the tindog coffeehouse

This is Part 7 of my chapter-by-chapter analysis of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

Up to this point, it seems like we’ve mostly focused on the corrupting potential of technology. Technology, after all, isn’t neutral. While the raw materials may be (Kline’s “technology as hardware” and “technology as manufacturing”), how they’re used certainly isn’t (“technology as methodology” and “technology as usage”). We saw in Chapter 5 how Adam and Eve used technology in the form of fig lives after sinning and how their son Cain used technology to build the first city. In each case, the point was to separate themselves from God, moving from interdependence to a state of independence.

If the story ended there, it would be easy to conclude, then, that technology is inherently a bad thing. But thankfully it doesn’t.

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This is Part 6 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

In Chapter 5, Dyer focused on the “corrupting” part, examining how both Adam and Eve and their son Cain used technology as a way to separate themselves from God. But as Dyer illustrated, technology (“the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”) isn’t necessarily bad. It existed before the Fall, and even after the Fall, God continued to equip his people with more of it. Technology, then, must be neutral. Right?

Well, no.

We concluded in Chapter 1 that technology is, in fact, not neutral; as it changes, we change along with it. How and exactly why we change is the focus of this chapter.

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I’m currently blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer, and today’s chapter focuses heavily on the “corrupting” part.

In Chapter 4, Dyer established a working definition of technology as “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes.” In the Garden of Eden, those purposes were to till the garden and cultivate the land. But once sin enters the picture, everything changes.

Rebellion.

Dyer picks up where Chapter 3 left off, with Adam and Eve still in the Garden. Technology, he pointed out earlier, was introduced by God before the Fall when He instructed Adam to “tend and watch over it” (Genesis 2:15). But after the Fall, it takes on a very different role. The first thing Adam and Eve do after sinning against God is to make something: their first set of clothes, fashioned from fig leaves (Genesis 3:7). Were the clothes a tool created for a practical purpose? Of course. But was it what God originally intended? No.

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This is Part 4 of my chapter-by-chapter walk through From the Garden to the City by John Dyer.

We started out talking about how technology isn’t neutral, how it not only changes the world around us, but changes us as well. And we started to see how we approach technology as a sort-of mini-narrative, allowing us to bridge the gap between our current world and a better one. We then looked at Genesis and how technology really began in the Garden of Eden when God told Adam to cultivate and till the garden, taking God’s initial creation and making something new out of it. But what exactly is technology anyway? Is it the tools used to cultivate the garden, the product of that cultivation, or the know-how that guided the process along?

It seems odd that a book subtitled “The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology” would wait until Chapter 4 to define what the author means by “technology”. But better late than never, I suppose. As we’ll see, however, the definition isn’t as clear-cut as we think it is.

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This is the third part of my chapter-by-chapter analysis of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer, and I have to say this has been the most enlightening chapter thus far.

Reflection.

One thing I love about this book is that Dyer is just as qualified to talk about Christianity as he is about technology. He has a Masters in Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary but is also a highly regarded programmer and web developer, having done work for companies like Harley-Davidson, Apple, and Anheuser Busch. In short, he knows his stuff.

The reason why this is important is because most people who would write a book like this are either tech experts or theologians but not both. They either really know technology and only have a basic understanding of Scripture, or they really know Scripture but only have a basic understanding of technology. And in most cases that would be painfully obvious to the reader.

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I’m blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. Dyer began the book by trying to put technology in its proper perspective. Technology, he argues, isn’t neutral. As it changes over time, we change with it. What we view as new and futuristic today becomes normal (or “mythic”) to future generations, to the point where we no longer even think of it as technology.

Imagination.

In Chapter 2, he builds upon this point by looking at exactly what technology is, defining it in terms of a narrative:

Though we might not realize it, we compose these mininarratives whenever we encounter even the simplest gadget. If we happen to see a shovel, our minds can easily imagine the act of digging a hole, visualizing how the ground will look after we’re finished. This small effort of the imagination has a clear movement from beginning (the world before the shovel) to middle (the act of digging) to end (the world with a new hole)—the basic arc of any story. …

Technology, then, is the bridge from this world to the imagined one.

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