I started the workshop by telling the story of three Polaroids in my head:

I do use the white board a decent amount, so that doesn’t lend itself to audio super well. And this was the first time through this material for me in this arrangement. But disclaimers aside:

Breakout Session: O Come O Come Emmanuel: Jesus, Israel, and the Gospel

We probably sang this favorite Christmas hymn in the last few week–”ransom captive Israel” and “Rod of Jesse?” But did we get it?  And did we notice that the song itself shares the Gospel?  Using insights from Bible professor Scot McKnight’s new book, The King Jesus Gospel, (plus others), we’ll explore again how the Gospel we share today relates to Israel.

 Listen Now (at www.gcmcignite.com)

 Handout O Come O Come Emmanuel

And if it’s at all helpful, here are my actual raw teaching notes (hopefully nothing embarrassing in here!). For anyone who actually attended, this will have portions of things I cut from the workshop.

 Ridgeway Workshop Outline (raw notes) 2012

Click to Zoom: Amazon.com homepage refresh

Just a note from floating on the web on a Saturday morning.  Today, Amazon seems to be rolling out yet another visual update (beta-tested earlier?); my Amazon home page looks a even more sparse than usual.  It made me think about how much their information hierarchy and resulting customer experience have been sorta both the best and the worst of the web over the years.

A decade ago, Amazon.com used the be the very model of the new, data-driven, intelligently easy-to-use website.  It had perfect “just in time” links and seemed to know where you want to go.  Their tabs interface from the late 90sand into the 2000s was widely copied.

Credit: www.lukew.com | Amazon Tabs in the late 90s

These days, Amazon.com remains one of the top retailers in the US ($18.5 billion), but its website is a glut of chocked together, un-curated information presented in long scrolling pages.  Over the last several years they’ve tried to recover, and definitely have done better work on cleaning up the main page.  Today they did it again, simplifying the top two inches and giving higher preference to a google-like search bar. All other options are hidden back into drop-down menus.

The Real Problem: The Product Page

The problem is that most of their attention has gone to cleaning up their front page, which I spend very little time on. 80% of the time, I google for a book or product I’m looking for, and jump straight through the search results to the Amazon product page.  Then I jump from product to product.

And let’s be honest, the product pages really are pretty bad.  Some key features shine (like “Search Inside” for books) and fortunately the pricing (for book editions at least) is cleanly displayed. But the rest of the page is a disordered, redundant mess of widgets demarcated only by dashed lines and populated by unreliable data.

For instance, I just searched for an iPhone (yep, got one of those now) charger. USB Sync and Charging Cable Compatible with Apple iPhone (White) came up first.  (It’s .78 cents.  I’m guessing because of the price the vendor will make up the cost in shipping charges. I had clicked on it because it was Amazon Prime eligible, but of course, that didn’t come up first:  I’ll have to find the Prime price.  But I digress.)

Is this the charger I want?? Maybe.  Maybe I’ll get help to decide by s c r o l l i n g   d o w n…

 (ps – clicking on screenshots quickly zooms in)

Frequently Bought Together

Rarely useful. Almost always promotes redundant purchases. In this case, I’d get two of the same cable. Lots of times you get two versions of the same book.

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?

Good idea. Sometimes genuinely useful to find the clear competing product. Not here though.

Technical Details

Warranty and Same-Day Shipping info are not technical details. Almost never a useful section: it’s used just as another text field by vendors, and rarely has stuff beyond the main product description even when it’s shipped from Amazon. For fun: click the ‘See more technical details’ naively assuming it will be useful!

I’ve been all over on books, but I’ve finally picked back up NT Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God, and like usual, always quickly wonder why I ever put Wright down. His writing is simultaneously fun and data-rich—I wind up pencil marking on nearly every page. That’s not typical for me. So many other writers I grasp their point in the first page of the chapter, and from then on it’s just repetition. Wright repeats themes, but always with nuance that makes not want to miss a paragraph.

Anyway, here he’s talking about the “authority of scripture” as a phrase that gets thrown around a lot but needs more critical examination.

In Christian theology, such phrases regularly act as “portable stories”—that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the church and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us.

(A good example is the phrase “the atonement.” This phrase is rare in the Bible itself; instead, we find things like, “The Messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures”; “God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” and so on. But if we are to discuss the atonement, it is easier to do so with a single phrase, assumed to “contain” all these sentences, then by repeating one or more of them each time).

Shorthands, in other words, are useful in the same way suitcases are.  They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point of doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in a new location.

Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron.

So I grew up mostly in conservative Reformed circles, but had more-than-typical exposure to various Christian traditions. Whether it was Vacation Bible School or the (50 minute) sermon, we’d regularly hear about Israel or the Old Testament. Most things were chunked into stories about people: David or Daniel, Esther or Moses. And typically the point of these stories was one of “example”: be obedient (faithful/brave/righteous/willing…) like this person was.

Knowing more detailed/nerdy things about Israel was also appropriate for two categories:

1. Bible Trivia (how many precious stones on the high priests ephod?? And name three!), and
2. Bible End-Times Prophecy (rapture, Armageddon, etc. Israel always figured prominently here).

As a pastor’s kid, I knew a lot of this Israel stuff. But it was Bonus Knowledge. Extra. And that didn’t seem to change as I grew older. The OT story was boring family history, but not central to the church and especially not relevant to the Gospel, unless you were illustrating a time when God used to NOT give people grace.

I can’t recall once hearing that the Gospel itself is dramatically and wholly dependent on the Story of Israel.

If we put this gospel now into one bundle, and if we focus on how that gospel was preached by the apostles, the book of Acts reveals that the gospel is, first of all, framed by Israel’s story: the narration of the saving Story of Jesus—his life, his death, his resurrection, his exaltation, and his coming again—as the completion of the Story of Israel.

But here are some of many of the Biblical connections Scot reminds us of:

• Mary and Zechariah and John the Baptist see Jesus as the Son of God and King of Israel who will sit on David’s throne and restore everything that was promised long ago
• Jesus stands up and reads from Isaiah 61 (Luke 4:18-19) and then claims that he’s the guy
• Jesus picks 12 disciples as the 12 tribes of Israel
• Eucharist/communion: The cup of the new covenant and the bread of his body=Egypt’s lamb’s blood of salvation and the hastily-made journey bread

These are the kinds of things the Apostles are preaching when they tell the gospel story.  Examples:  Acts 2.14-39, Acts 3.12-26, Acts 4.8-12, Acts 10.34-43, Acts 11.4-18, Acts13.16-41, Acts 14.15-17, Acts 17.22-31, (Acts 7.2-53).

It starts to become hard to see how you could speak of Jesus and the Gospel without telling the Story of Israel!

What don’t the apostles consistently include in their gospel-proclamation?  I’ve got to leave that to another post.

A History of the Sky
a dynamic time-lapse visualization of the sky for the entire year

Read more about the technical setup here.

Sorta captivating huh? But I love the data—the instant visual access to, say, how many cloudy mornings San Francisco typically has, or what portion of the year has fewer hours of daylight.

Artists must have a leading role in visualization design if we are to start adapting and surviving in an information-overload culture. The constant complaints we hear about how difficult it is to buy plane tickets or track status feeds or undig from the bottom of the Inbox are in-part due to our early, amateur attempts to present the information.  This is a glimmer of hope.

Chapter 11: Virtualization

Today’s Internet-enabled smartphone is perhaps the most humanlike tool ever created.

I agree with John Dyer’s quote.

It’s because each part of it extends a natural human function. Dyer points out several. Print and text extends our capacity for abstract and rational thought (old school: books). Images are visual and emotive (old school: the photograph). So that’s thought and emotion. Short messages extend our information (old school: telegraph). Voice and video interaction extends our human-to-human relational communication (old school: telephone).

The mobile phone combines them all. Thought, feeling, informing, relationship.

Human.

And I think like John does, that technology will increasingly be able to represent all the human senses and functions together, becoming more and more clear and representative. Think of it simply as the high definition… the more the resolution increases, the more it looks like you’re actually there.

And of course, John wrote this before we started seeing iPhone’s Siri, which is a whole new item along the same lines of discussion.

This is the final chapter of book review for ChurchM.ag. Read the post here.

But what if early church Fathers weren’t quite right. What do the scripture writers say? At a key point, Paul writes:

1 Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand,2 and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  1 Cor 15.1-5

Why is this so central? Paul here is repeating a “passed on” statement from the apostles. It shows up here but again and again. This was a summary of the good news. And it’s repeated elsewhere, like Romans 1.1-4:

1 Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,2 which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,3 concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh4 and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord

Again you see the life, death, resurrection of person of Jesus. And importantly, Paul constantly refers to how this was part of a larger story of Israel—”according to the Scriptures” and “from David.”

So great, what’s the point? Scot worries that many evangelicals have learned only the “Plan of Salvation” but not the bigger Gospel. Not the whole Biblical Story. And that this has really sorta messed us up. While everything about the Plan of Salavation is true, it’s not the whole Gospel. At least not the way Paul, Peter, Jesus, and the church fathers talked about the gospel.

I love how Scot quotes one of his undergrad students at North Park

Implicitly, in the theology I often heard, Jesus did not really need to be raised since the mission of Jesus was to forgive us of our sings and that was accomplished on the cross.

The resurrection only theologically counted for style points.

Scot is working to help us understand the wider Story. Why Israel, the Resurrection, and so much more matters when proclaiming the Gospel.

Chapter 9: Restoration & Chapter 10: Technicism

John Dyer (following Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants), points out that many human inventors have envisioned their advances as a means of peace.

For example,  Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun, insisted his invention would “make war impossible.”

Alfred Nobel believed his invention, dynamite, would “sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions.” When Nobel realized that his tool was bringing about the exact opposite, he founded the Nobel Prize in hopes that his legacy would be of peace instead of destruction. …

Orville Wright believed that the aeroplane he and his brother invented would, “have a tendency to make war impossible.”

Guglielmo Marconi believed his radio and “the coming wireless era” would “make war impossible.”

Today these claims seem quaint. But John Dyer warns against Christians doing the same thing. John offers this chart in the previous chapter:

On the unintentional line, John is saying that while the new iPhone can positively reflect the Creativity of a God Who Makes, it should not be looked to for Hope or to Bring Peace or finally Restore.

More at ChurchM.ag:

• Chapter 9 review
• Chapter 10 review

When I worked with him in 2007-09, one of my tasks was searching the Ante-Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (often abbreviated as ANF and NPNF; oh and thanks CCEL!) for any and all references to word the gospel. I didn’t use the traditional index (it wasn’t good enough), but instead looked for key words and in-text references to oft-cited scriptures.

As I compiled quotes and links for Scot to review (sometimes late at night after I finished my thesis work for the day), I became confused at what I was seeing. Nearly every time the word “gospel” was used by early church writers, they seemed to mean Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John—the story of Jesus. I get this—we call these Gospels too. But that seemed like an entirely different usage of the word. Where was the reference to the good news of salvation? I wondered if I was making a mistake in my approach.

That’s when I started to get it. For the church fathers, these two usages—Gospel for the first four books of the New Testament, and gospel for the “good news”—weren’t different. The gospel for them was the story of the life, teaching, death, ressurection and ascension of Jesus—each and every chapter—told loud and clear. Jesus was here. Jesus was God. Jesus was King. The Gospels were the gospel!

Scot knew this. But it felt new to me.

It was like the Princess Bride… “I do not think that word means what you think it means…”

This is what Scot’s new book The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited is all about.

Okay, but these were the church fathers. Couldn’t they get the definition wrong?
More posts soon.

ps – For theology-blog-world-nerds:  Today Dave Fitch is wondering why some of the Gospel Coalition peeps haven’t yet posted reviews of McKnight’s book.

Chapter 8: Mediums

Yeah, we know the plural of “medium” is “media.” But since the common usage still evokes Wolf Blizter anchoring a CNN marathon about a slow-speed car chase, John Dyer switchs it up, and has us talk about “mediums–those packages of communication that change the way we perceive and understand the messages.

In this chapter, Dyer hits three topics that anyone who has followed me for any amount of time is pretty familiar with:

• Cultural ritual, effort, and pace of mediums help define them
• Digital immigrant vs. digital native
• Printing press and photography as game-changers

One great illustration I’ll plan to steal (thanks John!) helps us picture the digital native/immigrant divide:

Imagine for example that Americans suddenly decided to replace shaking hands with bowing as the way to greet one another. For most adults, bowing would feel strange, different, and unnatural. It might take years for bowing to take hold and feel familiar, and even then some people just wouldn’t like the change. However if we taught our kids to bow from birth, it would never feel unnnatural to them. The wouldn’t have experienced “handshake culture,” so they would only encounter handshaking in history books or quaint small towns.
The result would be two groups of people: those raised with handshakes for whom bowing feels strange, and those raised with bowing for home bowing is completely natural.

301 Critique (more for the nerds):
Not much to pick at here: Dyer does a great job on this. When he speaks about the printing press encouraging uniformity, accuracy, and complex linear thought (he doesn’t note much earlier Chinese block printing, but that’s okay) , he could have extended the uniformity into how exact copies removes sacred objects establishes sacred thoughts as things that matc–something that has dramatically altered our view of orthodoxy. Linerarity can be extended to speak about the idea of a “start, middle, and end,” something that reinforced the “destination over the journey” in modern soteriology. But these are simply extensions with more space.

And huge kudos to Dyer speaking about versification as a “layer of technology” over Scripture. Yes! He doesn’t cite anyone here, and this is understandable, because I’ve seen very little written on this. Christians need to understand that this does not neutrally impact our use and understanding of Scripture.

I entered seminary with little, if any, interest in theology. In my experience theology was too contaminated with polemics and apologetics to take any pleasure in it. It always left me with a sour taste. The grand and soaring realities of God and the Holy Spirit, scripture and Creation, salvation and a holy life always seemed to get ground down into contentious, mean-spirited arguments: predestination and free will, grace and works, Calvinism and Arminianism, liberal and conservative, supra- and infra-lapsarianism. At my university I had avoided all this by taking refuge in a philosophy major that gave me room and companions for cultivating wonder and exploring meaning. When I arrived in seminary, I continued to keep my distance from theology by plunging into the biblical languages and the English Bible.

And then I met Karl Barth.

But not in the seminary. I was introduced to Barth by one of the young men on the basketball team I was coaching. Jordan was a graduate student in English literature at Columbia University and about my age. He was Jewish hut not an observant Jew. All he had observed from his parents was their indifference to any and all religion. He had started coming to

the church because of the basketball team and in the process became a Christian. It was a new world to him, and he loved talking about every latest book discovery. After our Saturday ball games we often had  long conversations over coffee—conversations about God, Jesus, and this Christian life that was opening into a world of wonders.

He introduced me to Karl Barth on a Saturday evening while we were showering after winning a close game. “Eugene, you’ve got to read this book. I just found it in a used bookstore. You would love this.” While we toweled ourselves dry and dressed, he described what he had been reading in Barth’s Epistle to the Romans.

Jordan’s excitement excited me. The first thing Monday morning I checked out a copy of the book from the library. I’ve been reading Barth ever since. He became the theologian I never had, a theologian who got me interested in God as God, not just talk about God. Franz Kafka in a letter wrote, “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?.. . A book must he like an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” This first book of Barth’s that I read was “like an ice-axe.”

What I had heard and read of theology up until this point was about God. God and the things of God as if they were topics for discussion, things to be figured out; there was no juice in them. What a contrast to the poetry of Whitman, the novels of Melville, the journalism of Chesterton. But there was juice and plenty of it in Barth. I couldn’t get enough of him.

In reading Barth, I realized that for most of my life the people I had been living with and who had taught me had been primarily interested in getting the truth of the gospel and the Bible right, explaining it and defending it. (My parents were blessed exceptions to all this.) Barth didn’t have much interest in that. He was a witness (a favorite word of his). He was calling attention to the lived quality of the Christian life, the narrative of the Bible, the good news of the gospel. Listening to God as God reveals himself in Christ and the Bible and preaching. Not taking the Christian life into a laboratory and dissecting it to figure out what makes it tick, but entering into God’s action of creation and salvation that is going on all around us and all the time and participating in it. Barth wasn’t indifferent to “getting it right,” but his passion was in “getting it lived”

Chapter 7: Redemption

Does God use technology? Yep. From the narrative of Scripture, Dyer points out three examples:

Noah’s Ark. God’s tech design. And one that shielded some of humanity from the destructive effects of sin. But the effects were only for a time: the DNA of sin got through.

Tower of Babel. Opposite example. God works against the city-building and unified language.

Law of Moses. In a world of spoken (oral) culture, God uses writing (in stone) to affix his law.

Can we think of other examples?
And does this lead us to agree with this:

“Perhaps God is telling us that he values not just humanity, but also the creations of humanity”

Go read more at ChurchMag –>

301 Critique (more for the nerds)
Dyer spends a lot of time here on communications technologies and language (love it), and makes three particularly important distinctions in human communication: orality, chriography (written), and images. When speaking of the law of Moses he follows Neil Postman saying that God wrote the 10 commandments in stone, and that this has theological meaning: that the fixity and permanence of writing was essential characteristic for God’s law. This leads Postman to critique image-based communication as inferior, citing the “graven image” clause of the 10 commandments.

I’ve got some objections.

First is the historical assumptions. This is pretty old history, so there’s no consensus, but scripture doesn’t commit us to what we call the “10 commandments” actually scratched on stone, doesn’t say what kind of writing it is (Dyer implies alphabetic, but Egypt was partially ideographic then logographic-phoenetic), and when and who the Pentatuech was written by (Moses is the traditional author, but multiple statements in the Pentateuch seem to be a much later recording of what he did/said). I don’t really need to argue the historical view of scripture (and I’m hardly an expert), but the assumptions on writing that Postman made for this time always seemed problematic because of the foundations that weren’t certain and not insisted on scripturally.

But further is Neil Postman’s strong statements that the printed word is the primary and preferred medium through which God reveals himself. Dyer smooths over this a bit, but Postman really doesn’t like images, nor does he like orality. McLuhan used to call Postman a “Print-Oriented Bastard.” But while images of God the Father weren’t to be carved, salvation history winds up leading us to the image and voice of Jesus his Son, not stone tablets–”the image of the invisible God.”

Too much for now. Still a great chapter.

Chapter 6: Approach

101 Basics:

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,”

goes the quote. I first recall it from hand-painted billboards posted at the edges of state highways in rural Illinois. John Dyer uses this as an example of instrumentalism, the idea that technology remains neutral, and that people imbue it with good or bad. He disagrees. So do I.

“Technology makes us…”

is the other side, more technically known as technological determinism. This is the view that technology is the leading force in societal change, and what people are believing when they wish away new technologies that are supposedly causing problems (TV is making us fat!).

Which is right?  (Dyer says:  middle way).

Read the rest of the blog tour at ChurchMag –>

301 Level Critique. (more for the nerds)

I fall closer to the technological determinism side. I wonder if Dyer would too if he changed his definition a bit. He focuses mostly on the individualistic effects of technologies (e.g. my cell phone makes me over-available), and he says determinism might say that we don’t have a choice, we must answer. But this isn’t the kind of determinism I’ve ever read about. What is might be more accurate is to day that determinism says that your individual choice to answer or not answer becomes insignificant in the wave of ecological change that the cell phone brings as a whole.  Put another way, plenty of my friends who are dads started out with “I’m not gonna answer that thing,” but now would be in serious trouble with the wife if they didn’t pick up. This isn’t technology forcing their personal choice. This is technology remaking societal expectations in relationships (and that’s in the short run!).

I also think that technological determinism and societal values, which Dyer sets as disparate instigators for change are often inseparable when looking at effects. Does the value make the technology or the technology make the value? Both! The recipe required both for the change to occur.  To take Dyer’s example—cars in America vs. individualism as a American value—the individualism might have existed prior to the cars, but you didn’t see the wide-scale change until the cars were mixed in. Oh, and the interstate system.

So, the online tasks manager I’ve been using was a little one called Action Complete. Recently, it switched to a pay-only model, and while I liked a number of features, there are enough annoyances to send me back to the Research Room. Which, truth be told, is probably my favorite place anyway.

Some stuff I wanted:

• Online/cloud. Want the data stored safely not on my computer. Magic sync.
• Android App. That’s what I got right now.
• iPad App. I’m using a GCM iPad, and anticipate upgrading myself.
• Beautiful User Interface. Can’t be ugly. Should have intuitive drag-and-drop. Should not be using Web Form controls that look like 1996 (Ahem, RTM). I should be able to create nice visual layouts and colors when I want them.
• Has to fit this mental model I’ve been using of Actions, Waits, Projects, and Ideas, a modified form of Getting Things Done (GTD) that Action Complete got me sorta hooked on.
• I’ve given up on sycing with Exchange/Outlook. So over Outlook tasks.
• I don’t mind paying an annual fee

 View the PDF Chart (best option)

• Action Complete.  My current app. Has been functional for me. Some picky things make me want to change.
• Remember the Milk.  One of the most well-known on the web, but the interface isn’t nice. Feels old.
• ToodleDo. Most customizable I’ve seen. Better interface than RTM, but not much.
• GQueues. Effective interface design, really nice drag and drop, but no real mobile apps
• Springpad. Beautiful design; some Onenote/Evernote-like features like pegboard, web clippings, and Facebook integration.
• Nobze. Laughably overpriced, pretty nice interface, but not substantially better.
• Astrid. Focused on Facebook or sharing, but too limited in features for me. Android only.

Chapter 5: Rebellion

How do Christians talk about sin and technology?
Many are pretty simplistic.  “All technology is evil (or at least really bad for you)” is a common pastoral mantra (though it rarely includes older technologies, usually just smart phones and internet porn).  “All technology is good” (and can help us grow, connect and love better) is less common, but equally simplistic.

But an important theological place to start is Scripture, and where technology appears in the Story.  This is what From the Garden does in its fifth chapter, wading carefully through Adam & Eve, Cain and Abel (Gen 3 and Gen 4).

Dyer makes some clever observations.  For instance, after Adam and Eve sin, they race to make clothes from leaves: technology!  So it IS bad.  But then God comes along and in his compassion makes them BETTER clothes from animal skins.

“he gives out the world’s first free technology upgrade”

Ha! The point is that God participates with us in “making”—or better, we participate with God.

Cities:  good or bad? Then Dyer begins wrestling with how we build things that make us possibly less dependent on God:  the City, for instance.  After murder, Cain wanders off and builds a city.

“The city is humankind’s first idol”

writes Dyer. Our banding together something that makes us separate and less-dependent on our Creator.

Yet this feels like only half of the story.  Dyer gives a Babel-like vision here (inspired by Jacques Ellul), but says little about a Revelation or Zionistic vision of the City and Feast that flow in the narrative as strong images of God’s peace and final rule.

It’s a tough question, huh?

There’s another huge point I want to hit from this chapter, but there’s too much here, so it’ll be another post.  For now, there’s more chapter summary at ChurchM.ag today.

Chapter 4: Definition

The history of technology is a wide landscape and John Dyer gives us a perfect fly over.  He writes that Aristotle is one of the first to use the word technologia, but he means it as systematic study (logia) of grammar, speech and writing (techne as a craft or art).  Tekton in Greek were essentially craftsman (Jesus’ father Joseph was this! “Carpenter” is too narrow a translation).

The word eventually becomes the skill, study, tools, and things made with the tools.  And things start off slow until 1650. Dyer divides it like:

He’s got a lot more in there, but I want to address Dyer’s definition of technology, which he writes is:

“the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”

I love the emphasis on the humanness (as opposed to “other than”) of technology, and the theological lens of Creation.  But I’m uncomfortable by the language of “practical purposes” here.  Dyer is using this to distinguish these tools from, say, art (a distinguishing factor I’d need to quibble with… but that’s not too important).

My issue is that the definition is particularly forced when it comes to communications technologies… and I Dyer provides an example at the end of his chapter of calling home using cell phones as “practical” and “transforming creation” that seems a bit stretched to fit this tool-oriented definition.

His solution, I think, is to see that humans don’t only work, but that they also classify and play and commune in ways that create identity categories distinct from tool using. The way we communicate with each other in family and society is establishes meaning in a way that is independent from our making. By McLuhan’s definitions of technology as extensions, our communicative thoughts and intents are amplified and extended into an environment that is difficult to describe as “practical” but easily identifiable as “human.”

From oral language to chirography to print to mass literacy to the telegraph, radio, TV, and the internet, I think the thread of history of communications technologies may stand on their own… uniquely human and theological but not practical in this sense.

John, did I get you wrong on this?  What do you think?

(Also: more at ChurchM.ag)

The printed book has always subtly preferred the past. Books, once published, become relatively unchanging bouys in the river of time. And the most important ones stay right there where they were dropped, which is why we were always taught in school that the year and author are the two most important things to cite when writing our research paper.

However, digital information culture as we’ve known it so far doesn’t work like this. Its time-orientation is toward the present: what is happening NOW. (Aside: It doesn’t flow quite as fast as “live TV”–it’s more viscous time syrup, with memes taking 24 hours to move to talking status, etc. More on this [pdf]). Searches give you a snapshot of what currently exists on the web, not what existed a five years ago. Aside from WayBackMachine, the web resists the “holding action” that defines print media.

This is why the 15th ed of the Chicago Manual of Style said that when you cite web pages in a research paper, you can stop putting “accessed on” in the citation. It’s meaningless, they said. It’s not likely that you can return to the website at that date. You can only access it as it is today.

So Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg introduced a new landmark feature for profiles called Timeline (watch the F8 keynote address). It tracks not only the years since you’ve been on Facebook, but lets you go fill in the gaps of your life, adding kid photos and important life events.

In some ways this adds an oddly historical view to an ahistorical world. For contrast, they’ve moved the live feed to the right of the screen: the perfect image of what is Now, with updates dropping off the cliff moments later.

But this is a digital take on a print orientation. I haven’t seen the actual timeline, but it seems that you can add data all across the timeline at once–say, all the 3-mile runs I’ve taken in the last years. But if I change my mind, in 1-click, I can remove them all as well. Not just the ones in the future, but the ones in the past as well.

This is not the old naive historiography that sees past events as unchanging anchors to be uncovered, nor is it post-modern history that seeks to reveal the forgotten past voices crushed by power. It moves past both of these, to view of history as data layers to be added or removed at will. We modify history not because we seek alternate views or are coming closer to the truth, but simply because we must. In an infinite world of information, there are infinite ways to tell the story, and only some of the layers can float to the top.

How will digital natives write history? Mark Zuckerberg just helped shape that.

Chapter 3: Reflection
Here, John Dyer lays one of the most important building blocks we need to think of technology and theology.

He starts with the Story, looking at God’s original creation and intent. Adam and Eve and how they were to cultivate the garden. As much as fish were made to swim, humans were made to cultivate. This encompasses both “keeping” but also “creating.”

What do we cultivate? Culture. Culture is “things, images, rituals, and language (Stanley Grenz) that mediate meaning, identity, and values (Barry Jones).

And where does culture start? In the garden.

Theologians know what this means. Commonly we ask the question of things in our world: is this from Creation (and therefore good!) or from the Fall (and therefore a result of sin and broken creation). Dyer is certain: culture-building starts in the Creation. Among other things, we see it in language.

And language is a culture-making tool we use to organize the world. A technology that acts as a lens for understanding and classification and even action (e.g. John Austin’s speech act theory).

Want to read more?  Read the featured post at ChurchM.ag.

ps – Each chapter I read of this one is nearly perfect in its analysis, and I’m increasingly impressed. If you haven’t already, pick it up and read along with me. John Dyer is doing good work here that we need to hear.

Chapter 2: Imagination.
John employs imagination and story for analysis on technology.

Technology is imagining a better world. From robot vacuums to the HTC EVO 4G (my current device, of course mine is hacked and customized), our invention and usage is usually taking us somewhere. Dyer summarizes:

“Technology, then, is the bridge from this world to the imagined one.”

This is fascinating and helpful–we live in a narrative that says: we invent technology to make things better. Hope and a future.

John tells the story of consumerism we are familiar with: fast cars and great deodorant will make you more sexy.

One question? What of serendipitous discovery and pursuit of knowledge? It seems there is a difference between “applied technology” combined with marketing, and human ingenuity that revels in discovery itself.

Another question? Is this human propensity to have technology represent the potential future part of our created image or part of the Fall?

Lots more in this chapter. Read the blog tour post here.

**UPDATE:  ChurchM.ag was down for 24 hours, but is now back up.

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The downtown intersection of digital technology and Christian theology has been increasingly busy (one imagines sleek futuristic cars on tracks), and John Dyer’s new From The Garden to the City may be the smartest vehicle for clear thought that I’ve seen yet. (For some other recent models, you think of Tim Challies’ Next Story (pretty much a Volvo–all about safety), Shane Hipps Flickering Pixels (SUV–cool, but too easy to roll).

We’re jumping in to Chapter 1: Perspective, and the quickest way in is to check out four quick quotes:

“Alan Kay famously described technology ‘as anything that was invented after you were born’ “
This is why new soccer mom’s can fret about their kids texting all day, but don’t notice that they themselves used to chill on the Princess phone for hours, writes Dyer. Bingo. Older technologies fade into the environment and don’t seem so techy to us. We’re surrounded by examples.

Why is this obvious point so often missed?

Continue post at ChurchM.ag →