Digital Liturgies E-Book

Samuel James

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

How the Habitat of Internet Technology Undermines Christian Wisdom With advancements in internet technology, people can get instant answers to just about any of their questions, connect long distance with family and friends, and stay informed with events around the world in real time. In Digital Liturgies, tech-realist Samuel D. James examines the connection between patterns in technology and human desires. Everyone longs for a glimpse of heaven; James argues they are just looking for it in the wrong place—the internet.  This accessible book exposes 5 "digital liturgies" that prohibit people from contemplating big truths, accepting the uncomfortable, and acknowledging God as their Creator. It then calls readers to live faithfully before Christ, finding wisdom through Scripture and rest in God's perfect design.  - A Biblical View of the Internet and Technology: Readers explore the connection between human desire, the internet, and wisdom through a Christian lens - Great for College Students, Parents, and Pastors: This book encourages readers to live faithfully for Christ  - Offers a Tech-Realist Perspective: Samuel D. James highlights the inherent dangers of digital technologies, offering wisdom for navigating our internet-saturated world 

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“This accessible but penetrating book shows how our late-modern, secular culture provides liturgies: soul-shaping practices and narratives that train us to turn from God to the sovereign self, from God-created nature to self-created reality, from living for truth and love to living for power. If you can’t see them, you can’t resist them, and the author gives you resources to do both. Samuel James has written an essential book. He is one of the small but growing number of young thinkers to whom the church must listen if it is to learn how to be effective in evangelism and formation in a post-Christendom world.”

Tim Keller, Founding Pastor, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City; Cofounder, Redeemer City to City

“This is such a wise and insightful book. Its power lies in the way it exposes truths not just about the digital world but about us: the things we want, the way we try to find them, how the internet weaponizes them in ways we may not have noticed, and what we can do about it. Penetrating without being frightening, and positive without being naïve, Digital Liturgies is the guide we need.”

Andrew Wilson, Teaching Pastor, King’s Church London

“Digital Liturgies is a book that issues both a challenge and a call. Samuel James challenges our perspective by pulling back the curtain so we see that technology’s effects are not neutral, and our digital habits tilt us toward an online world that makes the wisdom of God seem like foolishness. But James also calls us to a better way, reorienting us toward greater understanding, wisdom, and the practices of resistance necessary for faithful and fruitful living. An accessible book full of profound insight.”

Trevin Wax, Vice President of Research and Resource Development, The North American Mission Board; Visiting Professor, Cedarville University; author, The Thrill of Orthodoxy; Rethink Your Self; and ThisIsOur Time

“Virtually everyone I know feels exhausted by or enslaved to some aspect of digital life. In this book, one of the sharpest Christian minds helps us discover what exactly we’re looking for in our screens. Digital Liturgies points a path beyond the outrage, anger, shame, and boredom that we accidentally download into our souls.”

Russell Moore, Editor in Chief, Christianity Today

“After the first few chapters, I decided my teenagers should read this book, and maybe their whole school as well. Such good sociological insights. A few chapters later I decided I wanted my church to read it. Such helpful spiritual and pastoral insights too. By the book’s end, however, I realized I needed this book. It applied the gospel to me and my online habits, and I need worthier ones. What that means, friend, is that I’m pretty sure you also need this book. It explains the digital water we’re all swimming in and how that digital water has reprogrammed us more than we realize.”

Jonathan Leeman, Editorial Director, 9Marks; Elder, Cheverly Baptist Church, Hyattsville, Maryland

“Modern-day Christians are so trained to think about the what (content) that we don’t often enough consider the how (form). Digital Liturgies—wisely, clearly, and compellingly—helps us to consider the ways in which we are formed by the digital world in which we live. Samuel James not only introduces some of the most important thinkers on this most defining quality of our age, but he also offers his own fresh insights.”

Karen Swallow Prior, author, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

“Secular man is trying to supplant the divine Creator with a false one—the almighty algorithm. As Samuel James argues, we utilize digital tools believing that through them, we can make the world into our own image. With careless passivity, digital tools end up conforming us into its Silicon Valley–engineered image—alienated, fragmented, compulsive, and angry. There is no evangelical thinker I am aware of who has thought as critically, cautiously, and self-critically about the toll of digital life on our spirituality, psychology, and embodiment as Samuel James. From one of the most talented writers of his generation of evangelical thinkers, Digital Liturgies is one of the smartest books I’ve read from one of evangelicalism’s brightest lights.”

Andrew T. Walker, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Fellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center

Digital Liturgies

Digital Liturgies

Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

Samuel D. James

Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

Copyright © 2023 by Samuel D. James

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover Design: Jordan Singer

First printing 2023

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-8713-9 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8716-0 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8714-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: James, Samuel, 1988– author.

Title: Digital liturgies : rediscovering Christian wisdom in an online age / Samuel D. James.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022050804 (print) | LCCN 2022050805 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433587139 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433587146 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433587160 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Technology—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Social media—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: LCC BR115.T42 J36 2023 (print) | LCC BR115.T42 (ebook) | DDC 261.5/6—dc23/eng/20230512

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050804

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050805

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-08-09 04:32:13 PM

For

Mom and Dad

Contents

Introduction: What the Web Means for Our Spiritual Lives

Part 1: Truth and Technology

1  Embodied Wisdom in a Faceless Age

2  How Technology Shapes Us

3  Drowning in the Shallows

Part 2: Engaging the Digital Liturgies

4  “My Story, My Truth”

Digital Liturgy #1: Authenticity

5  The Abolition of Thought

Digital Liturgy #2: Outrage

6  Shame on You

Digital Liturgy #3: Shame

7  Naked in the Dark

Digital Liturgy #4: Consumption

8  Death by Minutiae

Digital Liturgy #5: Meaninglessness

Conclusion: Habits of Wisdom and Resistance

Acknowledgments

General Index

Scripture Index

Introduction

What the Web Means for Our Spiritual Lives

I registered for my first Facebook account the summer after graduating high school. Like so many others, I started using the site because friends were already there, and the last thing you want to do in high school is miss what everyone else is doing. I signed up, quickly sent friend requests to Andrew and a couple other guys in my class, and assumed this quaint little thing would add up to a few hours of social fun and maybe a way to keep in touch with some classmates who were going out of state to college.

In other words, I wasn’t at all prepared for the spell that Facebook would work on me.

The hook was almost instant. It only took a couple weeks before I was compulsively checking Facebook as often as possible to see if anyone had responded to my friend requests (or even better, if someone had sent one to me!). Even after adding only a few dozen friends, looking through profiles (we used to jokingly call it “stalking”) started to take up bigger and bigger chunks of my day. In the early days before the “Like” button, if you wanted people to know you appreciated their profile picture or a funny status, you had to comment on it. Notifications for comments became a deliriously intense source of both satisfaction and anxiety. Somehow, an entire adolescence’s worth of insecurity, crushes, ambition, and identity became compressed and contained inside a small, red, pixelated square at the upper corner of our family PC.

A story like that probably hits close to home for many, and if that were all there is to it, it might be little more than a warmly nostalgic remembrance of a piece of pop culture that we all seemed to share for a few years during the Barack Obama administration. But that’s not all there is to it.

Like many others, my story doesn’t end with a few nondescript years of Facebook use, followed by an adulthood that left algorithms behind. Rather, my first Facebook account in the summer of 2007 was the beginning of a way of living that was completely foreign to my parents. As the years passed, Facebook changed designs and features, but what didn’t change was how central digital media had become to my normal life. Instead of being a diversion that I stowed away in the corner for occasional use during the doldrums of offline life, my online activity became the most consistent, the most regular, the most habitual thing about me.

I would go to classes, then scroll Facebook. A couple hours at church on Sunday were followed by several hours of email, instant messenger, and (later) YouTube. Through the years, the centrality of the social internet was established more and more for me personally as well as seemingly everyone else. Blogs and tweets took up a huge percentage of my reading; I became twice as likely to text someone than call, even family. The transformation in the broader society became evident as I got older, as almost everyone I knew began talking about “fasting” from social media or their New Year’s resolutions to look less frequently at screens.

In just a few years, these digital technologies had gone from something we were all excited to try, to something we were all desperate to somehow escape (at least temporarily).

That’s one story, which a lot of us now in our mid-thirties know well. But there’s another story to tell about our relationship to digital technology, and it’s about much more than how much time we burn on it. This story is about the way that these technologies shape and mold. It’s about what it means to be humans, created in God’s image, whose lives are increasingly mediated by screens, algorithms, and pixels. What if the reality we need to face is not so much about how we overuse and overlove a valuable tool, but about what happens when a tool is no longer just a tool? What if the issue is not that we aren’t making the internet more humane; it’s that the internet is making us less so?

What’s Water?

In 2005 Kenyon College invited the writer David Foster Wallace to deliver the commencement address. Wallace began his speech to the graduating class with a short fable. Two young fish are swimming in the ocean, and eventually an older fish greets them. “Hello, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish look at each other completely confused, and then ask: “What is water?”

“The point of the fish story,” Wallace explained, “is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” This illustration, while also good for a light chuckle from an audience, communicates a profound truth. What we are immersed in is taken for granted, and what is taken for granted is not thought about. Wallace wanted the graduating class of Kenyon College to know that the hardest task that awaited them was not “changing the world” or “making a difference,” but paying attention to the right things:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.1

In other words, we are the fish. We swim each day in the depths of our modern world, floating past places, things, and ideas that we don’t even see because of how familiar they are. We take our day-in, day-out life utterly for granted, not consciously but automatically, and the result is that we rarely if ever think seriously about those things that are closest to our experiences. We just accept them without trying, like a fish spends a lifetime without ever knowing that the world he lives in is called “water.”

Being unable to notice or think reflectively about something does not change its reality. Taking something for granted does not diminish its significance any more than living in an underground shelter darkens the sun. What Wallace was getting at in his speech to the graduates of Kenyon College was that our ability or inability to really see the “water” of reality around us is ultimately about how well we are living. The water is there; it’s a given, inescapable. The question is not whether we will live in the water; the question is whether we will be able to see it as water.

This Is Water

Because the social internet has come to dominate and reorient our lives, it can be difficult to imagine how it might be affecting our emotions, our values, or our worldview.2 Many people who are young enough to feel invested in social media are not old enough to clearly remember life before it, while often those who can remember life before social media simply have no category for the immersive effect that it has on those who are younger. Further, the sheer omnipresence of digital technology can obscure its nature. As the social internet seems to blend in seamlessly to the fabric of day-in, day-out life, it doesn’t occur to us that it could actually be bringing an ideology or a value system into our lives. Like fish in water, it’s just all we know, so we don’t see it clearly.

Over the past several years, Christian theologians and others have described the emerging generation of Western adults as belonging to the spirit of “expressive individualism.” The scholar Robert Bellah defines expressive individualism this way: “Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.”3 In other words, what most people in the modern, secular world believe is that the key to their happiness, fulfillment, and quest for meaning in life is to arrange things so that their inner desires and ambitions can be totally achieved. If these desires and ambitions align with those of the community or the religion, great! But if not, then it’s the community or the religion that must be changed or done away with. Life’s center of gravity, according to expressive individualism, is the self.

In his helpful book Rethink Yourself, Trevin Wax describes this worldview as the call to “look in,” to peer inside your own wants and sense of self to find meaning in life. He writes:

The “look in” approach to life means that your purpose is to look inside yourself in order to discover who you truly are—to find what makes you unique—and then to take hold of your authentic self and emerge with it intact and uncompromised. Who are you? Only you can figure out the answer, and the way you find out is by looking deep into your heart to discover your uniqueness, to come to terms with what you most want from life.4

Expressive individualism is the quintessential secular creed. It is the chorus of nearly every chart-topping song, the subtext of every Disney film, the final resting place of contemporary education, parenting, and even much contemporary religion. How and why this happened is a fascinating story.5 For now, the point to take away is that expressive individualism is part of the “water” that surrounds us modern, twenty-first-century people. We rarely notice it because it is all we know, yet we remain immersed.

What’s crucial to realize is that alongside the philosophical revolution of expressive individualism, the digital technology revolution has exploded, and in the process it has provided the revolution of expressive individualism with its most important, most enchanting, and most effective vehicle.

What you and I know as the internet is a very recent development; the barest, most essential version of internet computing existed in the latter half of the twentieth century, but it was unusable for anyone except trained professionals. The commercial internet—otherwise known as the World Wide Web—is a product of the 1990s. In 1997 about 21 percent of Americans said they had used an internet technology in the past three months. In 2007 that percentage was 75 percent. By 2018 over 85 percent of Americans—or about 250 million people—were using internet technology at least semiregularly.6 Perhaps even more significantly, the number of people who spend much of their time logged on has skyrocketed in recent years: 85 percent of US adults report being online every day, and about a third say they are online “almost constantly.”7 In other words, in about twenty years the internet has gone from a hobby of the few to the routine of the majority.

Part of the reason for this is that the internet has not just stayed a recreational pastime, a way to watch funny videos, read sports statistics, or send the occasional email. Many industries are now centered around the internet. These jobs require constant access to email, videoconferencing, file hosting, social media, and more. In the twenty-first century, it is perfectly plausible that a typical employed person would spend most (if not all) of his workday online, spend most (if not all) of his break catching up on social media or listening to a podcast, and then go home to spend most (if not all) of his free time watching Netflix, playing online games, or just browsing the web.

While some of us can still feel occasional pangs of guilt for “bingeing” too much TV or losing track of time aimlessly scrolling through our social media feeds, the point is that this kind of rhythm does not stand out as strange in our modern world. We can tinker around the edges, but the life bordered on all sides by the internet is neither rare nor surprising in our era. From work to dating, from movies to music, from friendship to even church—the screen is mediating much of our modern life.

If the web is the water we live in, expressive individualism is the chlorine that permeates it.

Tool or Teacher?

The internet is a lot like pornography.

No, that’s not a typo. I did not mean to say that the internet contains a lot of pornography. I mean to say that the internet itself—i.e., its very nature—is like pornography. There’s something about it that is pornographic in its essence.

If this sounds confusing, you’re not alone. It sounds confusing because over the past few decades, the tendency among Christians has been to focus on what the internet provides instead of what it is. Consequently, evangelicals have indeed talked a lot about the scourge of online pornography. But while much attention has been given to how the web can supply us with spiritually dangerous pictures and videos, much less attention has been given to how the very form of the web shapes us in the image of the spirit of the age.

Few Christians would dispute that there is much on the internet that harms us. But by divorcing what the internet presents from what the internet intrinsically is, we are fighting against the symptoms of a more fundamental disease that we are failing to treat. “Staying pure online” is a worthy ambition, but defining purity to mean only one thing—the avoidance of certain content—not only misses the richer biblical ideal of wise living, but it ironically makes us more vulnerable to the allure of godless ideas and rhythms of life. It is entirely possible—in fact, all variables equal, it is likely—to faithfully avoid vulgar or explicit content on the web while simultaneously being shaped by it in a profoundly sub-Christian way.

This may sound incredibly strange. If we are avoiding sinful content online, how in the world can the internet “shape” us in a negative way? We try to avoid articles, podcasts, or videos that undermine Christian belief. Technology is a neutral tool; what matters is how we use it, right? The key (many might say) is to use the web only for good things: to keep up with friends, to consume wholesome content, to be more efficient at our work and school. Resist the allure of pornography or anti-Christian content, and the web is our friend, right?

This book tries to explain why the assumptions in the above paragraph are not quite right. Rather than being a neutral tool, the internet (particularly the social internet) is an epistemological environment8—a spiritual and intellectual habitat—that creates in its members particular ways of thinking, feeling, and believing. It’s true in one sense that the web is a tool that responds to its users’ desires. But the web is not a tool in the same way that a screwdriver or wrench is a tool. The web speaks to us. We talk to the web, and the web talks back, and this dialogue constitutes an ever-growing aspect of life in the digital age.

Rather than thinking of the web and social media as merely neutral tools that merely do whatever users ask of them, it is better to think of them as kinds of spaces that are continually shaping us to think, feel, communicate, and live in certain ways. In other words, the social internet is a liturgical environment. James K. A. Smith has written powerfully about the effect that certain habits and environments can have on our desires.9As we will see later on, even our most allegedly “nonreligious” spaces are deeply spiritual. They tell us a story about the good life: what it is, and how we can get it. These spiritual habitats train our hearts and make certain ideas and behaviors more desirable, and others less so, by immersing us in a particular narrative.

The web tells a story too. The disembodied, fragmented nature of the internet is not merely a quirk but a fundamental part of the web’s nature and, thus, part of the story it tells. As we will see, the form of the internet has radically altered how we read, think, feel, and believe. The digital liturgies of the web and social media train us to invest ultimate authority in our own stories and experiences as they separate us from the objective givenness of the embodied world. How is it that in a supposedly relativistic, you-do-you age, so many people have been shamed or “dragged” online, helplessly watching their reputation or career be destroyed? The answer is not just that some people are mean but that the form of the web undermines moral reconciliation.

These are some of the “digital liturgies” that you and I encounter almost every day. They are not neutral. They are theological, philosophical, existential, and moral stories that leave constant impressions on us. They are soul-shaping narratives.

The Gospel’s Analog Truth

One of the great things about being a Christian is that in a listless and frantic age, you don’t have to chase after every new idea or attitude. To be a Christian is to go to bed every night knowing that you have a completely trustworthy, completely solid, and completely good word from the Creator of the universe. The maker of the stars put the wisdom, truth, and hope we need in a book, the Bible. The Bible reveals to us the grand narrative, the master story, that gives meaning and direction to our lives: the gospel of Jesus.

David Foster Wallace said his hope for the graduating class of Kenyon College was that by beginning to see reality for what it is, they would be able to “construct meaning from experience.” The challenge for Christians in the digital age is different. We don’t have to construct meaning; we have to cling to the meaning we’ve been given already.

Amid the white noise of digital liturgies that preach to us every day, the gospel is wonderfully satisfying analog truth. We’ll say more about this later, but for now, by “analog truth” I mean that the story of the gospel is rooted deeply in physical reality. To preserve the good news of Jesus, God put his gospel in a physical book, inspiring real humans by the Holy Spirit to write physical words that tell a unified story about a speaking God, who was incarnated as a real human being to save us from our sin, free us from the slavery of self-obsession, and one day raise us up, body and soul, to live forever with him.

When we put the digital liturgies of our age up against the analog truth of the gospel, we see just how flimsy, how untrue, and how unsatisfying the spirit of the web age really is.

Before we begin, I want to offer one definition and two disclaimers.

First, in this book I will be using words like internet, web, social media, and digital technology. In most cases, these words will be used to refer to the same thing. This is important to acknowledge at the outset because, in technical terms, the internet, the web, social media, and digital technology are all distinct items. They share several things in common but are not the same thing. Throughout this book, however, these words will refer to one single idea: the disembodied electronic environment that we enter through connected devices for the purpose of accessing information, relationships, and media that are not available to us in a physical format.

Next, the first disclaimer: this book will not argue that Christians should stay off the internet. I’m not going to tell you to permanently unplug, find a cabin in the wilderness, and go “off the grid” so that you can be a better Christian. Not only would this be undoable for most of the people reading this; it would not accomplish what we might want it to. When Jesus prayed for his disciples a few hours before being crucified, he specifically prayed that instead of being taken out of the world, his followers would be preserved by the power of God’s truth (John 17:15–17). Our immersion in the world’s liturgies is not the deciding factor in our faithfulness to or love of Jesus. Rather, by identifying how the web shapes us, we can use these technologies more deliberately, more wisely, and more Christianly. To be in the world is not necessarily to be of the world.

Second, this book should not be read as a sermon by someone who has perfected what he is preaching. Something closer to the opposite is true: much of the last decade-plus of my life has been a struggle to reclaim my time, attention, and affection away from the ephemera of online existence. That struggle has probably seen more failures than victories. What follows is the result not of an exemplary lifestyle but of a journey to understand spiritual and mental tensions within myself and within others close to me.

The formative power of the web matters to me because I have experienced it in myself and in others. I have felt a change in the way I read and think that I believe is directly connected to how the web has dominated most of my adult life. I have noticed changes in myself and in people I know: not just personality tics but meaningful shifts in how we form our opinions, how we relate to those who disagree, and how we invest our time.

Many times over the last several years I have experienced a sense that the truths of Scripture feel foolish or implausible, not because of any strong argument I encountered against them, but simply because they felt out of step with the ideas and memes and mentalities that proliferate online. And especially in the past few years, I’ve seen and heard testimonies of genuine, God-fearing people who became deeply foolish—not because of intellectual deficiency, but by giving themselves over day after day to petty controversies, cheap outrage, and minute arguments. So many times, when these problems have emerged, a digital liturgy that took root in the heart has been the culprit.

This is the story for many of us. It’s a story about technology, yes. But more deeply, it’s a story about worship.

1  David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water,” commencement speech (2005), fs blog, accessed November 14, 2022, https://fs.blog/.

2  I first heard the term social internet from my friend Chris Martin. See his book Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2022).

3  Robert Bellah, cited in Carl Trueman, “How Expressive Individualism Threatens Civil Society,” Heritage Foundation, May 27, 2021, https://www.heritage.org/.

4  Trevin Wax, Rethink Yourself: The Power of Looking Up Before Looking In (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2020), 11.

5  See Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (New York: Basic, 2017).

6  “Share of the Population Using the Internet,” International Telecommunication Union, Our World in Data, accessed November 14, 2022, https://ourworldindata.org/.

7  Andrew Perrin and Sara Atske, “About Three-in-Ten US Adults Say They Are ‘Almost Constantly’ Online,” Pew Research Center, March 26, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/.

8  Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that asks about knowledge: how we can know things, what it means to believe correctly, etc.

9  James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 19–27.

Part 1

Truth and Technology

As we think about the formative power of online technology in our lives, we must start where all truth starts—with God. One of the reasons so few people can articulate the effects of the online world is that so few people have a baseline standard of human flourishing for comparison. The world is a thoroughly “tech-maximalist” place. As we will see, this is not an accident. Part of the reason is that much of our digital technology was invented according to a logic that sought to help humans transcend their humanness and achieve something more. Indeed, if there is truly nothing more to being human than endlessly optimizing ourselves, this makes perfect sense. Why not use every tool imaginable to escape the confines of our bodies?

Christianity, however, contradicts this narrative. As we open the Bible, God’s word to all humanity, we see a meaning and a purpose much different. We see that we are not self-made but created in another’s image. We see that we are not infinite or self-existent, but creatures who depend on the world around us and on each other. Most importantly, we see that the question of how we should live, rather than being an unknowable mystery or a self-chosen adventure, is a truth we must receive. There is an objectiveness to reality to which we as human creatures must conform if we are to live whole and well. The Bible calls our response to this objective reality “wisdom.” Wisdom is real; wisdom is embodied. And it is wisdom that is obscured in a digital world.

What is this wisdom? What does it consist of? And how exactly does our digital technology challenge our pursuit of wisdom? Those are the topics of part 1. My hope is to convince you in these pages that Scripture offers all of us a way of living that is both gloriously transcendent and radically practical. It is a gospel liturgy that offers staggeringly more than the enticing escape of digital life.

1