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I.
Modern Reformation
July/August 2023
Vol. 32, No. 4
RETRIEVE 08 REFORMATION OUTTAKES | Guillaume Farel
Dies Another Day | by Zachary Purvis
II.
CONVERSE 14 INTERVIEW | Being Human at the Intersection of Embodiment and Technology: An Interview with Jens Zimmermann | by Brannon Ellis
20 ESSAY | The Material Is Not Immaterial
| by T. David Gordon
III.
PERSUADE 32 BIBLE STUDY | Something Beautiful: Blessed with Bodies—and Technology
| by J. D. “Skip” Dusenbury
38 ESSAY | Going Upstream of Streaming Worship: Embracing Creaturely Limits in an Age of Autonomy and Disembodiment
| by Joshua Pauling
IV.
ENGAGE 50 ESSAY | Music and Technology
| by William Edgar
56 ESSAY | The Medium Is the Mania: Anxiety as a Feature, not a Bug, of Digital Media
| by Caleb Wait
65 BIBLIOGRAPHY | Media Ecology: A Brief Annotated Bibliography | by T. David Gordon
Endsheet illustration by Raxenne Maniquiz
Since Modern Reformation appreciates a full theological conversation, we’d like to hear your thoughts about what you’re reading in the magazine. So please write to us at letters@modernreformation.org. Due to limited space, please keep your letter under 400 words (letters may be edited for length and clarity). Letters will be published two issues later. We look forward to hearing from you!
Maybe sitting on your couch at home or looking at your phone on a walk. But what if we try to get more specific? Where are you, your self—the unique location of your personal consciousness and agency? If we know our Bibles, we might point to our chests and say we’re our hearts. (We might even point to our “bowels”— if we’re reading 1 John 3:17 in the King James— and say we’re also our feelings!) Christians sensitive to modern materialism might say our true selves are our spirits or souls. But most people nowadays, if you ask us to get that technical about it, will point to our heads. Really, your brain is where you are. Modern people know that everything we think, want, and feel happens between our ears.
Or does it? Here’s something that may seem counterintuitive: Many of the best artificial intelligence researchers have realized for decades that the main challenge confronting the development of true AI is the fact that thinking requires embodiment.* Try perceiving without senses. Try making wise decisions without context or constraints.
In this issue, we’re exploring the fascinating themes at the intersection of embodiment and technology and what these can teach us about God and ourselves. Many philosophers over the centuries have taught that the unique location of personal consciousness and agency is the immaterial soul. This seems directly contradictory to the modern view that we are simply the precise configuration of chemicals and proteins in our brains. But is the true self as soul so different, in practical terms, from the true self as mind ?
*See, for example, Hubert Dreyfus’s classic What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), and more recently, the critiques in Alva Nöe, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010). For a fascinating study in how our body size and position affect our senses, see Laurence R. Harris et al., “How Our Body Influences our Perception of the World,” in Frontiers of Psychology vol. 6 (2015).
Either way, you remain a hidden, inner reality. This disembodied notion of human identity seems even more plausible nowadays with so many digital alternatives to real presence. All the while, we’re asked to ignore the obvious fact that we’re still sitting here, every one of us living, breathing bags of mostly water, thumbing sheets of printed paper or poking slabs of polished glass. We are undeniably, astonishingly— even embarrassingly—bodily. And that’s good because God’s word says so. “Very good,” in fact (Gen. 1:31).
It’s not only good to be bodily; it’s essential to the good news. The gospel isn’t a spiritual idea, but a flesh-and-bone fact. The eternal Son of God took on our flesh. The location of your redemption was a desecrated hill outside Jerusalem. Blood smeared upon a splinter-ridden cross. Being embodied is now inseparable from who Jesus is, sitting triumphant at the right hand of the Father, coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
Your self is where you are, body and soul. And it’s true that you’re also hidden—but not within your inner self. You’re hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3), and one day, where he is, there you will be also.
Brannon Ellis Executive EditorOUTSIDE THE CATHOLIC VICAR-GENERAL’S HOUSE in Geneva, a large mob of priests congealed in the thin sunlight one autumn morning in 1532. Inside, Guillaume Farel, the French Protestant missionary who had stopped in Geneva, was summoned to answer the accusations of ten canons of the cathedral chapter. “Tell us,” said the canons, “have you been baptized, you ugly devil? Why do you travel here and there, unsettling the whole world? . . . Who invited you to preach?” One of the canons drew a sword. An attendant took aim at Farel and pulled the trigger of his gun, a pistol, or an arquebus (reports vary). What happened next was chaos: the weapon exploded in the attendant’s hand, Farel declared that he cowered before no popgun, the mob grew vicious in the street, and the city council expelled Farel and his little entourage of “Lutheran” Reformers. 1 The Frenchman escaped death—barely.
The gears and flywheels of the Reformation’s machinery often turned anything but smoothly. No one knew this more than Farel, who worked to a large extent in a particularly fascinating setting: the world of early religious reform among the French-speaking Swiss. Eventually, he became the leading preacher in Geneva from 1534, remonstrated successfully with a young John Calvin to join the cause in Geneva in 1536, and pastored in Neuchâtel from 1538 until his death in 1565. Someone—perhaps the Strasbourg Reformer Wolfgang Capito— dubbed Farel the “Apostle of the Alps.” For a decade at least, he remained far more influential, with much greater stature in the church, than Calvin. Before any critic of the Reformed hurled the epithet “Calvinist” as a term of abuse, “Farellista” was in common parlance.2
Educated in Paris and influenced by the great humanist and Bible reader Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Farel had taught briefly at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine. Then he joined an illustrious circle of Luther sympathizers in Meaux on the River Marne before clashing briefly with Desiderius Erasmus in Basel. In 1526, the Council of Bern authorized him to teach and preach in French-speaking towns under the canton’s considerable religious and political control. The next year, the Bernese Council added that he not be harmed in his duties.3 In hindsight, the comment seems unpleasant—a premonition of future dangers in his endeavors as a first-generation Reformer under the cross.
Farel poured inexhaustible energy into his task. Though he traveled with a stamp of approval from the Bernese Council, he experienced remarkable frustration. In fact, the episode at the vicar-general’s house in Geneva in 1532 was typical—one chapter in a harrowing itinerant mission, especially from 1529— structured around Farel’s fiery sermons against idolatry. 4 His conflicts seemed never-ending. When he spent the night in Saint Martin de Vaud in the winter of 1529–30, the Catholic clergy accused him of being a heretic and a devil. The vicar flung a cooking pot at his head. 5 Farel moved on. A few months later, the Bernese Council received information that a priest had assaulted one of Farel’s associates with a knife, and that elsewhere some priests’ concubines had tried to stone Farel. 6 In August 1530, Farel ranged near the town of Valangin, a few miles outside Neuchâtel. Some twenty priests and women tried to force him to kneel before a statue of the Virgin Mary and beg her for absolution. When he refused, the group beat him, leaving him severely bloodied. 7 In February 1531, at the request of the Bernese Council, Farel traveled to Orbe, the birthplace of the eloquent Pierre Viret, whom Farel would soon recruit as a fellow preacher. Farel tried to enter the pulpit in the church, but hostile congregants blocked the path. For everyone’s safety, a bailiff escorted Farel to his room at the inn. Undeterred, he tried again in vain several times to enter the church, berated by clergymen and laymen alike. 8 So, he left the town and passed through Yverdon, where he was again demonized. One of his co-laborers escaped an attempted drowning. 9
In the spring of 1531, Farel arrived in Grandson, on the southwest tip of Lac de Neuchâtel. He tried to enter the Benedictine monastery to preach. The chaplain of the priory pulled out a knife that he had concealed under his habit and thrust it at Farel, who managed to break free. 10 On June 18, 1531, Farel was refused entry into the church in Payerne, so he preached outside in the adjacent cemetery. Some hundred men gathered in protest, and when Farel would not stop, they threatened to cast him into the River Boye. The assistant bailiff had to sneak him into the prison for protection.11 After that, the Bernese Council arranged for the statesman Hans Jakob von Wattenwyl, Lord of Columbier, to provide Farel with a security detail. On June 25, 1531, von Wattenwyl personally escorted Farel to the Grandson monastery to attend the service. The Grandson religious, however, anticipated Farel’s arrival and refused to let him in. Von Wattenwyl’s servant pushed aside one of the monks, who revealed a hatchet hidden under his garment. Farel entered the building and interrupted the preacher anyway.12 For months, Farel and company continued to agitate in Grandson to stop celebration of the Mass. It seems easy, and natural, to connect “fiery Farel” with the squalid, violent side of the sixteenth century. 13 He left no real theology, after all, and made considerable trouble for himself and others. But this is a one-sided caricature. Farel championed frequent Communion, psalm singing, and catechesis before most of his generation. He was known and esteemed by contemporaries for his homiletic gifts. Calvin’s successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, commented, “No one could
“Let all . . . whether priests or preachers, have respect to the great shepherd Jesus Christ, who gave his body and his blood for the poor people. Let us prefer to be nothing, if only the poor sheep, gone so far astray, may find the right way, may come to Jesus and give themselves to God.”
Farel quoted in J. H. Merle D'Aubigne, History of the Reformation
listen to Farel’s fervent prayers without feeling almost as it were carried up to heaven.”14 Farel even recovered the ancient sursum corda, “lift up your hearts,” and introduced it into Reformed liturgy: “If Christ is in heaven and is to be worshipped there, then the church’s worship must involve more than God coming down to be in the midst of the church; the church must also ascend to the heavens by the power of the Holy Spirit.”15
So, how did Farel feel about such violent rejection and repeated assassination attempts—which, after the first or second occasion, might have been at least somewhat predictable and therefore avoidable? Perhaps he himself did not know but merely trudged forward. Still, he left clues in a few striking passages he composed on what seems to have been his favorite subject. “Praying,” wrote Farel, “is an ardent speaking with God from whom man asks and begs that which he has promised; that is, to aid his people, delivering them, forgiving them, saving them. In prayer, man declares God’s power and magnifies his name and reign.”16 This theme remained central to Farel’s life. In prayer, he had a foot in heaven already, as it were, which displaced and relativized his fears on earth. Convinced of the new understanding of the gospel and confident that God would hear and answer him in any distress, he threw himself into the reform of the church. Prayer reoriented his desires. In the end, Farel did see most of the French-speaking Swiss cities become Protestant, and usually he was at the center of the change. Like the psalmist, Farel made his fundamental appeal to God in Christ: “Will I die without hearing your holy word preached openly?”17
1. Details combined from Charles Borgeaud, “La conquête religieuse de Genève,” in Guillaume Farel, 1489–1565: Biographie nouvelle (Neuchâtel, 1930), 304 (hereafter Biographie nouvelle); Aimé-Louis Herminjard, Correspondance des réformateurs dans les pays de langue français, 9 vols. (Geneva, 1866–1897), 2:451; Paul Henry, Das Leben Johann Calvins des großen Reformators, 3 vols. (Hamburg, 1835–1844), 1:146–48; Abraham Ruchat, Histoire de la Réformation de la Suisse, 6 vols. (Geneva, 1727–1728), 3:175–79; Michel Roset, Les chroniques de Genève, ed. Henri Fazy (Geneva, [1560] 1896), 165; and Antonie Froment, Les actes et gestes merveilleux de de la cité faicte lan 1534 (Geneva, [1550] 1854), 5–9.
2. Pierre Caroli, Refutatio blasphemiae farellistarum in sacrosanctam Trinitatem (Metz, 1545).
3. Biographie nouvelle, 175–76.
4. Frans P. van Stam, “Piety in Tumultuous Times: Farel the Flamboyant Herald of Reformed Belief,” in Between Lay Piety and Academic Theology, ed. Ulrike Hascher-Burger, August den Hollander, and Wim Janse (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 289–307.
5. Herminijard, Correspondance, 2:223.
6. Aktensammlung zur Geschichte der Berner-Reformation, 1521–1532, ed. Rudolf Steck and Gustav Tobler, 2 vols. (Bern: Wyss, 1923), 2:1271, no. 2832.
7. Herminijard, Correspondance, 2:269–70, 275–76; Biographie nouvelle, 242–44.
8. Biographie nouvelle, 250.
9. Aktensammlung, 2:1344, no. 2988.
10. Herminijard, Correspondance, 2:486–87; cf. Herminijard, Correspondance, 2:370–76; 6:413–14.
11. Aktensammlung, 2:1364 (nos. 3029–30).
12. Aktensammlung, 2:1365–69 (nos. 3031–37).
13. See, e.g., Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 247.
14. Ioannis Calvinia opera omnia quae supersunt, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss, 59 vols. (Brunswick: Schwetschke, 1863–1900), 21:132.
15. Theodore Van Raalte, “Apostle of the Alps: Guillaume Farel and the Reforming of Geneva,” in A Companion to the Reformation in Geneva, ed. Jon Balserak (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 72.
16. Guillaume Farel, Sommaire c’est une brieve declaration [ . . . ] (Geneva, 1552), 113.
17. Guillaume Farel, Oraison tresdevote [ . . . ] (Strasbourg, 1542), b7v, quoted in Jason Zuidema and Theodore Van Raalte, Early French Reform: The Theology and Spirituality of Guillaume Farel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 83.
Exploring perspectives from the present
Jens Zimmermann is the J. I. Packer Professor of Theology and director of the Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s written or edited numerous works, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christian Humanism (Oxford, 2019) and Incarnational Humanism: A Philosophy of Culture for the Church in the World (IVP, 2012). This conversation is edited for length and clarity. Listen to an extended version at modernreformation.org/human.
Jens, in your conclusion to Incarnational Humanism, you say that one of your main goals is to help others see “the enormous theological, philosophical and social implications of the incarnation.” Why is the incarnation so central, not just for Christian doctrine but for Christian thinking?
I believe this occurred to me when I started reading the church fathers, particularly Irenaeus. But think about it: What is the gospel? How does God save the world? It’s by becoming human. It’s actually through humanity that all creation is reconstituted, renewed, and saved. (Whereas today, if we want to save the planet, we usually think we need to get rid of humanity or diminish it because we’ve so rapaciously exploited the world.) If the incarnation is at the heart of the gospel, then obviously it must be totally central for all our thinking.
It was quite a mundane occasion that triggered my interest in Christian humanism as a philosophy that rehabilitates the value of creation and embodiment, built on the good news that God became human so that we could become fully human by becoming Christlike. I was teaching undergraduate English classes at a Christian liberal arts college, and I was confronted with a deep-seated dualism in student’s attitudes to learning. I kept getting business and professional students who didn’t want to read poetry. The basic issue for them was a perceived gap between “real stuff”—you know, real knowledge that business conveys or the natural sciences—and the “airy fairy” stuff that literature and poetry convey. So, I had to come up with a defense, a way of saying, “Well, if you dismiss poetry, you’re also dismissing your own faith. You’re dismissing theology.” My defense of literature as real knowledge was the incarnation as the unifying center for all human knowing. The integration of all things starts with the incarnation, with the apostle Paul’s statement in Colossians that Christ is the center of all reality: “In him all things hold together” (1:17). And
“all things” means all things, including the arts. Sometimes it’s good to read the Bible literally!
As we think about the relationship between modern digital technology and personal identity, what are the dangers we should be sensitive to—especially as those who believe the fullness of human being and flourishing is Jesus himself, glorified at the right hand of the Father?
In the ancient world, a “person” fundamentally meant somebody’s social status. The idea of personhood that we have nowadays—that it’s my deepest interiority, who I am with my feelings and convictions, possessing irreplaceable dignity and worth—that idea is new in relation to all the millennia of human history prior to the biblical tradition. It arose through Judaism and Christianity. We believe in a Creator God who has made all things and is therefore the ground of everything, which makes him awesome and unknowable. Yet, as Jewish philosopher Martin Buber pointed out so well through the story of the burning bush, this personal Creator God addresses us and calls us to respond. This personal relationship between the transcendent God and individual human beings is totally, radically new in philosophy and theology. This Creator God, who is the ground of everything (even the very ground of Moses thinking about him), singles out Moses as a person and addresses him as a person. The Bible is the beginning of human dignity and personhood in that sense.
We can apply this insight to the dangers of technology. The person whom God addresses and dignifies is body and soul. The early church fathers were often accused of being body-hating Platonists. What is often overlooked, however, is that they recognized—based on Christ’s bodily resurrection—that you’re incomplete without your body. We also have personal identity and value because we’re made in the image of God, and not because we possess certain capabilities (like rationality or freedom). You can’t reduce the person to mental or physical capacities. A person has to reveal him or herself, just like God has to reveal himself. There’s a secret depth and opacity that we can never fathom.
We’ll never get to the point in the new heavens and earth where we say, “Okay, I guess I’m done growing in my knowledge and experience of the Lord.” No, not at all. This is what Gregory of Nyssa called “constant expansion.”
Can it be that in glory I expand every day and God fills me every day with a little more? There’s so much more—infinitely more! We can’t even imagine that. So, the question for any technology, particularly the digital technologies we have now, is whether it supports this rich biblical notion of the embodied and dignified person or diminishes or atrophies our imagination of what a person is and what we’re made for.
Transhumanists are fundamentally gnostic, in the sense that they want to get beyond the limits of the body to engineer humanity into a new species no longer reliant on this flesh. . . . For
Christians, transhumanism isn’t a cool creative reimagination of life but a violation of what nature actually is.
In the broadest sense, everything we’ve ever invented to accomplish a goal is a technology—from the alphabet to the airplane. Some technologies have been wonderful and some destructive. Most of them are both, depending on whose hands they’re in. So, what’s distinctive (and perhaps distinctively problematic) about recent developments in digital technology?
When we reflect on technology, it’s important to distinguish between the idea of devices or tools we employ to make life easier and the idea that technologies may change our worldview and even our self-understanding, and therefore change the way we interact with one another. Technology is never neutral; it always changes how we perceive reality. Some technologies do so more than others. Martin Heidegger, for example, in his famous essay “The Question of Technology,” says that modern technology frames our relation to the world in terms of commodities. We no longer consider the mystery of life as something we need to surrender to or conform to. It’s not something we need to explore in awe and wonder with an openness that says, “You teach me. Let me see.” With technology, our comportment changes; our framing of nature and reality changes. We increasingly look at nature as a huge warehouse of commodities available for our projects—the trees are made for chairs, that kind of stuff. Eventually, we start looking at each other in the same objectifying, commodifying way.
Another good example of this comes from Gabriel Marcel, a French Christian philosopher, who said that technology frames our thinking about reality in a way that replaces mystery with problem solving. Life, including human life, now becomes a problem to be solved by technological means. We see this today in a movement called “transhumanism,” a movement mainly founded by computer scientists and engineers. Here humanity is conceived in completely functionalist terms. You and I are sophisticated machines. Our brains are basically computers. We can be reverse engineered, and our consciousness can be uploaded onto a digital platform. What is consciousness? Simply the accumulated patterns of emotional and behavioral activity inscribed into our memories. Transhumanists are fundamentally gnostic, in the sense that they want to get beyond the limits of the body to engineer humanity into a new species no longer reliant on this flesh. So, with this technological mindset, we move in our imagination from the paradigm of incarnation to digitization.
For Christians, transhumanism isn’t a cool creative reimagination of life but a violation of what nature actually is. My point is that this reimagination of reality through technology is a metaphysic. That sounds pretty abstract, but this metaphysics is present in the gadgets that are conceived and built in order to instantiate the metaphysics that transhumanists believe. The use of our smartphones every day, or being on Zoom rather than meeting with others in person–these things are hugely powerful for how we think about reality. Our imagination is being changed by our use of these technologies. It’s the most powerful influencer, I think, that humanity has ever experienced en masse.
Is there any silver lining to these tensions for a Christian approach to identity and personhood? Is this pushing us in any good directions?
One simple point to be made is that technology should be our servant and not our master. That technology can be helpful is without question. I’m old enough for my parents to have experienced the end of the Second World War. In postwar Europe, there was so much displacement; people had to find their families across Europe by posting notes on Red Cross bulletin boards, hoping that somebody would see it. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes people didn’t locate their families for decades. If they’d had WhatsApp or even a cell phone, it would’ve taken seconds. What misery that would have saved!
Yes, technology can be helpful if we can use it in such a way that we preserve our souls. One of my favorite tech writers is Steve Talbott, who wrote Devices of the Soul He’s a former computer programmer who asks, How do we use technology without being suckered into the framing of technology? Think about when people say things like, “Oh, this new online service (ChatGPT) wrote an essay for me.” Nobody wrote an essay for you. What happened is that an algorithm capable of sifting through an enormous amount of data in nanoseconds is playing a statistical game of finding the appropriate parts to put together into sentence patterns. What’s the endgame here? As I tell my students, you would have this algorithm write your essay for you, then my algorithm would grade it for you, then another would create the grade report for you. And meanwhile, have you learned how to write? Have you learned how to think?
Toward the end of Incarnational Humanism, you say something that starts to get at our answer as believers to some of these issues: “The social imagination of the early Christians was filled with this vision of Christ as the first true human being, to whose image we are molded by the work of God’s Spirit, a Spirit that does not deny our own efforts.” And then you end with the Lord’s Supper: “This is the heart of incarnational humanism, into which we’re drawn every time the Lord invites us to the Eucharistic table.” Please reflect on that.
You have to believe in a real presence; otherwise, this doesn’t work. And I can accommodate the Calvinistic spiritual presence—that’s all good, as long as it’s a full presence! If it’s Christ, the new creation, a Person who is really there, and we really are feeding on his flesh and blood in that spiritual yet real sense that Jesus talks about in John 6:53–59, then we are ingesting life and being sustained by it. The Christ in whom all things were created, in whom all things hang together, is there! So, when you come to the table, what you experience is the materiality of the new creation. That new reality has come, and it’s there in our midst. We’re tasting all that is good, true, and beautiful. It connects you to your activity as a poet, as an artist, as a scientist, businessperson, or pastor, whatever your mission is, whatever your work is, because here is the transforming power that gives your mission its energy. This is the origin and the completion of all that we are given to be and to do.
When you come to the table, what you experience is the materiality of the new creation. That new reality has come, and it’s there in our midst. We’re tasting all that is good, true, and beautiful.
As I get older, I pray that God will make that reality more real to me than the desk I’m sitting at and the world I’m experiencing, because that’s where we’re all going. That’s what sustains us. If I have that, then why would I fear death? The absence of the fear of death is what set the early church apart. If you read Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, he says, in effect, “I have presented my argument for the incarnation. But if you want real proof, look at us Christians: we’re not afraid of death.” Unlike the transhumanists, who attempt to find a technological way of overcoming death without the body, Christianity embraces death because Christ made it the gateway to life.
And at the table is where I should learn not only who I am but also what my relationship with my smartphone should be.
As Rowan Williams has said, when you take the elements, you should see the glory of the new creation dripping from the bread and the wine, knowing that you’ve been drawn into that reality. It’s not the minister you see. It’s Christ you see. You’re truly eating life.
IF THERE WERE A SILVER LINING to the dark cloud of the recent COVID-19 restrictions, it would be that we were compelled to think about our bodies: what to put on them, what to put in them, how proximate to other bodies to place them. COVID forced us to come to terms with our embodiment and to manage our physical exile and segregation from others by using (settling for?) various digital media to preserve some sense of communion and communication with others when embodied communion was either unsafe or unlawful.
We’ve been wrestling with deep theological and philosophical questions about human communion, and mediated communion, long before COVID. God prohibited entirely the making or using of visual media in worshiping him.1 Socrates famously expressed concerns about oral cultures becoming manuscript cultures (ironically preserved for us in the manuscripts of his disciple, Plato). 2 Medieval popes and cardinals were concerned that the printing press might provide a standard by which the deliverances of the church could be critically assessed. Marshall McLuhan (and his disciples) regarded the visual and electronic media of the twentieth century to have placed humans in a new, virtual universe, referring to the previous four-plus centuries as “The Gutenberg Galaxy.”
McLuhan’s protégé Neil Postman credited McLuhan with inventing and naming the discipline now known as Media Ecology. Media ecologists look at cultures similarly to the way cultural anthropologists and archaeologists do: analyzing a culture, in large part, by its tools. The tacit assumption of all three disciplines has been to ask not merely what a tool does for us but what it does to us. 3 Put differently, we make our tools and then our tools make us. Three decades ago, we added a room to our house and I decided to build a deck next to it. When my wife looked out into the backyard, saw me digging away, and asked me what I was making, I replied, “Calluses.” What the shovel did for me was make a hole for a foundation; what the shovel did to me was give my hands calluses. This isn’t a value judgment about rough hands; handball players, for example, develop calluses intentionally, because the ball comes off of a harder surface faster than off of a softer surface. A callused hand is a type of tool. Every material tool affects the material human who uses it, since humans are material beings. This material reality is not in itself negative; to the contrary, it can be quite positive (as handball players realize). At each stage in the Creation account, God describes the various material realities he has made as “good” (tov) : light, water, a heavenly expanse, dry land, vegetation, plants bearing seeds, trees, sun, moon, planets, fish, birds, livestock, beasts, even “creeping things.” Then God made human beings in his image, expressly distinguished in two kinds materially as “male and female” (Gen. 1:27). After so doing, he looked at all that
Every material tool affects the material human who uses it, since humans are material beings.
Fallen humans . . . have always attempted not merely to extend but to transcend our human nature— especially in our desire to be more “like God” than we already are as his image.
he had made and affirmed that it was, by his own divine standard, “ very good” (Gen. 1:31).
The goodness of our material nature was affirmed even more emphatically in Genesis 2, in which we discover that Adam was created “of dust from the ground” (v. 7). Indeed, Genesis 2 contains twenty references to stuff of the earth in some form or another: land/eretz (5), ground/adamah (5), garden/gan (5), field/sadeh (4), and dust/afar (1).
If we add the fifteen references to “Adam,” an obvious derivative of ground/ adamah , that makes thirty-five references. We can safely say that Genesis 2 is the dirtiest passage in the Bible! It’s no wonder Paul refers to Adam as the “man of dust,” whose image we have as truly borne as that of the “man from heaven” (1 Cor. 15:47–49). From its first two chapters until Christ’s apostles wrote their letters, the Bible embraces human materiality.
One of McLuhan’s books is titled Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 4 McLuhan regarded various media as “extensions” of some aspect of being human. The telephone extended the human voice a far greater distance; the manuscript or book extended one’s communications into the future. Fallen humans, however, have always attempted not merely to extend but to transcend our human nature— especially in our desire to be more “like God” than we already are as his image. The serpent cultivated this yearning to transcend our created order by saying to Eve, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). We human beings, already dignified by being the only creature made in the image or likeness of God, were not content to remain so; we desired to transcend human creatureliness, to be “like God.” The Bible suggests, therefore, that obedient, grateful humans may very well extend their human capacities to serve God or others (by wearing glasses or using an X-ray machine, for example), while disobedient, ungrateful humans will be enticed to use the same capacities to transcend our created human nature and its God-given constraints.
***
Harold Innis, a political economist at the University of Toronto, argued that all human media (technologies of whatever sort) have biases, or emphases inherent in their form, that permit us to extend ourselves in either time or space.
Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character, such as parchment, clay, and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper.5
Grave markers, carved in stone, are time-extenders and last for many centuries; tweets and emails are space-extenders, permitting us to communicate with
people anywhere on earth. But these space-extenders also tend to be ephemeral (though the NSA probably has copies of them all), merely a hard-drive crash or a cloud-hack away from disappearing altogether. Interestingly, the media of ancient religions (including Christianity) have an inherent bias toward time-extending media. We regard some truths and realities as being timeless; we regard the ancient God of Abraham as our God still today, and the content of our beliefs derives from ancient documents that are at least two millennia old. Space-biased media serve us as instrumental goods—for example, by permitting us to disseminate the gospel more broadly than ever before—but our time-extending media roots run deep.
In contrast, electronic media, from the telegraph to Instagram, are inherently space-biased, and usage of such media has tended to shape us in ways that do not merely extend but also attempt to transcend our material nature. With the telegraph, the cultural impact on the typical individual or family was somewhat inconsequential. Telegrams were expensive, and one had to travel to a Western Union office in order to send or receive a message. 6 Then with each new development in electronic media (radio, telephone, television), the process of transcending our material nature accelerated. Via television, for instance, noncombatant Americans saw televised news of the war in Vietnam on the evening news—something that only military personnel had previously witnessed. By 1969, we could sit in our living rooms and watch the Apollo 11 team walk on the moon. With social media, we can not only communicate with those who are physically distant, but we can reach hundreds or even thousands with a single tweet. It seems a little like God, who can hear a million prayers simultaneously or be adored and worshiped by millions simultaneously. But does the quest to capture the attention of hundreds (or more) followers at a time seem a properly modest expectation for a mere creature, or is it an effort to transcend our material nature? Rereading Cicero’s essay on friendship recently, I was struck by his observation that few individuals had more than a single friend, perhaps two.7 Contemporary users of Facebook, Instagram, or other platforms may have thousands of connections— though, too often, no real friends in Cicero’s sense of the term.
Of course, people corresponded through letters before the electronic age, and these are a form of space-extending media. But when I write a letter, I do not feel in any sense as though I myself am present when and where the letter arrives. When speaking on the phone, I sense that I am actually, in some sense, with the other person on the line. Analog media like letters remind us of the material distance from our correspondent; electronic media tend to disguise the material distance. Yet this material human nature is part of our humanity, part of the humanity that God described as “very good,” and perhaps for good reason.
Analog media like letters remind us of the material distance from our correspondent; electronic media tend to disguise the material distance.
If the Christian doctrine of Creation honors the material human body as very good, then surely the doctrine of the incarnation does so!
What space-biased media do for us is permit us to influence and be influenced by those who are physically distant from us; what they do to us is harder to assess. According to media ecologists, media probably alter our sense of self, particularly our sense of our embeddedness in a particular physical environment. Some observers regard the matter as even more severe: Space-extending media cultivate a degree of contempt for place, enabling us to evade and avoid those who are present while attending to those who are absent, relativizing and obscuring the very definitions of “present” and “absent.” McLuhan noticed this long before the digital era and referred to such space-ignoring consciousness as “discarnate.”
The discarnate user of electronic media bypasses all former spatial restrictions and is present in many places simultaneously as a disembodied intelligence. This puts him one step above angels, who can only be in one place at a time. Since, however, discarnate man has no relation to natural law (or to Western linearity), his impulse is towards anarchy and lawlessness.8
McLuhan’s Christian faith informed his vocabulary, and I believe he coined the term “discarnate” as an intentional (and sarcastic?) inversion of “incarnate.” If the Christian doctrine of Creation honors the material human body as very good, then surely the doctrine of the incarnation does so!
McLuhan was not the first Christian to wrestle with issues of media, nor the first to be suspicious of space-biased, “discarnate” media. The apostle Paul was very aware of his material location, perhaps especially when he wrote his prison epistles. He was also aware, not merely of his physical captivity, but also of his painful absence from the congregations he had founded and served:
For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. I want you to know, brothers, that I have often intended to come to you (but thus far have been prevented), in order that I may reap some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles. (Rom. 1:9–13)
I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, for I am perplexed about you. (Gal. 4:20)
But now that Timothy has come to us from you, and has brought us the good news of your faith and love and reported that you always remember us kindly and long to see us, as we long to see you . . . as we pray most earnestly
night and day that we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking in your faith. (1 Thess. 3:6, 10)
As I remember your tears, I long to see you , that I may be filled with joy. (2 Tim. 1:4)
But since we were torn away from you, brothers, for a short time, in person not in heart, we endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face, because we wanted to come to you—I, Paul, again and again—but Satan hindered us. (1 Thess. 2:17–18)
This Pauline preference for face-to-face communication is both ironic and remarkable. It is remarkable because Paul not only strongly preferred in-person communication but, at least in the case of the Thessalonians, he also attributed his absence from them—an absence that necessitated the second-best available substitute medium, a written letter—to diabolical interference.
It is ironic because the only Paul we know is the Paul who wrote thirteen epistles and who appears in Luke’s account in Acts. The apostle, whom we know primarily by his letters, routinely expressed that he would have preferred to have been personally and physically present with his addressees rather than writing to them. We are forever grateful to have Paul’s letters, which are richly edifying to us; but it seems that Paul would have preferred if we as his brothers and sisters in Christ knew him only in person. This ancient lament from Paul should give Christians pause as we consider our relationship with space-biased electronic and digital media today. ***
The rapidity of media changes in the third millennium has made it difficult to assess what these media do to us, as well as what they do for us. I am not prepared to offer normative counsel on such matters, but I believe we should at least be wary of how our circumstances amplify the concerns Paul expressed. As limited beings, we should beware the trade-off between quality and quantity of communication and its consumption—only for God is this not an issue.
Our new media are called, even by their most avid proponents, “information technologies.” Implicit in “information technology” is the value judgment that what we need is more information. But the Bible—alongside other sage guides, ancient and modern—suggests that few human problems are due to a lack of information.
Too much in formal education has to do with quick response, with coughing up information quickly, and not enough leeway is allowed for reflection and brooding in the thoughtful way that serious subjects require.9
We are not brains on sticks, whose primary way of loving and serving others is to dispel information.
In an address he gave in Germany a decade before the third millennium, Neil Postman noticed the same reality when he said:
If you and your spouse are unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because of a lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to your family, does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone in your family has a mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack of information? 10
We are not brains on sticks, whose primary way of loving and serving others is to dispel information. Our most important human concerns are not informational; we attempt to make sense of our own internal conflicts and of our conflicts with those around us. These important issues in life do not, in the first place, require information. They require understanding and wisdom: understanding of the human condition, of the internal conflict we all experience, and understanding of others, whose conflicts, fears, and aspirations differ from our own.
In prolific author Mortimer Adler’s book A Guidebook to Learning: For a Lifelong Pursuit of Learning , he observed that all educational systems from the ancient world through the early part of the twentieth century conceived of education as having four progressive steps: information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Information, for Adler, is merely an observation about some specific thing (e.g., a frog); when that thing has properties similar to other things (e.g., salamanders), he calls this “knowledge.” When we understand the properties common to reptiles, amphibians, mammals, marsupials, and so
1. “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exod. 20:3–5).
2. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Project Gutenberg Ebook Phaedrus, 274–77, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/ epub/1636/pg1636-images.html.
3. “In The Second Self, I traced the subjective side of personal computers—not what computers do for us but what they do to us, to our ways of thinking about ourselves, our relationships,
our sense of being human.” Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2011), 2. She followed this book with Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015).
4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
5. Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (1950; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 7.
6. While the cultural impact of the telegraph was minimal, astute observers were wary about it. Henry David Thoreau famously said, “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic
on, we call this “understanding.” But the goal of all learning is wisdom: What do you do with a frog? What is it for ? How does it fit in an ecosystem where it plays a significant role? Should we study it? Should we fry its legs and eat them? Should we protect it?
At the turn of the millennium, the digital world was largely well received, and many of its early boosters spoke almost messianically of the potential of digital devices and the “information superhighway” (which quickly became the commercial cul-de-sac). Such fervor has largely waned now, and much of the cultural conversation revolves around how best to manage the disruptive, distracting, discarnating, dehumanizing nature of our beloved digital devices.
The material order that God made is “good,” and when God completed that order by making the human in his image, he declared that this entire material order, and the material human, was “very good” (Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). In the economy of redemption, God’s holy Son entered this material world in a material body, and he lived and died sinlessly in that material body. We who are benefactors of the incarnate work of Christ should be wary of the discarnate nature of electronic and digital media, and we should celebrate both his and our material humanity whenever circumstances permit.
T. David Gordon (PhD) is a retired professor of Religion and Greek at Grove City College. He has contributed to a number of books and study Bibles, published scholarly reviews and articles in various journals and periodicals, and his books include Promise, Law, Faith: Covenant-Historical Reasoning in Galatians (Hendrickson, 2019).
telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Riverside, 1957), 36. Mark Twain was even less desirous of electronic media: “The Bermudians are hoping soon to have telegraphic communication with the world. But even after they shall have acquired this curse it will still be a good country to go to for a vacation, for there are charming little islets scattered about the enclosed
sea where one could live secure from interruption. The telegraph boy would have to come in a boat, and one could easily kill him while he was making his landing.”
7. Cicero, Treatises on Old Age, on Friendship and on Divination, trans. W. A. Falconer, Loeb Classical Library No. 154 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923).
8. “Laws of Media,” in Essential McLuhan, ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 1995), 370.
9. Joseph Epstein, A Literary Education and Other Essays (Edinburg, VA: Axios Press, 2014), 9.
10. Neil Postman address given at Gesellschaft für Informatik in Stuttgart, Germany, on October 11, 1990.
At time’s first dawn, the Godhead shone in glory deep and splendor great. Enwrapt with beauty, mankind owned the praise of God inviolate.
‘Till in that sin of unbelief man sped to his eternal grief.
Then Eden fell, and, with it, joy as God His face from man withdrew. In desp’rate longing earth employed the scourge of sinners yet anew. Yet fleeting pleasures ne’er could fill the sightless void that lingered still.
From Cain to Judas horror swept across the dying realm of earth. In drunken blindness mortals crept away from joy, and love, and mirth. Take heart! The cross, though cloaked in pain shall guide man to their God again.
At death’s last night, a cloudless bliss shall gather ‘round the gates of heav’n. What glory deep and splendor this!— pure sight of God, all purged of leav’n. No cloud of sin shall e’er arise to dim man’s thrice-adoring eyes.
A crushed spirit dries up the bones. (Prov. 17:22) He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. (1 Pet. 2:24)
TECHNOLOGY’S TRIUMPH OVER SPACE , its power to entertain and distract, its promise of enabling us to construct not only our own virtual identities but our own realities—all this can seem to render our bodies problematic, even superfluous in the digital age. One legitimate response to such mythical thinking is that it’s patently false. After all, we must access these technologies with our eyes and ears and manipulate them with our fingers and voices. But here I want to explore together several deeper realities that give the lie to the myth of digital disembodiment and underscore both the importance and goodness of being flesh and bone. ***
One inescapable reality that underscores our embodiment is suffering. It comes, as we do, in as many shapes and sizes. Some kinds of suffering are overtly physical: for example, cancer, COVID-19, toothaches, and broken bones. Others are more mental and emotional. But can we ever really separate any form of suffering from our bodies? Can you suffer cancer with no mental and emotional consequences? Even “immaterial” pains like guilt, shame, anxiety, grief, bitterness, and depression manifest themselves in physical ways. Anyone who has experienced mental and emotional anguish can testify to the very real and very bodily tears, loss of appetite, overeating, insomnia, or excessive fatigue. As Proverbs 17:22 says, “A crushed spirit dries up the bones.”
Medical technology may provide healing or relief for many overtly physical pains. It may also provide some relief for mental and emotional pains. But no technology or technique can eliminate suffering from human experience, and many pains are so acute that technology can do little or nothing to ease their effects. Whether directly or indirectly—and especially when it is acute—suffering underscores the inescapable fact that we are physical beings. All suffering involves our bodies, but our bodies don’t explain all suffering. So suffering also drives us to the
further truth that in the unity of every human person, the material and the immaterial are inextricably united and interrelated: the body and the soul or spirit. ***
This brings us back to the fundamental, historical reality of human nature as created by God. Genesis 1–2 is clear that our existence is not the result of random natural processes but of the specific, intentional actions of our all-wise Creator, who showed a special interest and involvement in creating human beings in his image. Adam’s creation included both forming his physical body and breathing life or spirit into him. Our physicality or embodiment is no more superfluous to who we are than our souls. This body and soul unity is the express plan of God himself, and therefore, most wise and good. From the beginning, we were designed to glorify and enjoy him in the setting of his “very good” material universe and equipped with bodies to enable us to fulfill his calling to be fruitful and exercise dominion.
Far from being the prison house of the soul (as Plato and others have suggested over the centuries), the human body is the soul’s proper and permanent home, the good gift of our all-wise Creator. But, of course, that inevitably raises the question of suffering’s existence or the problem of pain. Here again, the Scriptures have a clear and satisfying answer if we are willing to hear it: While suffering profoundly affects our bodies and our souls, they are not suffering’s true source or cause. For that, we must look to Satan’s deception, Adam’s fall, and God’s righteous curse.
Genesis 3 connects those dots for us as it records Satan’s use of the serpent to deceive Eve (Gen. 3:1–6, 13; 2 Cor. 11:3; 1 Tim. 2:13),1 Adam’s willful disobedience in eating the fruit (Gen. 3:6–12; Rom. 5:12, 14), and the Lord’s consequent curse upon not just these three parties but the entire creation (Gen. 3:17–19; Rom. 8:20–22). In this brief passage, we find the word cursed twice, pain three times, and other suffering-related words—e.g., afraid (fear), naked (shame), and return to dust (death)—all underscoring sin’s sad effects upon formerly perfect creatures and creation. Yet amid those painful realities, the text (Gen. 3:15) also points us to another glorious confirmation of our embodiment: Christ’s redemption! ***
By pointing us to our need for Christ and his salvation, suffering further underscores our embodiment in profound and powerful ways. The Bible teaches that in order to be our covenant head and atone for our sins, Christ had to become like us in every way, except for sin (Heb. 2:14; John 1:14); and in that likeness, he had to live a sinless human life and bear our sins “in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). Christian theology describes this as the eternal Son assuming or joining to his person our complete human nature. He became incarnate—enfleshed in
Adam’s creation included both forming his physical body and breathing life or spirit into him. Our physicality or embodiment is no more superfluous to who we are than our souls.
Jesus’ incarnation was no mere theophany in which he simply appeared to have a body; it is his actual and permanent embodiment, because having a body is an essential aspect of our human nature, the nature Christ fully assumed in order to redeem us.
a real human body together with a “reasonable soul” (as the Definition of Chalcedon puts it). When the Son of God came into this world to redeem us, he did not come in his divine glory or even as a disembodied spirit, but as the Word made flesh (John 1:14). In that flesh, he suffered—supremely on the cross, but also throughout his life. Having come in “the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3), Jesus was subject to the same bodily trials that we face. He was hungry and thirsty (Matt. 4:2; John 4:7; 19:28), he was tired to the point of exhaustion (John 4:37–38), and he was subject to physical agony and death (Mark 15:37, 42–45). His body was conceived by the Spirit in Mary’s womb (Matt. 1:20–23; Luke 1:34–5); his newborn body was laid in a manger in Bethlehem (Luke 2:12, 16); his body sweated in a carpenter shop in Nazareth (Mark 6:3); his body walked the hills of Galilee and Judea (Mark 7:9–10); his body bled under Pilate’s scourge (Matt. 27:26); his body died upon Calvary’s cross (Mark 15:37, 42–45); his body was laid in the garden tomb (Matt. 27:57–60); his body was raised in glory on the third day (Luke 24:1–12); his resurrected body was seen and touched by a host of witnesses (Luke 24:14–43; 1 Cor. 15:4–8); and his glorified body now sits at the Father’s right hand in glory (Luke 24:51; Heb. 1:3; 10:12; 12:2). As my former professor Dr. Robert Reymond loved to say, “The reins of the universe are in the hands of a man—the nail-scarred hands of the God-man, Jesus Christ.” Ruling from heaven, he sympathizes with his suffering people on earth as he builds his church before he returns in the same glorified body in which he ascended (Acts 1:9–11; Rev. 19:11–16). Until that return, we feast at the table with elements, at his command, that underscore his embodiment: “This is my body. . . . This is my blood” (1 Cor. 11:23–25).
Jesus’ incarnation was no mere theophany in which he simply appeared to have a body; it is his actual and permanent embodiment, because having a body is an essential aspect of our human nature, the nature Christ fully assumed in order to redeem us. To say that Jesus accomplished all these things in his body is to say in the most profound way that he accomplished them.
***
Reflecting on the gracious work of redemption our Savior accomplished in the body leads to another classic Christian affirmation of our embodiment that we often lose today: the stress that Scripture places on our glorious hope, which is not to be set free from our bodies but to be glorified in our bodies. The separation of body and soul that occurs at death is not regarded in Scripture as a blessing, but as an unusual, temporary state (2 Cor. 5:4–8). While Paul says that “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord,” and that it is “far better” than life in this present fallen age (2 Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23), he also comforts and encourages believers by assuring us that at the resurrection our redeemed souls will be reunited with our glorified bodies (1 Cor. 15). Paul’s ultimate hope, as well as ours, is not to be “unclothed” or disembodied but “further clothed” (2 Cor. 5:4).
This isn’t just the hope of each individual Christian, but the hope of the cosmos. We will enjoy many “withouts” in the new heavens and new earth, which will be without sin, without death, without pain, without mourning, and without tears—but not without bodies! ***
As we await this glorious hope, the present reality of suffering also calls us to minister to the hurting, and all the various aspects of such ministry further underscore our embodiment. As mentioned above, given the unity of our persons, even nonphysical suffering manifests itself in our bodies. Whether or not suffering stems from our bodies, it involves our bodies. Jesus experienced this himself. In Gethsemane, as our Lord agonized at the prospect of the cross, he acknowledged his profound spiritual and emotional suffering accompanied by sweat like drops of blood: “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death” (Matt. 26:38a). As we contemplate this fearful mystery, we must not miss how in the midst of this experience Jesus sought comfort from his disciples in a physical way: “Remain here and keep watch with me” (Matt. 26:38b).
This is an example of what has been called by some “the ministry of presence”: the simple physical presence of a loved one can have a powerful soothing effect upon both physical and emotional sufferers. For all that they got wrong, Job’s three friends ministered well to him when they traveled to his home and sat with him in silent sympathy for a week (Job 2:11–13). Paul also alludes to the ministry of presence when recounting an episode from his missionary journeys: “For even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn—fighting without and fear within. But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus” (2 Cor. 7:5–6). Simply “being there” can be a tremendous comfort and blessing to sufferers, and that blessing—the reality that I am here and I am with you must be imparted and received in the body.
Sadly, Job’s friends discredited their ministry once they opened their mouths, but that need not always be the case. The blessing of bodily presence can be greatly enhanced by well-spoken words, as was the case with Titus and Paul in the rest of the episode recounted above:
God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus and not only by his coming but also by the comfort with which he was comforted by you, as he told us of your longing, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced still more. (2 Cor. 7:7)
Unlike Job’s friends, Titus’s words were an additional source of comfort to Paul as he brought a good report concerning the Corinthians’ repentance and their love for Paul. This reminds me of the Book of Common Prayer’s description of
Simply “being there” can be a tremendous comfort and blessing to sufferers, and that blessing—the reality that I am here and I am with you—must be imparted and received in the body.
the verses to be read in the assurance of pardon: these gospel promises are “comfortable words.” Whether read, quoted, or sung, “comfortable words” embodying God’s wise and gracious word out loud are a rich source of blessing to sufferers. Isn’t it also fascinating that though Jesus could heal with only a thought or a word, he also frequently touched those he was healing? Physical touch—a hug, a kiss, an arm around the shoulder, shared tears—can be a vital encouragement in the midst of suffering.2 Note how Paul and the Ephesian elders mutually comforted one another at the painful thought that this was the last time they would be together in person:
When [Paul] had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all. And there was much weeping on the part of all; they embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again. And they accompanied him to the ship. (Acts 20:36–8)
These wonderful and important ways to minister to sufferers—and many others I haven’t mentioned—have one thing in common: embodiment. Even ministry through recorded words or music or a written letter must be made and received by means of the eyes, ears, and hands. Not just the nature of suffering, but the nature of ministry to sufferers underscores the reality and significance of embodiment. Comfort is simply impossible for human beings to give or to receive apart from our bodies.
I previously mentioned the Bible’s seminal book of beginnings, Genesis 1–2, in connection with humanity’s creation as an “enfleshed soul.” In its revelation of the image of God and the dominion mandate, Genesis also reveals the origin of technology.
My favorite basic definition of technology is Merriam-Webster’s: “applied science,” or “the application of knowledge to practical purposes.”3 Given our creation in the Creator’s image, and his mandate to “rule” or “subdue” the earth, humanity also received what might be called the “technology mandate,” which Genesis reveals as being fulfilled very early in human history. Beginning with Cain, we read in quick succession of the development of agriculture, animal husbandry, architecture, and construction or “city-building,” musical instruments, and metalworking (Gen. 2:15; 4:2, 17, 20–22).
Yet Cain’s involvement gives us a hint at the mixed nature of this technological progress: technology, like everything else, is affected by man’s fall and God’s curse and simultaneously expresses our dignity and our depravity. So throughout human history, technology has been used for good and evil, and this too is inseparable from the reality of our embodiment. Like everything related to fallen humanity, technology is the proverbial two-edged sword. It has been used to
inflict great suffering but also to alleviate pain and promote healing. Besides its medical and other wonderful achievements, when we cannot be with needy sufferers in person, or touch them, or cook for them, modern technology enables us to see, hear, and share words of comfort and encouragement with them from halfway around the world.
Nevertheless, to the extent that technologies isolate us from other people and deceive us into imagining we can create our own identities and realities (including denying or diminishing our embodiment), they are harmful. Let me put a sharper point on this as it applies to suffering: If any technology shapes us to be so isolated, self-centered, or numbed that we fail to minister to those who are hurting, then it is destructive and idolatrous. This failure also includes minimizing our ministry to sufferers: we must not substitute a text, a tweet, a photo, or even a phone call when we should visit, talk, touch, and take a meal. ***
Someday, in that glorious new world in which righteousness dwells, technology will no longer be a double-edged sword. In that perfect environment, sinless men and women in deathless bodies will use human insight in practical ways to glorify God fully and bless neighbors perfectly. But we will not use our bodies or our technology to bless sufferers: that ministry will be fulfilled because pain will have been banished forever, along with mourning, crying, and death.
Our bodies will be glorified because the one who fashioned our bodies took a body to himself, and in that body he lived and worked, using technology with perfect wisdom and righteousness in a humble carpenter’s shop. In ministering to other sufferers, he suffered greatly to “abolish death and bring life and immortality to light” (2 Tim. 1:10) by bearing our sins “in his body on the cross” (1 Tim. 2:24). Until that eternal Day breaks, may we be properly grateful for our redemption through his body, and may our own bodies, who are “members of Christ” (1 Cor. 6:15), glorify him as living sacrifices and holy temples (1 Cor. 6:19–20; Rom. 12:2). And as members of his “body,” the church, we are his hands and feet, obliged and privileged to minister in his name to fellow sufferers. As we do, may we steward the double-edged gift of technology wisely, never letting it distract us or undermine our physical ministry of grace and comfort to other embodied souls.
J. D. “Skip” Dusenbury (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is a retired pastor who continues serving the Lord and his church through preaching, teaching, and writing.
Our bodies will be glorified because the one who fashioned our bodies took a body to himself, and in that body he lived and worked, using technology with perfect wisdom and righteousness in a humble carpenter’s shop.
1. All scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise specified.
2. There is a lot of data to show that physical touch is absolutely essential for healthy human development in the first place: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/infant-touch/.
3. Merriam-Webster.com. Britannica.com offers a somewhat fuller definition along the same lines: “Technology is the application of scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life or, as it is sometimes phrased, to the change and manipulation of the human environment” (my italics).
IN
NLINE WORSHIP . Zoom church. Streaming services on Facebook Live (if you can get it to actually work). We’re all used to this strange new world by now. But it can get stranger: how about entirely virtual churches in the Metaverse?1 This latest development should remind us that even though we’ve become used to digital versions of Christian community over the last couple of years, we should still find it all strange (if no longer quite so new). Now that there is sufficient distance from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is time for more intentional theological thinking about these matters. We can now ask—or revisit—some important questions: How are our experiences of the past few years to be understood in light of God’s word and Christian teaching? And what should we do moving forward? I want to begin this process of theological reflection by going upstream from online worship to explore its headwaters. What we find there is more complex than the strategic pros and cons or potential uses and abuses of worshiping via streamed or recorded media. Instead, at the wellspring, we discover age-old dilemmas: questions of human autonomy and embodied limitations, questions of the relationship of mind to body and of man’s nature in relation to God.
These are not new questions, but in the digital age, the church’s practices are mixing with new cultural and technological accelerants, which makes for an especially volatile combination—and makes clear theological thinking even more crucial. Once we explore the environment upstream, then we can more clearly navigate the downstream challenges the digital revolution has brought to the church, to bodily life, and specifically to the worship life of local congregations. ***
In Transhumanism and the Image of God, Jacob Shatzer suggests that technologies “train and disciple us in certain ways . . . drawing us further into a technological liturgy of control.” 2 Byung-Chul Han similarly notes how constant technological engagement functions as a “liturgical gesture” that catechizes us to conclude that “I have the world firmly in my grip. The world has to accord with my desires.”3 My phone stands always at the ready, to serve my every whim. My fingers effortlessly control the world. I click, I get; I swipe, I see. Both Shatzer and Han put their finger on the connection between our East-of-Eden desire for autonomy and the nonstop nudges in that direction from our technological surroundings. What results is a self-reinforcing loop: our disordered desire for control fed by the technological prowess at our fingertips, which in turn feeds our technological mastery.
Screen-based and internet-connected devices easily morph from capable tools with specific purposes to all-encompassing reality-mediating mechanisms through which we encounter one another and the world.
I don’t mean to suggest that we should consider digital technology to be categorically different from previous forms of technology. All technologies—from a plow to a pencil, from a calculator to a computer—impact our perception of ourselves and our world. Rather, we need to see that our deep impulse toward autonomy, which first arose in that primordial garden in response to the Serpent’s temptation that “ye shall be as gods,” is now intensified by advanced technologies that enable the effortless expression of such desires with the swipe of a finger or push of a button—or even, like God, by simply speaking.4 Screen-based and internet-connected devices easily morph from capable tools with specific purposes to all-encompassing reality-mediating mechanisms through which we encounter one another and the world. They are seamless habitats in ways that technologies like shovels, excavators, or electric toasters are not.5 You cannot be immersed in a toaster in the same way you can be immersed in an online world or a social media platform—unless, perhaps, you are a piece of bread.
To be clear, my argument here is not that each activity of, say, scrolling a news feed, posting on social media, checking a weather app, or taking a selfie are theologically suspect or harmful to our spiritual health in and of themselves. My point is that these undeniably convenient aspects of modern life are not neutral. Today’s digital milieu is filled with technological accelerants that excite our pre-existing tendency toward the illusion of self-sufficiency. The accumulation of such practices and habits—reinforced in countless small daily rituals—makes it seem as if everything that really matters is under our direct control, consumed, constructed, and curated when and how we choose. As Han says, “Through all my swiping, I submit the world to my needs. The world appears to me under the digital illusion of total availability.”6 Humanity’s essence is no longer one of being a creature dependent on God and others, but one of self-creation and autonomy— what Carl Trueman describes as “a world in which it is increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires, and not something that we necessarily conform ourselves to or passively accept.”7 Seeing myself and so many others breaking our backs hunched over our screens, I can’t help but think of Augustine’s understanding of fallen humanity being curved in on ourselves: incurvatus in se smartphone style.
***
Running in stride with this increasing sense of technologically fueled autonomy is an intensified sense of digital disembodiment, what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation.” This is a wordplay on incarnation: while the Son of God purposefully took on our flesh, we often try our best to escape it. In the process, we become “alienated from our anchoring in the world, in fleshy reality; which we can only recover access to through the lived body, whose testimony is being distortively shaped or even denied by ‘virtual’ reality.”8 By treating “the body as extrinsic to the person,” Nancy Pearcey explains, the inner self can impose its own inter-
pretations and desires on the physical body, resulting in a form of person-body dualism: the person is defined as the authentic self, constituted in the mind or heart, while the body is relegated to a secondary position with significance but no inherent meaning.9 Today’s cultural and technological conditions make it more possible, plausible, and palatable to reject the limits of bodily life in favor of such self-constructed identity and reality.
Such temptations toward disembodiment cluster around two main trajectories. For one, in the digital world we are nudged toward being thinking things, or as James K. A. Smith puts it, “brains on a stick.”10 We send messages and hot takes, consume endless information and images, perform our cultivated online identities, but all at a distance, seemingly without bodily involvement with the real world and in-person engagement with real people. Second, behind the screen, we are nudged toward being feeling things, or hearts on a stick. In a “race to the bottom of the brain stem,”11 digital and especially social media easily feed our basest instincts. In consuming, we are in turn consumed by sentiment, fed by algorithms through the frictionless allure of the swipe and the click. In both trajectories, disembodiment reigns. Screen and phone win out over skin and bone. ***
The upstream currents explored above are increasingly infiltrating the church’s downstream worship life. We frequently treat worship not as a communal set of practices but as an intellectual activity for God in our individual heads or an emotional activity for God in our individual hearts.12 In Disruptive Witness, Alan Noble warns of the consequences of a brain-on-a-stick approach to worship: “The weekly gathering together of saints is only justified if attending church is about much more than intellectual growth. In this sense, excarnation is not only a deviation from historical Christianity. It also renders regular church attendance obsolete.” 13 The heart-on-a-stick outlook fares no better. In it, “we experience worship much like we experience a concert. It becomes an individual, emotional, and spiritual exercise wherein I try my best to think about the words and praise God. But even though I am surrounded by the saints, I remain comfortably in my own head.” 14
Mind you, Noble offered these warnings before COVID-19. Such trends have only accelerated since the pandemic and the online turn. Digital technology disembodies: Why bother coming to church when online sermons and songs enable mind and heart work to be done anywhere, and with better musicians and preachers, and while in your pajamas to boot? And this technology accelerates our pursuit of personal autonomy: The church becomes just another content provider offering its product to consume or ignore. I choose which sermons and songs to listen to. I can turn them on or off at will.
Certainly, listening to sermons or songs online can be educational and edifying. But virtual presence cannot be confused with real presence, and the church’s use of digital technologies must not unintentionally undercut the very
Why bother coming to church when online sermons and songs enable mind and heart work to be done anywhere, and with better musicians and preachers, and while in your pajamas to boot?
message of Christ made flesh, Christ crucified, and Christ risen from the dead— an embodied message delivered through God-ordained means. We turn now to the natural embodied limits of creaturely reality and how they should inform our understanding of Christian worship in the digital age.
We are meant to touch, smell, taste, see, and hear the physical world with our actual physical bodies. The inbuilt limits of bodily life are purposeful and for our good. As modern life becomes increasingly digitized and mediated by technological layers, however, L. M. Sacasas wonders at what point humans will cross “a threshold of artificiality” beyond which our “capacity to flourish as human beings is diminished.”15 In an environment teeming with accelerants toward disembodiment and autonomy, we do well to recover the role of bodily limits in human flourishing. The body binds us to one physical location at a time, placing us within humanely scaled and manageable frameworks that direct our attention toward its proper ends. Such boundaries are what make the world navigable and meaningful.
Limits are part of God’s good design for human creatures. Kelly Kapic encourages us to “celebrate the goodness of being a creature of the God who loves what he made. God delights in our finitude: he is not embarrassed or shocked by our creatureliness.”16 Bodily limits are lovely to God and should also be to us. Recognizing the God-given limits of your body, according to Alan Noble, helps you also embrace “that you belong to your family . . . to the church . . . [and] to the place where you live.”17 Physical limits are a feature, not a bug, of the human experience.
Embracing our embodiment helps us overcome our sinful tendencies toward autonomy, whether of the heart- or brain-on-a-stick variety, and in the process helps us to understand the whole scope of the gospel. In Wonderfully Made, John Kleinig explains, “We human beings are not just spirits, like the angels, nor animated bodies, like the animals, but are embodied spirits, or if you will, spiritual bodies. We do not just have bodies; we are bodies.” 18 To claim that we are bodies sounds jarring to many of us, but that is the point. Such direct claims are needed to counteract the reductionistic mind-body dualism that pits our minds and hearts against our bodies, privileging the former so much that “the human body ends up being viewed as a nonpersonal instrument of the self.” 19
Again, this is a gospel issue. Since its earliest days, the church has faced challenges to the centrality of embodiment, whether from the Docetists claiming Christ only seemed to have a body, or from the gnostics seeking liberation from
the body. The Christian confession has always been in Jesus Christ “conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary” and in “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” 20 Bodily life is so central to our nature and our relation to God that Kleinig calls the body “theophanic,” meaning a visible manifestation of God. God made man and woman “so that he could give himself and his gifts bodily to people on earth and work with them in caring bodily for others and the world.” The human body “was made to bridge two realms: the invisible, eternal realm of God and the visible, temporal realm of his creation.” 21 This communion lost in the fall is restored by Christ, who took “on a human body to reclaim us bodily for fellowship with God the Father [so that] our bodies once again become what they were meant to be.” This is God’s design from the beginning: To “show himself bodily to other embodied people and give them bodily access to himself by his theophany, his physical appearance to them in Jesus.” 22 ***
The God-revealing nature of the human body, and specifically Christ’s body, has significant implications for how the church approaches technology and worship. For starters, worship is not the gathering of mere minds offering their intellectual efforts to God in a lecture hall. Nor is it the assembly of mere hearts expressing deep feelings to God in a concert hall. Church is about more than information exchange or warm fuzzies—these aspects of worship are important, but worship cannot be reduced to either of them. You are not a plug-and-play device downloading information from your pastor or experiences from your worship team. You are not a disembodied spirit hovering online, clicking your way to God. You are not a bundle of feelings to be manipulated algorithmically. Instead, you are meant to engage fully in worship—body and soul, together in person with God’s people—receiving from him as the primary actor giving, loving, and serving us through the spoken and sacramental word, while responding in confession and praise. Worship is a feast of forgiveness and life for all the senses.23
The fact that so many churches have gone fully online is evidence of the digital revolution’s impact, leading to a faulty grasp of human nature and of worship seeping into the church. I hope at this point it has become obvious that the question of online worship is more than just a matter of preference or pragmatism. Going all-in online clashes with Christianity’s core theological and anthropological claims. I’ll mention just a couple of these clashes.
Online worship mutes the proclamatory power of preaching. The arresting summons of the law’s accusations against you and the liberating comforts of the gospel for you are obscured and depersonalized in online isolation and anonymity. The pastor cannot look at you; you cannot look at the pastor. The unified focus of the church as ekklesia (the called-out ones) is splintered between every viewer’s personal screen.
Church is about more than information exchange or warm fuzzies— these aspects of worship are important, but worship cannot be reduced to either of them.
Online worship also renders baptism and Communion impossible as there is no sacramental union between spoken word, physical element, and believing reception within the context of a communal rite. Without this union, there is no sacrament. 24 The means of grace engender intimate, participatory worship, which requires mutual presence around font, pulpit, and table. Here we are known and loved by God and one another. Christ the bridegroom gives himself to his bride the church, and the bride receives life from him. Acts of divine self-giving are intimate, deeply real, and fully embodied. The marital intimacy of body inside of body; the family bonds of blood with blood: these are images of the mystical yet physical unity of Christ and his church. Such is the embodied setting for the potency of God’s word as living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword.
Can God use any means to achieve his purposes? Yes, certainly; but the real question is what he has chosen to use, where he has promised to be, and where we can be assured that he is present to save and to guide. And that is in the means of grace.
Just how these rich theological currents flowing through digital media and embodiment should inform our worship and other downstream areas of the Christian life will require much wise reflection in the years to come. For now, I want to leave you with five sets of questions to contemplate in light of the upstream realities we’ve been considering together.
1. Should “online worship” be called that? If Christian worship and especially sacramental administration cannot be fully enacted online, should we—can we—call it online worship without being self-contradictory or at least misleading? Perhaps call it Sunday devotions or sabbath meditations?
2. What message does streaming or recording the whole service send? Does livestreaming, or else recording the complete church service for later consumption, suggest that these media are a direct and sufficient replacement for in-person worship? What if we just record the sermon or the liturgy related to the preaching of the word and prayer? Does streaming or recording Communion, in particular, encourage misuse and send an “excarnational” message about an incarnational reality?
3. Has in-person worship already become too digital? Is stepping into a typical church sanctuary today like stepping into a holy place—a sacred world on sacred time? Or has the technological chatter of everyday life intruded too deeply into the inner sanctum? What if we remove as many layers of modern technological mediation as possible and encounter God through the timeless media he has chosen: a book read, words proclaimed, water poured, bread and wine received? Our sacred spaces and liturgical practices should retain the transcendence and physicality, the grandeur and simplicity, that make Christian worship as relevant
and compelling in the first century as in the twenty-first century. How do we guard our communal worship from what Byung-Chul Han calls the digital dismantling of the real? 25
4. How can we strengthen extraordinary care and ministry? Something that still haunts me from the pandemic is when a homebound member said that “the only time I see my church family is when I watch the service online.” Providing some kind of online participation has a place in unusual or emergency situations in the life of the church and its members, especially for those who are homebound. But the only time such members see their pastor or church family should not be through a backlit slab of glass. How can we fortify in-person ministry with members truly unable to gather in person?
5. What does church membership mean when endless Christian content and connections are available online? The proliferation of doctrinal, practical, and devotional content available online makes it easier than ever not only to pick and choose our personal flavor of the faith but to graze whenever and however we like. And there are online forums and groups for every flavor. What does this do to the local church as an “organic community into which one [is] received” and a “spiritual authority to which one [is] submitted”?26 The church’s inimitable role as a locally embedded but universally embodied communion united to Christ reminds us that the church plays an entirely different game than online communities or content providers. It is in the local church where Christ gives himself to us. There the embodied riches and mysteries of the gospel anchor us to a place and a people, as our lives are together and forever marked by the rhythms and milestones of God’s work in word and sacrament. ***
As the digital revolution marches on, Christianity remains committed to celebrating the reality of being truly human, embracing the grounding beauty and purpose of embodied limits in a fractured age of disembodied autonomy. We must not waver from the earth-shaking paradox of apostolic faith that continues to turn the world upside down: The confession that the God of the universe has taken on flesh—not just temporarily, but permanently. Christ will always have his body. Not only that, but the glorified body of God the Son is a wounded body. In Charles Wesley’s hymn “Lo!
Descending,” we read:
Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body bears, cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshipers. With what rapture, with what rapture, with what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars! 27
It is in the local church where Christ gives himself to us. There the embodied riches and mysteries of the gospel anchor us to a place and a people, as our lives are together and forever marked by the rhythms and milestones of God’s work in word and sacrament.
Christ, the Word made flesh, the One who is preeminent over all things, has wounds in his hands and in his feet and in his side, and that is what makes his body most glorious—dazzling as Wesley rhapsodizes. His body, with his scars, is truly him, truly Jesus. That very body—incarnate, scarred, dead, buried, raised—is united with our bodies, redeeming us along with our scars in a mysterious and mystical union through very real words and sacraments. This is what it means to be fully human, an identity that claims our full presence and deepest praise. No screens or apps required.
Joshua Pauling is a classical educator, furniture-maker, and head elder at All Saints Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Charlotte, North Carolina. He studied at Messiah College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University. In addition to Modern Reformation, Josh has written for Areo, FORMA, Front Porch Republic, Mere Orthodoxy, Public Discourse, Quillette, Salvo, The Imaginative Conservative, Touchstone, and is a frequent guest on Issues, Etc. radio show/podcast.
1. For more on virtual reality churches that exist only in online digital worlds with no physical location, see Joshua Pauling, “Baptismal Degeneration: Baptizing Avatars in the New Frontiers of VR Church,” Salvo, https://salvomag.com/post/ baptismal-degeneration.
2. Jacob Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today’s Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 88. Shatzer is not alone in contending that technology is not neutral and that it shapes humanity toward certain sets of habits, ideas, and certain visions of life and world. This is an ancient human concern, but one that has taken on new gravitas in the last century as many see in the industrial and digital revolutions harbingers of dehumanization. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”; Neil Postman, Technopoly; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization; Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society; and one of the freshest contemporary philosophers on the subject, Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects and Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (Boston: Polity Press, 2022).
3. Han, Non-Things, 19.
4. Jacob Shatzer acknowledges that technologies have always formed us, but he thinks digital technology is “a very different game” for three main reasons: “First, the type of access that we have to digital technology is different from previous tools. Second, studies on addiction demonstrate that digital technology is a game changer. And third, I’m convinced that technology does an excellent job of recruiting disciples into its way of viewing the world.” Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God, 21.
5. For more on how digital technologies become habitat-like, see Roberta Katz et al., Gen Z Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age; and Samuel James’ forthcoming book, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age
6. Han, Non-Things, 19.
7. Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 41.
8. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 741.
9. Nancy Pearcey, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), 64.
10. James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power
of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016), 3.
11. “Former Google Ethicist on Tech’s ‘Race to the Bottom of the Brain Stem,’” CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/video/ former-google-ethicist-on-how-tech-companies-are-downgrading-humans/.
12. Taylor, A Secular Age, 613, 771.
13. Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2018), 130–31.
14. Noble, Disruptive Witness, 137–38.
15. L. M. Sacasas, “Thresholds of Artificiality,” The Convivial Society , https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/ thresholds-of-artificiality.
16. Kelly Kapic, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022), 16.
17. Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2021), 156.
18. John Kleinig, Wonderfully Made: A Protestant Theology of the Body (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), 4. See also Gregg Allison, Embodied: Living as Whole People in a Fractured World (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2021), 17: “I am my body.”
19. Edmund Fong, “Gender Dysphoria and the Body-Soul Relationship,” Themelios 47, no. 2 (2022): 361.
20. Apostles’ Creed, Lutheran Service Book (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 2006), 175.
21. Kleinig, Wonderfully Made, 14.
22. Kleinig, Wonderfully Made, 14–15.
23. Kapic asks, “Have you ever noticed how much of the biblical material that is associated with the gathering of God’s people emphasizes our physicality: eat the bread . . . drink the wine . . . clap your hands . . . lift them in prayer . . . bow down and kneel . . . anoint with oil . . . and baptize with water? Worship in the Bible engages all five senses: see, touch, smell, taste, hear.” You’re Only Human, 61.
24. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Art. 13: Of the Number and Use of the Sacraments; The Belgic Confession, Art. 33: The Sacraments.
25. Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 22.
26. Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 279.
27. Charles Wesley, “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending,” Lutheran Service Book (St. Louis, MO: Concordia , 2006), 336.
I’ll meet you at the bottom of the lake. We’ll watch our friends and enemies ripple the effervescent sky—then perforate
the firmament like wished-upon nickels flicked into a fountain and flashing while they fall. All skipping stones will fall: triples
and fours and fives gathered to the fertile garden of rock at the base of the lake, a congregation waiting for the sky
to part, to feel the sunshine on their face, to feel the sun shine on their craggy face.
HEN I WAS GROWING UP , my father had a rather extensive collection of 78 RPM records, the ones made of shellac in the first half of the twentieth century before vinyl took over. They were about the same size as later vinyls, but held only a few minutes of music per side. Longer pieces might feature sides one and two on the same record, and sides three and four on the next. And we had to change the needles periodically as they tended to wear quickly.
Then came the vinyl 33⅓ RPM. This revolutionized our musical experience: we could listen to music for nearly forty-five minutes at a time without having to change the record. I was a teenager when I started collecting my own vinyls. I still have (literally) thousands of them. But I rarely play them today, because along came the cassette and then the compact disc. I own shelves full of CDs. But now even they collect dust alongside my records because I use MP3s and YouTube. My children and grandchildren prefer Spotify. My dad’s 78s were originally designed for the gramophone, but today people are more likely to listen on smart speakers or wireless headphones via Bluetooth.
What is the effect of these changes? Like every innovation, there is good and bad. The good is that we can listen to what we want, when we want, and for however long we want. And things are relatively easy to find. For years, I searched for the great Don Lambert’s recording of Grieg’s “Anitra’s Dance” in ragtime, rummaging through record stores without success. Then I thought to check YouTube—and there it was, a live performance no less!
Are there negatives? Yes, and I’d like to touch on a few of the most theologically significant. First, contemporary music is often experienced apart from its native context. Listening to your headphones in your bedroom is nothing like being at a concert hall or in a church. I listen to a good deal of sacred music, including Gregorian chant. But much of the music is liturgical—made for a cathedral—and it is somewhat artificial to listen to it on a personal media device. This does not make it morally wrong, but listeners should at least be aware of isolating the consumption of worship music from participation in actual worship.
It is a bit illusory to listen to isolated pieces without context, whether or not it is worship music. Cherry-picking our favorite tracks from albums is a bit like having only dessert at a meal or settling for a TV dinner. It is true that Spotify and the like will suggest other pieces “you might also like.” This is a form of context, created by algorithms. An algorithm is a sophisticated way of collecting data and solving problems. It has multiple uses, including market research. It can help people, buyers or sellers, sort through information. Amazon uses them to decide the range of books a particular customer may be interested in. But this brings with it its own problems.
With increasing use of calculators, we have forgotten how to add and subtract. By typing on computers, we have forgotten handwriting skills. In music, it is the same.
YouTube will often show recordings related to the ones you have enjoyed to keep you listening. Or it may list items in a particular category. For example, RapCaviar selects top hits in the rap genre for listeners to sample. VivaLatino selects Hispanic bestsellers. Ironically, though, this may deprive the listener of the hard work of research and discovery. It also keeps us from being exposed to things we weren’t already looking for. It’s a bit like using Barnes and Noble on a computer rather than going into the store and exploring the bookshelves.
Ted Gioia, one of my favorite music critics, has written about the eclipse of new music among today’s streaming listeners.1 Using carefully researched statistics, he shows how fewer and fewer listeners are paying attention to exciting new musicians and compositions available. I can testify to this phenomenon from my contact with students. They can hum or sing Beatles songs or “Message in a Bottle” by the Police but have no idea what new artists are creating. Gioia notes the underwhelming reaction to the suspension of the Grammy Awards, compared with what would have happened if the Superbowl had been suspended.
The digital disruption of technology is true not only for music listening but also for music creation and distribution. Years ago in music school, I remember composing songs using pencils (and lots of erasers!) on score paper, which the professor corrected with red ink. Today, thanks to music notation programs such as Finale or Sibelius, anyone can produce a perfectly printed score. If by accident you have the wrong number of notes in a measure, these programs automatically correct you. There are parallels. With increasing use of calculators, we have forgotten how to add and subtract. By typing on computers, we have forgotten handwriting skills. In music, it is the same. With sound samplers and music writing programs, who needs to practice their scales? With drum machines, who needs to hire percussionists? Analog skill with instruments, microphones, and magnetic tape has shifted to digital skill with MIDI triggers, emulators, and recording software. Electronic music is controversial. Though there are earlier precedents, mainstream electronic music was developed in the mid-twentieth century. The French composer Edgard Varèse specialized in “organized sound” and used a computer to generate sounds not produced by analog or physical instruments. Musique concrète, pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer, explored things such as speed variation (allowing pitch shift) and tape splicing (allowing combinations and recombinations not possible with musicians playing live from scores).
Some composers combine electronics with traditional sound generators. Karlheinz Stockhausen is a leader in this field. For example, his “Mikrophonie 1” for tam-tam, potentiometers, and filters is now well known in the field. His “Mikrophonie 2” adds a choir, a Hammond organ, and four ring modulators. I find a certain beauty in these strange new resonances. (The old days of painstaking scoring at the piano with a pencil in your mouth are gone, too, though I suspect most of us won’t miss them.)
While technologically intense productions should not be summarily dismissed, no one has suggested discarding analog musical instruments either. And
because technologies can lead to shortcuts, what may sound impressive at first listen sometimes becomes clear that the machine has trumped the person. There’s no substitute for flesh and blood—or soul.
The mindset and skill set needed for successful distribution have shifted as well. The rise and fall of Napster is instructive. Created in 1999, Napster was a peer-to-peer audio sharing facility using P2P file sharing. In 2002, the company went bankrupt, largely due to the many lawsuits it sustained against piracy. Why? Because artists and record companies made most of their earnings through album sales. Smaller, better protected sharing companies emerged, though copyright issues soon lurked. Either way, income for artists from music sales plummeted, and many musicians have been unable to adjust to the new economics of the music business.
Still, not everything disruptive about the new paradigm is negative. One of my friends writes scores for The Learning Channel, The History Channel, and the like. He built a state-of-the-art studio in his home and composes all his music on keyboards and sound samplers. These TV channels have right of first refusal, and he has done quite well for himself. Without prohibitively expensive gear, restrictive contracts, or record deals, musicians today can easily record anywhere and choose to stream songs everywhere.
What should Christians make of this brave new music world we are in? The answer is to exercise wisdom (or balance). The remarkable sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote extensively on technique. While not a Luddite, he warned against the idol of efficiency.2 The machine, he affirmed, can make our work more effective but at the expense of the human touch. Just because machines are ubiquitous doesn’t mean they can’t be dangerous.
The most obvious danger for musicians is the elimination of craft. Harvard sociologist Edwin Tenner refers to the (often hidden) costs of pursuing technological improvement as “revenge effects.”3 For example, if you add more lanes on a turnpike, they immediately fill up with more cars. Word processors are faster than long hand and include tools to help with our grammar; but when we use them, we are not as careful with our writing. In music, such mixed results from the pursuit of technological improvements carry the hidden consequences of ease of access for musicians, but often also loss of effort in musicianship.
Art production, at its best, occurs when dexterous artists wield available materials to skillfully create an object in the world that formerly only existed in their imagination. Biblical examples abound. Chosen by God to create the tabernacle, Bezalel and Oholiab, though filled with the Spirit, had to “exercise wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and all kinds of skills ” (Exod. 31:3). David was included among those who played skillfully on instruments (1 Sam.16:14–23).4 In the New Testament, there is an intriguing passage where Jesus reproaches his spectators for not responding to music: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn” (Matt. 11:17). The flute and song, though well performed, did not evoke the response they deserved.
Art production, at its best, occurs when dexterous artists wield available materials to skillfully create an object in the world that formerly only existed in their imagination.
We cannot . . . abandon our own embodied selves and contexts in order to recover a nostalgic yet mythical past. Museums are marvelous places. But so are studios.
Must we give up analog skill and rich context in a brave new electronic world? I do not believe so. Advocates of early music attempt to meticulously recreate the purely analog world using traditional instruments and settings. There are some marvelous beauties here, but it is illusory to think we are perfectly recreating the sounds and circumstances of those days. We cannot, as it were, abandon our own embodied selves and contexts in order to recover a nostalgic yet mythical past. Museums are marvelous places. But so are studios.
Either way, the challenges are real. As in every area of life, wise decisions will be required. The proper use of technology is fraught with both opportunities and pitfalls. This is true in medicine, manufacturing, and music. As many commentators have put it, technology is a “flawed hero”: we cannot do without it, but we must not be enslaved to it. We can certainly manage to wrestle it down and use it artistically. Christians need to get into the fray and learn to navigate these high waters. As we discern the ways new technology has changed how we experience music, or create it, we need to learn how “to discern good from evil by practice” (Heb. 5:17) in our use of technology. We will need grace to make the right choices and to ask for forgiveness when we don’t. Our loving God is ready to help us here as in every challenge of life.
A few years ago, the great pianist Arthur Schnabel recorded the complete Beethoven sonatas. Quite an achievement. There were several minor errors. His record company told him they could easily erase the mistakes and dub them over digitally. He refused, telling them that while he could record the entire series again, new errors would doubtless emerge! To be wise in the art and skill of creating and enjoying music requires courage—including the courage to be human.
1. See Ted Gioia, “Is Old Music Killing New Music?,” https:// tedgioia.substack.com/p/is-old-music-killing-new-music.
2. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological System (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018).
3. Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the
Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Vintage, 1997).
4. See Rajesh Gandhi, “The Importance of 1 Samuel 16:14–23 for a Sound Theology of Music,” https://apeopleforhisname. org/2014/01/the-importance-of-1-samuel-1614-23-for-asound-theology-of-music/.
A crown of thorns is forced upon his brow, His scalp is sliced and both his temples torn; The skin gives way like dirt beneath a plow, A crown of thorns.
The soldiers laugh. In derision they adorn His shoulders with a scarlet robe and bow Before His feet. They hit him, taking turns
With clubs and whips, but little do they know This is the King of kings they treat with scorn. One day he will be wreathed with gold but now, A crown of thorns.
THE LAST FEW YEARS have seen a global pandemic, civil unrest, and increased political division. These miasmas of polarization, alienation, and apathy have been accompanied by stranger trends, such as declining birth and sex rates, record levels of depression, anxiety, mental health issues,1 loneliness, spiritual deconstruction, and an overall decline in church attendance and profession of the Christian faith. Not to mention an influx of Facebook messages from your uncle about flat earth conspiracy theories.
In the wake of so many maladies, there is no shortage of theories to explain them or suggestions to fix them. Yet much of this advice sounds too much like what it’s attempting to oppose. No matter how complex an issue, there are increasingly only two sides. And both are increasingly angry.
Instead of adding to this cacophony of opinion, I want to highlight a common denominator in all these movements and phenomena: digital media. Although we need to address messages within prevailing philosophies, theories, and movements, we must also wrestle with the significance of the medium in order to understand the meaning of these it all.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to suggest we abandon our iPhones and social media for butter churning and communes out in the country. But I do truly believe that if we don’t approach digital media with care (and circumspection), then instead of thwarting the messages and attitudes that threaten the church, we may unintentionally perpetuate them.
For the past 3,500 years of the Western world, the effects of media—whether it’s speech, writing, printing, photography, radio or television—have been systematically overlooked by social observers.2 —Marshall
McLuhanDigital (and especially social) media is ubiquitous. When we’re bored, exhausted, lonely, or distracted, this is the antidote. The internet, which promises infinite education and knowledge, also runs rampant with mindless distractions, ads, pornography, and more ads. Even now, billions of dollars are being invested into platforms like the metaverse, an immersive iteration of the internet accessed with virtual-reality headsets. The internet is also the place where many Christians get on their soapboxes and publish their complaints—usually against one another. The internet has both created and destroyed countless relationships. It has both built and ruined entire industries. Indeed, digital media is a powerful tool to shape the world around us. But what if this tool we’re using to shape the world is
To criticize media is not to look down on the kids these days and their newfangled gadgets. It’s to hold it accountable to its purported promises.
no less powerfully shaping us? As we wrestle with such a question, we necessarily become critics of the media.
Media criticism has long been dominated by the field of media ecology, a mid-twentieth-century philosophical movement that studied media as environments with their own conditions in which persons live and operate. If we look at media ecology—along with its notable figures such as Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, Walter Ong, Lance Strate, and Jacques Ellul—we notice a school of thought that’s bent on asking questions that help us become aware of “the psychic and social effects of [our] new technology as a fish of the water it swims in.”3
Often dramatic and dour, like all good prophets, media ecologists are eccentric with an important message to deliver that overshadowed everything else for them. As Neil Postman wrote in 1990,
The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one’s status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don’t know what to do with it.4
But you don’t have to be a media ecologist to be sensitive to the profound—and frequently disturbing—effects of digital media. We’re all more anxious nowadays, aren’t we?
In the Gospels, Jesus is often confronted with the urgent questions and anxieties of those around him. In what sometimes feels like a dismissive tone (John 11:23–26), he usually ignores their questions and in turn asks them questions (Matt. 9:14–15; Mark 2:6–8; Luke 10:25–26). In doing so, he reveals to them (and us) what questions we should be asking about God, the world, and ourselves. Similarly, the goal of media ecology is to ask questions that guide us in thinking more clearly about the use of technology. To criticize media is not to look down on the kids these days and their newfangled gadgets. It’s to hold it accountable to its purported promises.
***
Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition.5 —Marshall
McLuhanLike many Millennials, I grew up with screens: I watched television two-plus hours every day and played video games into the night. When I was twelve, I joined my first online forum. It was for fans of Christian novelist Frank Peretti; we talked about his books and shared our attempts at writing Christian fiction. It was
there that I first felt the dopamine rush brought on by online strangers complimenting my comments and insights. I transitioned to MySpace, then Facebook, Instagram, and now Twitter. These media have been with me for over half my life.
Perhaps the most important and famous tenet of media ecology is Marshall McLuhan’s maxim, “The medium is the message.” In recent years, this has become a pithy catchphrase that advertisers and marketers use to highlight how important branding is for a company’s content or products. But McLuhan meant it much more literally. One reviewer wrote that McLuhan’s maxim was originally meant “to be opposite of Bill Gates’ slogan that ‘content is king.’ Content, thought McLuhan, was merely window dressing for the psychic and social consequences imprinted by the instruments that broadcast the information, whether it be radio, telegraph, telephone, or television.”6 L. M. Sacasas has noted that McLuhan was primarily concerned with the idea that “all technology . . . alters perception.” That is, all technology mediates reality to its user in some way, “because it is that through which we perceive the content.”7
When we receive communication through any sort of media, our reception of the content is thoroughly influenced by the communicating medium. Consider Neil Postman’s description of children’s educational television: “As a television show, and a good one, Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.” 8 If you keep reading books, you’ll not only love or hate the specific books you read, but you’ll be shaped more and more into a book reader.
Digital media shape us in the same way, and its always-connected interactivity makes it all the more effective at doing so. As Nicholas Carr says in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Shallows, “The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing. . . . It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check email, click links, do some googling. I wanted to be connected.” I’ve felt its impulse—its craving, prodding presence—within my mind since childhood. No matter how wholesome the content is that I consume, this gnawing feeling to consume doesn’t discriminate between good and bad content. It doesn’t want certain content, but content in a certain way.
When human communication is transferred online, where it’s supposed to connect us, the results are quite the opposite. In 2021, certain Facebook employees leaked internal research to the Wall Street Journal, carrying headlines like, “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”9 Additional research shows that social media forces the brain to either flood the nervous system with dopamine, searching for a “like,” or release chemicals associated with sentiments, such as rejection and disappointment (if there is a lack of engagement from friends or followers).10
Before any of this research—before there was any Facebook—Marshall McLuhan predicted that digital media would stoke anxiety and apathy. From McLuhan’s perspective, all technology is an extension of the human person. The pen is an extension of one’s thought, the hammer is an extension of one’s hand,
We stream cooking shows instead of cooking with our families. We fight on Twitter instead of meeting our neighbors.
fashion is an extension of one’s skin, and media—books, radio, television, and so on—is an extension of one’s nervous system. Digital media in the internet era has expanded our nervous system to a “global embrace, abolishing both space and time.”11
Whether we’re stopped at a red light, standing in line at Starbucks, or lying in bed, digital media has extended our nervous system beyond all proportion. We feel the pull of “refreshing” and logging on. Our brains are overstimulated from the news and content we encounter online—everything from cute puppies to reports of mass shootings—while our bodies remain largely stationary. We stream cooking shows instead of cooking with our families. We fight on Twitter instead of meeting our neighbors.
So many of our relationships are no longer mediated through in-person presence with all its givenness (which sometimes involves awkwardness). We’ve replaced this admittedly slow and messy life with carefully curated profiles, controlled connections, and preferred experiences. This seems ideal. But in neglecting the body, we also neglect the soul. As Andy Crouch wrote in his recent work on technology,
The soul is the plane of human existence that our technological age neglects most of all. Jesus asked whether it was worth gaining the whole world at the cost of losing one’s soul. But in the era of superpowers, we have not only lost a great deal of our souls—we have lost much of the world as well. We are rarely overwhelmed by wind or rain or snow. We rarely see, let alone name, the stars. We have lost the sense that we are both at home and on a pilgrimage in the vast, mysterious cosmos, anchored in a rich reality beyond ourselves. We have lost our souls without even gaining the world. . . . It is no wonder that the defining condition of our time is a sense of loneliness and alienation. For if human flourishing requires us to love with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, what happens when nothing in our lives develops those capacities? With what, exactly, will we love?12
It makes sense that after a pandemic and increased social unrest and polarization many Millennials and Gen Z are retreating from real life to digital life. Our generations were not raised in gathered communal institutions like churches and social clubs. We, along with an ever-increasing proportion of older generations, try to find common places and spaces within the scope of our typical experience. Yet too often, these are the things that give us whatever we want while buffering us from so much of what we truly want and need: a billion backlit screens, but no stars in sight.
My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring
certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.13
Okay, you may be thinking, but what if we just use digital media responsibly? What if we implement healthy practices and boundaries and avoid letting all those algorithms get the best of us? Can’t we subvert these powerful technologies to our advantage? I suspect many media ecologists would answer the way Elrond responded to Boromir in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring when Boromir suggested they use the one ring against their powerful enemy Sauron: “Its strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will. . . . The very desire of it corrupts the heart.” 14 But the argument of media ecologists is not bent on the abolition of the use of digital media. They are merely helping us ask questions about how media is changing us as individuals and as a society. What we do with their insights is up to us.
Postman—who did not wholly agree with McLuhan and described some of his theories as “wild and crazy”—did, however, agree with the essence of his famous maxim about the medium being the message. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman writes, “Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.”15 Postman speculates that this is why, for example, celebrity fundamentalists who reject liturgy and theological nuance dominate TV preaching:
I think it both fair and obvious to say that on television, God is a vague and subordinate character. Though His name is invoked repeatedly, the concreteness and persistence of the image of the preacher carries the clear message that it is he, not He, who must be worshipped.16
Certain media naturally cultivate a culture of celebrity and performance and chafe against slow, quiet things like humility and nuance. So, while we should ask ourselves what content will help others, we should also filter it through the inevitable scenarios of how and when the media determine how that content is received (and often distorted) beyond our intended purposes. When we think of addressing the decadent milieu of our day by fighting fire with fire, we should pause to ask what content we might create to share on social media to inform and bless others. But as newly minted media critics, we inevitably will ask some hard questions. Will our good intentions be thwarted by using unsuitable means? Might we be displacing some other institution or practice that is even more impactful?
[In] the real world, it’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.17 —Ross Douthat
The ubiquity of digital media may lead us to believe that its power is near unstoppable, or even invincible. Significant as it may be, its oversaturation also reveals its weakness. Even with digital media’s ever-present and constant content, we might ask why isn’t it more powerful? Why are important messages online so quickly ignored while banal ones reach virality? With the amount of information online, both profound and disturbing, why does it yield anything less than a kind of revolution?
I believe one reason is that digital media, as a means and an activity, is largely self-referential. No matter how earnestly we use it and no matter how heartfelt our words, they become content for the platform. Deep down, most of us know that it’s all closer to a video game than a town hall. We can feel as though we are fighting for reform, as if we’re involved in political organization and activism, as if we are a part of the good fight—but, in reality, media rarely inspires us to act beyond itself because it makes us believe we have already acted. When we engage online, we feel as though we’re participating in and doing something. In some ways, we are: it’s not as though our words online don’t matter and we’ll escape having to give an account for them (Matt. 12:36). Yet in another sense, we’re merely logging on and playing our parts, using our time in a way uncomfortably like playing solitaire on Windows 98.
Philosophers have long thought that our minds must be guarded from such artificial pastimes. Plato decried the arts (and even blue-collar work) as trivialities; practices that were too fraught with the material, noneternal things of the world. More of a Platonist than a Puritan, the eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that cultural and political stagnation would result from going to the theater. The theater is the place in which human compassion (pitié), the thing that separates us from the animals, is unnaturally depleted. This results in a kind of fatigue that leaves us incapable of fulfilling our actual political duties.18
The elitist and world-denying strains of thought from these philosophers aren’t helping anyone. Plato would hate Instagram for some of the same reasons he would hate carpentry or oil painting. And in a world where our political duties are less clear and it’s easier than ever to be sequestered into our own preferred groups, the stories we find through media can awaken much-needed empathy in us. The average American is not familiar with impoverishment in India, but those who stream the film Lion on Amazon Prime Video can’t help but be moved by the story of an orphan finding his mother after decades apart. We should be
In reality, media rarely inspires us to act beyond itself because it makes us believe we have already acted.
thankful for the social consciousness that digital media seems to invoke on us. It has exposed many of us to the plight of others that we might not have known about. The viral footage of George Floyd’s murder is one example, and the leaked footage of the Uyghur Muslims in China is another. Even still, when compiled with McLuhan’s description of the overextended nervous system and the onslaught of content on the internet, Rousseau’s concerns, no matter how curmudgeonly, can’t be entirely dismissed. If we consult McLuhan and Postman on our digital doings, they are going to point out that every like, comment, tweet, share, stream, and impression of engagement, no matter how it impacts our nervous system, is a replacement for something else. Technology extends one aspect of humanity while replacing and disrupting our reliance on others.
Our online actions are satiating various aspects of our real lives without taking much real-life action. While some radical revolutionaries do act on their online manifestos, thousands more are merely playing one on Twitter. As our rhetoric and language change to fit the online-fantasy genre of digital discourse, it’s no wonder that real ecclesial and political organizations have been replaced with viral clips, memes, tweets, and comments. With digital media, we can be everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time, no longer bound by our place and context, but no longer grounded either.
While it’s imprudent to divest the digital environment of all theological content, pastors and church leaders would do well to temper its importance. We may want our pastors to tailor their sermons to confront the pundits we don’t like, to weigh in on spats within online discourse, and we may judge other pastors for their lack of using social media to address the “current thing.” But if media ecologists are right, then we should do a double-take at our anxiety and apathy and ask if it’s a bug or a feature of the mediums we can hardly stand to be away from.
All of this might seem ironic (even hypocritical) coming from someone who has made a career out of being a media producer. I had the privilege of working with Michael Horton at White Horse Inn for several years and have seen firsthand the good fruit of these labors. That doesn’t mean that in some way White Horse Inn isn’t subject to some of the dangers mentioned (even though Postman did refer to radio as the medium most “well suited to the transmission of rational, complex language”). Indeed, there’s something embedded in WHI we ought to recover far and wide. The radio show is named after the White Horse Inn in Cambridge, England, which is where the Reformation first came to the English-speaking world—that is, it’s a public house. A pub is an embodied environment where folks come after a long day’s work with their anxieties, burdens, and brash personalities and hash life out over a pint of ale or a glass of lemonade.
Every like, comment, tweet, share, stream, and impression of engagement, no matter how it impacts our nervous system, is a replacement for something else.
I wonder whether it would be better for the church’s imagination to be taken up less with the efficiency and reach of digital media and communication for sharing our message, and taken up more with the heart and good cheer of in-person discussion and debate. Perhaps we should consider attending and helping build institutions that want to cultivate such intimate gatherings. Investing our time and finances in such personal ways may offer less maximum reach than digital media, but its meekness and commitment to a creaturely, deeply human discourse may be one of the surest ways to counter the decadence and maladies of our day without becoming too similar to what we oppose.
Caleb Wait (MA Theological Studies, Westminster Seminary California), a licentiate in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), works in technology and media, and previously served as the associate producer of Core Christianity and White Horse Inn.
1. Giancarlo Pasquini and Scott Keeter, “At least four-in-ten U.S. adult have faced high levels of psychological distress during COVID-19 pandemic,” Pew Research Center, December 12, 2022.
2. McLuhan, 1969 interview with Playboy magazine. A text-only archival version of the interview is available at https://web. cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/spring07/mcluhan.pdf.
3. McLuhan, 1969 interview.
4. Neil Postman, “Informing Ourselves to Death,” Speech to the German Informatics Society, Stuttgart, October 11, 1990, https://web.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/informing.html.
5. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (repr., Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 47.
6. Ryan Zickgraf, “Review: The Medium Is the Message,” Freddie deBoer (Substack), January 9, 2022, https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/review-the-medium-is-the-message.
7. L. M. Sacasas, “Technology and Perception: That by Which We See Remains Unseen ,” L. M. Sacasas: Technology, Culture, and Ethics (Blog), June 24, 2012, https:// thefrailestthing.com/2012/06/24/technology-and-perception-that-by-which-we-see-remains-unseen/.
8. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1986), 144.
9. Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show,” The Wall Street Journal , September 14, 2021.
10. Daria J. Kuss and Mark D. Griffiths, “Online Social Networking and Addiction—A Review of the Psychological Literature,” National Library of Medicine, August 29, 2011, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194102/.
11. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 4.
12. Andy Crouch, The Life We Are Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World (New York: Convergent Books, 2022), 58–59.
13. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 27.
14. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings, Book II, Chapter 2 (repr., New York: Clarion Books, 2020).
15. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 8.
16. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 55–56.
17. Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), 136.
18. In Steven B. Smith, ed., Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 187.
AFTER TEACHING AN INTRODUCTORY COURSE on media ecology at the college level for eighteen consecutive years, I place current authors into two camps: Those who do not regard new media as capable of being tamed (at least, not cold turkey), and those who believe it will take significant personal discipline to restrain them. Some of the latter category of authors propose practical means of understanding and taming our media (and ourselves). Even some who worked in the industry earlier believe that the digital world is largely unmanageable, following the twentieth-century warnings of Jacques Ellul and Neil Postman.* I cannot summarize all of their insights, but certain recommendations appear as a near consensus, which I want to share here in my own words in no particular order:
1. Do not permit disruptive or distracting media to disrupt or distract what is important to your humanity (for example, family meals, or family or private devotions).
2. Do not attempt to multitask; it cannot be done.
3. Set specific, brief windows of time during the day to check email, Facebook, and the like, ignoring them otherwise.
4. Find a way to tame your boss (depending on your role): The fact that your superiors are able to reach you at any time does not mean you should welcome such transcendence of your personal time and space.
5. Consider adopting William Powers’ suggestion to take a regular sabbatical from all external interruptions. He and his wife turn everything off from Friday evening until Sunday evening in order to have focused time with family (your needs might vary).
6. Adopt some practices that require—and therefore cultivate—uninterrupted attention, like reading a novel or poetry, listening carefully to classical music, or writing handwritten letters.
Camp One (a select bibliography of those who do not believe media can be tamed):
• Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion (Zondervan, 2011).
• Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place (Baker, 2017).
• D. Brent Laytham, iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment (Cascade, 2012).
• William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age (HarperCollins, 2010).
• Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You (Crossway, 2017).
• Felicia Wu Song, Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age (InterVarsity Press, 2021).
• Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Harper, 2007); Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (HarperCollins, 2018). Dr. Wolf is the former director of the Reading Lab at Tufts University, who published on the neurology of reading for several decades. She wrote Reader, Come Home in her current post as director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA.
Camp Two (those who believe the digital world is largely unmanageable):
• Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone under Thirty) (Penguin,
2008); and The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults (Regnery Gateway, 2022).
• Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010). Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (repr., Picador, 2019).
• Mari K. Swingle, i-Minds: How Cell Phones, Computers, Gaming, and Social Media Are Changing Our Brains, Our Behavior, and the Evolution of Our Species , 2nd ed . (New Society, 2019). Dr. Swingle is a practicing neurophysiologist in Vancouver. Her clinic uses treatment that assesses and regularizes brainwaves to help behavioral and learning disorders. She received an Early Career Award by the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences for her research on the effects of dig-
ital technologies on brainwave functions. This book is the result of her research on the damaging neurological effects of digital technologies.
• Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin, 2016). Dr. Turkle is the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a licensed clinical psychologist, and a former student of Joseph Weizenbaum.
• Jean M. Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—And What That Means for the Rest of Us (Atria Books, 2018). Dr. Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. This book has been widely read and dis -
cussed, and I required it in my courses on media ecology. She used the General Social Survey, augmented by many interviews, to compare and contrast the digital generation to predigital generations.
• Craig Watkins, The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social-Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future (Beacon Press, 2009)
IN THE CAR TODAY , I happened upon a disturbing radio interview. The guest was a poet and designer of transgender and queer clothing whose world (ironically) seemed morally blackand-white. Those who “express their gender and sexuality, whatever it happens to be in that moment,” are free. Those who happen to think people have inborn natures are “body police,” living in slavery to their embodiment. The guest’s underlying philosophical conviction was that embodiment is a constraint to overcome, not a gift to receive.
In the fourth century, Augustine, who would eventually become the bishop of Hippo, was saved from a Manichean cult. Manicheism taught that everything material—the body, the visible world, and natural and moral laws—was designed by an evil creator to enslave us. The innocent soul must express defiance against its fleshly cage in order to be free of its captor, which some Manicheans expressed through punishing their bodies, and some by indulging them. I’m sure you can guess which of these paths the teenage Augustine chose. Augustine’s way out of this morass may be instructive for us. It required both truth and kindness.
Augustine’s conversion to the truth of Christianity took twists and turns. Take his interest in Neoplatonism. That philosophy didn’t have much good to say about the body, either, but at least it taught that there was one divine source from which all things flowed, not separate gods for spirit and matter. At the same
time, this insight wasn’t enough until he encountered the truth of the gospel. Augustine admitted in his Confessions , “I never read in the Platonist books that ‘the Word became flesh.’” That’s just it: In the fleshly world—not only of our own bodies but in the church and society— we meet sin and temptation but also the image of God and especially Jesus giving himself to sinners through water, bread, and wine.
Yet Augustine’s turning point came only after he met a wise and godly Christian teacher. He wanted to meet the famous Ambrose, bishop of Milan, because he heard of his skill as an orator. But what immediately captured Augustine’s heart was not the bishop’s eloquence or teaching but his kindness—even to someone like Augustine. Augustine recalls, “I began to love him, of course, not at the first as a teacher of the truth, for I had entirely despaired of finding that in thy Church—but as a friendly man.”
I’m sorry to say that my first reaction to that interview, while truthful, wasn’t friendly. My first thought was not to argue but to dismiss in disgust, which is easy to do with a radio program—or cable news, social media, or the other carefully guarded silos we all live in these days. Peter, however, urges Christians to be ready always to give a reason for our hope, “but do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15). Truth with kindness. Evidently, this has been a challenge for a long time. Augustine found both in Ambrose, despite his past sins as a religious and sexual rebel against his Creator. Through such truth and kindness, the church received the gift of Augustine of Hippo, the theologian of grace.
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