The Pastor as Romantic Author: AI, Preaching, and the Unacknowledged Inheritance of Authenticity

This article interrogates contemporary reactions to sermons produced with generative technologies through a historical–conceptual lens, arguing that widespread judgments of such outputs as “soulless,” “generic,” or lacking a “beating heart” are best explained by an unacknowledged inheritance from nineteenth-century Romantic expressivism. Rather than treating resistance to machine authorship as a theological verdict on computational incapacity, the study reconstructs how Romanticism centered authorship in sincere self-expression and solitary genius, displacing earlier heraldic expectations that prized fidelity to a received message. Methodologically, the analysis combines intellectual history with discourse analysis of global Christian experiments in synthetic composition (2020–2025), denominational guidance, and media commentary to map evaluative language about empathy, presence, and struggle. Findings show that signature critiques—insistence on lived experience, emotive immediacy, and visible spiritual labor—track Romantic values, whereas premodern postils, lectionaries, and printed collections reflect a utilitarian, office-anchored model of mediated authorship. Reframing the debate through this genealogy clarifies which objections are theological and which are cultural, enabling more precise judgments about the admissible roles of computational tools. The article proposes a two-axis matrix contrasting expressive-authorship criteria (voice, pathos, autobiographical index) with heraldic-fidelity criteria (doctrinal conformity, tradition-consistent rhetoric, communal authorization), and specifies use-cases where automated systems serve as instruments under pastoral oversight rather than as independent authors. Contributions include: (1) theorizing the “pastor as Romantic author”; (2) a typology of authenticity claims in homiletic criticism; and (3) policy-adjacent recommendations on disclosure, provenance, and sermonic labor. Recognizing Romantic inheritances allows churches to choose their authorship ideal consciously, evaluating generative media not by reflex but by clearly articulated theological priorities.