I think Logos has come out with its best Bible study tool in years, and I want to tell you about it in three videos. I’ll tell you what that tool is after three introductory paragraphs. Then I’ll show you how I’ve used the tool. I think you’ll want it after that. And I’ll give you a code to use that will help you get it. Ready?
I worked at Logos Bible Software for nine years. The first few years were some of the best of my life. They were glory days. I worked with smart Christians in an exciting environment under leadership I liked a lot, specifically Bob Pritchett, the founder and (then) CEO; and Phil Gons, a long-time friend for whom I have great respect. I had phenomenal managers in Todd on the Logos Pro team, Brannon Ellis at Lexham, Jesse Myers at Lexham (now CEO of Baker Publishing), and Beka of Content Marketing. Good people I really love.
I marketed Logos in hundreds of articles, but I always felt that the best way for me to serve Logos and Christ at the same time was to never drink the Blue Logos Kool-Aid. I always tried to take as honest a look as I could at the new tools Phil and his developers put out. I tried not to glaze, as the youth say, any features I didn’t truly believe were valuable. And I was and am open that most of my use of Logos revolved around a few simple tools, some of which are available freely in other apps. Countless times I thought of Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street. If Gimball’s had a better product than Macy’s, I wanted to be free to say so.
But here’s the thing: I genuinely believed while working there that Logos was the best Bible study software available. I still believe that now. Accordance is good, too. A number of phone apps for Bible study are also good. I still use Literal Word regularly, though not frequently. But when I want to do serious work in the text of Scripture—for sermon prep, Sunday school prep, YouTube scripts, or personal study—I hit my Raycast shortcut for Logos, and when it pops up I’m always excited.
I asked Logos to sponsor this and two more videos on this new tool, and they said yes, but I want you to know that I was going to make at least one of them anyway. Probably two. Because I actually believe what I’m saying: the Logos Study Assistant is the best thing that has happened to my Bible study since Pigma Micron pens and wide-margin Cambridges. I get more out of my Logos library than I used to. Study Assistant solves the hardest problem with Logos, which was always searching for concepts rather than words. Study Assistant has me reading more of my Logos books than ever. It pretty neatly solves the problem we all have with using AI in Bible study, namely that you can’t vet the sources, because it can limit its answers to what it gets out of your own pre-vetted collection of resources. After dozens or hundreds of uses of the Study Assistant in the last year-plus, I’ve never seen it hallucinate. I’ve never had to say to it, “No, what you just said is heresy.” I’ve never had to have that cloying experience of hearing AI respond, “Yes, you’re right. I apologize for spouting heresy and will try to be more orthodox in the future.” No, the still newish Logos Study Assistant is Logos search on steroids. Legal steroids. Yummy steroids. The kind that every baseball player should take.
Ok, let me eat some proof-pudding to prove this to you. I’m going to give you the three most recent, real-life instances in which I used the Logos Study Assistant. Then I’m going to tell you how you can get it and try it out for your own Bible study.
1. Is the healing of James 5 physical or spiritual?
The Bible has been studied carefully for many centuries. It is a comfort to me to know that the ways I read Scripture, including especially the questions I still have about it, have substantial continuity with the way Christians of the past read the text. Yes, there was a lot of allegorizing and spiritualizing at times in the Christin past. There have been bad interpretations and bad interpreters. But I certainly don’t need to reinvent any wheels. The arguments and counterarguments regarding certain common interpretational questions have been more or less ironed out, even ossified, over time.
And sometimes I just want a quick reminder, a rundown, of those arguments and the major positions they support. And that happened with a passage in James recently. I have spent some time on James 5:14–16 in the past, the passage which says that the elders should come to the sick person and pray over him or her, and that “the prayer of faith shall save the sick.” I specifically recall hearing a detailed sermon about this in chapel at Bob Jones, preached by a competent exegete who was (I think he maybe said this in the sermon) leaning on a journal article that I want to say was in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. But it’s been a while since all that. I just wanted a refresher as I prepared to talk about James in a seminary class I was teaching. So I asked, “Is the healing of James 5 physical or spiritual?” Also, to be clear, I always only search my own books. I’ve got a big library, and I want my answers to come from it. I vetted that library. I want to use it.
The first paragraph the Logos was in itself helpful:
The healing described in James 5 involves both dimensions, though interpreters disagree on which takes priority.
The next paragraph is very judicious.
James 5:14–16 is the only passage in the New Testament epistles that directly addresses the question of physical healing. While the Greek terms used can denote spiritual weakness in some contexts, James’s language makes it impossible to eliminate the physical dimension—in the Gospels, the most relevant material to James, these words almost always refer to illness, and the term for healing (iaomai) refers to physical healing when not used in Old Testament quotations. Additionally, anointing with oil appears elsewhere in the New Testament only in a description of physical healing.
There are three footnotes in this paragraph, and if I click it—I LOVE this feature—the Study Assistant takes me to the resource in my library from which it derived its carefully worded paragraph. And there you find out where it got most of the language. Not only that, but it highlights the relevant portions. That is huge. I love this.
So you do need to be careful when quoting the Study Assistant. You are often reading wording straight out of your resources; you’re not quoting a nameless and faceless computer entity.
I for one welcome our new AI overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted YouTube personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to live in the matrix pods from which they derive their sustenance.
Oh, wait. What I mean is, I think some preachers and teachers are wondering, as I have, whether or not you need to cite AI when it gives you some tidbit you can use in a sermon or lesson. In Logos, you do, and you should, because AI is summarizing and quoting from the resources in your library.
I just love this. Sometimes I want to do deep dives; sometimes I want and need to read page after page and marinate in some writer’s argument. Sometimes I just want the TL and the DR. That’s not wrong. I know of no better way for preachers and Bible teachers to get that than the Logos Study Assistant.
I won’t read the rest of what the Study Assistant told me about James 5. Suffice it to say that it sent me to three resources in my library that made great sense and that it gave me the quick summary I needed, plus citations to use if I needed them.
Logos Study Assistant for the win.
2. What is the sin of “robbing temples” in Rom 2?
The next most recent question I asked the Study Assistant was, “What is the sin of ‘robbing temples’ in Rom 2?”
I do believe I’ve looked into this before. But, once again, it wasn’t in the memory banks, and I was using a fairly limited time window to prepare for a Sunday School lesson taught to the whole church.
The AI gave a contextual and exegetical argument, but it sent me to resources that lean in the lexical direction. I thought this was a good balance. I got a prose description and argument in the body of the efficient, three-paragraph answer, and I get quick links to intelligent and more specific discussions below. What’s not to like?
I like that the summaries are usually short and brisk but practically always contain the information I want—plus, of course, links to more information.
3. How do interpreters of Romans harmonize Paul’s very negative description of non-Christians’ “debased minds” in Romans 1 with the evident goodness of many non-Christians?
I preached a message recently at my church on 2 Timothy 3, which says that people in the last days will be “lovers of self.” I also taught on Romans 1–8 in all-church Sunday school, which begins with three chapters of divine indictment against all people. I asked the Logos Study Assistant a pretty complex, conceptual question:
How do interpreters of Romans harmonize Paul’s very negative description of non-Christians’ “debased minds” in Romans 1 with the evident goodness of many non-Christians?
This is topical search on a meta-level.
Logos gave me a great discussion with links to major names and trusted resources. I took note of this, because my early complaint—like right after the beta came out, I sent this to my friends at Logos—my complaint was that my queries were returning results without apparent reference to their weight. That is, I might get hits in some obscure Rose Publishing booklet that has its place, don’t get me wrong, but isn’t as valuable as names like theologian Mark Seifrid, commentator Mark Seifrid, and theologian Donald Bloesch. That’s what the Study Assistant gave me here.
The answer confirmed my general orientation: Paul teaches that non-Christians have consciences and openly acknowledges that they often follow those consciences. But they also, in Paul’s famous line from Romans 1, suppress truths about God’s eternal power and divine nature that they can’t not know.
The Logos Study Assistant found for me a journal article I just wouldn’t have found otherwise, a commentary discussion that I wouldn’t have thought to seek out because it wasn’t on the passage I was thinking of. It honestly didn’t add much in this case, but it was absolutely on topic and might have provided a helpful quote had I been
Conclusion
I asked users of the brand new Logos forum to tell me what answers from the new Study Assistant surprised them, and I must say that not all of them have had the universally positive experience I have had. I think some of them were asking detailed grammatical questions, and one seemed to me perhaps to be asking the AI to be creative—which, I note, AI seems to have trouble with because by its nature it is (and I speak somewhat out of my depth) recombining existing text strings and not thinking thoughts the way a human does. I am avowedly hedging that statement: I am not knowledgeable enough about the way AI works to be confident in it, but it does underline what some other Logos users have said: AI, even in Logos, is not a good replacement for education. Thankfully, though, the resources to which the Study Assistant sends you are likely to be written by educated people. And, thankfully, the kind of people who buy Logos libraries big enough to make such tooling helpful tend to have some facility in using the concepts they read.
Ok; this video was just singing the praises of a Bible study tool I appreciate very much.
The next video will compare this tool to other tools in the same category. Other people are making cool stuff you should know about, but I will argue for why I think Logos is still the best.
The final video will get philosophical and talk about AI and Bible study. I’m hoping to have some special guests from Logos to weigh in, too. Wait and see.
I’m gonna be super honest here: I don’t, uh, maybe understand all the subscription offerings at Logos. They were being phased in as I was leaving for the company for new parachurch ministry opportunities. My friends there have had me on the Max subscription, and I have never even come close to running out of AI credits. They’re there when I need them; you’ll have to see what subscription level works for you. It’s still a little hard for me to grasp a subscription model for Bible study resources. I want to own my books. That is still absolutely possible at Logos. But if you’re a student who is unsure what your ministry future is, subscriptions may make a lot of sense. You’re not locked in forever. And it makes some sense to most of us that apps that use a lot of AI juice from those bodies in the matrix need to cost some kind of monthly fee. So power Logos users probably won’t balk much here.
If you want to try the Logos Study Assistant, you and I will both benefit if you head to logos.com slash Ward on Words to see some resources I’ve put together in a Bible study bundle. I don’t accept sponsorships unless I would have sought them out independently. Logos is the real deal, and for what you get, it’s a good deal. I don’t regret a single cent of the many I have spent on Logos. Check out logos.com slash Ward on Words, and give the Logos Study Assistant a try.
Extra tidbits
I’m a little surprised by how much confusion exists over Logos’ offerings: do I get to keep my books, what do I get with various subscription levels, is Logos removing our ability to buy books? I must admit, however, that even I sometimes get confused… Or lazy, rather, because I already have what I like in Logos and don’t feel I need more—save for Study Assistant and the occasional book!
When I worked at the company I know we tried to get out ahead of these questions, tried to educate users and buyers, tried to stem the confusion. I self-consciously chose to mention names of Christian people I love at Logos in this piece because I want to humanize it for others. It’s mostly a bunch of Christian people trying to serve the church with technology, it really is.
And because Logos serves some highly educated people with highly specialized tools, it going to include some complexity. I’m not sure that’s a bug; I think it’s a feature.
All the same, I’ve repeatedly said that Logos Is Two Things—and you don’t have to know any more than those two things to get great value out of it.