Exercised Particularity: Agentic AI and the Imago Dei

Christian engagement with artificial intelligence has considered two questions: (1) whether machines might bear the image of God, and (2) what machine outputs do to their consumers. A third question is more urgent and unasked: what happens to the bearing of the image in the practitioner whose competencies an agentic system absorbs? Drawing on comprehensive capability collapse (a practiced competency converted into a query) and its limiting case, Artificial Persona Interchange (a person's voice and judgment reconstituted from their corpus), the article contends the collapse is not merely a labor problem but an anthropological one: what is lost is not efficiency but the exercised particularity through which the imago Dei is borne, and the church must name that loss before it is normalized. It develops a Reformation account of the person-works relation, answers the strongest objections, and states what the church must refuse, retain, and reteach.