Happy Belated Birth Announcement

When you go from zero kids to one, Daddy still gets extra time for blogging because the newborn needs to be bounced to sleep every night while Mommy rests.

But when you go from one to two, there’s no time for that. Or anything. Even finishing this senten

So I’m sorry this is so late! (But you both knew about this already, right?)

Here are some more pictures:

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Review: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m hovering between three and four stars here, because I did enjoy the book. Quite a stirring narrative. But, to put it too bluntly, I don’t have a fundamental trust in the theological acumen and judgment of Eric Metaxas. He’s certainly a good writer who did his homework (more on that in a moment), but I’ve read some Bonhoeffer—and he just didn’t quite speak the language of evangelical Protestantism like Metaxas seems to assume.

Even within the book there are hints that Bonhoeffer probably shouldn’t be claimed as an evangelical patron saint, the guy who did, we’re sure, what we evangelicals would have done in the same Hitlerian circumstances. Bonhoeffer’s closeness with Barth, his appreciation for Roman Catholicism, his chumminess with Union Theological Seminary—all of these made me uneasy. Yes, he praised a fundamentalist preacher in NYC and made some incisive criticisms of Fosdick and Coffin—but I never felt comfortable with him theologically.

Metaxas defends Bonhoeffer by suggesting several times that he tended to overstate his case in order to shock people into listening. I have no reason to dispute that assessment. But I’m still stuck at three stars, because Bonhoeffer’s place on the evangelical-to-liberal spectrum seems all-important for the biography of a theologian.

In addition, Metaxas fails to delve much into the circumstances behind Bonhoeffer’s apparent conversion. He writes of one instance in Dietrich’s life, “What happened is unclear, but the results were obvious. For one thing, he now became a regular churchgoer for the first time in his life and took Communion as often as possible.” Really? He was already a theologian at this point and had done church work. This seems very important to ferret out, but Metaxas leaves it unclear.

Yes, Bonhoeffer said and did some evangelical things, and I surely hope he was regenerated. I simply don’t feel I can trust Metaxas to help me decide. I’m afraid he made Bonhoeffer into our evangelical image. Thankfully, I don’t have to decide Bonhoeffer’s eternal destiny. It’s in God’s good hands. And no matter where he is now, God’s grace (common or special?) was strong in him, and he did courageous and honorable things I’m not sure I could do, even on my best day.

Criticisms over—because Metaxas deserves a great deal of praise for this book. I couldn’t help liking the clever little wordplays he used frequently. For example:

Norway … had recently been handed over to Hitler by the Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling, whose surname became an improper noun, meaning “traitor.”

Metaxas also has a flair for epithets. Nazi Reinhard Heydrich was alternately a “piscine ghoul,” an “albino stoat,” and a “waxy lamprey.” (He was also “cadaverous.”) A little much, perhaps, but it made for good reading.

So did the rest of the story—at least once the conflict between Bonhoeffer and the Nazis began. I had done some study of the man, but I had no idea how early, powerfully, confidently, prominently, and presciently Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazis. He really did seem to see what was coming as few others did. And instead of being an alarmist or conspiracy theorist, Bonhoeffer had access to real evidence of Nazi atrocities.

Metaxas gives sufficient detail, lets characters speak in their own words from actual letters, and yet keeps the story moving. One thing for which I will always be indebted to him is resurrecting the validity of Bonhoeffer’s relationship with 18-year-old Maria von Wedemeyer. Getting to read her letters makes the relationship plausible in a way it hadn’t been when I just watched the movie.

Bonhoeffer’s story is one that challenged me deeply, and yet I think evangelicals should not be quick to claim him or his brave actions as their own.



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When I’m Having a Bad Day

When I’m having a bad day, I just read my blog comment spam. Here’s a sample from an actual comment a spammer calling himself “Forrest Enget” tried to leave on my site just a few minutes ago:

This is the very first time I frequented your website page and so far? I amazed with the analysis you made to make this actual publish amazing. Great job!

I’m a bit puzzled by the second sentence, but overall this is a real encouragement in the dog-eat-dog world of blogging. It’s a thankless job, blogging—except when you hear from “Dominique Behunin”:

I would like to thank you for the efforts you have put in writing this blog. I’m hoping the same high-grade website post from you in the upcoming also. Actually your creative writing abilities has inspired me to get my own blog now. Really the blogging is spreading its wings rapidly. Your write up is a great example of it.

I don’t get a whole lot of spam. I guess most spammers feel that, in all honesty, they can’t say nice things about my particular blog, so they move on to another blog they can praise in good conscience. But it’s nice that a few squeak through. All you spammers out there in Nigeria, may I say a humble “thank you” for your much-needed support? Or let me put it in language you can better understand:

A spammer necessarily help to make helpfully posts I might state! It is much of them so excellent that a favourable impressions were had by all!

Review: The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism

The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism by Garth M. Rosell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Two friends, perhaps more than any others, were responsible for giving shape and direction to the kind of evangelicalism that took root in twentieth-century America and soon spread throughout the world. Despite their regional, cultural, and personal differences, Harold John Ockenga and Billy Graham’s friendship and deep personal regard each had for the other helped forge a movement that continues to thrive in scores of countries around the world" (222).

This paragraph from its penultimate page makes a good thesis statement for The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism. Author Garth Rosell is an evangelical, the son of a leading evangelical (mass evangelist Merv Rosell), and he sat at the feet of many evangelical leaders in his formative years. The younger Rosell is now an older man himself, an experienced teacher of church history at center-left evangelical schools (Bethel and Gordon-Conwell).

Rosell’s perspective in The Surprising Work of God (the title borrows self-consciously from Jonathan Edwards) is warmly appreciative but still fairly objective and straightforward. The author rarely (and mainly near the end) offers much in the way of explicit criticism or evaluation, but instead lets his characters tell their story in their own words. Rosell keeps the story moving—and has a moving story to tell.

Harold John Ockenga
The first half of the book is mostly a biography of Harold John Ockenga, the young and dynamic intellectual leader of the new evangelicalism. Ockenga’s early life will sound a great deal like that of many BJU students. He was a theologically conservative, spiritually earnest young man who took his sanctification very seriously, yearned for personal and church-wide revival—and had a bit of trouble figuring out how to get a good spouse! (He once presented flowers and a marriage proposal to a girl he’d never met simply because his pastor recommended her!) One of his attempts at spouse-location resulted in a six-year correspondence with a young lady in Virginia (whom he did not in the end marry) that has been preserved to this day. This correspondence, along with everything else in the Ockenga Papers, allowed Rosell to tell great swathes of Ockenga’s story in his own words.

The biography transitions a summary of Dr. Ockenga’s major theological emphases: the centrality of the cross, the church, the authority of the Bible, the necessity of conversion, the importance of spiritual renewal, the task of worldwide evangelization, and—something that may surprise some readers—the corrosive influence of modernism (every one of these emphases is worded verbatim as Rosell words them). Ockenga clearly stood in the evangelical tradition going back to Edwards and Whitefield—and these emphases are still alive, if not always well, in American evangelicalism.

This summary, in turn, transitions nicely into a description of Ockenga’s rise as a leader, preeminently in his role as head of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Every American Christian who cares about his brothers in Christ should read pages 101-106 of this book, because it describes Ockenga’s incredibly influential philosophy, the one underlying the NAE and so much else in contemporary American Christianity. Ockenga defined himself both in comparison to earlier fundamentalists (he revered Clarence Macartney and worked as his assistant for a time; he also treasured the influence of J. Gresham Machen) and in contradistinction to them. Ockenga said what nearly all evangelicals still say about fundamentalism, that its major problems were withdrawal, isolationism, separatism, and "come-outism." Rosell reports quite straightforwardly and in Ockenga’s own words that the “Park Street Prophet” advocated another strategy: infiltration (see es105, 162). The fundamentalists had failed to retain the major institutions of American Christianity; the evangelicals would go on the offensive and retake them. (Financier of evangelical works John Bolten called this philosophy of infiltration a "biblical principle," though I kept hoping for and never found Ockenga’s elaboration of the biblical rationale for it.)

The Band of Brothers
But none of these early evangelicals denied that individual conversions were necessary before real change could take place, and the next phase of Rosell’s story tells of the evangelists whose goal it was to work and preach hard for those individual conversions. Billy Graham is the focus here. Graham doesn’t get a biographical treatment like Ockenga; his life is already quite well known. Instead, Rosell zoom out a bit to the whole group of evangelists who formed a "band of brothers" during the last era of American city-wide crusades. (Bob Jones Sr appears several times as a senior evangelist who takes great interest in the success and progress of the younger ones.) These men—including Graham, Chuck Templeton, Torrey Johnson, Merv Rosell, and others—come off as earnest and energetic, if a bit naive. They worked hard to stay humble and prayerful, taking no credit for themselves for gathering the huge crowds they were seeing all across America and even in Britain. But they were still sometimes immature in their reaction to all the fervor they found themselves at the center of. They were all quite young, Rosell points out, and could get a little carried away: Graham told a group at Ockenga’s church that the next twelve months would "determine the destiny of America" (137), and Rosell at least records no awareness among them of the sad fact that not all professions at a public altar are genuine conversions. (It’s also very interesting to see the vintage advertisements for the rallies Rosell includes; they look impossibly hokey today because Graham and his compatriots were using then-cutting-edge Madison Avenue techniques—an example which evangelicalism still follows assiduously.) Graham and his fellows also united Christianity and patriotism in ways that might make contemporary Christians nervous. Graham, for example, declaimed that the U.S. "must maintain strong military power for defense" and "must strengthen organizations like the F.B.I. for internal protection" (145). Rosell points out that few Christians till the 1960s questioned the tight wedding of God and country.

The immense energy of those days, and preeminently the work of Billy Graham, launched a worldwide movement, so Rosell turns to the important evangelical institutions that arose out of that era—many of them founded and/or led by Graham and Ockenga. The National Association of Evangelicals and Fuller Seminary are the two most prominent, but a vast subculture of parachurch organizations also developed. This is where Rosell does ask one question that is critical of his subjects: if Ockenga and Graham, et al., were so opposed to "come-outism," why did they invest so much energy in creating new, transdenominational evangelical institutions? Why not simply work within existing denominational machinery?  (see 178, 185-186).

The life of the mind was important to the early new-evangelicals. Rosell devotes a chapter to the topic, and he quotes Carl F. H. Henry and Ockenga saying several times that they hoped to bring intellectual respectability back to evangelicalism. Graham, Ockenga, and others even considered seriously the possibility of founding "Crusade University," an East-Coast institution that might rival the Ivies. (That name would of course be a public embarrassment today.)

Conclusion
Rosell’s story does a bit of rambling, perhaps. It’s unclear why the Ockenga biography takes up so much space, for example. But the rambling is appropriate, because the movement called new evangelicalism was, like any, a mixture of persons, occurrences, and institutions. (Rosell notes that by the late 50s, leaders such as Ockenga and Carnell had dropped the moniker they invented, "new evangelicalism," opting for "evangelicalism," "biblical Christianity," or "historic orthodoxy." [13 n.10].)

Fundamentalism plays a major role in this story. Ockenga, especially, but also leading thinkers like Carl F. H. Henry, defined themselves frequently in contradistinction to fundamentalism. They pointed specifically, of course, to separation (see 162). But not only separation. Henry wrote a few more criticisms in his landmark little book, The Uneasy Conscience of a Modern Fundamentalist. Rosell writes,

While affirming fundamentalism’s theological orthodoxy,realistic assessment of a fallen human nature, and commitment to the supernatural work of God, Henry criticized the movement for “its spirit of independent isolationism,” “overly-emotional type of revivalism,” “tendency to replace great church music by a barn-dance variety of semi-religious choruses,” and, most especially, “ethical irresponsibility." "It is not fair to say that the ethical platform of all conservative churches has clustered about such platitudes as ‘abstain from intoxicating beverages, movies, dancing, card-playing and smoking,’" Henry remarked, “but there are multitudes of Fundamentalist congregations in which these are the main points of reference for ethical speculation."

Almost 65 years on, some of Henry’s remarks still hit home—self-described fundamentalists now regularly hear the same criticisms from other self-described fundamentalists! And yet, of course, the movement Henry helped found is not immune to critique. Has success or failure come from the philosophy of infiltration that Ockenga explicitly recommended? Rosell is probably right in saying that evangelicals created their own subculture like the fundamentalists had; if that is the case, how has that fared? Rosell provides little in the way of evaluation; his is a historical book focusing on a limited time frame. But readers should not fail to ask these questions.

Rosell has written a valuable and interesting little book, one that is often edifying—and never fails to be instructive.



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Spotify: Not Sharpest Knife in Drawer, But Close

This review was supplied by little Mikey Wood, a ten-year-old technology reviewer I have hired to do kid-appropriate reviews of new tech. Mikey is a distant cousin of Rodney Trotter, of Reformation 21 fame.

I like Spotify. It is good.

It’s kind of weird, though, because, like, it advertises rap music. And doesn’t it sort of know by now that my musical tastes run the gamut from mainstream choral music to arcane choral music?

And it stops my choral music. For RAP MUSIC ads! Crazy!!!!!!

But it reads your iTunes library. That’s pretty cool.

And if you’re willing to pay most of your allowance (five dollars a month), you can listen on your computer.

And if you’re even more willing to pay even more of your allowance (ten dollars a month), you can listen on your smart phone if you have those kinds of parents who get you that kind of thing.

But I still miss LaLa. From when I was like 7 and 8. The social networking on there was cooler. It helped me figure out good music from my friends better than Spotify. But Spotify does that, too, I guess. Through Facebook. Just not as easily. You have to go to Facebook to see what your friends are listening to. And it’s not easy to find.

And Spotify is in the end better for some people. Because you can listen to music over and over and not just once.

But the constant rap and pop commercials ruin it for me. The people on those things just sound so scuzzy. It’s distracting.

Genesis 15 and 17

Do Genesis 15 and 17 constitute two related but distinct Abrahamic covenants?

Yes

Paul R. Williamson, in his very helpful and thorough NSBT volume Sealed with an Oath argues that Genesis 15 and 17 constitute separate (though obviously related) covenants. Here are his reasons as best I can distill them:

1. Gen 15 is unilateral; Gen 17 is bilateral (“be blameless, so that”).
2. Gen 15 has no covenant sign; Gen 17 has circumcision.
3. Gen 15 mentions no international dimensions or royal descendants; Gen 17 does.
4. Gen 15:13-16 gives an explicit timetable for when God’s promises will be fulfilled–after they go through 400 years of slavery; Gen 17 says that God’s covenant will be established, implying that it has not been already established (in Gen 15).
5. Gen 15 says nothing about what God will do with that nation after it is established; Gen 17 speaks of God’s covenant with Abraham’s descendants as “everlasting.”

Williamson offers this summary statement:

It is clear from the above analysis that the covenants mentioned in Genesis 15 and Genesis 17 are manifestly different in both nature (temporal/eternal; unilateral/bilateral) and primary emphases (national/international). The suggestion that they are simply two stages of the one covenant is seriously undermined by the inexplicable gap of some thirteen years between them, and by the consistent projection of the covenant in Genesis 17 into the future (lit. ‘I will give my covenant’ [Gen. 17:2]; ‘I will establish my covenant” [Gen. 17:7 my trans.]). Both these anomalies, as well as the significant differences between the two covenant chapters, suggest a more plausible synchronic explanation: these chapters focus on two distinct, but related covenants. (p. 89)

No

But… The Old Testament itself treats all the various promises to Abraham—and Isaac and Jacob—as one covenant (Ex 2:24; 2 Kgs 13:23; Lev 26:42 need not be speaking of three separate covenants, and in any case, it ascribes only one covenant to Abraham.) The Bible, in fact, never speaks of more than one covenant with Abraham (cf. Acts 3:25). If the two are related but distinct, the relation must be a lot more prominent than the distinction.

Mathews (NAC) points out that “the apostle Paul treats the covenant chapters in Genesis as one covenant when he contends on the basis of the life of Abraham that salvation is received by faith alone (Rom 4:1–25).” In that chapter, in fact, quotations from Gen 15 and Gen 17 are treated as part of the one promise of God to Abraham; both chapters are quoted with no intimation that they come from different covenants. The one fact of importance Paul draws out of the distinction between chapters 15 and 17 is that Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness (ch. 15) before he participated in the sign of circumcision (ch. 17). So to Paul, the stages of the Abrahamic covenant are significant because they make faith logically prior to works in the ordo salutis.

And lest we use that point to push Genesis 15 and 17 apart again—one is unilateral and therefore gracious, the other is bilateral and therefore works-based—James unites the two poles and uses Abraham as his example in doing so (Jas 2:14–26). Abraham’s works vindicated his (logically prior) faith, showing it to be really real.

I think Williamson (in an otherwise very helpful book!) makes too much of the distinctions between Gen 15 and 17. I admit I’m not sure what to do with the tense distinctions—and Williamson surely did some careful, challenging exegesis. But I do wonder if he should have violated (?) biblical-theological methodology just a bit and let Paul do some authoritative apostolic exegesis for him.

Huffington Post on Bob Jones University

Very interesting. More generous and accurate than I have been led to expect over the years.

Non-Christian people in the U.S. have a tough time understanding and accepting that conservative Christians, on the whole, don’t look to politics for saviors as much as they do. At the same time, Dr. Gary Weier admits helpfully in this article that some evangelicals have become worldly in just that way: for them, politics is a do-or-die, vote for the Messiah or for Satan game.

The Pastor and His Technology

My friend Dr. Bob Gonzales is the Academic Dean at Reformed Baptist Seminary, whose upstate SC modules meet down the street from my neighborhood. He’s asked me to deliver two little lectures at their upcoming module, and they say “auditors are invited.” I think that means either of you is welcome to join us. Here’s the promo:

Reformed Baptist Seminary is offering a theological module on "Pastoral Theology" on the week of January 23-27 in Taylors, South Carolina. We’ve invited Pastors Bob Selph, Tom Ascol, Gary Hendrix, and Donny Martin to address the nature and various facets of pastoral ministry. We’ve also invited Dr. Mark Ward, an author at BJU Press, to lecture two sessions on "The Pastor and His Technology." Students and auditors are invited.

The Singular They

Reasonable, clear, straightforward, and admirably brief (and it even quotes the KJV):

BJU Press CHART Webinar on a Christian Worldview of Literature

Yesterday I gave a live BJU Press webinar from my home office to some of the best listeners anyone could ask for. Both of them seemed, as best I could tell, engaged and interested—at least judging by the fact that they stayed till the end.

I’m told that we get a lot more views of the archived broadcast than we do of the live one, so I encourage you to take some time and check out the presentation. You’ll hear my voice and see a professionally designed set of slides.

And you’ll hear me apply to literature the Bible Integration levels used by BJU Press (click here for a series of posts I wrote on those levels). I did not come up with these, but I see them as incredibly useful.

Even if you don’t care about literature (why?!), at least come to see the levels fleshed out. The levels aren’t Scripture, but they are. They arise directly out of Scripture. I think you’ll agree if you watch.

Review: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book made a deep impression on me. I could hardly stop reading it, even when I was supposed to be sleeping. Even when I was especially supposed to be sleeping because of a newborn who sometimes fails to do so herself…

Walter Isaacson’s work is world-class. He did his homework—hundreds of interviews, including 40 with Jobs—and he let all sides have their say. He adds some real wit and has an eye for it in anecdotes from Jobs’ life. He’s sympathetic to Jobs but not afraid to blame him for lying or whining.

The book tells the story of one of the landmark tech titans of the turn of the 21st century, and it has a lot to teach readers.

First, the positives. I learned a number of good leadership lessons from Jobs’ life:

• Make a quality product your priority, not money.

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

• Get your departments to work together, not compete.

”Steve would fire people if the divisions didn’t work together, but Sony’s divisions were at war with one another.” Indeed Sony provided a clear counterexample to Apple. It had a consumer electronics division that made sleek products and a music division with beloved artists (including Bob Dylan). But because each division tried to protect its own interests, the company as a whole never got its act together to produce an end-to-end service.

• Don’t forget form in your pursuit of function.

[Jobs:] I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics…. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.

• Your greatest work may be creating a company culture that lasts beyond you.

Jobs said that the past twelve years of his life, since his return to Apple, had been his most productive in terms of creating new products. But his more important goal, he said, was to do what Hewlett and his friend David Packard had done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would outlive them.

But now the negatives… I learned a number of bad leadership lessons from Jobs’ life:

• Don’t be like Steve Jobs. He was one-of-a-kind… or at least I hope so. I would never want to work for someone who curses and screams and cries and throws tantrums like him, no matter what we were accomplishing. I’m glad I work in an organization in which the leaders are told, “The servant of the Lord must not strive” (2 Tim 2:24).

• Don’t motivate people mainly through fear.

Was all of his stormy and abusive behavior necessary? Probably not, nor was it justified. There were other ways to have motivated his team. Even though the Macintosh would turn out to be great, it was way behind schedule and way over budget because of Jobs’s impetuous interventions. There was also a cost in brutalized human feelings, which caused much of the team to burn out. “Steve’s contributions could have been made without so many stories about him terrorizing folks,” Wozniak said. “I like being more patient and not having so many conflicts. I think a company can be a good family. If the Macintosh project had been run my way, things probably would have been a mess. But I think if it had been a mix of both our styles, it would have been better than just the way Steve did it.”

• Don’t forget that money still has to figure into your calculus when making good products.

“The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get lost,” Arthur Rock later said. The theory, shared by many, is that the tough love made him wiser and more mature. But it’s not that simple. At the company he founded after being ousted from Apple, Jobs was able to indulge all of his instincts, both good and bad. He was unbound. The result was a series of spectacular products that were dazzling market flops. This was the true learning experience. What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act III was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II.

One Criticism
Isaacson left Jobs’ religious views very unclear. That notable feature of his life certainly merited a chapter, and yet Isaacson never explains how Jobs went from Hindu ashrams into Buddhist spirituality, and what exactly that meant for him. Perhaps Jobs didn’t tell Isaacson. Perhaps Jobs himself had little explanation. It’s not clear from the book that Jobs’ religious views made much of a difference in his life, except for abetting his wacky eating habits. None of Jobs’ religious dabblings succeeded in making him a nicer person; that much is clear from most of the pages of the book.

Conclusion
I think Chrisann Brennan, the mother of Jobs’ first child, gave the best short description of Jobs: “He was an enlightened being who was cruel.” Everyone and everything was either a hero or an unbloggable curse word. Some people managed to swing wildly between the two poles, even in the space of one day. His perfectionism was intense and scary—and, admittedly, productive. But it left a lot of people out to dry.

I read most of the book on my iPod Touch, and I’m typing this review on a Mac. I find myself having a somewhat different attitude toward my beloved Apple devices now that I know more about their genesis. I’m a little wary of them while still being in awe.

Not so incidentally, Jobs made these devices by unconsciously obeying the Bible—hear me out. As Andy Crouch points out so well in Culture Making, people made in God’s image are called in Genesis 1:26–28 to cultivate existing traditions (in technology, farming, art, music etc.) and create within them, making it progress for the benefit of others and the glory of God. Jobs definitely did that, whether he knew it or not:

What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.

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Review: From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology

From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A little story at the very beginning of this book is the one that has stuck with me:

Throughout my years in seminary, I continued to study and work hard in both theological studies and programming. I spent as much time learning Greek and Hebrew as I did learning languages like PHP, C#, Python, HTML, and JavaScript. But in my final semester of seminary, a professor, who was known both for his brilliance and shocking, out-of-nowhere statements, said something that changed everything for me. In the middle of addressing a variety of current issues in society and culture, he looked straight at all of us and said, “One of the most dangerous things you can believe in this world is that technology is neutral.” Wait, what? I thought. Surely, he must have misspoken. After all, nothing could be more obvious than the fact that technology is neutral. What matters is that we use technology for good, right?

Dyer brings up this issue later in the book, and he helpfully frames a question that far too few people are asking: is technology a neutral instrument or does it in some measure determine the ends to which it is put?

Dyer’s answer is no: technology is not neutral. Neither is it fully determinist, making anyone do anything. But we have to recognize that, as media ecologists have pointed out, technologies tend to “play themselves out” within a culture. They do what they were designed to do (even if the designer isn’t always aware how choices he’s making in the design will influence that play). A great example is cellphones:

The presence of a cell phone in my pocket means that my conceptions of space, time, and limits are radically different than a world without cell phones…. When people have cell phones, they tend to answer them when a call comes in. A person is free to use a phone as a paperweight, doorstop, or hammer, but people will tend to use phones to accomplish what they were designed to do—communicate with people. The longer a tool has been around and the more often we use it, the more ingrained and culturally acceptable its tendencies become. Individuals are still free to discard it or use it in some way other than its original design, but the tool has a specific tendency that will usually prevail among the masses. For example, when mobile phones first came on the market, most people bought them only for emergency or business use. Yet, it seems that mobile phones have the built-in tendency to be used much more often, especially as they continue to gain features far beyond making calls. Instrumentalism is partially true in the sense that individuals are free to use phones however they please, but determinism also has an element of truth in that society at large tends to use the technology in a certain way.

Dyer has done better than Challies, for example, in bringing in the insights of media ecology for Christian discussion of technology. He also used Andy Crouch’s work helpfully, speaking of a given piece of technology as a “cultural good.”

I believe I agree with several reviewers that this is the Christian book to read about technology.



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Ultimate for Fans and Non-Fans

Ultimate fans (not UFC fans—I mean frisbee): you can watch national tournament games free online here. I watched the end of a good one featuring the current superstar of ultimate Brodie Smith.

Non-ultimate fans: watch Brodie Smith below. You won’t believe your eyes.