The Flood and the Flesh

I watched a machine write in four seconds what I used to charge money for.

It was a product description, the kind of small commercial writing I've done a thousand times. I typed in a few details and the screen filled with competent, faintly soulless copy. About as good as mine. Free. It took less time than I spend looking for my reading glasses.

I run a marketing agency and I've published more books than I can keep straight, so I've spent most of my working life inside the exact corner of the world that just got automated. I felt the floor move under me.

If you've ever used an image editor, you know the paint bucket. You click one spot and color floods out from your cursor, filling everything until it slams into a hard line. The first time I used it, back in the nineties, it felt like a magic trick. Touch one pixel, change a whole region at once.

That's the picture I can't shake about this moment. Somebody tipped the paint bucket over onto the economy. The color spreading out is automation, and the only question anyone really has is how far it goes.

The novelist and programmer Robin Sloan has the best answer I've read. He says the flood stops. There's a hard line it can't cross, and he borrows the name for it from the people who study games. He calls it the magic circle.

A magic circle is a space where the rules get agreed on ahead of time. On a chessboard you could reach over and swat your opponent's king onto the floor. Nothing physical stops you. You don't, because the whole point was to play the game, and you both signed up for that before the first move. Computers, Sloan says, live inside a magic circle too, and it's a narrow one. Symbols in, symbols out. That's the entire territory. A computer can become anything you want, as long as the thing you want is the rearranging of symbols.

It feels bigger than that only because we stare through it all day. The view through a drinking straw would look enormous too, Sloan points out, if you never once put the straw down.

The physical world won't fit through the straw. His proof is the office printer, the spot where the clean world of symbols runs into dust and friction and a sheet of paper that has decided, today, to fold itself in half on the way through. Engineers have been trying to perfect the printer for forty years and it still jams, because reality is gnarly in a way that code never is. The line of his I keep repeating: "Software cannot, in fact, eat this world. Software can reflect it; encroach upon it; more than anything, distract us from it. But the real physical world is indigestible."

I think he's right. I also think he's more right than he knows, and the reason is the oldest news I've got.

Christians have a sentence we say so often it's gone smooth from handling. "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1, ESV). The Word, there, is bigger than vocabulary. It's the logic and the pattern under everything, the source code of the cosmos if you want the nerd translation. So far this is a story a computer could love. Symbols all the way down.

Then comes the part that breaks the machine.

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).

We've sanded that sentence into a Christmas ornament. Strip the tinsel off and look at what it actually claims. The pattern behind everything did not send a clearer memo. It did not improve the delivery. It grew a body, the kind with a spine and a stomach that growls at the wrong moment. God's signature move is the exact reverse of the one we're all so excited about. We are racing to turn the world into symbols. He turned the Symbol into a world you could put your hand on.

The man who knew Jesus best wrote it down years later, like someone who already knew you wouldn't buy it. He's talking about the thing "which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes... and have touched with our hands" (1 John 1:1). He stacks the senses on purpose. He can see where this is headed, toward a day when people will try to make the whole thing abstract, a philosophy you can hold at arm's length. No, says the old man. I touched him. There was a body in the room with scars and a pierced side. He ate fish.

Once you see it, you can't stop seeing where the faith keeps its weight, and it is never inside the magic circle.

It's bread you actually chew, the cheap kind that sticks to the roof of your mouth. Water cold enough to make a grown man gasp when they put him under. A hand on your shoulder during a prayer you were too proud to ask for out loud. A casserole carried onto the porch the week somebody died, by a woman who can't fix any of it and drove over to not-fix it in person. Confession said with your own voice, to a face that doesn't look away when you get to the bad part.

None of that is symbols in, symbols out. All of it is gnarly. It's slow and awkward, and it costs you something you don't get back. The printer jams. Thank God.

People can fake the room, too. I've sat through the church-growth version, where the lobby is engineered like an Apple Store and the altar call has clearly been A/B tested. But even the slickest, most over-produced Sunday still needs a few hundred actual humans to haul their bodies into a building on the one morning they could have slept in. The machine can write the sermon. It cannot show up.

That's the part that should make us nervous, and not about the robots.

An AI will write you a prayer right now. A good one. Scripturally sound and properly humble, with a tidy turn at the end. It will write you a sermon, a worship song, a devotional for every morning you have left, and a condolence note that hits every beat and means nothing. There are already apps that will disciple you, and at least one that answers your questions in the voice of Jesus, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type.

Maybe sit for a minute with how strange that is. If a machine that only shuffles symbols can manufacture your spiritual life, then your spiritual life was already made of symbols. The water was never deep. Somewhere along the way we swapped the faith for content about the faith, the verses screenshotted but not lived, the worship playlist doing the felt-work of worship while we sat in traffic. That version automates beautifully, because it was already running inside the circle.

So the flood is coming for the counterfeit of your discipleship. Let it come. It can't touch what was real to begin with.

We've been here before, on a smaller scale, every time a new machine promised to deliver God more efficiently.

The printing press put a Bible in every hand, a genuine miracle that remade the world. It also never once saved a soul by ink alone, and the same Reformers who fought over that press still made you come get the bread. Radio piped preachers into the kitchen. Television gave us church in our pajamas, which felt like progress until you noticed that loving your neighbor required more than passive consumption. Then a virus sent us all home and turned the whole church into a livestream for a year, and we found out in our living rooms that watching worship is to worship roughly what watching a cooking show is to dinner. Each new medium swore it would revolutionize our faith. Each time, the heart of faith and love and hope stayed exactly where it had always been, at a table and in a room full of people you didn't choose, half of whom you find irritating, which is the entire point.

The faith has never relocated its center into a medium. It can't. The center is a body, and you can only meet a body with a body.

I learned that in the least automatable place in America.

I went to federal prison. I won't dress it up, because the whole value of it was that it was real in a way nothing on a screen has ever been real to me. You can't stream your way out of a cell. You can't optimize your sentence. Prison is pure friction and pure obstruction, the physical world with the volume turned all the way up.

And grace didn't show up there as information. It showed up as people, which is the only way it has ever shown up for anybody. In person. On the far side of a steel door, on a schedule somebody else controlled. It came later through a marriage that had to be rebuilt the slow, bodily way, in the same rooms, on the other side of everything I had done. Every piece of my redemption was gnarly. Every piece of it needed a physical presence. If God had been willing to settle for symbols, He could have left me a very nice note. Instead He kept sending people, which was far more inconvenient and the only thing that worked.

So this is what I'd say back to Sloan, with gratitude, from the other side of the circle.

He said, "The world can run without an internet. The internet can't run without a world." But underneath the world, holding it up, there is a God who would not stay a symbol when staying a symbol would have been so much cleaner.

The flood is real. It's going to keep rising, and a great deal of what we've called church will turn out to have been pixels all along. When the water finally drains off, what's left is going to look embarrassingly small. A handful of people around some bread, and a God who refused to phone it in. Which turns out to be all it ever was.

So go put your body somewhere real this week, a kitchen table or a hospital chair next to someone who's scared. The machine can't follow you there, and it never will, and after the year we're walking into, that might be the kindest thing anyone can tell you.