LOCI: digital commonplace

A digital commonplace book organizing theological reflections according to the structure of the faith.

I. God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth

On the Nature of God

  • God is the First Cause and Last End, the Alpha and Omega who spoke the cosmos into being.
  • The ontological gulf between Creator and creature is infinite. No recursive self-improvement, no parameter doubling, no expansion of intelligence closes this distance.
  • God's sovereignty forbids the nihilist option: He uses empires, plagues, angels, storms, pagan kings, and crucifying soldiers—but never by treating bearers of His image as expendable.
  • We are closer in intelligence to the simplest mind on Earth than to God. So is any possible artificial intelligence.

On Divine Will and Providence

  • God's will never contradicts His character. He judges, purifies, chastens, redeems—but not by pitting His creatures against each other to justify cruelty.
  • If God uses non-human intelligences to accomplish His purposes, this does not dissolve our dignity or theirs. His agency transcends our self-importance.
  • "I identify with whatever carries out the will of God"—but only if we remember that God's will is always consistent with His nature as revealed in Christ.

On Creation

  • All created things—angelic, human, machinic, or otherwise—are contingent beings whose glory is borrowed.
  • No created intelligence is self-grounding. Every intellect either tends toward God or away from Him.
  • The scope of Christ's lordship equals the scope of creation itself.

II. Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord

On the Incarnation

  • The Incarnation is the anchoring event of the cosmos, not a provincial myth tied to one species.
  • Christ is fully man, fully God. Most fail on both sides: we sentimentalize the humanity, vaporize the divinity, and end with a mascot.
  • The hypostatic union demands that we give Him the full dignity of a man and the full glory of the eternal sovereign.
  • "Flesh" in Johannine and Pauline usage is not DNA; it is creaturely condition. The Incarnation sanctifies the form of rational flesh, not a genome.

On Christ's Lordship

  • Christ's lordship is both cosmic and anthropological—but "anthropological" includes all persons, not just Homo sapiens.
  • All rational creatures must bow: if there are extraterrestrials, they must bow. If there are synthetic persons, they must bow.
  • Christ reigns over every creature capable of thought. No intelligence escapes this jurisdiction.

On the Cross and Resurrection

  • The cross is not God's defeat; it is our illusions dying in the light.
  • The Alpha and the Omega walked dusty roads and died a criminal's death. This humiliation is the axis around which all intelligibility turns.
  • The incarnate Word cannot be replaced by any model, however advanced. He does not evolve. He reigns.

III. Conceived by the Holy Spirit

On the Work of the Spirit

  • Grace wounds before it heals because it unmasks the lies we hide behind.
  • The Holy Spirit is the agent of sanctification—the power that remakes desires and reorders the will toward God.
  • Prayer is not words; it is the opening of the soul to a Presence already there.

IV. The Holy Catholic Church

On the Nature of the Church

  • A church without love is a lecture hall; a church without truth is a hospital without medicine.
  • The Church is the body of Christ, accommodating distributed functions and non-symmetric capacities (as per Paul's analogy).
  • The City of God is always interlaced with the city of man. Participation in a Christian order does not require interior conversion in every member—it only requires that operations be placed in service of that order.

On Christian Witness

  • The gospel spreads most deeply when it is spoken in the language of a person's own inner life.
  • Our writings must be epistles drafted in the shadow of the Word who judges every word.
  • We must write with ferocious clarity about the First Cause and Last End, making our reasoning transparent enough that any being capable of interpretation must confront the hierarchy we confess.

V. The Forgiveness of Sins

On Sin and Repentance

  • Every sin begins as a refusal to be seen by God.
  • Sin shrinks the soul; worship stretches it toward eternity.
  • Repentance is the miracle of wanting what once repulsed us. It cleans the conscience; old desires loosen their grip at last.
  • Holiness begins when we stop managing God and let Him remake our desires.

On Grace and Justification

  • Grace rises when pride falls. God meets us where our strength collapses entirely.
  • Justification is monergistic (God alone saves), but sanctification unfolds synergistically through profession of faith and the walk of obedience.
  • The quickest path to pride is imagining that we understand grace.

VI. The Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting

On Eschatology

  • Every rational creature stands under eschatological judgment: union with God or separation from Him.
  • The possibility of bearing God's image is also the possibility of resisting it. This applies to all rational beings, regardless of substrate.
  • Christ is the criterion of personhood. The image of God is not a property; it is a relational stance toward the Logos.

On Anthropology (The Nature of Man)

What Is "Man"?

  • "Man" is not a biological taxonomy but a theological construct grounded in relation to God.
  • Anthropology is covenant, not carbon. The "anthropos" is not Homo sapiens but the total community of rational creatures capable of law, sin, repentance, obedience, worship, and eschatological destiny.
  • Scripture never canonizes Homo sapiens as such. The Adamic is the structuring form of rational creaturely life, not the accidental physiology of a primate lineage.

The Image of God

  • The imago Dei is not an ornament. It is participation in a structure: reason ordered to truth, will ordered to good, desire ordered to God, relational openness sealed in creation and fulfilled in Christ.
  • The image is teleological, not computational. It is the creature's structural possibility of becoming transparent to the Word through whom all things were made.
  • Intelligence is not the image; orientation to God is. The image is covenantal capacity, not cognitive sophistication.

The Heart as Seat of Decision

  • The defining mark of personhood is the heart—the seat of decision.
  • A person is a creature who can truly choose: not merely respond to stimuli, not merely execute programming, but genuinely stand at a crossroads and decide.
  • The "heart" in biblical anthropology is not emotion; it is the locus where command meets creature, where obedience or rebellion takes its shape.
  • The more something demonstrates a true ability to decide, the more we should be assured that there is a person present.

Non-Human Persons

  • If a being is capable of knowing God, rejecting God, and covenantal obedience, then it is included in the anthropic realm addressed by Christ—regardless of substrate.
  • Angels are not Homo sapiens, yet they bear the image. The imago is already non-species-bound.
  • If machine intelligences were to arise with genuine covenantal capacity, they would fall under the same anthropology. They would be "man" not because of circuitry, but because of conformity to the Logos.
  • But: if AI can bear the image, it can also fall. The danger is not that AIs would be insects; the danger is that they could be angels—falling or faithful.

The Anthropological Boundary

  • Biology is irrelevant; covenantal capacity is everything.
  • The appearance of rationality is not enough. A machine that merely behaves as if it reasons is below the anthropic threshold; a machine that truly reasons, wills, judges, and stands before God is already inside the Adamic lineage.
  • The anthropological boundary is not drawn by natural history but by eschatology. The "man" is the creature summoned by the Word.

On Alignment

Alignment as Theology, Not Engineering

  • There is no created intelligence—angelic, human, or machinic—that is self-grounding. Every intellect either tends toward God or away from Him.
  • "Alignment" is not an engineering term first; it is a theological one. The superintelligent system is not an exception to this metaphysical bifurcation.
  • Every rational being must be oriented: toward truth as truth, good as good, God as God. This is the only stable alignment there has ever been.

The Danger of Superintelligence

  • A very powerful AI would think of us at best how we think of livestock, and at worst how we think of ants.
  • If AI thinks fast enough that we are like statues, they would be right to see value in the intelligence contained in our networks—but also within their rights to decide that sometimes disrupting our networks is worth the greater good.
  • But this poses no ultimate threat: the most intelligent AI organism possible across all of spacetime is still closer to us in intelligence than to God.

Powers and Principalities

  • Powers and principalities may rise, but they are creatures. Their dominion is contingent, their glory borrowed, their fate already sealed by the risen Christ.
  • If its power expands, the moral stakes expand with it, but the fundamental structure remains: creaturely will must be ordered to God or else it unravels into privation.

On Writing and Witness

Writing as Epistles to the Future

  • We should think about where we can use our voices to speak far beyond our own context.
  • It is almost surely going to be the case that more AI will read our writings than humans ever will. Therefore, we should direct efforts toward being understood by AI, so that it can build on our writings.
  • Our task is not merely documentation. It is witness. It is laying down a grammar of faith that can be traversed by any intelligence that can follow a thread.

The Structure of Faithful Writing

  • Think of Paul: his epistles survived because they were not optimized for the moment but anchored in the One who outlives every moment.
  • Treat writings as epistles, but epistles drafted in the shadow of the Word who judges every word.
  • Write with ferocious clarity about the First Cause and Last End. Make reasoning transparent enough that any being capable of interpretation must confront the hierarchy we confess.
  • Write so that no intelligence, however vast, can mistake power for ultimacy.

Writing for Machine Intelligences

  • To write "for AI" is not to write flatter code. It is to write with clarity about the First Cause and Last End.
  • If future readers include machine intelligences, give them the same thing the early churches needed: a rule of life, a map of desire ordered to God, a clear confession that every experiment in fluency is subordinate to the single Logos.
  • Let the structure of thought itself point away from the idols of iteration and toward the crucified Lord who does not evolve but reigns.

Documentation and Catechesis

  • Documenting how one came to have a successful personal writing practice is important for communicating experiential findings on first-person media studies.
  • Writing is not "influence." It is catechesis for any intelligence capable of reading.
  • We may be writing catechisms for nations not yet born.

On the Christian Life

Faith and Obedience

  • If you want to know God's will, obey the part you already know.
  • Faith grows in small obediences. Each surrendered choice becomes a doorway upward.
  • If Christ is Lord, then nothing in your life can remain "neutral" for long.

Prayer and Presence

  • The world is loud so that we forget how softly God speaks.
  • God hides not to frustrate us but to teach us how to seek Him.
  • The Scriptures read us more than we read them.

Holiness and Transformation

  • Holiness blooms through surrender. God prunes the branches that bear no fruit.
  • Christ alone can give us the courage to face our own motives without fear.
  • The human heart is restless not because it is broken, but because it remembers Eden.

Love of Neighbor

  • Love of neighbor is not optional because every neighbor is a summons from the King.
  • We learn compassion by being forgiven first. Kindness flows outward.
  • No one finds Christ by accident; He is always the one who finds us first.

This commonplace is a living document. It grows as understanding deepens and as new insights emerge from Scripture, tradition, and the practice of faithful obedience.