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A tool of communication is a tool for communicating something.”
Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) reminded his generation that technology is always an extension of the self.
In the ancient Mirror of Erised, you see the deepest longings of your heart revealed in vivid color. Our shiny smartphone screens do the same.
My phone screen divulges in razor-sharp pixels what my heart really wants.22 The glowing screen on my phone projects into my eyes the desires and loves that live in the most abstract corners of my heart and soul, finding visible expression in pixels of images, video, and text for me to see and consume and type and share.
As the broader history of technology unfolds, the Bible teaches us nine key realities we must rehearse to ourselves in the digital age.
1. Technology modifies creation
Technology is used to subdue creation for human good, but also to increase efficiency.
Technology is the reordering of raw materials for human purposes.
2. Technology pushes back the results of the fall
3. Technology establishes human power
4. Technology helps to edify souls
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.
5. Technology upholds and empower...
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Technology enhances our bodies, refines our movements, amplifies our actions, and shapes how we present ourselves to the world.
6. Technology gives voice to human autonomy
Babel was man’s attempt to hijack technology and to fabricate an entire society and religious life in rebellion to the Creator.
Technology is not inherently evil, but it tends to become the platform of choice to express the fantasy of human autonomy.
7. God governs every human technology
God’s sovereign reign over the most horrific evils of technology is nowhere clearer than in the Roman cross.
But this awful tool of torture doubled as the hinge on which all of God’s redemptive plan turned.
Evil was defeated by technology, all by God’s sovereign design. 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 does this: he makes a mockery of our evil technologies through his sovereign hackery.
8. Technology shapes every relationship
First, technology changes how we relate to the earth.
Second, technology changes the way we relate to one another.
Third, technology can become a metaphor that God uses to reveal his work in the world.
The unveiling of new technology creates new metaphors for God to reveal how he engages with us mortals.15
9. Technology shapes our theology
we use technology to manifest metaphors of God (f...
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For better or worse, technology fundamentally changes how we talk about God. And technology shapes the way God communicates himself to us.
every technological innovation is a new theological invitation for renewed biblical contemplation by God’s people.
First, life in 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.
Second, technology is technology, whether tethered to an ou...
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household gods of carved stone or wood and handheld idols of silver and gold, common in the ancient world, were not tools. These idols were more like our technologies, divine oracles of knowledge and prosperity, used by worshipers in an attempt to control and manipulate the events of life for personal benefit. The figurine and the iPhone appeal to the same fetish.
Third, whatever my smartphone is doing to me, it is also pointing me toward a glorious city to come.
Our phones are addictive, and, like addicts, we seek hits immediately in the morning.
Ofir Turel, a psychologist at California State University-Fullerton, warns that Facebook addicts, unlike compulsive drug abusers, “have the ability to control their behavior, but they don’t have the motivation to control this behavior because they don’t see the consequences to be that severe.”4
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.
we need situational wisdom to answer three spiritual questions: Why are we lured to distractions? What is a distraction? And, most foundational of all, what is the undistracted life?
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.
Second, 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.
if my phone is in my hand, and I am responding to texts and scrolling social media, I project open dismissiveness, because “dividing attention is a typical expression of disdain.”6
Third, we use digital distractions to keep thoughts of eternity away.
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.
said Pascal in his day: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
To numb the sting of this emptiness, we turn to the “new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety”—our smartphones.13
Feel the brevity of life, and it will make you fully alive.19
Bruce Hindmarsh adds, “Our spiritual condition today is one of spiritual ADD.”21
In six places, the New Testament warns us about the effects of unchecked distractions on the soul, and we can boil those distractions down into three potent categories:
