We live in a world increasingly given over to “smart” gadgets and digital programs that finish our sentences. At the end of a message, I now have a choice of canned replies (“Thanks for your input!”), which I will obstinately reject even if they were what I had in mind, rewording the response just to claim my own voice.
The idea that nature bears the divine image, the traces of the Creator, is shot through our Christian tradition. Paul insists on this notion, saying that God’s very self can be known through creation, that a sincere heart will know the difference between truth and falsity, and can know God.
The challenges of social media and artificial intelligence are not what Paul had in mind as he wrote to the Romans. Nevertheless, his exhortation to reject created things as idolatrous, excoriating the community for their worship of false gods, seems eerily prescient in our day.
How, today, do we know what is real, even when we search with a sincere heart? “Fake news” has quickly led to “fake images”—idols not of the divine but virtual distortions of the image of Christ in our neighbors, friends, and those we care about around the globe. Can that “imprint” of the Creator, those “vestiges of the Trinity” be composed of bits and bytes—or will it be dangerously obscured?
Perhaps our answer lies in this passage from Luke, as Jesus rejects our outer forms of piety in favor of quieter, chastened “alms.” Fake news is all around; our prayerful task is to be ever vigilant for the divine image that quietly breaks through.
