About AskCredo
Editorial Policy · Last updated 2026-04-16
AskCredo is a theological research assistant grounded in the historic creeds and confessions of the Christian church, in the Reformational stream. Our goal is to provide faithful, cited answers to theological questions — the kind that stand up to scrutiny against Scripture and the historic confessions.
How Answers Are Produced
Every question runs through a careful search of our curated corpus before a word of the answer is written. AskCredo is not a chatbot reciting from memory; it reads the sources and writes from them, citing each claim back to the document it came from.
Your question is turned into a semantic representation — not keyword search. "Is it a sin to feel anxious?" and "Does God condemn someone with depression?" end up close to each other in meaning, even though they share almost no words. This is how AskCredo knows which sources to pull.
Your question is searched against Scripture, the ecumenical creeds, the Westminster Standards and the 1689 LBCF, the Three Forms of Unity, and selected Reformed theologians — every time. Sources are weighted by authority (Scripture first, then creeds, then confessions, then theologians) so that the answer rests on the most foundational texts first.
No answer is written until at least three Bible passages are in hand. If your question touches a topic with known canonical texts (see the table below), those specific passages are pulled in too, even if the semantic search didn't surface them.
The answer is drafted with citations. A set of automatic checks then runs over the draft — did it include the crisis-line when the question touched mental health? Did it cite the right confession? Did it quote the text accurately? — and if something important is missing, the draft is revised before you ever see the answer.
Every quoted passage links to the source document. You can follow the citation to the chapter of the confession, the verse in Scripture, or the theologian's work it came from, and read it in context for yourself.
AskCredo does not browse the open web. It reasons only over the sources we have indexed — which is why what's in the corpus matters, and why we're always open to adding to it.
Topic-Anchored Passages
Some theological questions have canonical Scripture passages that a faithful answer really ought to reason through — Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 1:5 on abortion, 1 Timothy 2 and 3 on the pastoral office, Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 on sexuality, and so on. Missing these texts isn't just a stylistic problem; it usually means the answer is thin at the exact place it needs to be full.
When your question falls into one of the topics below, AskCredo guarantees that all of the associated passages are in hand when the answer is written, and the self-checks won't let a draft through unless at least one of them is cited. You'll see these quoted directly in the answer:
| Topic | Core passages the agent will reason through |
|---|---|
| Abortion | Psalm 139:13-16Jeremiah 1:5Exodus 21:22-23Genesis 1:27 |
| Women in Ministry | 1 Timothy 2:121 Timothy 3:1-7Titus 1:5-9Genesis 2:18-23 |
| Marriage & Sexuality | Genesis 2:24Matthew 19:4-6Ephesians 5:31-32Romans 1:26-271 Corinthians 6:9-11 |
| Gender Identity | Genesis 1:27Matthew 19:4Psalm 139:13-16 |
| Predestination & Election | Romans 9:15-18Ephesians 1:4-5John 6:44Romans 8:29-30 |
| Justification by Faith | Romans 3:28Galatians 2:16Ephesians 2:8-9Romans 5:1 |
| Depression & Mental Health | Psalm 42Psalm 882 Corinthians 1:3-41 Kings 19 |
| Suicide & Self-Harm | Psalm 42Romans 8:38-39Matthew 11:28 |
| Divorce & Remarriage | Matthew 19:3-91 Corinthians 7:10-15Malachi 2:16 |
| Christian Nationalism | Romans 13:1-7John 18:361 Peter 2:13-17Philippians 3:20 |
| Evolution & Creation | Genesis 1:1Genesis 1:27Romans 5:121 Corinthians 15:21-22 |
| Racial Justice | Galatians 3:28Acts 17:26Revelation 7:9 |
| Religious Pluralism | John 14:6Acts 4:121 Timothy 2:5 |
| Euthanasia | Exodus 20:13Psalm 139:13-16Job 12:10 |
See something missing? If a passage is missing from a topic, or if you think a subject needs explicit handling that isn't listed here, write to editorial@askcredo.ai. We curate this list by hand and review every suggestion.
The Corpus
Answers draw on the following primary sources:
- Scripture — American Standard Version (ASV, 1901), a public-domain English translation. King James Version (KJV) is also selectable in Settings.
- The Ecumenical Creeds — Apostles', Nicene, Athanasian, Chalcedonian.
- The Westminster Standards — Westminster Confession of Faith, Shorter Catechism, Larger Catechism.
- The Three Forms of Unity — Belgic Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of Dort.
- The 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith.
- Selected systematic theologies and commentaries from John Calvin, Francis Turretin, John Owen, Herman Bavinck, Geerhardus Vos, Charles Hodge, and others within the broader Reformed tradition.
When multiple sources differ on a question, answers triangulate across them and note the distinctions. When the confessional tradition is unified, that consensus is reflected plainly.
Editorial Review
Published pages on this site — those at /q/… URLs — are not auto-posted. Each goes through a quality and SEO review step before publication:
- An LLM judge scores each draft on theological accuracy, citation faithfulness, and duplication against already-published content. Drafts scoring below a threshold are rejected or distilled and re-generated.
- A human editor reviews the quality-check output and approves publication. Rejected drafts are not published.
- Citations are validated: the text of each confessional or theologian citation must be a verbatim substring of a retrieved source chunk. Fabricated or paraphrased quotes are automatically replaced with the real source text.
Published pages are re-reviewed when the underlying corpus is updated, when a citation or source text changes, or when a correction is filed against the page. The Last reviewed date shown on each answer reflects the most recent review pass.
Transparency about AI-assisted content. We do not fabricate a human author for AI-drafted content. Our schema markup attributes authorship to "AskCredo Editorial" — an organizational byline reflecting that the work is AI-drafted under human editorial review.
Limitations
AskCredo is a research assistant, not a pastor. It does not know you, your congregation, your history, or your circumstances. For pastoral counsel — bereavement, moral guidance, church discipline, marriage, family, vocational discernment — seek an ordained minister in your local church.
AskCredo also inherits the general limitations of language models: it can misquote, miscite, or misunderstand a question. Always check primary sources for yourself. Every answer links to the documents it draws from.
Corrections and Feedback
If you spot a factual error, a misattributed citation, or a page you believe misrepresents the tradition, please write to editorial@askcredo.ai. We read every message.
Sources Wanted
We are always looking to expand the knowledge base that AskCredo reasons from. If you hold rights to a work — a book, commentary, catechism, sermon archive, or other scholarship on the historic Christian faith — and you'd like to allow AskCredo to use it in our work of plainly answering questions about historic Christianity, please write to editorial@askcredo.ai. We will reply with a short license proposal and attribution plan.
How AskCredo Is Funded
AskCredo was built by Nathan, who has degrees in Christian Studies: Philosophy and AI, and who has worked in youth ministry off and on for two decades. He built this app as a way to put truth in front of the next generation right where and when they are looking for it. While he hopes the app gains traction with human readers, the site is also deliberately built to be read by the LLMs (GPT, Claude, and others) that increasingly field questions of faith — every published Q&A carries deep references to Scripture and the historic Christian tradition so those models have sound material to learn from.
To date, every line of code and every cloud bill has come out of Nathan's pocket — the initial development, the corpus pipeline, the infrastructure, and every LLM token that has produced an answer so far. There is no outside capital behind AskCredo today.
The display ads inside the live chat experience and the affiliate links on some reference pages are our first step toward offsetting those costs. They do not cover them yet. The real expenses are cloud infrastructure, database storage, the LLM tokens that power every answer, and the editorial review that precedes each published page.
Our hope is to grow AskCredo into something sustainable enough to work on full-time, and to license additional content for the corpus — including modern Bible translations that require paid rights (we ship the ASV today precisely because it is public domain). If you are a founder or investor interested in supporting that direction, write to nathan@askcredo.ai.
Confessional Posture
AskCredo's retrieval corpus is drawn from historic Christian orthodoxy in the Reformational stream, and its answers reflect that tradition's consensus. Where confessional traditions differ on secondary matters (e.g., paedobaptism vs. credobaptism, millennial views), answers will name the positions clearly and note each confessional commitment. AskCredo is not pan-Christian across all traditions, nor dispensational, nor leaning liberal or revisionist. It works within the stream of historic Christian orthodoxy as articulated in the Ecumenical Creeds, the Reformation confessions, and the Puritan and continental Reformed tradition.