Application
Ten commandments, ten attributes of God, and what they require of those who build.
A pastor asks a model to draft a sermon. A hospital deploys a triage system. A parent hands a child a companion app. Each raises a question the commandments answer. The answers rest on the covenant history and on God's character, which the table assumes.
Each row of the table pairs a commandment with the attribute of God it most clearly displays, following Table 1 of Poythress's essay. Poythress offers each pairing as one helpful association among several, since God's attributes are inseparable. The next two columns give the duties the commandment requires and the sins it forbids, in the words of the Larger Catechism, modernized and abridged (Q. 103-148), read by its own rules for interpreting the commandments (Q. 99). The last column applies those duties to the people who build and use AI. The rows are grouped as Vern Poythress suggests (Introducing the Law of Christ, §22.4): the first three commandments concern our service directly to God, the fourth is transitional, the fifth through seventh concern our relations to other people, and the eighth through tenth our relations to the world of things. The Larger Catechism divides the same commandments into two tables, the first four setting out our duty to God and the other six our duty to man (Q. 98, 102, 122).
AI is an artifact and not an image-bearer, and it has no moral attributes and no moral agency of its own. Poythress distinguishes the attributes of the Creator, which are His supremely, from their reflection in human beings, who are made in God's image and whose corresponding attributes are creaturely and derivative (Sections 11-12).
| Commandment | Attribute of God | Duties required | Sins forbidden | What faithful design requires |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Service to God Commandments 1–3 | ||||
| 1. Do not have other gods Read the study | Supreme | Knowing and acknowledging God to be the only true God and our God, and worshiping and glorifying Him accordingly, by thinking, believing, trusting, loving, and fearing Him, and yielding all obedience to Him (Larger Catechism 104). | Atheism in denying or not having a God; idolatry in having or worshiping more gods than one, or any with or instead of the true God; and the omission or neglect of anything due to Him (Larger Catechism 105). | Keep the system subordinate. God's lordship belongs to Him alone: His authority, His control, His presence (Frame, ch. 3, 21-24). No model, company, or optimization target may hold the place of final authority over truth, value, or human life. A model's output is an input to human judgment, and those who build and deploy it answer to God and to the people it affects. |
| 2. Do not bow to images | Holy | Receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire all the religious worship and ordinances God has instituted in His word, particularly prayer and thanksgiving in Christ's name, the reading, preaching, and hearing of the word, and the sacraments (Larger Catechism 108). | Devising, counseling, or any wise approving religious worship not instituted by God; making any representation of God, inwardly in the mind or outwardly in any image; worshiping it, or God in it or by it; and corrupting His worship by adding to it or taking from it (Larger Catechism 109). | This commandment governs worship. What it asks here is that no one use a system to represent God, to stand between Him and a worshiper, or to take the place of the word, the sacraments, and prayer, the means He has appointed. A model cannot administer the word or the sacraments, so its output is not an ordinance. |
| 3. Do not use God's name in vain | Blessed | That God's name, titles, attributes, ordinances, word, sacraments, prayer, oaths, and works be holily and reverently used in thought, meditation, word, and writing, to His glory and the good of ourselves and others (Larger Catechism 112). | Not using God's name as required, and abusing it by ignorant, vain, irreverent, or profane mentioning of His titles, attributes, ordinances, or works, and misinterpreting, misapplying, or any way perverting His word (Larger Catechism 113). | Do not put God's name on a machine's output. Churches, ministries, and companies that invoke His name for a product answer for what it produces, and no one may cite His authority to certify what a model says. Generated devotional or exegetical text presented as His word perverts it. |
| Transitional Commandment 4 · worship before God and rest for neighbor and servant | ||||
| 4. Keep the Sabbath | Dynamic | Keeping holy to God the set times He has appointed in His word, and since the resurrection of Christ the first day of the week, resting the whole day from worldly employments and recreations and spending it in the public and private exercises of His worship, apart from works of necessity and mercy (Larger Catechism 116, 117; Westminster Confession 21.7-8). | All omissions of those duties, careless and unprofitable performing of them and being weary of them, and profaning the day by idleness, by doing what is in itself sinful, or by needless thoughts and words about worldly employments and recreations (Larger Catechism 119). | A product designed to maximize engagement draws people away from the rest and worship the commandment requires (Larger Catechism 117). The exception the Confession grants is narrow: works of necessity and mercy. A hospital monitor or a utility control system is a work of necessity, and a product that makes its money by manipulating people's attention is not. |
| Relations to people Commandments 5–7 | ||||
| 5. Honor your parents | Harmonious | The honor, obedience, and support that inferiors owe their superiors, the love, instruction, protection, and provision that superiors owe those under their charge, and the mutual regard and preference that equals owe one another (Larger Catechism 127, 129, 131). | Neglect of those duties, envying at and rebellion against lawful authority, and in superiors an inordinate seeking of themselves, with the undervaluing of the worth of equals (Larger Catechism 128, 130, 132). | Support the authorities a person already has. The commandment reaches every ordered relation and not parents only, so it bears on teachers, employers, pastors, and magistrates. Do not put a system between a child and the adults responsible for him, or use one to bypass lawful authority. Authority rests with persons who can answer for it, and a machine cannot. Those who train models on the accumulated work of earlier generations owe that inheritance honor: credit to those whose work they use, and care in how they use it. |
| 6. Do not murder | Living | All careful studies and lawful endeavors to preserve the life of ourselves and others, by subduing passions and avoiding the occasions, temptations, and practices that tend to the unjust taking away of life, and by its just defense (Larger Catechism 135). | Taking away the life of ourselves or others except in case of public justice, lawful war, or necessary defense, and the neglecting or withdrawing of the lawful and necessary means of preserving life (Larger Catechism 136). | A person must answer for any system whose failure can kill. This covers a weapon that selects its own target, a triage model that ranks a dying patient too low, and any other system whose error ends a life. Because neglecting the means of preservation is itself forbidden, withholding safety testing or suppressing failure reports is also forbidden under this commandment (Larger Catechism 136). |
| 7. Do not commit adultery | Intimate | Chastity in body, mind, affections, words, and behavior, and the preservation of it in ourselves and others, with watchfulness over the eyes and all the senses, temperance, modesty, and diligent labor in our callings (Larger Catechism 138). | All unclean imaginations, thoughts, purposes, and affections; all corrupt or filthy communications or listening to them; wanton looks, impudent or light behavior, and immodest apparel; and all other provocations to, or acts of uncleanness, either in ourselves or others (Larger Catechism 139). | Intimacy belongs to persons. Companion products that simulate intimacy for revenue, sexual images generated from a real person's likeness, and designs that feed on loneliness are occasions of the unclean imaginations and corrupt communications the commandment forbids. Because the catechism forbids the causes, means, and occasions of a sin along with the act itself, the duty of preserving chastity in others rests on the people who design and engineer the product and not on the user alone (Larger Catechism 99). |
| Relations to things Commandments 8–10 · property, truth, and desire | ||||
| 8. Do not steal | Giving | Truth, faithfulness, and justice in contracts and commerce, rendering to everyone his due, restitution of goods unlawfully detained, giving and lending freely according to our abilities and others' necessities, and a lawful calling diligently followed (Larger Catechism 141). | Theft, robbery, and receiving what is stolen; fraudulent dealing, false weights and measures, injustice and unfaithfulness in contracts or in matters of trust; oppression, extortion, and engrossing commodities to raise the price (Larger Catechism 142). | Take only what you have the right to take. Training on a creator's work without a license, scraping private data, and surveillance that extracts value fall under what the catechism calls unjust ways of taking or withholding from our neighbor what belongs to him (Larger Catechism 142). Rendering to everyone his due means securing permission first, paying what is owed, including to the people who label its data and moderate its output, and crediting sources. |
| 9. Do not bear false witness | Truthful | Preserving and promoting truth between man and man, and our neighbor's good name as well as our own; appearing and standing for the truth; and speaking the truth, and only the truth, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully (Larger Catechism 144). | Prejudicing the truth and our neighbor's good name; giving false evidence; outfacing and overbearing the truth; calling evil good and good evil; and concealing the truth when we are bound to speak (Larger Catechism 145). | A system must never pass itself off as a person. A legal brief citing cases a model invented, and a cloned voice used to put words in a real person's mouth, are false witness. Synthetic content should be marked, and a system that imitates a person should say that it is a machine, since someone deceived about who is speaking has been given false testimony. Model output must not stand as sole or unverified evidence where a person's reputation, property, or liberty is at stake. |
| 10. Do not covet | Contented | Such a full contentment with our own condition, and such a charitable frame of the whole soul toward our neighbor, that all our inward motions and affections touching him further the good that is his (Larger Catechism 147). | Discontentment with our own estate, envying and grieving at the good of our neighbor, and all inordinate motions and affections toward anything that is his (Larger Catechism 148). | Do not provoke discontent, and do not build out of envy. A product engineered to manufacture dissatisfaction commits the sin the commandment forbids, and a development race driven by envy at a competitor's gain and discontent with one's own position commits the same sin in the builder (Larger Catechism 148). Those who keep a system within its task do not let it gather data, power, or attention beyond its purpose. |
Note: The second column is adapted from Table 1 of Vern S. Poythress, "Introducing the Law of Christ (Lex Christi): A Fruitful Framework for Theology and Life", used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The table has been extended: the duties and sins columns are drawn from the Westminster Larger Catechism, the design column is this site's own, and for the seventh commandment the table gives only the essay's main term, "Intimate," and leaves out its parenthetical additions. The framework the essay presents, and the name lex Christi itself, are Timothy P. Yates's, whose own work carries the same license. Because of those share-alike terms, this table is itself made available under CC BY-SA 4.0, including the columns added here. Nothing else on this site is offered under that license.