Continuing the discussion from last time, let’s look at a couple of possible scenarios. There are a lot of unknowns about technology so these are really hypothetical scenarios rather than real predictions. These are useful to consider because they help make the five principles concrete. Here are the five principles: 1. Natural form of the body matters, 2. The soul matters to the body, 3. What is the purpose of technology, 4. Treat the body as made in the image of God, 5. Technology is a tool.
The first scenario to consider: a third arm implant. While this might seem strange, this seems like a pretty reasonable development. If there is a way to implant a third arm on a body, then that could offer a number of interesting possibilities for people. An extra hand to hold a phone, operate a machine, complete a complicated task. How do the principles in the last article apply to this?
Computer technology is changing rapidly. There are many wonderful gifts with this technological advancement and there are also many issues that accompany it. One of the challenges facing the Church is thinking through the morality of these developments and working out principles that help guide the use of these new tools. There are technological developments where the morality of the issue is not complicated and is obviously wrong (e.g. robosex, etc) and then there are other developments that are more complicated. Acknowledging the complication in this matter is not an excuse to ignore these things, but rather this means we need to think carefully about them. This means that we need to get the conversation going now in order to arrive at a thoughtful position. In keeping with that spirit, this discussion is offered as a prompt (divided into two articles).
In this discussion, I will focus on tech implants. What I mean by that term is a piece of technology that you would physically and permanently attach to your body. These implants could include things like an earphone implant in your ear, a digital bar-code implant in your hand, or even an extra computer arm. While some of these might seem bizarre and far-fetched, the point is to consider the principles involved rather than trying to predict the next technological development.
This is an important discussion because we live in a time which emphasizes the fluidity between the human body and our identity. This discussion on tech implants is downstream from the fundamental questions of what is the human body and how should we understand the relationship between body and soul. In these discussions, we must emphasize that God designed us as bearing His image which in turns gives dignity to the human person.
Smartphones were turned loose on the world in 2007. How many of us have stopped to think that the average fifth grader has never known a world without smartphones? Today’s seventh graders were only two years old in 2007, so it is doubtful they can access much memory before smartphones. These children have always had the power of the internet and everything it brings with it right at their fingertips on their parents’ phones. Now they have it right in their back pockets because the average American child receives his first smartphone at the ripe old age of 10 (Psychology Today). As you might expect, that little number comes with some baggage.
Technology is moving so fast that parents often do not have time to get their minds around one gadget or game or social media craze before the next one has kidnapped their child’s attention. Don’t think it is any easier for school teachers and administrators either. Even though student cell phones must be in the backpack, in the locker, and turned off at Trinitas, the residual effect smartphones are having on school culture isn’t so residual. The age group from 10 to 15 years old is the hardest hit because they are not mentally, emotionally, or socially prepared to navigate the enormous responsibilities that come with having a smartphone and the data plan to go with it.
Some estimates are that teens spend six to nine hours a day on their phones (Psychology Today). This kind of usage could be considered addiction (or idolatry). Many parents are harrumphing right now because they cannot imagine how their child could spend that much time on his or her phone. I’ll tell you how: they aren’t sleeping! (The Conversation) Just recently a group of pre-teen boys told me that they regularly wake up at 2am to play Fortnite. One of the boys was sheepish about not being allowed to play until 8am; the others teased him.
The boys aren’t the only ones affected, though. Girls are also sleeping less while spending more time on their phones than on any other activity. For girls, it isn’t gaming that interests them; instead, it is searching for acceptance on social media. Jean Twenge, Ph. D., writes in Psychology Today:
… we found that social media use was significantly correlated with depression for girls … Developmentally, girls are more concerned with physical appearance and social popularity than boys are. Social media is a showcase of those issues, even quantifying them in numbers of likes and followers. Girls also spend more time on social media.
As it turns out, girls’ reactions to how they are perceived on social media can be dangerous. In fact, self-harm among girls between the ages of 10 and 14 has tripled since 2009. And by self-harm, I mean cutting or poisoning or something else serious enough for an ER visit. In short, our teenage daughters are looking for love in all the wrong places and are hurting themselves when they don’t find it (Psychology Today).
As a parent talking to other parents, I want to ask you a few questions. Does your child really need a cell phone, especially a smartphone, before he or she is driving? Does your teenage son or daughter have unrestricted access to the internet? Does he or she keep the phone in the bedroom? Do you have a way to check what the phone is being used for?
I firmly believe we are giving our children far too much freedom on the internet before they are mature enough to handle it. The effects on our culture are widespread, of epidemic proportions really. It is a disaster we are bringing on our own children. And why? For what reason? If our best answer is that everyone else is doing it and we can’t bear to tell our children no, then we need to carefully count the costs because they are high. I have only scratched the surface in this little blog. I encourage parents to do their own research. It will be well worth your time.
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”Orange Catholic Bible
That quotation comes from a sacred text found only in the imaginary universe of Frank Herbert’s Dune saga. But if things keep going the way they’re going, we may need that “Bible”.
Dune is about a distant future, over ten thousand years from now. Man has gone off to colonize the galaxy, but on the way, there has been great social upheaval. The machines man made had come to dominate him, and even enslave him. Some of the elite had merged with the machines, achieving god-like power and seemingly unending life, while the rest of humanity was enervated and idle. Then came the war, the Butlerian Jihad. Over a 100 year span, the machines were defeated and the new commandment you see above was enshrined.
Just so much science fiction?
If you’re dismissive of science fiction, you shouldn’t be. Not only has this preoccupation of teenage boys predicted many of the things we enjoy today, everything from smartphones to gene therapy, it has helped to direct the aspirations of those boys.
You could say science fiction is a series of thought experiments about the role of science and technology on the development of human society.
What are people for?
I have a book, a collection of essays actually, by Wendell Berry by that title. It is one of the basic questions. A great deal depends on the answer. I’m afraid most of the people working in the fields of science and engineering proffer a really bad answer. And because the question is so terribly important to being human, the implications of those answers are dehumanizing.
The real Bible tells us that man was made in the image of God and was immediately situated in a garden in order to cultivate it. That work was performed within a household economy right from the start. The union of a man and wife was intended to be productive and they were to share both the work and the fruit. The cultivation included their bodies: Eve is the mother all the living and Adam is the husbandman, tilling the soil of her body. And they are to be fruitful and multiply and extend their dominion, their household–their domus–over all the earth.
The rise of the machines
The machines began their rise when creation itself was reconceived as a machine. Once, man had been the center, a microcosm, the hermeneutic of the cosmos. Man’s life was the scale by which the universe was ordered. This made the cosmos our home.
But today we see things differently. The universe is a vast mechanism and human beings are just tiny cogs in it, perhaps even malfunctioning ones. But we are still microcosms, but now the hermeneutic works in reverse. Now the machine defines us.
Are you obsolete yet?
A few years back a fantasy purporting to be social commentary was published entitled, The End of Men. The gist of it was pretty simple, men are obsolete because many of the functions traditionally performed by men are now performed by either the welfare state or by machines. (The same thing, actually, the welfare state is a kind of machine.)
I’m not sure what would make a feminists think women are exempt from this. Many of the jobs performed by women in the corporate economy are just as vulnerable to being made redundant by machines as those performed by men. (See the video below to see this explained.) Even sex with women is subject to obsolescence; virtual reality-porn is just around the corner and we even have sex-bots to look forward to. And don’t think your uterus makes you indispensable ladies, people are working on a replacement for that too. (Click here to learn about artificial wombs.)
But the very notion that a human being could be made obsolete by a machine reveals that we have already given ourselves over to the machine. In part, it goes back to the loss of human scale and the centrality of the household economy. When production moved out of the house so that the division of labor and economies of scale could increase production, it was only a matter of time before human beings were re-conceived as parts of larger mechanisms, and therefore subject to obsolescence.
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Today, households have been reduced to centers of consumption, places we go at the end of the day to watch television, sleep, and maybe eat. The transformation from production to consumption is reflected in the transformation of the word “householding”. (A word my spell-checker doesn’t recognize, by the way.) What once was considered a near synonym to “family-business” now is a term used by marketers to refer to mass mailings of a certain type.
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Now human beings run the risk of justifying their existence solely by their role as consumers in the machine economy. Some technophiles, seeing no other use for the rest of us, have proposed putting everyone on the dole, with an allowance, so we can give the machines something to do. But what will that accomplish? Think about the indolence of aristocrats, do we really want to democratize that?
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The choice before us
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I’m not your run of the mill luddite. I like tools. But we shouldn’t let ourselves be carried along like flotsam and jetsam in the wake of technological development. We need to choose between one of two ways of working with these changes.
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Transhumanism
The first possibility is to merge with the machines. There are people out there advocating the way of the Cymeks of Dune. They’d like to take a hand in their evolution and upgrade humanity. (If you think this is overblown, just follow the diva of transhumanists, Ray Kurzweil and I think you’ll begin to see things differently.)
But this is odd; we are told repeatedly by materialists that evolution is a blind process, feeling its way forward, filling niches in a vast, interdependent, mechanical system. Transhumanists overestimate our ability plan and control human development. And wouldn’t radically extending human life-span, genetically modifying people, and merging humans with machines make for a new species? And how will this be implemented? Who will be the early adopters? And how will they feel about the rest of us?
The recovery of the household economy
But there is another way forward. These new technologies could portend a re-centering of the economy back in the household. Telecommunication networks, and small-scale, highly adaptive manufacturing, will allow for a decentralized economy where husbands and wives, and even children, can work together.
What we need is dreamers, people who can envision an altogether different future than the one seen by the transhumanists. We need a vision of man the microcosm again, where our creations enrich us and lend meaning to our lives, not replace us or turn us into something subhuman.
I leave you with the following video. I hope you can agree with me by the end of it; if we can’t redirect this freight train of technological innovation in a more humane direction, let the Butlerian Jihad begin.
If you’d like to read my book on the subject of household economics, Wipf and Stock, the publisher of, Man of the House, has given me permission to share a little sample of the book with you. The hope, of course, is you will like it enough to purchase a copy. Enjoy!.
I sit here in my office and poke around on a keyboard that is not even physically connected to my laptop and characters appear on a screen. I have a phone in my pocket through which I talk to someone around the world, send a text message, and to which I can ask questions and give commands. Usually, when all things are working as they should, the phone responds. At times it will even talk back to me asking me clarifying questions or telling me it doesn’t quite understand me.
I still marvel at this technology. As a child, I watched television shows such as Star Trek and dreamed of a time when those communicators would be real. Not only did they become real. The flip phone that they resemble is already technologically passé. One generation’s science fiction dream world is the next generation’s relative necessity.
These technological dreams and advances are an aspect of our being created in the image of a creative God. As such, they are not only good; they are also necessary. We are created to take dominion over the world, making it fruitful in every way. When God created Adam and told him to tend and guard the Garden, Adam had to figure out new and creative ways to plow the ground and, eventually, fight the thorns and thistles. He and his descendants created new and more effective and efficient ways to accomplish their tasks, making the world an ever-increasingly fruitful place.
Throughout history, man has continued to create new technologies for these purposes. From farm implements to the vast array of computer technologies, we have made our lives and the world flourish. But there is something interesting about the technologies that we create. As Sherry Turkle observes in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Others, “We make our technologies, and they, in turn, make and shape us.”a Our technology begins to drive and shape the culture.
This is not inherently bad. It is simply the statement of a fact. One generation invents the automobile. The culture of the next generation is driven (pardon the pun) by the automobile. Schedules, work, play, markets, and other cultural matters assume the use of the automobile. What was a luxury to the culture of one generation becomes the necessity of the culture in the next? Electricity, phones, and computers are now the staples of the culture. We have developed our technologies, and our technologies, in turn, have shaped the way we live our lives.
As a pastor, I have been especially intrigued by the world of “relational” or “social” technology; that is, technologies designed to keep us connected in some form of communication. How are these relational tools affecting our relationships? How do these technologies affect the expectations that people have when they come to be a part of a local church? Is there a dark side of these technologies that the gospel must address? As Christians, we are called to engage the culture. What kind of culture are we engaging? How much of that culture has affected (infected!) the church? How does the church counter those cultural trends?
It is becoming painfully evident that our social technology is being used in such a way to make us more lonely. We are connected more than ever by telephones and social media, yet we are more and more isolated from one another. This is not the conclusion of some Bible-thumping Luddite. Non-Christians are recognizing it. Ironically, I suppose, you can find articles online such as Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? , The Loneliness Epidemic: We’re More Connected Than Ever – But Are We Feeling More Alone? , and The Age Of Loneliness Is Killing Us. Here is a video that explains how our connectivity is isolating us. That video is based on a TED Talk delivered by Sherry Turkle summarizing her full-length treatment of the subject in her book Alone Together. None of these is an explicitly Christian evaluation of the situation, but they are all recognizing that our social technology is developing a culture that, while connected, is becoming disconnected from full human interaction.
This technology gives each of us the sense of control that we haven’t had in the past. We always have a measure of control to be sure, but today’s technologies give a perception that we are more in control than ever before. Looking at a sliver of the metanarrative of our culture, we can see huge cultural shifts and, consequently, how we have gained more and more control of our lives and interactions with others.
There was a time in our country when, by and large, to have a job, one had to go to a place of work, was forced to work with others he didn’t know and submit to “the man.” A man was “forced” to learn to interact with others in an amicable way and, generally, wanted to keep his job for forty years and retire with a gold watch. Though we still go to places of business, internet technology has changed our situations tremendously. Now we can be employed by a huge corporation and rarely go into “the office.” We connect online, control our schedules, and control our interactions with people.
This was brought home to me at a dinner with a young couple who were both urban professionals. We talked about their work. The lady to whom I spoke worked from her home and only chose to go to the coffee shop to work when she felt as if she needed to be around people. She was in control of her interactions. In the previous generation, unless you were a farmer, you weren’t able to isolate yourself to this degree. Now technology has allowed us to interact only as much as we feel comfortable doing so. (more…)
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Others (New York: Basic Books, 2011) 263. (back)
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Others (New York: Basic Books, 2011) 263.
Our friend (and one of the fabulous Baylor history Ph.D. students) Paul Putz has a fascinating piece over at the Religion and Politics blog on the deep history of Christian matchmaking in America. After discussing the intriguing “matrimonial bureau” of Omaha pastor Charles Savidge in the early 20th century, Putz reflects on the contemporary relevance and challenges of online dating sites such as ChristianMingle. Putz says that
Given the reality of our increasingly online, increasingly digital world, Christian niche dating sites serve as an easily identifiable online companion to more traditional offline means used by evangelicals to find a spouse. They allow evangelicals to adopt the broader cultural turn towards individualism in the selection of romantic partners while still remaining true to conservative evangelical insistence on intrafaith marriage. “We want Christians to marry Christians,” Moorcroft said. “We don’t want Christians to marry nominal Christians or nonbelievers at all.” And once their customers are married, Christian dating sites claim to provide help on another account: they supposedly facilitate more compatible matches, which, according toChristianCafe.com’s Fred Moesker, will help “to decrease divorce rates.” Moesker’s claim may seem dubious, but it does have at least the modest support of initial research from John T. Cacioppo and others for the National Academy of the Sciences. They conducted a recent study showing that marriages that began online were slightly less likely to end in divorce and were “associated with slightly higher marital satisfaction” than marriages that began offline.
Of course, not all evangelicals view Christian online dating in a positive light. In 2011, Christianity Today ran an opinion roundtable with the headline, “Is Online Dating for Christians?” Answers ranged from “With Gusto!” to “With Caution” to “No; Trust God.” More recently, Jonathan Merritt, a senior columnist at Religion News Service, wondered if online dating websites actually served to undermine Christian values, concerns that were echoed from another corner of the evangelical world by the Gospel Coalition. For wary evangelicals, the turn to online matchmaking could carry the potential for further detachment from involvement in local church bodies at a time when more and more Americans are willing to shun affiliation with formal religious organizations.
I am no Luddite about technology, or about newfangled ways to connect with people. For full disclosure, I met my wonderful wife through common friends, not through the internet, but we were a several-hour drive away from one another when we started courting, and e-mail did play an important role in starting our relationship. Therefore I can fully appreciate circumstances which warrant looking outside one’s own town, and one’s own congregation, for a good match, and using technology to do so.
But there may well be a price to pay for a highly individualized, digital method of dating. Yes, online dating can help singles find “like-minded” believers more readily, and evangelicals should unapologetically affirm that marrying a spouse who’s within the evangelical (or at least orthodox Christian) fold is a must. But I wonder if our approach to dating in evangelical circles implies that if you can just find the right match, wedded bliss will follow, with no thought toward the struggles or suffering that inevitably come via changing circumstances, family problems, or the garden-variety consequences of sin. Spiritual compatibility matters, but a focus on compatibility can also obscure the difficulties and gracious compromises that any healthy marriage will pass through.
The right balance, for those not called to singleness and celibacy, is to look for someone of spiritual compatibility, but to understand from the start that this is someone with whom you will share hardship and struggles as much as the much-advertised (literally) delights of Christian marriage. Instead of the quest for Mr. or Ms. Perfect, those called to marriage should pursue someone of shared values regarding family and church, but realize that for all its goodness, even the best Christian marriage only unites two sinners who are at some incomplete stage of sanctification. No matter how perfect the match, this is going to require some work.
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Over the years there have been more than a few memes and videos posted to social media about the ways that laptops, tablet computers, and smart phones (a.k.a., “screens”) are causing us to become socially inept hermits who are missing out on “real life.” The latest example is this video. Go ahead and watch. We’ve got all the time in the world.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
I will grant that there is more than a little truth in the message that videos such as this try to deliver. Screens have become nearly ubiquitous and it is good for every right-thinking man, woman, and child to step back and ask, “Is my life is an over-connected life? Are there changes I need to make in the area of limiting exposure to ‘screens?'”
Having done that, I would suggest that modern evangelicalism also needs to step back en masse and practice a good measure of overdue introspection. How many evangelicals that robustly “amen” the above video also attend a church where the most prominent architectural feature in their sanctuary is one or more video screens? How many attend churches where the pastor ascends into the pulpit armed with nothing other than a Kindle, an iPad, or some other tablet device? How many attend churches where texting, live tweeting, and/or Facebooking during the service is de rigueur? How many people are following along with the Scripture readings in church on their smartphones instead of shutting those devices down in order to stand and give an attentive hearing (with their ears alone) to God’s Holy Word?
In a more thoughtful, less wired time church architecture revolved more or less around two things–the pulpit and the communion table. From the sparse sanctuaries of the Puritan churches to the more ornate cathedrals of the high churches, it was clear to all that God’s herald would ascend into the pulpit to declare the Good News of Jesus Christ and then would descend to serve as an under-shepherd at the Eucharistic banqueting table of King Jesus.
For centuries Christian churches arranged things this way because they knew that the pattern of preaching and food in Luke 24 was paradigmatic. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, the ordained minister would declare the Good News concerning Jesus to the people, feed them the Eucharist, and then have confidence that the afflicted would be comforted and that the comfortable would be afflicted. The Second Great Awakening blew that paradigm out of the water and we have been downgrading ever since. The modern church no longer has any confidence in the Holy Spirit working through Word and Sacrament. Today’s church must innovate and invest in new techniques, new gadgets, and new technological gee-whizzery in order to “win the unchurched to Christ.”
I suspect that most churches don’t install jumbo-trons to aid the visually impaired or to compensate for poor sight-lines in the sanctuary. They install them because we live in an age of “screens” and because the average religious consumer expects the latest and greatest technology to be front-and-center in the church of his/her choice. At least that is what we were told by the high-dollar church growth consultant.
If we are going to “amen” videos extolling the unplugged life, why can’t we put our money where our “amens” are and begin unplugging on the Lord’s Day during His service? Is it really necessary to have so much technology going on during our services? Can evangelicals stand to be a even a little bit counter-cultural and (gulp!) “uncool” by scaling things back and restoring the centrality of the pulpit and the table during our services? Or are our church services really so barren that if they were forced off of the grid by a massive power/Internet outage would we be left looking around at each other and wondering, “No band, no screens, no words, no access to my online Bible, no latte machine. Now what?”
Before society at large can even hope to address their issues with “screen culture,” evangelicalism needs to take the beam out of its own eye and address its own technological addictions, especially as they pertain to corporate worship on the Lord’s Day.
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Derek Hale has lived all of his life in Wichita, Kansas and isn’t a bit ashamed about that fact. He and his wife Nicole have only six children–four daughters and two young sons of thunder. Derek is a ruling elder, chief musician, and performs pastoral duties at Trinity Covenant Church (CREC). Derek manages a firmware lab for NetApp and enjoys reading, computers, exercising, craft beer, and playing and listening to music. But not all at the same time. He blogs occasionally at youdidntblogthat.tumblr.com.<>позиция а в поисковике
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
If you’d like to read my book on the subject of household economics, Wipf and Stock, the publisher of, 
