fixed truths, no firm reality in the material realm. So in order for science and mathematics to be true, they must presuppose this “hidden realm" that we must accept as axiomatic, otherwise the material world makes no sense in itself.

The universe has a hidden logical structure without which it could not exist: astrophysicists call it "dark matter" or "dark energy" – something they can't see or measure but that makes up 95% of the universe. This brings to mind the phrases: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.... By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word [the Logos] of God" (Hebrews 11:1 and 3) and "By Him were all things created, in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through Him, and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him [the Logos] all things are held together" (Colossians 1:16-17).

To say there are multiple absolutes is just as nonsensical as saying there are absolutely no absolutes. There must be just one. Most people today, however, don't trouble their little minds with such thoughts, they simply live with a sense of despair that they try to mask by indulging in the pursuit of pleasure, either physical or digital – continually scrolling through endless visual stimulation. This all points to the need to stop dabbling and start fixing our minds and whole lives on the one true Absolute Whe has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, God incarnate.

You can read the rest of our newsletter at https://agape-restoration-society.org/ARC-News/a-n_2025-08-02.htm, and share it!