The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place

by Andy Crouch

Please understand: I’m not saying technology is bad. In fact, I would say it is very good. Christians inherit the Jewish story in which the world is meant to be tended and developed by human beings, with their unique capacity for memory, reason, and skill. Once these image bearers were placed in creation, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). Part of that “very-goodness” is the human capacity to discover and develop all the potential in God’s amazing cosmos. It took thousands of years for us to understand how electricity and magnetism work together, to learn how to efficiently harness the earth’s amazing reserves of energy, and to discover the properties of materials at tiny scales—but all that was there from the very beginning, waiting for us. Technology is the latest, and in many ways most astonishingly good, example of the fruit our image bearing was meant to produce.