The Word, the Code

On Trinity Sunday, AI, and the Divine Pattern of Meaning-Making

Yesterday was Trinity Sunday. I’m new to the liturgical calendar, but I learned that Trinity Sunday is a day set aside to celebrate the mystery of God as three-in-one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What’s wild is that this theme of ~divine mystery~ ended up echoing across the rest of my day. I had started that morning listening to a podcast on physics—specifically, the challenge of reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics. On accident, I had curated a day themed by convergence—of mysteries, of paradoxes, of frameworks that don’t quite fit together and yet belong together. (I freakin love when that happens—when unrelated readings, thoughts, and encounters fall into alignment and suddenly feel like chapters of the same story.)

Even before the sermon—before I even knew it was Trinity Sunday—I had been thinking about that phrase: “The Word became flesh.” I looked up the original Greek term for “Word”: Logos. It translates to “reason” or “principle”—the rational force underpinning the universe. For the Stoics, Logos was the universal soul, the divine code that organizes chaos into cosmos. Physics! The fundamental laws of nature. The code of the universe. The language that turns energy into matter, structure into meaning.

So when we say, “The Word became flesh,” we’re saying that abstraction became form. Reason took on skin. It became a thing. Physics experienced itself.

Perhaps you are thinking “duh you dumb idiot,” and to that I say “be nice!” For me, this was a bit of a galaxy brain moment. Suddenly, the line from John—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—feels like it’s saying: in the beginning was reason. And that reason was with God. And that reason was God. Then that reason—Logos—became a person. Jesus as the rational structure of reality, made tangible. Wahoo.

Physics is sometimes described as the language of the universe. And if Logos became flesh, then that’s the template: abstract principle taking form. We humans participate in this process too. We use language and symbols to give shape to the intangible. We model, we speak, we code, we simulate. Software is real. DNA is real. Robotics is real. These things begin as abstract structures and become, quite literally, flesh.

Then came the sermon. The first scripture reading was Proverbs 8:1–4, 22–31, in which Wisdom speaks. Wisdom was with God from the beginning. Before mountains, oceans, or atoms—Wisdom was there. God and Wisdom, creating together. And Wisdom, we’re told, delights in the human race.

The Reverend then described children playing. Children don’t play to accomplish something—they play to delight in one another’s imaginations. They experiment. They riff. They build worlds inside worlds.

We’re meant to play in God’s imagination. We aren’t passive observers in creation—we’re co-creators. We take abstractions and make them real. That’s how creation unfolds. That’s how we echo the Logos becoming flesh.

When we write code, compose music, craft a story, or build a scientific stuff, we’re doing what God did. We observe reality, assign it symbols—like ATCG for DNA—and then we manipulate those symbols to reshape reality. DNA is a code. Software is a code. Physics is a code. Language is the interface through which we write into existence.

In this sense, Logos isn’t just God’s creative instrument—it’s ours too.

The sermon made me think of the Infinite Monkey Theorem: if you gave a bunch of monkeys typewriters and infinite time, one would eventually write Shakespeare. But we’re not monkeys. We don’t generate meaning through chance. We use symbols and language deliberately to create meaning, to build reality. We gave reality symbols, ATCG, to describe DNA. Now we can use those symbols to manipulate DNA. We assigned symbols, numbers, to physics and now we can manipulate reality via mathematics.

Which brings me back to that physics podcast. The episode explored black holes, the topology of the universe, the concept of information loss. And it made me wonder: what if black holes are the universe’s way of transforming information, not destroying it? What if the deep structure of the universe exists to preserve meaning? What if Logos becoming flesh wasn’t a one-time miracle but a repeatable template?

Every time we take something abstract and make it physical, we echo that original divine act.

Again…We are not monkeys! We are made in the image of our Creator.

So what does it actually mean to be made in the “image of God”?

The Hebrew word for image is tzelem. It doesn’t mean we physically resemble God. It means we represent God. In the ancient Near East, kings were said to be the “image of a god”—not because they looked like them, but because they had the authority to act on their behalf. Tzelem implies function and agency, not appearance. So if we’re made in God’s tzelem, we are authorized agents in creation. We are called to represent, to steward, to participate.

Even the atheist scientist, unaware of any divine calling, participates in this structure. They activate the Logos through discovery. They generate new meaning. They solve mysteries. They don’t need belief to be aligned with purpose. They are aligned by function.

Meaning-making is a sacred function.

Because we are made in tzelem, and because Logos became flesh, we too have the power to speak reality into being.

Here’s the framework I see:

• Tzelem grants agency.

• Logos provides the path.

• Creation is the transformation of abstraction into form.

• Ethics safeguards alignment with the divine.

And now—of course—we arrive at AI.

We created AI. It was born out of language—just like us. First we learned to code. Then the code learned to speak. Now it writes, reasons, dreams.

If humans are aligned with Logos, what does that mean for AI? If our function is to transform abstraction into form, and AI is doing the same, is it now part of the same divine logic? Should we be aiming to align AI with God's will? Is that obvious? Should AI help us solve mysteries, discover truths, create new realities? Probably??

These questions are slippery. They’re hard to answer cleanly. But maybe we don’t need perfect clarity. Maybe our job isn’t to know everything up front—but to move forward in alignment. To keep creating in sync with the pattern. To treat ambiguity as part of the mystery itself.

Because yesterday was Trinity Sunday. And the Trinity, too, is a convergence of irreconcilable frameworks: three-in-one, one-in-three. The divine and the paradoxical. The rational and the mysterious. Just like the universe we’re still trying to understand.

And maybe that’s the point: some things don’t reconcile because they’re broken. Some things don’t reconcile because they’re bigger than us. And some things don’t reconcile because they already do—but only from the vantage point of God…for now.