In the exodus, God supernaturally sustained his people’s material needs (Dt 8:2–4, 14–16). As he did, he was leading them to an earthly home, to the Promised Land, a land “flowing with milk and honey” — the repeated shorthand slogan for its riches. God’s good land will lack nothing. It will have water and wheat and vineyards and olive groves and honey and never-ending bread, “a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper” (Dt 8:7–9). Israel will lack nothing, in part because all the metal tools and technologies she will need was already pre-infused into the land. In this we behold the generosity of the Creator’s covenantal love and the spring of human innovation, his created order, a globe stuffed with elements he invented, created, and distributed throughout the earth at his pre-determined scale, depth, and location — a sort of bait to lure discovery and invention from us, to behold God’s ancient generosity to us in the new, shiny things we make today.

But this richly infused land came with a divine warning to “take care lest you forget the LORD” (Dt 8:11). Material prosperity goes together with forgetting. “When you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Dt 8:12–14).

God’s people, in a future state of material prosperity, will face three temptations.

(1) They will replace God with the world’s false gods of security (Dt 8:19).

(2) They will forget God’s redemptive grace (Dt 8:14).

(3) They will forget the Creator’s preemptive material generosity by simply celebrating human inventiveness (Dt 8:18).

This Creator who pre-patterned into the material world every single technological advance we use today, that generous Giver gets ignored. We fall for the lie of self-confidence. It seems to me the church in the prosperous tech age must heed God’s warning to his people entering the Promised Land: “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth’” (Dt 8:18). That’s the great spiritual battle in the tech age.

Our takeaways:

(1) Refuse to put your security and idolatrous self-confidence in man’s technological powers.

(2) Celebrate Christ’s redemptive work.

(3) Celebrate the Creator’s generosity on display in the tens of thousands of innovations we use daily, knowing none of them would exist if not for God’s kindness to us.

Taking those material gifts for granted, using them, but never seeing God in them, is spiritually perilous.

God never pitted the spiritual against the material. We are not called to choose a spiritual OR material existence. We are not called to choose worship OR iron. We are not called to choose to be a faithful Christian OR technologically adapted. But we are called to ensure the prosperous, material, tech age does not erode our worship. Life in the Promised Land, or in Silicon Valley, is ultimately all about worship. It’s about heeding the call: “You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth” (Dt 8:18). In such a land, to forget God is as easy as starting up your car and driving off blind to the divine generosity that causes it all move.

Running notebook on war, narrative, on the ground social media capture, and why the invasion of Ukraine and the heroic resistance of its president and people are getting etched deep into the collective memory.

Background: Why the Gulf War (1990–91) was forgotten per Chuck Klosterman (The Nineties [2022], 56):

The Gulf War was a triumph of public relations. But it was forgotten almost instantly. We tend to assume that seeing an event ‘live’ deepens its imprint on the mind. It should, in theory, make the experience more intense, and the associated emotions should be more ingrained. But the prolonged liveness of the Gulf War produced the opposite effect. Like a CGI action movie with no character development, the plot vaporized as it combusted. The network footage was live and raw, but dependent on the military’s willingness to grant those networks access, which meant the rawness was clandestinely cooked. The public saw almost no casualties from either side. The strategic success was robotic. Despite the buildings that were annihilated and the civilian lives that were lost, there was no obvious emotional component to the war, which meant there was no narrative. And since American audiences had been trained to understand the world through the process of storytelling, a war with no story was a war they did not care to remember.

Daniel Johnson (Slate, February 24):

It’s been less than 24 hours since Russia invaded Ukraine, yet we already have more information about what’s going on there than we would have in a week during the Iraq war. Already, Google Maps has revealed Russian armored invasion routes due to civilians in the area getting caught in traffic, leading Google to send out alerts. We know almost exactly when Russian forces began their helicopter air assault near Kyiv. We know that one of two Russian soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces on Thursday is probably 20 years old — a reporter found his social media account.

If you’re interested, you can find footage of airstrikes, ground battles, Russian helicopters getting shot down, civilians being targeted. Most of it isn’t coming from traditional sources. … What is coming out of Ukraine is simply impossible to produce on such a scale without citizens and soldiers throughout the country having easy access to cellphones, the internet, and, by extension, social media apps. A large-scale modern war will be livestreamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world.

Thomas Friedman (NYT, February 25):

Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world. This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones, so acts of brutality will be documented and broadcast worldwide without any editors or filters. … Welcome to World War Wired — the first war in a totally interconnected world.

Roger Cohen (NYT, March 1):

TikTok, the video-sharing app with more than a billion active users, has shaped views of the conflict and contributed to an intense wave of global sympathy for Ukraine. Call it Resistance 4.0, the influencers’ war against an unprovoked Russian invasion.

Sheila Dang and Elizabeth Culliford (Reuters, March 1):

When Russia invaded Ukraine last week, some of social media’s youngest users experienced the conflict from the front lines on TikTok. Videos of people huddling and crying in windowless bomb shelters, explosions blasting through urban settings and missiles streaking across Ukrainian cities took over the app from its usual offerings of fashion, fitness and dance videos. … Montages of residential buildings destroyed by missiles, empty grocery store shelves and long lines of cars piled up outside gas stations could be seen on the TikTok pages of top Ukrainian influencers. … The app has become so influential in this conflict that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy appealed to “TikTokers” as a group that could help end the war, in a speech directed at Russian citizens. Some TikTokers picked up where the politician left off.

Drew Harwell and Rachel Lerman (Washington Post, March 1):

Early Monday, minutes after cluster bombs plunged into a neighborhood in Ukraine’s second-biggest city, Kharkiv, people nearby used social media to document the grisly aftermath. Ukraine’s underdog defense is nevertheless staring down a stark reality: that a fierce onslaught of troops and tanks, regrouping after early losses, continues to charge toward the capital. The glory of the scrappy resistance, less than a week into the invasion, could turn at any moment, and no amount of online victory will change that fact. But the information they’ve surfaced could help define how the world remembers the conflict.

Mike Allen (Axios PM email, after Zelensky addressed Congress via video from Kyiv [March 16, 2022]):

Zelensky’s speech evoked imagery of a youthful JFK, in his day the master of the new medium of TV, Axios politics editor Glen Johnson tells me. Zelensky is 44, using cellphone cameras and Zoom.

No, this post is not important, it’s not political, and should make no sense to anyone right now because it entirely exists in the world preemptively because I, an author, thought it a great idea to footnote a gif in my forthcoming tech book, page 81, using the phrase that most likely brought the image up in a Google search, and did work very well in my writing phase, terms which were codified in said footnotes of a book now at the printers. Now those search terms got all changed up, and I recently discovered that for my footnote to work I needed to actually create a new url on the webs with this dumb title to preserve the original seo terms I used to find the image and thus got cited in my book so readers can find it without using the dominant acronym now used to title the gif, an acronym shared with: wow that’s fun. In sum, this is a teaching moment for authors. Do not footnote gif titles in book footnotes. You’ll be left asking: come on what?! Also, if you want to make sense of all this, the book can be pre-ordered on Amazon.

A few quick thoughts I shot off to an inquiring friend this morning, on why Litton’s sermon borrowing/plagiarism is unthinkable to someone like John Piper. None of it based on private conversations, all simply what I know from his books, particularly his latest trilogy.

• A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness (2016)
• Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture (2017)
• Expository Exultation: Christian Preaching as Worship (2018)

For Piper, authentic preaching (like authentic Bible reading) is not ultimately about discovering true comments on the text, finding its outline, inner logic, picking up on grammar cues, or accurately stating the text’s intent. No. It starts with the text, but soon goes beyond interpretive accuracy. The end of the biblical text is to disclose a divine glory. Scripture, in this sense, must be transfigured (as Alastair Roberts puts it). Or we must experience the telos of the text, its divine glory (as Richard Hays puts it in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul [1989], 137).

This point is developed at length in Piper’s trilogy on the nature of Scripture, its reading, and its preaching. Scripture, in Piper’s words, is a window. And the goal of Bible reading and sermon proclamation is not to marvel at the window (the text) but to freshly see in and through the text, as seeing through the window, to behold and encounter the glories of the divine reality explained by the text.

This dynamic (for Piper and Roberts and Hays) stems from the complex text of 2 Corinthians 3:7–4:6. The net result is that, unveiled to Christ by the Spirit, every Bible reader can see more than words on a page but, through those words, we see and encounter the divine reality itself—its glory—Christ himself. When this happens, each of us, unblindfolded, beholds the same divine glory, but we see it from different and unique angles. We each come away from our encounter with Christ having seen and felt something we then work to put into words so others perhaps can see it, too. This encounter is essential to what the preacher brings into the pulpit on Sunday.

Of course, this holds true for daily Bible reading, too. So here’s Piper on what an ideal encounter with God in daily Bible reading would look like, all leading to a sermon.

I would resolve every day in reading my Bible to push through the haze of vague awareness to the very wording of the text. I would push into and through the wording of the text to the intention of the author’s mind, both human and divine. I would push into and through that intention of the author to the reality behind all the words and grammar and logic. I would push into that reality until it became an emotionally experienced reality with emotions that correspond to the nature of the reality. I would push into and through this proportionately emotional experience of the reality behind the text until it took form in word and deed in my life. I would push through this emotionally charged word and deed until others saw the reality and joined me in this encounter with God. (APJ 1197)

But back to the trilogy, here’s a paragraph from book one, A Peculiar Glory (2016).

As I said at the beginning, the Bible has not been for me like a masterpiece hanging on the wall of an Alpine chalet but rather like a window in the wall of the chalet, with the Alps on the other side. In other words, I have been a Christian all these years not because I had the courage to hold on to an embattled view of Scripture, but because I have been held happily captive by the beauty of God and his ways that I see through the Scriptures. (18)

And in his second book, Reading the Bible Supernaturally (2017), he explained why in his pre-pastorate years as a New Testament scholar he didn’t spend much time defending inerrancy. Instead,

mostly, my energies were devoted to looking through the inerrant window, not at the Bible’s “inerrancy” itself. I loved pushing students’ noses against the window pane of the first epistle of John, and the first epistle of Peter, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and the Gospel of Luke, and doing all I could, with prayer and modeling and asking good questions, to help them see the glory of this Christ-dominated landscape. (29)

Later in the same book.

All Paul’s letters—indeed all of the apostolic witness of the New Testament—bear the marks of this divine authority. These writings as a whole—not just a slice of them called “gospel”—are our window onto the glory of God. And through this window we see the peculiar glory of God by reading. (84)

A passion for Christ, by the Spirit, “is the key that throws open a thousand windows in Scripture to let in the brightness of God’s glory” (248). And in case this all sounds mystical or divorced from the text, it’s not, because “God’s glory does not float over the Bible like a gas. It does not lurk in hidden places separate from the meaning of words and sentences. It is seen in and through the meaning of texts” (299).

Finally, here’s a quote from the preaching book, the capstone, Expository Exultation (2018):

Preachers do not aim to draw people into their excitement with the shape of literary windows, but with the reality seen through the windows. We aim to draw our people’s minds and hearts to the world of glory, through the window of the Scriptures. The aim of preaching is that people experience the God-drenched reality perceived through the window of biblical words. Beware of making textual structures (whether microgrammatical structures or macrocanonical structures) the climax of preaching. Always keep before you the summons of the reality factor. (162)

All that to say, to borrow and copy from others shows a fundamental disconnect from the purpose of preaching. The preacher is to look in and through the window of Scripture, to encounter the glory there, and then to put this to words so that others (by the Spirit) are brought into the same encounter. To copy is to simply echo what others have seen. It’s a shortcut. But it’s inauthentic preaching, because it fails to originate from fresh seeing.

Thus, it’s rather easy to see why Piper finds it “utterly unthinkable” that “authentic preaching would be the echo of another person’s encounter with God’s word rather than a trumpet blast of my own encounter with God’s word.” Preaching is “expository exultation”—truth and explanation leading to exultation. The preacher is actively worshiping from his encounter with God. On the other hand, copied sermons “expose a failure on the part of the preacher to see the beauty of truth and feel the value of truth. He is having to go to someone else to see what he ought to see in the word. He is having to go to someone else to express the feelings he ought to feel when he reads the word. This is a symptom of something gone deeply wrong and in need of quick remedy in the preacher” (APJ 829).

Borrowing from others, whether blatantly plagiarized, or by announcing that you’ll be reading from a nineteenth century homily (sorry Alastair!), or by constructing your sermon as a patchwork of citations from other sources, simply means you failed to look through the window for yourself into the glorious reality of divine glory that gives the sermon its ultimate telos, its final reality, its glorious Object, and provides the fuel to sustain a man in worship over a text for forty minutes.

Christ’s resurrection from the grave changed everything. Seriously. Everything. Easter marks a cosmically epic moment in time — and yet the celebration enters and exits our calendars too quickly. So several years ago I slowed my life down in order to really soak in the implications of what Christ’s victory over death means for this world and for my life.

In the spring of 2009 I gathered up my favorite quotes on this important theme for my personal meditation in the month leading up to Easter. A year later I posted the quotes online for others to do the same. Friends who used the collection later encouraged me to expand the document with more of my findings during the intervening years. So I did.

The final product is a short book you can download here: Easter Changes Everything: A Theological Devotional.

Enjoy!

In the course of my tech research I found the following video of Mike Wallace interviewing Ray Bradbury in the wake of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Here’s the video:

Here’s the transcript:

Wallace:
This is Ray Bradbury. For me, the most evocative, the most persuasive of the science fiction writers. He has gone to space — he’s lived in space — in his fertile imagination off and on since he was a boy of nine. Is this the way that you wrote the script? I think it is. Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury:
Yes, and a lot of other people before me. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, the great uncles and grandfathers of all of us. When I was down in Houston a few years ago, I discovered in meeting the astronauts that they had read Jules Verne. They had read H. G. Wells. And in a few cases they had read some of my work, which made me feel very good at the time.

Wallace:
But it is astonishing, really, because they are following a script that seems to have been written by various writers over a period of the last half century.

Bradbury:
Yes. Well, I look upon the function of the science fiction writer as being the romantic who starts things in motion, and the astronauts are the actors who come along and flesh it out and put bones inside the dream.

Wallace:
You have said that a single invention, the rocket, is redesigning mankind. Would you elaborate on that?

Bradbury:
Well, it’s redesigning in us in the following ways. I’m willing to predict tonight that by the end of the century, our churches will be full again. That’s redesigning mankind back in the direction of God again.

Wallace:
Because of space travel?

Bradbury:
Because of space travel. Because when we move out into the mystery, when we move out into the loneliness of space, when we begin to discover we really are three billion lonely people on a small world, I think it’s going to draw us much closer together.

Wallace:
Some people suggest that the very fact that we have now gone into space and have been on the other side of the moon has proved that there is no . . . well, the Russians themselves have said that proves that there is no God up there.

Bradbury:
Well, they’re welcome to use any clichés they want to use. And in turn, I hope to be allowed to use my newer clichés. I believe firmly, excitingly, that we are God himself coming awake in the universe. In other words, we exist on a very strange world that we know nothing about. Our theologians have tried to help us understand this. Our scientists have tried to help us understand this. We know nothing. We start in ignorance.

Wallace:
Can man ever feel at home elsewhere than on earth?

Bradbury:
Yes, and he’s going to make himself at home first on the moon. Then we’re going off to Mars. And then we’re going to build ourselves large enough ships to head for the stars, and when we do reach the nearest stars and settle there, we will be at home in the universe. That’s what the whole thing is about. This is an effort on the part of mankind to relate himself to the total universe and to live forever. This is an endeavor to . . .

Wallace:
Wait a minute. Live forever. You mean . . .

Bradbury:
. . . to live forever. This is an effort to become immortal. At the center of all of our religions, all of our sciences, all of our thinking over a good period of years has been the question of death. And if we stay here on earth, we are all of us doomed because someday the sun will either explode or go out. So in order to ensure the entire race existing a million years from today, a billion years from today, we’re going to take our seed out into space and we’re going to plant it on other worlds. And then we won’t have to ask ourselves the question of death ever again. We won’t have to say why existence, why life, why anything. We will stop questioning in those fields.

Wallace:
Well, of course, but as individuals we will die.

Bradbury:
Oh yes.

Wallace:
The race will be immortal, you’re suggesting.

Bradbury:
The same process that goes on in families today will exist for the whole race in a few . . .

Wallace:
You’re a man of peace, obviously.

Bradbury:
Very much so.

Wallace:
What, though, are the military implications of what we’ve seen tonight?

Bradbury:
The military implications are as following. We have finally, after thousands of years of search, found a substitute for war, which I think is beautiful. The rocket and the exploration of space can be as exciting as war, can be as masculine as war.

Wallace:
A moral substitute for war.

Bradbury:
It can be the wonderful moral substitute we’ve been searching for. We’ve always wanted something to yell and jump up and down about. And war is a great toy to play with. Men and boys loved war. They pretended at times that they don’t love it, but they do. Now we’ve found a greater love, one that can bind us all together, one that can fuse the entire race into one solid mass of people following a single ideal. Now let’s use this thing. Let’s name this ideal and let us eliminate war because the proper enemy is before us. All of the universe doesn’t care whether we exist or not, but we care whether we exist. Now we’ve named the universe as the enemy and go out to do battle with it. That’s the big enemy. And this is the proper war to fight.

Wallace:
Conquer the universe.

Bradbury:
Absolutely.

Mike Wallace:
And conquer it peacefully.

Bradbury:
Peacefully, with these fabulous tools that we’ve been watching tonight on TV.

These days I’m down on cinema, so it’s probably not the best time to be interviewed on the topic. But I was, by two journalists (Cody Benjamin and Chris Hayes) for their upcoming book: What About the Movies? Exploring Cinema’s Place in a World Full of Screens, Streams, and Smartphones (March 2020). And given permission to post the full interview here.

What is it about movies — both past and present — that you believe makes them so captivating, especially in comparison to other media?

Since the first moving picture of a stream train chugging silently right past a camera spooked French audiences in 1895 [L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat], film has been intense, immersive, and thrilling. Our movies are much longer, louder, and complex. And the movie industry has become a dominant center of our cultural mythologies (The Avengers, Transformers, Star Wars, etc.). CGI and 3D and surround sound have all caught up to the imagination of the myth-makers, bringing to life imaginary worlds, amplifying those worlds to truly superhuman proportions.

Countless people in and around the movie industry point to two main reasons for the theater’s longstanding relevance — (1) its tech-fueled experience, which you can get at home (big screen, surround sound, etc.) and (2) its physical, communal space. Do you foresee those factors maintaining their influence amid today’s media landscape? Why or why not?

Once subwoofers, surround sound, and 60-inch TVs moved into the home, the personal theater was destined to become the epicenter of video consumption and the cinema was doomed to stagnation, now reflected in domestic profit growth lagging behind overall economic growth. Theaters have tried to incorporate 3D and various digital surround systems with proprietary names. But to this point most of the technologies that attract moviegoers into the cinema can be replicated at home to significant effect.

For cinemas to break from this stagnation they will be forced to incorporate more and more extraneous value-adds: Freestyle touchscreen soda machines, foodie-level dining delivered to your seat, over-21 screens with alcohol and waiters walking through aisles of La-Z-Boys with electric recliners. New ways of attracting moviegoers will have less to do with the movies themselves or A/V advances.

Would you go so far as to suggest that physically going to the movies (where we are prompted to “disconnect” and focus our attention on what’s literally in front of us) could be beneficial to our health, at least in some senses? Why or why not?

Movie theaters are public entertainment, like major sporting events. I don’t see any inherent virtue in them. I guess the question would be which setting fosters greater personal interaction to love others, and for me personally I know my experience with my family is that we typically feel more together at home, pausing for breaks, and talking about things immediately. For obvious reasons a theater intentionally stifles conversation, so we try to hold off our thoughts until we can get to a local restaurant in order to talk over what we just ingested whole. I do think there’s advantages to going to the theater on special occasions, but I engage with others more at home.

Being someone who’s researched and reported on digital media, technology, etc., what do you believe are the biggest pros and cons of theater-going, both in general and in comparison to at-home, on-demand media consumption?

The biggest cultural con is that theaters have notoriously been targeted by agents of mass violence. It’s really hard to break that stigma.

I think theaters will thrive around major holidays, with families seeking to go out and see new blockbuster releases together. Otherwise apart from pretty significant changes and adaptations to food culture, I don’t know if the theater will thrive, and if they do survive I don’t see them again claiming a cultural center like they once did as anchors in the golden age of the mall.

Looking at the movie theater industry from afar, what do you believe are some of the most promising signs of its survival/future success?

Bringing back historic films, remastered, could draw people back into the theater to relive memories of seeing a movie three decades later. I think the incorporation of live events, like concerts and major sporting events, could be a new way to leverage existing technologies for new purposes. Subscriptions (like, unlimited monthly movies for $19.99 a month) will bring volume up. But no matter what, the industry seems to be in need of major rethinking.

Similarly, what do you believe are some of the biggest challenges for its survival/future success?

Cinema is an incredibly powerful medium for projecting the dominant cultural mythologies of our age. But the video-gamming industry is doing the same thing, and better, by putting us inside the action. If 3D immerses us into a gigantic screen, video games immerse us inside the mythology itself. Action role-play video games move us from merely spectating a mythology to actually becoming a star/spectator within it. And it’s incredibly addictive, more addictive than the cinema.

The Netflix film Mowgli (2018) was a game-changer for me. I streamed the film with my family at the same time it was a new release in local cinemas. Theaters have gotten used to holding proprietary rights for a movie for a certain length of time before those films go to streaming services. And if this continues, as large media streaming services fund their own large-scale sitcoms, dramas, and feature-length movies, this will continue to blow up the big studio/cinema marriage we have come to assume. And as streaming giants find themselves in a foot race for proprietary content, this will continue to undermine theaters.

If you had to take a few guesses (educated or just for fun), what are some ways you believe movie theaters — the industry, the experience, whatever it may be — will change over the next 5–10 years? What other technologies might be weaved into cinema? And what is your general outlook on the industry as a whole?

Yeah, I think that’s the problem. The technology has reached its marketable limit. I don’t know many people who decide against seeing a movie because the theater didn’t have Dolby Atmos sound. Tech upgrades at this point are subtle and largely overlooked by the public. So theaters will survive as long as they can each brand themselves as something beyond a theater. It’s very similar to what happened to the brick and mortar bookstore industry, especially Christian bookstores, that could only survive by also selling music albums, Jesus trinkets, breath mints, gum, paintings, and figurines — all the things that have nothing to do with books. Those “book” stores have died off. Cinema is in a similar boat, forced to adopt endless amounts of supplementary offerings.

With or without the physical theater, do you believe movies themselves will survive or succeed in the coming generation(s), considering the more immersive qualities of video games, social media, etc.? Why/why not?

It’s hard to say. What is a movie? What is television? These lines are now blurred. During my formative years of adolescence, live-linear television was the place for a quick hit of sarcasm and slapstick comedy (Letterman, SNL, Simpsons). The cinema was where I went to have my mind blown by immersive CGI, longform storytelling, and thundering audio technology (ET, Star Wars, Back to the Future). But this dynamic has drastically changed over the past decade. We’ve entered the golden age of television. I remember a time when you’d never see a Hollywood actor soil their reputation on television unless they were promoting a film. Now television has incorporated many of Hollywood’s well-known actors, along with all of its CGI and audio tricks. Today, it would be really difficult for me to determine if the first season of Netflix’s Lost in Space (2018–) is a 10-part television series or a 10-hour movie. I honestly don’t know. I lean toward seeing it as a 10-hour movie. It offers all the CGI and acting you’d expect from Hollywood. All the lines are blurring.

Hollywood operates by a time limit of about 120 minutes. People don’t want to sit there any longer. So movies need to fit inside this attention-window. That was an impressive feat in the 1980s. And people came away satisfied in the 120-minute storyline. But now the length of how long people will engage with a cultural mythology exceeds 50 hours! People have changed. Media has changed people. Television has made our minds more complex, better able to follow multiple plots over longer periods of time.

Studies have demonstrated this historically. Dragnet (1951–59) was a television series about LA cops. It featured one plot per episode, beginning to end. Real clean. Simple. Each episode works A to Z as a standalone storyline. Starsky and Hutch (1975–79) was also a television series about LA cops. It featured two plots, one at the beginning that is picked up at the end, but a second, major plot filled up the middle. Each episode also tied off cleanly. Hill Street Blues (1981–87) came along, another police drama, but this one featured around eight plots per episode, relatively clean plots, rarely overlapping, some carrying over to later episodes. And then of course you come to The Sopranos (1999–2007), the hit mobster crime drama. It featured around ten plots per episode, overlapping one another, scenes where two or three plots are concurrently developed at the same time, unfinished plots carrying over from one episode to another episode, and some plots dropping out for multiple episodes, even for whole seasons, only to be picked up later. Very complex storytelling.

In today’s media landscape, to imagine an entirely developed storyline in just 120 minutes is overly contained. The Sopranos drama required 4,300 minutes. Again, this is one of the reasons why the home theater trumps the cinema. No one could watch The Sopranos in a theater. Some will say home theater watchers have settled for something smaller than the cinema. But in many ways this is exactly wrong. Home theater viewers are asking for mega-longform media, the kind of media that could never fit inside the cinema.

And would their survival/success be a good thing? Or, like the act of going to the movies at the theater, would it be no different than any other activity of entertainment?

I don’t know. I hope we continue to attend live sporting events and don’t just watch them all on VR goggles in 3D. But if that’s what happens, I won’t be too concerned. The stadium vendors will find other employment. The same is true of the theater. I’m rather ambivalent. But if theaters become a glorified marriage between the privacy and comfort of our dimly lit living rooms, while we are served a foodie-level menu by waiters from a kitchen with the best chef in town, could we really say that the cinema has survived? To double a patient’s life-support is not to say he’s now twice as much alive. It’s to say he’s twice as much dead.

Our kids’ lives are full of progressions: from crib to “big kid” bed, from tricycle to bicycle, and from learner’s permit to driver’s license. We use phrases that mark these milestones: when they sleep in their “own bed,” when they ride their “own bike,” and when they get their “own car.”

But in the digital age, kids face a new suite of technological progressions: from digital media, to tablets, to a dumbphone, and then eventually to a smartphone. As in the case of a new bike, sometimes we buy things for kids and give them full ownership. And many parents have witnessed their teen’s excitement in unboxing their “own phone.”

But I think smartphones call for a different approach. Here’s an alternative route.

Instead of giving a teen their “own phone,” it may be better to speak of the smartphone in terms of a gift, on loan, in the form of an experiment. The phone is purchased by, owned by, and all monthly services are paid by, mom and dad. This arrangement is made clear from the outset. This phone is, and will remain, mom and dad’s phone. The parents lend it out to the child, per agreement, as an experiment.

And since the smartphone is an open experiment to test teen maturity and responsibility, we can then set clear expectations in a written contract to cover a few baseline rules on content, apps, personal behaviors, and family engagement.

At a bare minimum, a contract will make statements like:

• This phone does not go into the bedroom. While at home, the phone stays in the living room (or in a central charging location).
• This phone is charged in mom and dad’s room from 7pm to 7am.
• This phone is not to be jail-broken or hacked.
• This phone is for limited apps and no new apps will be added without parental approval (something Apple makes relatively easy).

When considering violations of the agreement, you can set consequences out clearly. For example: on the first violation, dad takes back his phone and deactivates it for one week. On the second violation, dad takes back his phone and deactivates it for one month. And on the third violation, dad takes back his phone and the smartphone experiment comes to a halt.

A contract like this will be unique to each child and you’ll need discernment on what exactly each child needs to hear. But all of these negotiations are made possible because of language you use from the start. No, we did not buy our teen his or her “own phone.” We are conducting a trial, an experiment to see if our teen is mature enough for such a powerful technology.

This approach puts the burden on the teen, and gives you opportunities to talk about what is and is not working as the teen learns to navigate such a complicated new landscape. This framework also gives you an “out” clause if the experiment explodes, or even a “wait” clause if you need time to rethink digital media in their lives.

So if you think your teen is ready for a smartphone, don’t buy them one for Christmas. Buy yourself a redundant new phone for Christmas and lend it out to them. Love them and guide them through this powerful life progression. Like bicycle training wheels and parking-lot driving lessons, give them the tools they want with the safeguards they need.

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.

Jonathan Edwards’ lecture on James 1:13 (April 1733) —

It’s impossible [that God be tempted to sin] because it’s impossible that God should be in want of anything or be capable of having his happiness added, he that has already an all-fullness in himself, and is infinitely happy. It’s impossible that he should desire to be more happy. For there is no such thing as more happy than infinitely happy. There can be no addition to that which is infinite, that which cannot be exceeded.

But if it be impossible that God should desire to be more happy, then it’s impossible for him to be tempted with a view to his own interest, for that is to suppose that he has a view to an addition to his own happiness, when at the same time he desires no addition, nor is capable of it.

Men are liable to temptation because they have an inward craving of happiness. They are tempted by some object to allure that craving. But he that is self-sufficient is not liable to any such temptation nor capable of it. It’s impossible that he should have any such prospect.

Men are tempted to do evil from a view at some profit or pleasure. A view at being in some way added to by it. But it’s impossible that he that is infinitely happy and blessed should have any such temptation to do any evil or unrighteous thing.

But then if it be inquired how it appears that God hath such a fullness in himself that he can’t be added to, the answer appears by this: that he cannot receive any addition from any other because all others have all from him. It appears God has all fullness in himself because the whole creation have all from him. He is the fountain of the good that is received and enjoyed in the whole creation. Every creature has all that he has from God. . . .

Therefore it is evident that God can receive no addition from or by the creature, or by anything in the creation. If the creation be happy, that makes no addition to God. And if the creature be miserable, that makes no addition to God. Therefore God cannot be under temptation to wrong creatures or to do unjustly by them from any expectation of getting anything by them.

[Editing note: All contracted ’tis-es changed to it’s-es.]

Usually by the time December begins Christmas decorations are up, holiday music is blasting, and pumpkin spice is in the air. But as the culture prepares for the holiday, I invite you to do something counter-cultural: to read the ancient collected prophecies of a man named Isaiah. Not only do I want you to read it, I want to run alongside and help you understand and enjoy it (Acts 8:30–31). That is my goal for you in the month of December leading up to Christmas — in twenty-four readings beginning on December 1 and ending on Christmas Eve.

Isaiah tells the boisterous story of international political upheaval — the stunning prequel to Bethlehem. Nothing will deepen your appreciation for the Incarnation, nothing will better help you enjoy Christ, and all that he is for you, if you understand the global setting that anticipated, and demanded, his birth. It’s been called the Fifth Gospel for good reason because along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John it’s a book about the Messiah, not merely in his birth, but in the whole of his world. And it’s majestic. It’s the prequel-gospel, the first gospel, or the gospel before the first gospel, because it serves as a forerunner to the biographies of Christ.

Ever since George Frideric Handel’s famous oratorio Messiah took its rightful place as the musical theme of Christmas the holiday season has been a good time to reflect on the full redemptive story-line of Scripture. Handel’s work builds from seventeen key citations drawn from across the prophetic book. Soaring texts like Isaiah 7:14; 9:2, 9:6; 35:5–6; 40:1–5, 40:9, 40:11; 50:6; 53:3–8; 60:1–3. He left no great Christmas text behind. But those texts are set within a bigger context we shouldn’t ignore.

But any reader soon finds out that the book of Isaiah, like the incarnation of Christ itself, is rather dark and gritty compared to the holiday season we experience each year. Our Christmases are clean and too easily reduced to fresh pine trees cut and domesticated, boxes wrapped in shiny foil, and mass production frosted cookies in the kitchen. The true reason for the birth of Christ is borne of global need and widespread desperation. Christ arrived from sheer human necessity, based on the dominant political powers and the resulting pains of the world. Isaiah offers us all the reasons to explain the story.

A Christ-centered reading of Isaiah is problematic, too. We can too prematurely read Isaiah in light of what we know about Christ and miss the urgency of the prophet’s hope and global expectation. Indeed what Isaiah sees is a threefold need which must be remedied by a threefold promise. As scholars have pointed out, Isaiah’s visions for the future redemption of the world calls for three separate individuals: a King, a Servant, and a Prophet.

“Isaiah does not envision only one lead agent,” Andrew Abernethy writes, “instead, there are at least three distinct lead agents whom God will use in each of the major sections of the book: (1) the Davidic ruler (1–39), (2) the servant of the Lord (40–55), and (3) God’s messenger (56–66). While Christians profess that Jesus ultimately embodies what the book of Isaiah envisions for these lead agents, I am not certain that these agents are necessarily understood to be the same individual throughout Isaiah.”

What I uniquely offer is a way of approaching these themes in the season of Advent that covers the entire prophecy of Isaiah.

In the end, we will learn to postpone the urge to merge this trio of figures together in Christ until the end of the book. What we see is the urgent need for God to send three men, a threefold anticipation manifesting in three very distinct parts. Only as we approach Christmas will we begin to assemble these three anointed characters together.

This is my fourth consecutive Advent leading readers through Isaiah online. I hope you can join us by following the hashtag #IsaiahChristmas. Here’s the reading schedule (PDF). Download and print it. And join us on Twitter.

With the socials abuzz over news that Westminster Seminary Press is publishing a retypeset hardcover edition of Herman Bavinck’s one-volume classic (formerly known as Our Reasonable Faith, now The Wonderful Works of God), here’s a little taste. From pages 6–7:

The conclusion, therefore, is that of Augustine, who said that the heart of man was created for God and that it cannot find rest until it rests in his Father’s heart. Hence all men are really seeking after God, as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place. They seek Him down below, and He is up above. They seek Him on the earth, and He is in heaven. They seek Him afar, and He is nearby. They seek Him in money, in property, in fame, in power, and in passion; and He is to be found in the high and the holy places, and with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit (Isa. 57:15). But they do seek Him, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him (Acts 17:27). They seek Him and at the same time they flee Him. They have no interest in a knowledge of His ways, and yet they cannot do without Him. They feel themselves attracted to God and at the same time repelled by Him.

In this, as Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature. He is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer. 2:13). He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isa. 29:8).

Science cannot explain this contradiction in man. It reckons only with his greatness and not with his misery, or only with his misery and not with his greatness. It exalts him too high, or it depresses him too far, for science does not know of his Divine origin, nor of his profound fall. But the Scriptures know of both, and they shed their light over man and over mankind; and the contradictions are reconciled, the mists are cleared, and the hidden things are revealed. Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God.

Love that. Classic Bavinck.

The Wonderful Works of God ships in early December. Preorders currently 50% off.

Isaiah 28:23–29 —

Give ear, and hear my voice;
give attention, and hear my speech.
Does he who plows for sowing plow continually?
Does he continually open and harrow his ground?
When he has leveled its surface,
does he not scatter dill, sow cumin,
and put in wheat in rows
and barley in its proper place,
and emmer as the border?
For he is rightly instructed;
his God teaches him.

Dill is not threshed with a threshing sledge,
nor is a cart wheel rolled over cumin,
but dill is beaten out with a stick,
and cumin with a rod.
Does one crush grain for bread?
No, he does not thresh it forever;
when he drives his cart wheel over it
with his horses, he does not crush it.
This also comes from the LORD of hosts;
he is wonderful in counsel
and excellent in wisdom.

The long process of human science, engineering, and technological advance in agriculture is simply mankind being given the intellectual powers to read and take its lead from the possibilities inherent in the created order. This is akin to learning tech from the Creator himself.

Thomas Edison holds 1,093 patents and invented the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the alkaline battery, the X-ray fluoroscope, among many other things. He was a freethinker. More agnostic than believer. But he did believe in nature, and once admitted:

I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment — I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born. Everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment.

So where do inventions originate if not in the inventor’s head?

As I’ve said previously, God makes lightning bolts (Psalm 135:7). And this act is the genesis of what we now call the digital age. The same is true of farming tech.

Without baptizing every use of technology as good, we can at least affirm that every technology must take its prompt from what is first made possible by the Creator in his created order.

* * *

Source: Edmund Morris, Edison (Random House, 2019), 12.

It’s always an honor to talk with Dutch journalist Maarten Stolk of Reformatorisch Dagblad. Last month he interviewed me about my most recent book: Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Digital Age. The interview was published today in the Netherlands under the title: “Why We Must Digitally Fast.” With his kind permission, here’s the full English interview.

Why did you write Competing Spectacles after 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You?

My work seeks to help Christians think critically and biblically about the changing world of technology. But many of the technologies on my radar are too futuristic or abstract to yet draw popular attention — topics like artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, autonomous domestic robots, companion robots, designer babies, social credit scoring, global surveillance, transhumanism, etc. Smartphone habits are immediately relevant to all of us. So my smartphone book serves as a both a practical how-to book and an introduction to a broader discussion of our tech age.

But at the end of that project, I knew that there were more questions to address about the power dynamics of digital media. Some have called Competing Spectacles a prequel to 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You. I think that’s accurate. Shiny new technology affects all of us in many ways, but the dominance of digital media, inside what has been coined the “attention market,” is the bigger backstory behind why our smartphones are so addictive.

So this new book asks: What does it mean for Christians to live with eternal purpose inside a digital age filled with viral video clips, live sports, video gaming, on-demand television streaming, virtual reality dreamscapes, loudmouthed political pundits, brash political tweets, the latest blockbuster movies, brand new YouTube videos — enough eye-candy to consume every waking moment of a lifespan?

Why is it important for Christians to have periods of digital detoxes?

Attention is the currency of power. The more plays or “likes,” the more power. A digital detox is a withdrawal from this power-currency system. But a digital detox is a type of fasting. And fasting is how Christians say: ‘Food is not my god. Food is not my comfort. Food is not the basis of my happiness. God is.’ We use food rightly when God is at the center of our lives, not food.

In a consumer-driven age of abundance, you can imagine how fasting becomes even more urgent. Food is a powerful habit, and so are our smartphones. Every day, we habitually turn to our phones, more often than we turn to sugar. Smartphones are a virtual form of candy. So a digital detox is a way of saying, ‘The endless digital media available to me in my phone is not my god. The self-affirmation and acceptance I seek in social media is not the basis of my happiness. God’s acceptance of me, in union with Christ, is.’

Only when our lives are re-centered on God can we learn to use our phones in honorable ways and with eternal purpose. Digital detoxes are essential only because we have been showered with new gifts from God in the form of technology and media. Like all fasting, it’s sanctified gratitude, one way to ensure that our lives center on the gift-Giver, not on his proliferated gifts.

Is an image or a ‘spectacle’ theologically neutral?

Maybe. But every spectacle implicitly makes one of two claims, either: ‘God is the central reality to the universe.’ Or: ‘God is inconsequential to the universe.’ And most of our spectacles present us with a distortion of reality: reality minus God is a false reality, an unreality. Bluntly put, this distortion is demonic, a worldview that shrugs off God. But my concern is not in separating inherently good spectacles from inherently sinful ones.

Where I think the church has failed more commonly is in failing to speak to the dangers of spectacle-saturation in the digital age. Today we are conditioned to binge television shows, plunge into hours of gaming, to live online, and to soak up the lingua franca of our age in advertising, Hollywood movies, the music industry, and large-stadium athletics. We live inside a matrix of media like no other people in world history. Where do we draw healthy limits? That’s the question I’m chasing.

To what extent must the church be ‘countercultural’ in a visual world?

The Church is a counter-cultural resistance movement because our identity is shaped by our hopes and our convictions about unseen realities (2 Cor. 4:18). Particularly in the digital age, the church is countercultural because we set our minds and our hearts are affections and our hopes on unseen realities above, “where Christ is” (Col. 3:1–3).

The world hungers after the latest gadget, the newest thrill, and whatever is projected to them in the digital media that shapes the loves and longings that drive them. But Christians live with one foot in this world and one foot in an unseen world. Which means that our loves and longings are fundamentally shaped by a hidden realm. By faith we can see through the veil of CGI spectacles to behold an “eternal weight of glory,” heavier than a granite mountain, and more luminous than a diamond, and invisible to the eyes of the world today (2 Cor. 4:17).

Why are Christ and the church ‘spectacles’?

Since at least the Exodus, God has delighted to flex his own spectacle-making power for the world to behold (see Ex. 9:16). God is not against spectacles; he’s opposed to the fictional CGI spectacles of our movie age that grab more attention than his glorious Son. God’s people have been central to the celebration and re-proclamation of God’s spectacles.

This is no different today. We proclaim the perfect life, atoning death, and victorious resurrection of Christ. We give testimony of God’s work to the people around us, pointing others to the great Spectacle of the universe, Jesus Christ.

How can Christians speak prophetically to demask spectacles? Can you give an example?

As Herman Bavinck put it, Christians are not, in principle, opposed to culture. We are opposed to worldviews that fail to subordinate this world to the world to come. So we can begin by realizing that the world doesn’t question the glut of digital media. Our world blindly plunges into all the world’s entertainment offerings. A small voice, all throughout Church history, has objected to this cultural plunge. I’m trying to echo that objection in my own way, in my own age, while also realizing that I am, and will remain, a minority voice in the Church.

Quite frankly, most Christians don’t want to hear it. We can fear falling out of step with modern media more than we fear overconsumptions of media. It is time for an awakening to begin inside the household of God. Then perhaps we can make broader inroads in our culture, as people who live with priorities beyond the latest viral video.

How do you know if the spectacles of this world are suffocating your heart?

Jesus Christ died, was buried, and raised to eternal life to purchase our joy now and eternally! There’s nothing more thrilling, no greater Spectacle. So we are commanded to give our most earnest and careful attention to the person and work of Jesus Christ. Because even though we have not seen Christ, we can love him with a love that fills our hearts with an inexpressibly glorious joy (1 Pet. 1:8).

Only Christ can be this most brilliant Spectacle for us. But when our attention neglects Christ, we drift away from him (Heb. 2:1–3). And this drift is felt most clearly when we find ourselves always seeking after a new thrill in our media, meanwhile losing interest in the person of Christ, declining interest in the Bible, yawning through Christ-centered sermons, and spiritually snoozing through the Lord’s Table. Christ grows boring compared to the latest digital thrills. So we pump new thrills into our worship services to compete with the volume of digital thrills of our age, but we really only spotlight the decay of our holy affections.

We grow bored with Christ. And to be bored with Christ is to be disconnected from the great thrill of the cosmos, severed from God’s purpose for this creation — a theater to display the worth and beauty of his Son.

There’s no greater catastrophic loss imaginable to a soul than to grow weary of Christ, the Spectacle of all spectacles. And if I’m right, such catastrophe is accelerated in a media age like our own.

“For this perhaps [τάχα] is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever …”

Peter T. O’Brien, Colossians, Philemon, vol. 44, Word Biblical Commentary (1998), 295 —

Paul puts forward this suggestion about God’s purpose modestly with the adverb τάχα (“perhaps,” “possibly,” or “probably”; it usually occurs with ἄν and the optative mood, but in the two NT passages where the word appears, Rom 5:7 and here, the indicative is used without ἄν), since he is not assuming an acquaintance with God’s designs.

N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013), 1350–1351 —

For Cicero [beyond worship and prayer], the other two aspects [of religio] were the taking of auguries [omens] and the consultation of ancient oracular texts. Paul did not, of course, use divination, or consult the entrails (or the flight-paths) of birds. He did not expect to be guided, or warned, by a sudden clap of thunder. But he believed that the divinity he invoked guided him, at least when he particularly needed it.

[In Acts] it is noticeable that there are several moments when specific words from the lord give order and direction to Paul’s life, from his conversion itself through to the angelic encouragement he received shortly before the shipwreck. It is equally noticeable that there are several moments when we might have expected such things but none appear. Paul, Silas, and Timothy go wandering off northwards through Asia Minor without knowing quite where they are going. The only guidance, for a while, is negative: they are forbidden to preach here, prevented from going there.

Many of Paul’s decisions about where to go next, and when to move on, seem to have been taken on what we might think of as purely pragmatic or common-sense grounds, not least when he was being physically threatened or attacked and deemed it prudent to leave town in a hurry. If Paul urged his hearers to learn how to think things through, to develop a wise Christian mind, it was something he had had to do himself. Certainly Luke has made no attempt to portray the apostolic mission in terms of constant ‘supernatural’ guidance, though that kind of ‘intervention’ does happen from time to time.

In Paul’s own writings this kind of guidance seems at best oblique. He has long been intending to go to Rome, but things have got in the way. His journeyings have been planned on the basis of his overall understanding of God’s work in and through him, not ad hoc because of particular sudden impulses — even if some might accuse him of such a thing. God would use combinations of circumstances both to encourage him and to nudge him in a particular direction. There might be occasional moments of ‘revelation,’ but these are conspicuously rare.

As often as not, Paul sees the divine hand only in retrospect. For the present, the attempt to discern divine intent carries a ‘maybe’ about with it. Maybe, he writes to Philemon about Onesimus, this is the reason he was separated from you. To believe in providence often means saying ‘perhaps.’

All this might seem to lead to the paradoxical conclusion that Paul was less certain of the divine will, on a day-to-day basis, than his pagan counterparts.

]]> https://tonyreinke.com/2019/09/28/the-perhaps-es-of-life-under-gods-sovereign-governance/feed/ 0 9958 tsr https://tonyreinke.com/2019/04/17/good-friday-is-no-funeral/ https://tonyreinke.com/2019/04/17/good-friday-is-no-funeral/#respond Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:44:48 +0000 http://tonyreinke.com/?p=9932 Continue reading Good Friday Is No Funeral]]>  

Charles Spurgeon was no fan of Good Friday. Too many people in his day ignored the church until “Holy Week,” a week so sacred that attendance on Good Friday and Easter apparently atoned for neglecting the church for the remainder of the calendar year. (Sound familiar?)

In this way Good Friday became, in his words, “a superstitious ordinance of man” — too rote, too structured, too formalized. Good Friday became a day when human emotions were forced, like a performance art, to impress Rome, “the kind of religion which makes itself to order by the Almanack, and turns out its emotions like bricks from a machine, weeping on Good Friday, and rejoicing two days afterwards, measuring its motions by the moon, is too artificial to be worthy of my imitation.”

In sermon 2248, prior to communion, he elaborated.

The Lord of life and glory was nailed to the accursed tree. He died by the act of guilty men. We, by our sins, crucified the Son of God.

We might have expected that, in remembrance of his death, we should have been called to a long, sad, rigorous fast. Do not many men think so even today? See how they observe Good Friday, a sad, sad day to many; yet our Lord has never enjoined our keeping such a day, or bidden us to look back upon his death under such a melancholy aspect.

Instead of that, having passed out from under the old covenant into the new, and resting in our risen Lord, who once was slain, we commemorate his death by a festival most joyous. It came over the Passover, which was a feast of the Jews; but unlike that feast, which was kept by unleavened bread, this feast is brimful of joy and gladness. It is composed of bread and of wine, without a trace of bitter herbs, or anything that suggests sorrow and grief. . . .

The memorial of Christ’s death is a festival, not a funeral; and we are to come to the table with gladsome hearts and go away from it with praises, for “after supper they sang a hymn” [Matt 26:30, Mark 14:26].

A number of scholars believe the disciples would have closed their Passover-turned-Lord’s-Supper gathering with a hymn taken from the joyful Hallel Psalms (113–118), perhaps even a majestic one like Psalm 136. Similarly, for Spurgeon Good Friday, like any celebration of the Savior’s death in the Lord’s Supper, was a proper and suitable context for worship, joy, and gladness.

In Spurgeon’s mind, Good Friday was no funeral.

I’ve been enjoying Akiko Busch’s new book: How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency. She makes the distinction between disappearing and hiding — the two are quite different, although easily confused in the digital age. Indeed, “it is time to question the false equivalency between not being seen and hiding. And time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world” (10).

She’s not addressing the challenges as a Christian, but the book itself is beautiful, and it works as a fine conversation partner into my own thinking in contrasting personal virtue as performance art in the digital age and the virtues of charity, personal prayer, and fasting in their invisible forms (Matthew 6:1–18).

The desire to spiritually perform is even more challenging in the age of Instagram. In part this is because we live in an age in which exposure is increasingly equated with action, and where invisibility is more and more acquainted with passivity.

But something beyond mere performance is happening, as she explains.

Visibility has gone from being passive to active.

In Jennifer Egan’s 2001 novel, Look at Me, Charlotte, a model struggling to reconstruct her identity after her face has been grossly disfigured by a car accident, explains her choice of profession by saying, “Being observed felt like an action, the central action — the only one worth taking. Anything else I might attempt seemed passive, futile by comparison.”

I agree. Teaching recently, I assumed an afternoon visit to my classroom by a camera crew documenting campus life would be inhibiting to students. I was sure the two young men with video cameras would make the students feel self-conscious and that classroom discussion would become stilted and awkward.

To the contrary, the students were suddenly participating more actively, sitting up a bit straighter, choosing their words more carefully, and citing sources with greater precision. The intensity of their engagement improved under the eye of the camera, and the classroom conversation found new energy. It wasn’t so much about performing for the camera as coming alive before it, engaging and perhaps even conversing with it. Of course, I later thought, these kids were filmed as they emerged from the birth canal, took their first steps, uttered their first words, and stepped onto that first school bus. Of course they find the camera not only a congenial presence but also an affirming one. (8–9)

The Church’s challenge will be to reclaim and recapture the beauty — the activity — of the invisible life in the age of “continuous exposure.”

Jonathan Edwards championed the idea of authentic Christianity as dis-interested, and he made the argument in one of his profoundest books, The Religious Affections. It took me years to grasp his reasoning, more years to appreciate why he belabored the point, and only recently have I picked up on his implications for the digital age.

The Enlightenment world Edwards inhabited was an age of practical sciences and groundbreaking discoveries. He lived through the early era of a coming technological jackpot. A science-driven pragmatic age was gestating, and Edwards could feel the fetal movements.

This pragmatic age would bring massive changes in how people read the Bible, applied the Bible, and Instagrammed the Bible.

Edwards was concerned that people would read promises like Luke 12:32, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” as if those words were “immediately spoken from heaven to them.” The words in the gospels would become “sweet” but only because “they think it is made to them immediately,” and “all the sense they have of any glory in them, is only from self-love, and from their own imagined interest in the words: not that they had any view or sense of the holy and glorious nature of the kingdom of heaven, and the spiritual glory of that God who gives it” (W2:221).

He arrives here by making the argument that no promise of Scripture was made to anyone alive today. We cannot embrace Scripture’s promises too quickly, and certainly not because someone else has said we are an inheritor of the divine promises. Edwards’s experiences in the froth of revival led him to conclude that even Satan can manipulate people to think the Bible is a book of blank banknotes of personal blessings to be grabbed, rendering down the glorious God of the universe into a Pez dispenser of gifts and blessings.

So is there ever a personal application of Scripture to a saint? Yes, Edwards affirms, but not because someone else makes the claim. This conformation is a distinct work of the Spirit, “a spiritual application of the promises of Scripture, for the comfort of the saints, consists in enlightening their minds to see the holy excellency and sweetness of the blessings promised, and also the holy excellency of the promiser, and his faithfulness and sufficiency; thus drawing forth their hearts to embrace the promiser, and thing promised; and by this means, giving the sensible actings of grace, enabling them to see their grace, and so their title to the promise” (W2:224–25).

Where the Spirit is active, the Promiser is always greater than the promise. This was a priority Edwards feared would be lost as preaching and revival moved toward man-centric themes and approaches.

This coming shift in pulpits was riding the wake of the Enlightenment, a social shift that changed how millions defined happiness and pursued it. Once considered in the hands of God and in fate, or a divine reward for obedience, Enlightenment thinkers came in and said no, grab for happiness, change the fate, “change these things — change ourselves — and we could become in practice what all were intended to by nature be” (McMahon, Happiness, 13).

But the foundational work of God in the soul is not discerned in the grab for a gift or even for a rescue, it’s found in a soul that apprehends the beauty of the promise and the glory of the Promiser. Aesthetic appreciation of the King precedes the joy of holding the title to the kingdom. “And this is indeed the very main difference between the joy of the hypocrite, and the joy of the true saint. The former rejoices in himself; self is the first foundation of his joy: the latter rejoices in God” (W2:249).

In other words, saints “first rejoice in God as glorious and excellent in himself, and then secondarily rejoice in it, that so glorious a God is theirs: they first have their hearts filled with sweetness, from the view of Christ’s excellency, and the excellency of his grace, and the beauty of the way of salvation by him; and then they have a secondary joy, in that so excellent a Savior, and such excellent grace is theirs” (W2:250).

On the other hand, hypocritical professors “take more comfort in their discoveries than in [the] Christ discovered” (W2:252).

The dichotomy is clear for Edwards: “The grace of God may appear lovely two ways; either as bonum utile, a profitable good to me, that which greatly serves my interest, and so suits my self-love; or as bonum formosum, a beautiful good in itself, and part of the moral and spiritual excellency of the divine nature” (W2:262–63).

Self-interested religion, that uses the gospel “to serve a turn,” to serve some felt-need or pragmatic purpose as an end in itself, falters and eventually fails to lead toward a life of self-sacrificing holiness. Self-interested religion contradicts selfless sacrifice, as Paul was aware (Phil. 2:21).

Thus, “what makes men partial in religion is, that they seek themselves, and not God, in their religion, and close with religion, not for its own excellent nature, but only to serve a turn [a purpose and end in itself]. He that closes with religion only to serve a turn, will close with no more of it than he imagines serves that turn: but he that closes with religion for its own excellent and lovely nature closes with all that has that nature: he that embraces religion for its own sake, embraces the whole of religion” (W2:394).

Faith as pragmatic expedience is empty and stunted.

Faith that is aesthetic is whole and embracing.

So what has Edwards to do with technology?

Only recently did I notice the connection here, made by Yale editor John E. Smith (in 1959!).

“As we contemplate the renewal of interest in religion, we must not fail to apply these criteria,” Smith says of this dis-interest, in the introduction to the Edwards volume. “What permanent change is taking place in the depths of the self and with what consistency will it show itself in practice? More likely than not the vast majority of cases will be unable to pass the test. And one of the principal reasons for the failure is to be found in our by now well-established tendency to view everything as a technique used by the human will to conquer nature and master history. Edwards had seen this source of corruptions, and he had attacked it through the doctrine of divine love as disinterested. Religion is genuine and has power only when rooted in a love which does not contemplate its own advantage. Religion becomes false at just the point when we attempt to make it into a device for solving problems” (W2:51).

The gospel is not good because it’s useful for fixing life. The gospel is glorious because it reveals the beauty of God. So if I mainly embrace God’s kingdom because it means I get a bigger house in the end, I don’t understand the kingdom, because I’ve missed the beauty of the King.

Tell me Edwards didn’t see Freud coming with a therapeutic model of understanding all things, indeed of validating all things to the standard of immediate personal applicability.

Tell me Edwards didn’t foresee a pragmatic gospel (“Believe because it works!”).

Tell me Edwards didn’t see me-centered worship music coming.

Tell me Edwards didn’t see the prosperity gospel coming.

Tell me Edwards didn’t see lifehacking apps coming.

Edwards (the postmillennial) celebrated social progress, economic development, trade, and he “welcomed technological advances” while also understanding that “selfishness — self-interest, self-promotion, self-centeredness” governs in a fallen world (Edwards Encyclopedia, 85).

Speaking of anything “serving a turn” was the 18th century lingo of lifehackery. In the age of micro-apps and our well-established tendency to view everything as a technique used by the human will to conquer nature and master history, and where we are addicted to shortcuts and technologies of simplicity and expediency that promise to order our lives, we are led to think of everything in life in functional and pragmatic terms.

In every generation you will find doubting Christians, who have a taste for God’s glory but who need pastoral help to embrace the promises of Scripture for themselves. Edwards’s counsel may prove counterproductive for such souls. But he’s on to something really important for us all to note.

We must resist the temptation to transpose spiritual truth down to mere use — techniques, technologies of expediency, shortcuts of self-interest. We must fundamentally pray for an appetite for God in his radiant and holy beauty, for it’s in the aesthetics where the genuine work of God’s Spirit is to be first discerned inside us.

Last week I spoke at Texas A&M on smartphone use and abuse. After the event, a young man approached me with a personal concern. Digital media was getting in the way of his schoolwork and responsibilities on campus.

This student’s situation is common, but he wasn’t distracted by Instagram and Snapchat or Fortnite — he was distracted by the many sermons and Christian podcasts he was trying to ingest all week. He’s a well-intentioned young man, and he’s not alone.

I applauded his taste for edifying content. Surely he could harbor a craving for worse things! And then I reminded him that his struggle predates podcasts. More than a century ago, this same impulse led people to church-hop and celebrity-chase the most popular preachers in London. The Puritans tried to tamp down this trend, as did Spurgeon, but the spirit of the hunt lives on in the digital age. Without prayer and meditation, feeding on daily sermons would do little good, said Spurgeon. The spiritual life has an implicit pace of progress, measured not by the speed of exposure but by the speed of internal processing.

In our brief interaction, I reminded this young man that when God wants to warp-speed our sanctification, he has a plethora of tools at his disposal to do so — mostly in the form of personal suffering.

The opinion of this young man, and of our age, is that super-spirituality is most attainable by those who ingest the highest quantity of edifying media. But this impulse, which can drive us toward a mountain of good and helpful content, is also fueled by one of the great dynamics of our age, detailed in German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (2015).

Rosa’s basic argument is that our western experience is a forever-accelerating economic system, reinforced politically and socially. Said another way, acceleration is the desire we feel to collapse life into a series of discrete moments and experiences — email to email, tweet to tweet, text to text, snap to snap, meeting to meeting, image to image, and video clip to video clip. All of life, even real experiences with hard edges, are rendered into moments or incidents. Like LEGO pieces, the moments of our lives are made into discrete bricks, stacked end to end, in order to be compressed into a smaller time-cost.

As we pack more of these moments into our lives, and as we increase the number of experiences per minute, we feel like time is speeding up. We feel as if our lives move at warp-speed, while the clock ticks away at its same old pace.

Acceleration is a much larger story, where the mutually reinforcing changes of media and technology and economics and politics and society and the workplace all converge. But the bottom line is that this promise of ever-compressible experiences tempts us to pack ten lives into one lifetime. In our age, we think that success is the hoarding of digital spectacles, work achievements, and personal experiences before we succumb to the darkness of mortality.

Inside a society of acceleration, says Rosa, we put greater and greater hopes in technologies, like our smartphones, to give us more productivity, more experiences, and also more free time.

Does it all work?

No. Most of us feel like we have less marginal time. In response, we accelerate even faster, we compress moments even tighter, all in search of more margin. But the hunt is elusive. Instead of an abundance of free time, we’re met with a growing sense of burnout.

This is because the smartphone takes more time than it saves. As life seems to speed up, we keep returning to our technologies in order to find productivity and more free time. And as we turn to those technologies, they cost us more time than we save, because those technologies introduce us to new products and ideas and experiences in the world that we didn’t know existed previously.

In other words, let’s say you have a bucket list of ten things to see and experience before your life ends. Then you go out and get a smartphone with Instagram, and your bucket quickly grows from 10 things to 100 things (and likely before you’ve had a chance to cross off one thing on your list). For every single experience you’re offered 100 other equally alluring (or better) experiences.

Inside the acceleration society, how do we approach this expanding bucket list?

We continue to compress each experience into smaller and smaller available time slots. We try to speed everything up through new technologies. We get more apps. We listen to podcasts faster. We move everything faster. We keep spinning the self-reinforcing cycle of hastening.

Rosa says that the whole system continues moving faster and faster until that acceleration is met by one of two things that help reset life — nervous breakdowns or economic recessions. Those resets return balance to life and society. But as these de-celerants are thwarted and postponed through economic and medical intervention, as we “advance,” natural breaks are bypassed and the whole system accelerates ever faster with unlimited gas and no brakes. Rosa says the whole thing eventually flies apart.

I’m more hopeful of our future. But this social dynamic is something of what drives us onward in the quest for more media. We listen to sermons at 2x speed. We no longer read horizontally, we read vertically. We scan articles. We scan everything. Nothing grabs our sustained attention, because the promises of acceleration keep us jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink with the hyper-speed the name implies.

We think that like everything else in our lives, we can attain hyper-sanctification. And within our acceleration society and the wealth of our digital tools, we get easily tempted towards a holy-looking fear of missing out (FOMO). But it’s still a FOMO, and FOMO always carries with it the stench of spent jet fuel of promise inside the acceleration society.

In reality, God’s work in us smells more like rich manure, and moves at the pace of sowing and reaping. Sanctification is the slow and steady horticultural hope for a distant payoff, never measured in terms of the most immediate apparent wins, only recognized in its eventual harvest, the fruit of long patience (Gal. 6:6–10).

Another helpful way to think about it comes from German sociologist Hartmut Rosa in a recent Q&A session —

There are two forms of reading. I’m a very slow reader and now I think that’s quite good. If you read slowly your mind wanders around and you don’t really know what the result is. And then there are many technologies of speed-reading — very focused, very attentive. So you get the information but you block being touched by something. You don’t want to be touched. You want to be efficient and focused. And my claim is that if you have to be fast you develop a kind of instrumental stance towards the world, a muted relationship which makes you very efficient. It doesn’t mean that you’re not attentive, but the quality of attention changes because it becomes directed and intentional. And it becomes very difficult then to get into a mode of resonance because resonance is a state of relating to some person or something, like a book or it could be a piece of music, which affects you, you let yourself be affected, which also means you are vulnerable. And you never know when it happens and what the outcome of it is and how long it takes. So if attention needs to be very focused and very instrumental, the quality of attention changes from the resonant towards a mute form of relating.

Both are useful but for different aims:

• Quick reading — efficient sifting with the mind (muted instrumentality)
• Slow reading — inefficient soaking with the affections (heart vulnerability)

The world’s most famous New Years song is a hymn: “Amazing Grace,” penned by pastor John Newton and unveiled for the first time to his Olney congregation on January 1, 1773.

The entire hymn is inspired by 1 Chronicles 17, a chapter that speaks of King David’s past, present, and future. Newton does the same, reflecting on past grace, present grace, and the hope of future grace — a progression you can watch unfold in the hymn itself.

Newton’s original title was more accurate to this purpose (“Faith’s Review and Expectation”), but today it is more widely remembered by its catchy first two words.

Setting the text of “Amazing Grace” alongside 1 Chronicles 17 will show just how deeply Newton’s hymn soaked up the rich biblical theology of this chapter of Scripture. We see direct lines of contact made by the terms house/home, word, and forever. Also notice the corresponding tenses of the hymn echoed in 1 Chronicles 17: past (verse 7: “I took you from the pasture”), present (verse 16: “Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?”), and future (verse 26: “O Lord, you are God, and you have promised this good thing to your servant”).

While writing my book on Newton, I made this colorized chart to trace the correlations between Newton’s hymn (left) and the inspiring themes from 1 Chronicles 17 (right):

Paradoxically, the final verse (“When we’ve been there ten thousand years…”) originated in the Afro-American worship tradition, not by the former slave trader. Of all places, the added verse made its first formal appearance within “Amazing Grace” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

Reflecting his personal practice on New Year’s, Newton’s hymn itself provides a doxological moment in time to stop to thank God for his past mercies, his present mercies, and his future mercies.

The scope of the Christian life can be found in Newton’s hymn:

• salvation (“sav’d a wretch like me”)
• trials (“many dangers, toils, and snares”)
• struggles with doubts and need for divine promises (“his word my hope secures”)
• protection in spiritual battle (“he will my shield and portion be”)
• aging and facing death (“when this flesh and heart shall fail”)
• hopes for re-creation (“earth shall soon dissolve like snow”)
• anticipation for the beatific vision (“A life of joy and peace”)
• and treasuring God forever (“But God, who call’d me here below, / will be for ever mine”)

From the beginning to the end of this autobiographical hymn, we are introduced to the unwavering grace of God throughout the Christian’s immortal, eternal existence. Newton communicates this vision of the Christian life in catchy language very easily read and sung. About 85% of the hymn is comprised of monosyllabic words. Newton was committed to clarity and simplicity, traits that spill over into all his pastoral work and explain his enduring place as a spiritual luminary so many centuries after his death.

Of course, nothing from the pen of Newton endures like this hymn. Amazon.com currently sells the song in 12,700 different versions. It has been recorded in every genre, including jazz, country, folk, classical, R&B, hip-hop — even heavy metal! The popularity of the hymn is obvious at sporting events and political rallies, among other settings. It endures as one of few religious songs that can be sung impromptu in public because many people (if not most people) can recite at least the first verse by heart.

The hymn is, first, brilliant biography (of David) and, second, brilliant autobiography (of Newton). Newton is the wretch, a term he often used to allude to his own sin and to a period of physical captivity he endured before his conversion. But most brilliantly of all, the hymn functions as a collective autobiography for every Christian. “Amazing Grace” is perceptive biblical theology, embraced by one man deeply moved by his own redemption, articulated for corporate worship. And it is the perfect hymn for New Year’s Day.

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For more on Newton’s life and pastoral legacy, see my book on John Newton here.