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If you live long enough, pray earnestly, and keep your focus on the imperishable Word of God, you can be spared the slavery to newness. Over time, you can watch something wonderful happen. You can see overweening fascination give way to sober usage. You can watch a toy become a tool; a craze become a coworker; a sovereign become a servant. To cite Tony’s words—and his aim—you can watch the triumph of useful efficiency over meaningless habit.
We are, in fact, living with a parallel, virtual universe, a universe that can take all of the time that we have. What happens to us when we are in constant motion—when we are almost addicted to constant visual stimulation? What is this doing to us? That is the big question.”
The question of this book is simple: What is the best use of my smartphone in the flourishing of my life?
we must ask ourselves: What technologies serve my aims? And what are my goals in the first place? Without clear answers here, we can make no progress in thinking through the pros and cons of smartphones as Christians.
If we are honest enough to face our smartphone habits, and use the pages ahead as an invitation to commune with God, we can expect to find grace for our digital failures and for our digital futures. God loves us deeply, and he is eager to give us everything we need in the digital age. The spilled blood of his Son proves it.23 We need his grace as we evaluate the place of smartphones—the pros and the cons—in the trajectory of our eternal lives. If we fluff it, not only will we suffer now, but generations after us will pay the price.
Farming also is one example of technology built from the Creator’s intelligence (given to mankind) and creation’s abundance (supplied in the earth). Technology is the reordering of raw materials for human purposes. Adam and Eve reordered the raw materials of soil in order to make plants and flowers flourish.
The sweep of technological advance is a gracious gift from God to help us live in a fallen creation. But all of this technology also reminds us of our fundamental problem—we are sinfully alienated from God.
Unhitched from fear and obedience to God, technology quickly becomes a pawn in human power plays.
Every time we open our Bibles, our souls are being fed through centuries of technological advancement.
From trumpets and temples to gold-edged Bibles, God intended technology to play an essential role for us to know and worship him.
Technology enhances our bodies, refines our movements, amplifies our actions, and shapes how we present ourselves to the world.
The good-bad-ugly mix of technology came to a particularly obnoxious expression at the Tower of Babel, an attempt to consolidate all known building innovation to build a rebel city.8 More than a simple skyscraper, Babel was a new empire with a central city unified around a temple (the tower), all dedicated to the worship of human progress. Suppressing God’s ingenuity in all human advances, Babel was man’s attempt to hijack technology and to fabricate an entire society and religious life in rebellion to the Creator.
God is the genesis of all knowledge and technological advance, and he is the author and finisher of a glorified city to come.
Technology is not inherently evil, but it tends to become the platform of choice to express the fantasy of human autonomy.
Technology, even in the hands of the most evil intention of man, is never outside the overruling plan of God. In this case, Calvary was hacked. God broke into the technology of the cross “and with a little twist reversed its function.”14 God does this: he makes a mockery of our evil technologies through his sovereign hackery.
Every new technology opens humanity to new hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Every technology changes the fundamental social dynamics of how we relate to the world, to one another, and to God.
the digital age is an open invitation for clear, biblical thinking about the impact of our phones on ourselves, on our creation, on our neighbors, and on our relationships to God. Thoughtlessly adopting new technology is worldliness.
Perhaps we adapt so readily because we are a gifted generation, easily trainable and moldable. Or perhaps we adapt so readily because, as Jacques Ellul suggested, our technology exerts a sort of terrorism over us.18 We live under the threat that if we fail to embrace new technologies, we will be pushed aside into cultural obsolescence, left without key skills we need to get a job, disconnected from cultural conversations, and separated from our friends.
As digital distractions intrude into our lives at an unprecedented rate, behavioral scientists and psychologists offer statistical proof in study after study: the more addicted you become to your phone, the more prone you are to depression and anxiety, and the less able you are to concentrate at work and sleep at night.
First, we use digital distractions to keep work away. Facebook is a way of escape from our vocational pressures. We procrastinate around hard things: work deadlines, tough conversations, laundry piles, and school projects and papers. The average American college student wastes 20 percent of class time tinkering on a digital device, doing things unrelated to class (a statistic that seems low to me!).5 When life becomes most demanding, we crave something else—anything else.
we use digital distractions to keep people away. God has called us to love our neighbors, yet we turn to our phones to withdraw from our neighbors and to let everyone know we’d rather be somewhere else.
In the digital age, we are especially slow to “associate with the lowly” around us.7 Instead, we retreat into our phones—projecting our scorn for complex situations or for boring people. In both cases, when we grab our phones, we air our sense of superiority to others—often without knowing it.
we use digital distractions to keep thoughts of eternity away. Perhaps most subtly, we find it easy to fall into the trap of digital distractions because, in the most alluring new apps, we find a welcome escape from our truest, rawest, and most honest self-perceptions.
the human appetite for distraction is high in every age, because distractions give us easy escape from the silence and solitude whereby we become acquainted with our finitude, our inescapable mortality, and the distance of God from all our desires, hopes, and pleasures.
“We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us.” In fact, “we want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”
“The reality is, though, deep down there’s part of me that’s scared that if I’m out of sight, I’ll be out of mind, and I won’t matter anymore. In a sense, this is one dimension of the looming fear of death that most of us in contemporary American society never want to wrestle with or name anymore.”
The philosophical maxim, “I think, therefore I am,”15 has been replaced with a digital motto, “I connect, therefore I am,”16 leading to a status desire: “I am ‘liked,’ therefore I am.”17 But our digital connections and ticks of approval are flickering pixels that cannot ground the meaning of our lives. And yet, I seek to satisfy this desire every time I cozy up to the Facebook barstool, to be where every friend knows my name, where my presence can be affirmed and reaffirmed at virtual points throughout the day. I want anything to break the silence that makes me feel the weight of my mortality.
“It is difficult to serve God with our heart, soul, strength and mind when we are diverted and distracted and multi-tasking everything.”20 Historian Bruce Hindmarsh adds, “Our spiritual condition today is one of spiritual ADD.”
Unchecked distractions that blind souls from God. These are the most dangerous distractions: worldly worries, anxieties, and pursuits of wealth, self-centered concerns with personal security that suffocate the soul by snatching away seeds of truth, choking off the fruit of the gospel, and rendering its hope irrelevant. The vanity of the ephemeral robs our lives of what has infinite value.
Unchecked distractions that close off communion with God.
We can become so unfocused in life that we get lost in the unforgiving wheel of daily tasks and fail to listen to the voice of Christ. We fail to pray and fail to see him as intently listening and drawing near to us. God feels distant because we are distracted. Yet he seeks us; he seeks our undivided attention.
True distractions include anything (even a good thing) that veils our spiritual eyes from the shortness of time and from the urgency of the season of heightened expectation as we await the summing up of all history.
The date of Christ’s return is a secret, but it approaches so rapidly that it calls for every Christian to remain on his or her toes in anticipation.
All distractions are measured by the reality that “the appointed time has grown very short.”33 We are called to watchfulness34 because everything in the Christian life is conditioned by this sense of the eschatological urgency of Christ’s return.
our battle against the encumbering distractions of this world—especially the unnecessary distractions of our phones—is a heart war we can wage only if our affections are locked firmly on the glory of Christ.
The beauty of Christ calms us and roots our deepest longings in eternal hopes that are far beyond what our smartphones can ever hope to deliver.
Here’s the warning: as Christians, if we fail to manage life’s distractions wisely, we will lose our urgency and—in the sobering words of one smartphone-addicted mom of young children—we may “forget how to walk with the Lord.”37 Distraction management is a critical skill for spiritual health, and no less in the digital age. But if we merely exorcise one digital distraction from our lives without replacing it with a newer and healthier habit, seven more digital distractions will take its place.38 Over time, we may lose our hearts by the erosive power of unchecked amusements. Eventually we
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spiritually. Following Paul’s words to married couples, we must make it our aim to purge our lives of all unnecessary and unhelpful distractions. Pastor Tim Keller was once asked online: Why do you think young Christian adults struggle most deeply with God as a personal reality in their lives? He replied: “Noise and distraction. It is easier to tweet than pray!”40 (Said on Twitter, no less!) The ease and immediacy of Twitter is no match for the patient labor of prayer, and the neglect of prayer makes God feel distant in our lives.
here are ten diagnostic questions we can ask ourselves in the digital age: 1. Do my smartphone habits expose an underlying addiction to untimely amusements? 2. Do my smartphone habits reveal a compulsive desire to be seen and affirmed? 3. Do my smartphone habits distract me from genuine communion with God? 4. Do my smartphone habits provide an easy escape from sobered thinking about my death, the return of Christ, and eternal realities? 5. Do my smartphone habits preoccupy me with the pursuit of worldly success? 6. Do my smartphone habits mute the sporadic leading of God’s Spirit in my life?
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Our smartphones amplify the most unnecessary distractions as they deaden us to the most significant and important “distractions,” the true needs of our families and neighbors.
Texting and driving is such a commonplace habit, the stats are now canonical. Talking on the phone while driving a vehicle makes you four times more likely to get into an accident, but texting while driving makes your chance of a crash twenty-three times more likely.
We are quick to believe the lie that we can simultaneously live a divided existence, engaging our phones while neglecting others.
It is too convenient to vent our rage in public now. On top of this, there are three other culprits: “relative anonymity, a lack of authority and consequences, and solipsistic introjection—the theory that, subconsciously, talking on a computer can seem more like we’re talking to ourselves than to real people.” In other words, “It’s very difficult to link words on a screen with the reality that there’s a living, breathing human on the other end of the connection.”9 Online anger is a consequence of the division in our lives—our attention is divided, our minds are divided, and our digital
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These divisions lead to avoidable misunderstandings and short fuses online. Our typing thumbs lack empathy without living faces in front of us. It is much easier to slander an online avatar than a real-life brother.
John closed one of his ancient handwritten letters with a line of enduring relevance for those of us who now write with our thumbs: “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink [modern technology for John]. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12). John used technology to communicate, but he knew that his letter was only part of the communication. It was a way of expressing anticipation; face-to-face fellowship had to follow.
The Christian’s challenge is to love not in tweets and texts only, but even more in deeds and physical presence.
In the smartphone age, when our cognitive actions are separated from our bodily presence, we tend to overprioritize the relatively easy interactions in the disembodied online world and undervalue the embodied nature of the Christian faith.
From the opening narrative of God becoming flesh, the New Testament is thick with the idea of embodiment. Keep reading, and Scripture describes the nature of God’s people: we are individual members of the church, and our unity amid diversity finds expression in metaphors of the multisensory and multifunctional nature of the human body.14 Keep reading, and Paul encourages holy kisses (awkward!).15 He also warns us not to neglect our gathering together,16 and focuses on two common church celebrations: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Both sacraments are essential to our gatherings and contain
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The modern-day mantra we hear so often—“I will follow Christ, but don’t bother me with organized religion”—is symptomatic of the disembodied assumptions of the digital age. In reality, the Christian life could not be more embodied. To ignore all these facts, and to prioritize our disembodied existence online, is nothing short of “conniving at dehumanization.”
the epidemic of texting and driving (among many other epidemics) is an attempted escape from the limits of our flesh-and-blood nature. We try to break through the boundaries of time and space, and we end up ignoring the flesh and blood around us. In reality, we are finite. We assume that we can drive cars and read and write on our phones all at the same time, but we are weaker than our assumptions.
