theo|digital

Ready for a (really) long scrolling post with not much more than a minor, un-life-altering rant? Perfect.

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)

Read the rest of this entry »

(Okay, hiatus on writing and reading while I survived December and holidays is over.  Back to the blog.)

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.

This is my third post on Scot McKnight’s new book The King Jesus Gospel.

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.

Check this out. Sometimes data streams aren’t just about better efficiency vs. information overload. Here’s one that combines information and beauty. By artist Ken Murphy, it’s entitled

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.

This is near the end of a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A post from me every week, plus more at host site: ChurchM.ag. Check it out..

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.

So Scot McKnight’s new book The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited is all about seeking a Biblical view of what gospel really means. In my first post, I mentioned how all the early church fathers used the word Gospel to refer, not just to the crucifixion of Jesus, but to all the chapters of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The stories themselves were the Good News.

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.

I’m catching up on a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A post from me every week, plus more at host site: ChurchM.ag. Check it out..

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

New Testament scholar Scot McKnight has been thinking on the definition of the gospel for a long time.

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.

I’m chillin’ on a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A post from me every week, plus more at host site: ChurchM.ag. Check it out..

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m very much enjoying Eugene Peterson’s 2011 memior, The Pastor.
Long quote from Chapter 13:

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.

Read the rest of this entry »