The Census, the Shepherds, and the Child Messiah.
Ponderings at Christmastide on AI vs. human creativity, the Holy Spirit, and the birth of Jesus.
THE CENSUS, THE SHEPHERDS, AND THE CHILD MESSIAH.
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register.
So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.
And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.
Luke 2:1-20
Adoration of the Shepherds
Rembrandt is one of my favourite painters.
The painting above is Rembrandt’s “Adoration of the Shepherds”, painted somewhere around 1625-1669, which really means no one actually knows when it was painted; 1625-1669 means literally sometime when Rembrandt was an adult. I believe scholars are not even sure that it was him who painted it; but we will assume that it was. It was someone who was inspired, whoever it was.
For in this painting the child Jesus looks so fragile and vulnerable, Mary and Joseph so worn and tired, the shepherds so ordinary and down-to-earth and human and worn out by hard work. This painting depicts the light of God being revealed in ordinary people, ordinary situations.
The birth of Jesus was a very simple occasion.
Mary and Joseph were simple people, at the mercy of the merciless decrees mandated by the mighty: the census1 that Augustus issued around that time of Jesus’ birth took little consideration of the difficulties that ordinary people might have in returning to the town of their birth, particularly a poor, pregnant young woman like Mary.
The Shepherds
The shepherds in Luke’s gospel passage were probably not even counted in the census. They were complete nobodies. They were out in the fields when the angels appeared; being a shepherd was not a fancy job, not ever. These men were humble and poor and ordinary; how wonderfully Rembrandt paints them, they look so ordinary and human, their faces and figures marked by difficulty and suffering. Let me say that no AI could ever reproduce the humanity of this painting: every little detail and even every imperfection of Rembrandt’s rendition is inspired, from the position of Mary’s hand, protective over the child, to the tired look of compassion and motherly love on her face, to the chastened expression of Joseph’s righteous gentleness: here is a father who wants to provide for his child, who sees ahead to the many years of work and labour he must perform to make sure his newborn son – God’s newborn son – is provided for and protected.
Jesus’ real name in Hebrew is Yeshua, (whose name means Yah saves) - He is God with us - here is God, fragile and human and vulnerable.
What a beautiful painting.
The question I’ve been asking.
And here’s the question I’ve been asking myself: my question is, can an image created by AI can ever express anything truly spiritual, in a Christian sense?
A painting can be spiritual, for the painter’s every brush stroke can be inspired by God’s Spirit in him and the whole picture can be informed by the patience the painter has acquired and difficulties he or she has had to undergo.
Even a photograph is spiritual: for is it not true that the whole world is imbued with God’s Holy Spirit, Who is both completely transcendent and completely immanent, in other words, the Holy Spirit is in all created things and beyond all created things, and a spiritual photographer chooses which view to frame, what to look at, and is informed by what the spiritual human eye considers and sees?
And the divine Logos (logos Greek for word), that is, the Word of God, Christ the Jewish Messiah, is seen at work everywhere in creation, for Jesus is the light of the world, the light that enlightens all men.
And is not life itself is the most marvellous expression of Jesus’ creation, the greatest expression of the divine Logos, the Word of God, of course, apart from God’s incarnation itself, his becoming human in Jesus?
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not grasped it.” ….The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Sonc from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:1-5, 14
The Word of God - related to DNA how?
A word is a symbolic representation of reality, and DNA, being the blueprint of life, reveals its original source in the divine Logos, Jesus Christ, by being a word that describes every aspect of the created being, a word from which the created being is continually created and renewed and grown and adapted. The way we are created is highly spiritual and shows the marvel and wonder of God in every cell.
Thus we see, in the marvellous engineering of life itself, the work of the Logos, the divine Word of God.
But many of us fear that today that wicked people have been corrupting this natural word: the word of DNA, with their pharmakoi, their wicked sorcery, but we do not understand how these natural mysteries relate to the spiritual world.
But let us remember that the Holy Spirit is not natural, not part of nature at all: the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, is within and through everything and yet completely beyond physical nature, and thus, it is my belief that even if a person’s DNA has been damaged, if that person is a Christian, he or she is still capable of faith and still belongs to the Son of God and is a child of God. If the person has faith in Jesus Christ, let us reflect that the DNA is not the spirit in a person. It is just another part of his or her natural body. Let us not be thinking that imperfections or alterations in the word of DNA are alterations in the Word of God or the spiritual nature of a person: DNA is a word that was written by God’s Word, in a certain sense, but it is not God Himself. God’s image in a human being can be marred but every human is still made in the image of God2.
Still, remember: render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and render to God what is God’s. Caesar’s image is stamped on the coin. God’s image is stamped on the human being. The human body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, after all.
Anyway, it’s probably way better for your health not to take the mRNA injections, any more, if you have been taking them.
A picture is a word, art is a language.
Looking at Rembrandt again: a picture is a type of word as well, and art is a language.
Representational art in particular has meaning and purpose and is informed spiritually by its creator, in every intentional brushstroke, and even in the mistakes and imperfections, which might be seen as divinely ordained where the artwork is created in prayer and through the Spirit.
What sort of artistic words do we want to hear, to speak?
What sort of pictures do we want to see?
If a picture is created by AI, it will doubtless be excellent and beautiful and technically perfect.
But what the AI cannot do is to create that human imperfection and vulnerability that reflect the realities of human life: the cross of Jesus is the exemplar of this.
Just try to get an AI to make a Rembrandt painting: the faces are humanly speaking ordinary to the point of being ugly, but they do not shine with the inner light that makes ordinariness beautiful. The AI cannot make a face that is beautiful because of the light of Christ that shines through that person’s face, when the faces don’t conform to conventional beauty - I have an example of this - it’s in the footnotes because it’s too disturbing and I’d rather you remember Rembrandt’s faces. But you can look if you want.3
AI creates art that is completely flashy and superficial, worldly, in other words, with no effort; it is really dreadful actually, if you think about it4.
But this light that shine through the faces of the ordinary, unbeautiful people in a Rembrandt painting makes them even more beautiful than the most beautiful, perfect model or television personality.
It is that light of love that shines through a person’s face, love purified in a life of suffering and difficulty, carrying one’s cross patiently, that makes someone’s face truly beautiful. To love is to suffer, to be open to suffering, to forgive and to be willing to be vulnerable, and to be willing to be hurt by others again in the future and yet to keep loving. This is the definition of carrying the cross of Christ.
Christians can know that the Holy Spirit is at work in everyone who suffers as Jesus did: but AI, which is really nothing more than an algorithmic generation from a collection of numbers, indeed, generated by statistics, a kind of census generated from millions and millions of art works, can never have any ‘understanding’ of this reality, for it never has any understanding of anything, everything it creates it just a series of random choices generated by an algorithm?
AI generated pictures may already be perfect, in a technical sense, but they will never express what a Rembrandt painting can express, which is the patient suffering of a life of love for God and others, exemplified in the life Jesus lived, from the moment of his conception, and seen also in his parents’ lives, Mary and Joseph, in their own Old Testament way, when Jesus was born, for like Abraham and Moses, they were saints under the Old Covenant, until the death and resurrection of the Messiah.
You should think very carefully, my friends, before you rely on AI to draw your pictures for you, to draft your essays, to create your creations, to manufacture your products, for the very imperfection and brokenness and beautiful ordinariness* of your own photographs, drawings, essays, paintings, scribblings, is the very essence of humanity, and the Holy Spirit works through your creations.
A thank you to my readers
Thank you so much to all my readers this year, particularly for those who have encouraged me in comments, and particularly to my paid subscribers, whose generosity particularly motivates me to work harder to provide better essays and better information for everyone5.
Final word: a blessing to all my readers
May the Lord bless you all this Christmas, my readers, with a renewed appreciation for the way that facing the difficulties of your lives with faith in Jesus Christ can make you more loving and more patient with others, more generous and more kind, more like Jesus in every way.
For we are His workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:10
Please pray for me for this blessing as well, for none of us can do anything good without the love and patience of the Spirit of Christ comforting us and making us more like Jesus, even more the more life throws suffering and difficulties in our path.
Praise the Lord!
May you be a blessing to others, and may God bless you all with His comfort and the knowledge of Him, in Christ Jesus.
And to those among you who do not know Jesus: I pray that you will seek Him and be found by Him, for if you are seeking Him, it means He is already calling you and already knows you. God bless.
On Censuses.
A census: a desire for accurate statistics – an evil thing in biblical terms – for when God was angry with Israel He caused David to incur His wrath by taking a census (see 2 Samuel 24) – this is a strange passage in the Bible that tells us that sometimes it’s simply better not to know something.
Sometimes it’s better just to trust God.
Joab, David’s trusty commander, knew that it was wrong.
But Joab replied to the king, “May the Lord your God let you live to see a hundred times as many people as there are now! But why, my lord the king, do you want to do this?” 2 Samuel 24:3
David’s census didn’t end well: in the end he had to choose between three punishments that would fall on Israel, but he refused and asked the Lord to choose. After all that, though, David prayed thus, a true shepherd: “I have sinned; I, the shepherd, have done wrong. These are but sheep. What have they done? Let your hand fall on me and my family.” But he was allowed to make sacrifices instead, and these stopped the plague; he made his sacrifices on the oxen-threshing floor, the future site of the Jewish temple, whose sacrifices prefigured or outlined beforehand the future sacrifice of Jesus for our sins, the Great Shepherd of the Sheep.
Nonetheless, I would recommend that every single one of us should avoid the mRNA injections in this coming year: for Genesis 6 tells us of a time when human nature was corrupted by DNA from angels, and this was the occasion of the flood of Noah, but Noah’s family was perfect in their generations (perfectly human), but that’s another story for another time; I think that physical purity was only required for holiness up until the birth of Jesus, when God becoming human changed everything.
I’ve put this in the footnotes - it’s just too disturbing to look at:
A
I wonder if perhaps the AI is a perfect expression of “the World”, in the sense of “the World, the Flesh and the Devil”, that all Christians renounce when they are baptised.
I originally said here, “God bless you all. I think of you all as friends; although sometimes I feel like the Chinese poet Han Shan, writing his poems on rocks or throwing them onto the river, where they float down and someone reads them, but he never knows who reads them or sees the effect of the poem on the reader (except for the occasional comment or ‘like’, which is a blessing.)” but now that I read it I think it sounds a bit pretentious, particularly since I like the ‘likes’.