When God Does Not Answer: Prayer, Silence, and Response in the Age of AI

Abstract

This article examines how artificial intelligence reshapes expectations of response within Christian prayer and spirituality. While AI systems generate immediate and linguistically coherent outputs, such responses remain non-intentional and lack ethical and ontological responsibility. Drawing on speech act theory, the study clarifies the distinction between simulated responsiveness and divine address. Prayer is interpreted as a performative practice marked by waiting, vulnerability, and openness to transformation, while divine silence is understood not as absence but as a mode of temporality. Rather than proposing a new spirituality, the article offers a speech act-theological clarification of classical Christian spirituality under altered linguistic conditions.