In the hours and days following an act of mass violence, something predictable happens. Attention turns almost immediately to motive. Questions are asked before facts are known. Conclusions form before evidence is gathered. The human impulse is understandable: if we can explain the violence, we can contain it. If we can name the cause, we can distance ourselves from it.
After recent attacks, antisemitism was quickly identified as the explanation in Australia. International commentary included political figures framing the attack in terms of Islamist extremist ideology.
In the United States, public commentary veered toward familiar suspicions. Amit Sarwal, writing for The Australian Today, reported on social media comments by Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. Director of National Intelligence, in which she described the attack as an “Islamist terror attack” and warned that the goal of Islamism was the “Islamisation” of countries around the world. Her remarks suggested that immigrants of the Islamic faith pose a threat to national security.
Such rhetoric reflects a broader pattern in moments of fear: the rush to explanation, the narrowing of responsibility, and the temptation to fold entire communities into a single story. It also overlooks the fact that a Muslim man was among those who risked his life to disarm one of the attackers. That contradiction has barely slowed the narrative.
This pattern reveals something deeper than political rhetoric or media failure. It exposes a wound in how we respond to fear. When love is absent, people are no longer encountered as persons. They are encountered as explanations.
In these moments, accountability becomes distorted. Rather than patiently seeking truth, responsibility is assigned hastily. Motive is inferred. Identity becomes evidence. Entire communities are folded into a single story—not because the story is accurate, but because it is simple. And simplicity feels safer than complexity when we are afraid.
This is the logic of abstraction.
Abstraction is what happens when we relate to one another at a distance—when we trade presence for categories and explanation for encounter. It allows us to speak about people without ever being with them. And in times of fear, abstraction is often rewarded. It offers speed instead of care. Certainty instead of humility. Distance instead of responsibility. Abstraction isn’t always cruel. It’s often tidy.
One way to understand abstraction is to imagine filling out an application. We’ve all done this. Applied for jobs, for schools, for housing, for benefits. Immigrants hoping to stay in this country apply for safety, asylum, and opportunity.
An application decides who qualifies. It determines who belongs, who receives the benefit, and who is allowed to move forward. Applications require information—but only certain kinds. There are spaces for status, address, history, and category. But there is no space for who depends on you. No space for who you love. No space for the names of people who call you when they’re afraid.
If it doesn’t fit on the application, it doesn’t matter. Whatever doesn’t fit becomes invisible.
Once we accept this logic, people stop being neighbors. They become applicants. Or worse—cases to be processed, threats to be managed, problems to be solved. Love is excluded not because it is unimportant, but because it cannot be quantified. And what cannot be measured is easily ignored.
The result is a strange irony. This is how abstraction quietly reproduces the moral logic of violence. We reduce human beings to categories. We strip them of their particularity. We distance ourselves from their humanity. And in doing so, we participate—often unintentionally—in the same failure of love that makes violence possible in the first place.
Scripture does not explain love from a distance. It draws us into love through presence—through flesh, through nearness, through God’s refusal to remain abstract.
In the opening chapter of John’s Gospel, we are told that the Word became flesh and lived among us. The first witnesses testify that they saw His glory—the glory of God’s Son—full of grace and truth (John 1:14-18). Grace and truth do not arrive as concepts for those who have seen Christ; they arrive embodied.
Christ lived among us.
Not above us.
Not beyond us.
And not safely removed from the risks of human life.
As a result of God’s love, we have all received grace upon grace. This is not efficiency. It is generosity. God is made known not by explanation, but by proximity. If love takes flesh, then love cannot remain abstract. And if love becomes present, then love becomes accountable.
The writer of 1 John puts it plainly: “Let us love one another, because love comes from God. Whoever loves is a child of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7–12).
Notice what Scripture does not say. It does not say that everyone who is correct knows God. It does not say that everyone who is powerful knows God. It says that everyone who loves knows God. This is not poetry. It is a diagnosis.
God does not ask us to qualify. God does not sort us into acceptable and unacceptable. God does not decide our worth based on what can be verified. God rescues the artificial by becoming present—by knowing us not as applicants, but as beloved.
Let us love one another, because love comes from God. Whoever loves is a child of God and knows God.
1 John 4:7-12
God’s love is revealed. God’s love is sent. God’s love enters the world. And because God has loved us so deeply, we are called to love one another. Love does not end in admiration. It moves outward.
God is made visible—not by systems, not by certainty, not by judgment—but by love embodied in human lives.
Our past conversations around artificial intelligence help illuminate this very human pattern. In complex systems, when something goes wrong, there is strong pressure to act quickly—to infer intent, assign blame, and restore order. But ethical reflection insists on restraint. True accountability requires humility, patience, and relationship. Without these, systems may respond decisively—and still be wrong.
We have seen how interruptions can occur when a system attempts to protect itself without fully understanding context or motive. What looks like accountability can become misrecognition. What feels like safety can reproduce harm. This is not a failure unique to machines. It reveals a human temptation to trade presence for efficiency. God rescues the artificial by refusing this trade—by knowing us not as problems to be managed or data for forming abstractions, but as persons to be loved.
What is true of machines is also true of us. When fear replaces love, we stop encountering one another. We begin to process one another. We explain instead of listening. We label instead of knowing. We judge without presence.
This is where the language of “the artificial” becomes revealing. The danger is not that machines might become too human, but that human beings might become artificial—relating to one another through inference rather than presence, through categories rather than compassion, through systems rather than love. When accountability is severed from relationship, when judgment replaces encounter, we begin to live as though people were problems to be solved rather than neighbors to be loved.
This is precisely what God comes to rescue. God rescues the artificial—not by rejecting intelligence or systems, but by restoring love as the condition for truth.
Love is not an idea we master. Love is a reality we enter.
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland is often remembered as a civil rights activist, but that label is too thin for what she represents. Early on, Joan was a white college student who chose to sit where she was not welcome, not out of ideology alone, but out of relationship. She did not argue segregation from a distance. She placed her body where love was being denied.
She endured arrest, harassment, and violence—not because she misunderstood the danger, but because she understood love. She did not explain injustice; she entered it. She did not reduce people to categories; she shared their vulnerability. She refused the safety of abstraction.
Her life bears witness to the difference between knowing about justice and loving people enough to risk being present. This is incarnation lived out in human flesh. Love does not remain neutral. Love does not remain distant. Love takes a seat at the counter.
Another story of love is quieter and harder to bear the implications.
Did you know that two students who were in a classroom at Brown University had already survived a mass shooting? Years later, they survived another. Their story is not heroism in the traditional sense. It is a story of endurance.
They did not choose to become symbols. They did not volunteer to teach us anything. Yet their lives confront us with a haunting truth: violence repeats itself, trauma accumulates, and love is tested not once, but again and again.
The absence of love is visible in the recurrence itself—in how communities fail to protect, how systems fail to learn, how safety remains unevenly distributed. And yet love appears here not as triumph, but as refusal to disappear.
They kept going to class. They kept building lives. They kept trusting spaces that had already betrayed them. This is love stripped of romance. Love that persists without guarantees.
These students are not data points in a trend. They are not “repeat instances.” They are persons whose stories resist reduction. Their presence reminds us that trauma is not an error to be corrected, and survival is not a statistic. Love is what remains when nothing feels safe.
Joan Trumpauer Mulholland shows love chosen. The Brown students show love endured. One steps forward into danger. The other keeps walking after it. Both reject abstraction. Both insist on presence.
This is the claim at the heart of the gospel: God rescues the artificial by reminding us what cannot be replaced—a body, a story, a life that matters.
The incarnation proclaims that love refuses distance, that truth requires presence, and that God does not rescue the world by abstraction, but by coming near. Because once people become abstractions, harming them becomes easier.
This is the world into which Christ is born—not as an escape from human complexity, but as God’s refusal to deal with humanity at a distance.
I don’t know if it shows, but I have tried to be cautious with my words. It is not because the subject is abstract. It is because I love you. And that love does not come from me—it comes from God, who refuses to reduce any of us to an explanation.
Since God refuses to deal with us at a distance, the question is no longer whether we will be present with one another, but how. In a world that rewards abstraction—where speed replaces care and categories replace faces—God insists on presence.
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Pastor Tommy
Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh, AI Ethics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020. (ISBN 9780262538190).
Amit Sarwal. “US intelligence chief calls Bondi shooting an ‘Islamist terror attack’, warns Australia may be ‘too late’.” © The Australian Today News, December 12, 2025. Link.