theo|digital

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 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 »

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 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.

I got invited to jump in on a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. I met John at Exponential 2010 (big ‘ol church planters conference) when I swung by his workshop on the topic. Given how easily I critique in this area, I prepped myself for disappointment, and instead heard one of the more sane and clever presentations I’ve heard.

Dyer, who works as programmer + has a seminary degree, is well positioned to look at this stuff. But his real strength is it looks as if he’s engaging well into Media Ecology, my favorite playground. I do see signs of Postman and Ellul lurking about (paddling a bit more in the pessimistic part of the pool), but I’m feeling good about this one: we may have a well balanced analysis of new communications technologies here.

So 13 of us will be blogging through the book, and each week, one of the posts will be featured by the tour host: ChurchM.ag.

We’re kicking it off (Introductory post on the Preface here), and I’ll have the first chapter next week.

Stay tuned!

I’m blogging through James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Chapter 3: Two Wordbooks

Anyone who has done some study of  historical documents in English notices right away that words are not spelled the way we expect them to be. In  fact, sometimes they’re almost unrecognizable.

This is the page of a very early dictionary, a new idea in 1604. It was compiled and published by Robert Cowdrey—a obstinate Village priest (or so James Gleick describes him).  The purpose of the dictionary was education so that the poor could better understand words in Scripture and sermons, he says.

But this is also a good example of how spelling wasn’t a thing.  It’s not just what you would assume: that certain words have evolved over time.  This is true, but the spelling issue has more to do with the concept not even existing. The written word was best described as stored sound or an MP3 recording (this is my way of speaking, not Geick’s here).  The verb “to spell” originally simply meant to speak aloud (think Harry Potter). And just as our pronunciation can vary slightly as we speak with no consequence, so the spelling of the same word might vary in the same early printed text.

For instance, the title page of Cowdrey’s first edition of this dictionary read:

(* fol. A1r *)

ATable Alphabeticall, con-
teyning and teaching the true
writing, and vnderstanding of hard
vsuall English wordes, borrowed from
the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine,
or French. &c.

With the interpretation thereof by
plaine English words, gathered for the benefit &
helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other
vnskilfull persons. 

Because “words” sounds the same either way, it didn’t matter much how the letters were laid out, even when compiling a dictionary. You’ll notice on this image of the 1613 edition, this had changed so that the spelling matched. The effect of the printing press was that spelling began to be noticed.

I’m blogging through James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Chapter 2: The Persistence of the Word (There Is No Dictionary in the Mind)

This just keeps getting better!  I was tickled (yep) to see that the second chapter of The Information begins with a quote from possibly my favorite media-ecologist-theologian:  Walter Ong (posts).  The St. Louis University Jesuit professor is perplexingly less well-known than Marshall McLuhan, yet he informs my own thought in significant ways.  His writings from the 60s and 70s apply nearly perfectly to, say, Facebook chat.

Gleick gives a great introduction to Professor Ong and his study of human thought before writing (oral culture), and echoes the famous quote of Socrates about how writing will destroy our memories:

For this invention will produce forgetfullness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.  Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.  You have invented an elixer not of memory, but of reminding, and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

(sidenote: this common complaint about the internet in modern life was refreshed again last month in this study.)

So we enter the history of writing:  pictographs and ideographs, the origin of the alphabet, and how writing froze in time previously fluid poetry and thought:  like the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Writing was a way of abstracting thought into it’s own thing, separate from us.

And writing changed the way we think, apply logic, and categorize. It, in fact, created the idea of categorization, and of beginning, middle, and end.  It allowed symbols.  (for bible nerds, it’s why λογος /logos can mean both “word” and “reason”).

Oh, and there’s a great section on Babylonian mathematics. In Cunieform.  Sexagesimal. (base 60!)

Dang good talk on the idea of filtering communities by someone I haven’t yet heard of: Eli Pariser.  He identifies one of the key issues, which is whether “personalized” visibility of information can simply reinforce your own’s tribe’s prejudices, interests, and paradigms. Pariser perfectly illustrates how Facebook has been slowly increasing this “feature.”  You might have 800 friends, but you’re only seeing regular entries from a small portion of them in your news feed, and it’s based on it tracking who/what you show interest in based on your clicks.

A few things Pariser doesn’t get quite right.  He describes the “early internet” as not really have gatekeepers, and now it does. That’s not true. There’s no such thing as “no gatekeeper” (read: no editor) in a overwhelming flood of information. The early gatekeepers were simply the  rudimentary keyword matches algorithms, etc.  Anything below result #50 was still invisible, whether or not it was relevant. And Google has never indexed more than a percentage of the web.  Now instead, the discussion of gatekeepers is starting to appear as we think about this, but it’s always been there.

So now the gatekeeper function is more personalized, which more closely models how we actually work.  We all tend to notice and read and pay attention to things we already know about or agree with.  Further, we pay attention to the information friends and community give us over strangers, generally speaking.  Our lens is self-directed and relationally-directed.  So this “new” function is doing exactly what most new digital innovations have been doing over the last few years:  modeling behavior humans already had to begin with.

I share exactly Eli Pariser’s concerns on this.  I just don’t think the problem is new because of digital space, I think we’re simply noticing it there.

Another step towards information filtering through the social graph.  If this one doesn’t catch on, another will. Digital information tools will continue to better image real human interaction, and social information has existed since civilization.

Here’s an initial take from Gizmodo. More theological analysis when I get a chance to think a bit more on it. But my basic thoughts in this arena imagine the Church as the filtering community (more in Chapter 6 here if you want).

John Piper interviews Rick Warren. I have not tightly followed the conversation here, so I can’t helpfully comment on that. What I notice here is the non-adversarial, warm tone of this conversation. And I appreciate Piper speaking directly to less charitable critique.

I read Purpose Driven Life very carefully – this is 20 pages of notes. And I have read critiques of it and one of my agendas is to do an appreciative critique.  And it will, I think, feel to you–I hope it does–mainly appreciative.

Because, frankly I’m appalled at the kinds of slanders that have been brought against this book by people whose methods of critique, if they were consistently applied to the Bible, would undo it as the Word of God.

I really–I’m one of these Reformed types, and my type tends to get on your case pretty often. And when I read the book, I thought:  “What’s the issue here?”