the tindog coffeehouse

I’ve been angry and bitter all week. Disgusted, really. As the Supreme Court heard arguments in a couple of highly controversial cases involving same-sex marriage, people all over the country showed their support for gay marriage on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. But it wasn’t just non-Christians turning their profile pics red, it was many Christians as well. And that’s what pissed me off.

I know that we Christians aren’t always going to agree on everything, but the fact that so many Christians not only support same-sex marriage but endorse it just doesn’t make sense to me. How on earth can you read the Bible, claim that you believe what it says, and yet not find anything reprehensible about homosexuality, particularly when the Bible is extraordinarily clear in its opposition to it?

So I’ve spent the week fuming at my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, angry that they’ve chosen political correctness over biblical truth, and despondant over what that means for the future of the Church. If we choose to no longer identify sin as sin, then the gospel means nothing.

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading through Paul’s epistles in the New Testament in the order in which they were written. I’m not sure that the order really matters, but the audience definitely does.

Paul wrote 13 epistles, or letters, which correspond to books of the Bible. Some of the letters were written to individuals, like Timothy and Titus, and some to churches, like those in Ephesus and Rome. The first of such letters was written to the Thessalonians around AD 51, less than twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. When Paul and Silas first visited Thessalonica a year earlier, the local Jews formed a riotous mob and ran them out of town. Yet the Christian church there continued to thrive in spite of such persecution. Paul says that the Thessalonians became imitators of the Lord in spite of severe suffering and examples to believers throughout Greece (1 Thes. 1:6-7). In fact, the church’s faithfulness had become so well known that their reputation had spread beyond the region, such that churches outside of Greece were telling Paul about them instead of the other way around (1 Thes. 1:8-9). The Thessalonians, Paul wrote, were his pride and joy (1 Thes. 2:20).

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This is Part 11 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. (Thankfully for you, it’s also my last.)

The subject of technology and how it relates to the Church certainly isn’t new, and there are a ton of different books and blogs and so on out there that have their own spin on it. The reason for that, I think, is because technology is a moving target. It’s constantly changing, and therefore how we think about it, how we approach it, and ultimately how we use it changes as well.

Technology, we said, is “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes.” It’s a means to an end, a bridge from one world to a better one, allowing us to overcome some sort of problem to accomplish a goal we couldn’t have on our own. Defining it further, we broke it down into four separate layers: technology as hardware, technology as manufacturing, technology as methodology, and technology as social usage. The first two layers, we concluded, are inherently neutral; a shovel is just a shovel. However, the knowledge used to create those tools and how the tools are used are most definitely not neutral; how we approach those various tools is determined by our own internal values but also has the ability to reshape those values over time.

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As you probably know by now, I’ve been blogging my way through John Dyer’s From the Garden to the City, a book about the redeeming and corrupting powers of technology and how that impacts the Christian Church. Of course, when we talk about technology in that context, we tend to assume that means the Internet and social networking, but other than the physical mediums of our modern-day telecommunications, we tend to forget that none of that is really new. In fact, the social media of today bears a striking resemblance to the social networks of 16th century Europe, which allowed Martin Luther’s charges against the Catholic Church to spread like wildfire.

From the moment in October 1517 when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, his anti-Catholic protests began spreading at a rate that even took Luther by surprise. The Economist takes a look at why this happened and finds that just like with the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement of today, technology was at the heart of it:

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This is Part 9 of my chapter-by-chapter analysis of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

By now we’ve seen numerous examples both the redeeming and corrupting potential of technology and how that relates to us as Christians. We’ve seen how God first commanded us to “cultivate” His creation in the Garden of Eden and how even after Adam and Eve sinned and were expelled from the Garden, God continued to use technology to further His plans, from Noah’s Ark to the Ten Commandment to the Ark of the Covenant. And yet, there’s no question technology can be extremely destructive, allowing mankind to separate ourselves from our Creator as an act of rebellion.

So it’s not just redemption we need, it’s restoration. We don’t just need another coat of paint to cover up the flaws and defects of this city we’ve built, it needs to be demolished and replaced with a whole new one that’s perfect.

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This is Part 8 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

We’ve talked at length about both the “redeeming” and “corrupting” potential of technology and concluded that it’s not neutral; as it changes, we’re changed as well. How we view technology, then, becomes a critical question. Do we view it through the filter of instrumentalism, the idea that the tools themselves are neutral and it’s only the usage that’s not? Or do we approach it from the side of determinism, the belief that the progress of technology is an “unstoppable power” that “operates independently of human choices”?

For the Church, that’s not an easy question. Yet, if technology is defined as “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”, then it would seem as though the choice of which tools the Church uses is absolutely critical.

Mediums.

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