hughbiquitous

I’m starting to think that the web rots the mind.

That’s not an absolute statement, mind you. But I think that there’s some truth in the idea that “the medium is the message” and that our interaction with the web has an effect that is independent of the content we encounter there.

For example, television accustoms us to 22-minute conflict resolution and commercials popping up every so many minutes. There are similar issues with the web: as a blogger, I find myself trying to write everything in paragraphs of no more than four or five printed lines because, as a reader of online content, I know how the medium works.

(Indeed, see web design tip #10, “Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones. Information on your page should be designed for the short attention span of most Internet users. Keep paragraphs and sentences short unless context mandates otherwise…”)

The Need for Examination

Back in August I bookmarked a number of blog entries and articles expressing concerns about our technological saturation and its effects. The points were well taken—we need to examine our habits:

Keith Plummer: “Christians are prone to assess our use of information technologies solely on the basis of what kind of information is being conveyed with little thought given to how uncritical and excessive use of information technologies may have undesirable effects even when we are using them to communicate good things.”

Douglas Groothuis (quoted by Justin Taylor): “Any area of culture that decreases godliness and enhances worldliness must come under the loving discipline of Jesus Christ–for his glory, for our good, and for the good of those we serve. Christians need to withdraw from aspects of our technological culture … in order to gain perspective on ourselves, God, and our culture.”

John Mark Reynolds: “[The New Media] could also develop a nasty laziness in me. If I can write quickly, why refine my ideas? Why not hop from one idea to another without ever revisiting them? Doesn’t the public demand something new? This underestimates the public and threatens to leave me and any other new media writer severely weaker than we need be.”

Jerram Barrs: (sorry, it’s more than five lines…)

A good test of whether television is servant or master is, when your children have watched something, do they then go out and do something related to what they have seen? Is their imagination stimulated? Television is a servant when your children can watch a program then say, “Well that was fascinating. Let’s go and play Robin Hood,” or “Let’s go and do this thing.”

Is television stimulating your children’s interest and imagination, or is it actually having the opposite effect? When you turn it off, do they just lie around on the floor and say, “What am I going to do now?”

So, What Are You Going to Do Now?

When my church’s blog launched in 2004, the ideas I interacted with there stimulated my interest and imagination, and sure enough, I found myself saying, “what am I going to do now?” The answer came when I launched this blog in January 2005. It’s been fun and it’s definitely provoked me to greater and deeper thoughts (and clearer expressions of those thoughts, too). You might even say that blogging has become a discipline.

But there are times when I wonder if blogging has “jumped the shark.” (It should be noted that some say that the phrase, “jumped the shark,” has, itself, jumped the shark. But I digress.)

I think—I hope—the answer is “no,” but that blogs (and bloggers) are maturing. Hopefully the ideas are growing and the thoughts are stewing. Hopefully readers will get more comfortable reading longer paragraphs and writers will reward them with longer paragraphs worth reading.

Reasons to Believe’s David H. Rogstad has just completed a series of blog posts under the title “Intellectual Repentance,” dealing with 1 Corinthians 2. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) I might fuss with his characterization of Paul’s attitude toward reason and argument after the Areopagus event, but I’m right with him about this much:

In order to receive God’s gift of life, [the Corinthians] needed to repent. This repentance is not only from their moral failures. They must lose confidence in their independent, self-sufficient ways of thinking and come to a kind of “intellectual repentance.” We are told in many places in Scripture that human wisdom causes us to be puffed up with pride. For Paul to prepare an argument that appeals solely to the mind may, in fact, convince a mind, but he wants to do much more than simply convince them intellectually. He wants their hearts. (Intellectual Repentance, Part 2)

Now, I’m a big life-of-the-mind guy. In general, I think the 21st-century church is not sufficiently characterized by careful, disciplined, God-honoring thought. A student of Douglas Groothuis has said, “Christians should humbly try to be the smartest people on the planet,” and I wholeheartedly agree.

But there’s a trap that is ever-present when Christians seek intellectual formulations of faith: it becomes sterile. I’ve been listening to a series of lectures given by Michael Ramsden at the European Leadership Forum; he often admonishes his listeners that apologetics died in Europe when it became a sterile, academic discipline. Instead, any banners for intellectual Christianity ought to fly far behind the standard of the Gospel message itself. Put simply, the Gospel, with its transforming power, must come first. Any defense or explanation thereof must come thereafter.

There are all kinds of debates about apologetic methods—presuppositional vs. evidentialist apologetics, and so forth—but I’m beginning to think that’s just the sort of sterilizing phenomenon Ramsden (and others) warn against. I’m reminded that Francis Schaeffer tired of such affairs; he simply left them to the academy and went off to actually minister to people.

Similarly, William Lane Craig cautioned in one of his podcasts,

We must never let apologetics distract us from our primary mission, which is sharing the Gospel. And I would only use apologetics when the unbeliever has questions or objections to the Gospel message that we present. We must never make apologetics our focus of attention or the goal in interacting with nonbelievers. …Always get the Gospel out first, and then deal with the arguments and evidence in favor of the Gospel.

Likewise, Ravi Zacharias warns against letting our intellectual pursuits desiccate our ministry:

For those of us in who are in the ministry, we are immersed in [our message]. We are immersed in it. We speak it, we study it, we read it, we proclaim it, we sit around tables and interact with it. And there’s a point at which something very, very dangerous can happen. It’s what I call that danger point that comes in theological training when the Bible becomes merely a textbook that removes itself from becoming a fire within your bones, which it was when you entered in order to study it. And the challenge of the young theological student is to recognize that as much as he or she is critiquing all avenues of sacred writ (because we are there to defend it) and while we are going through authorship and date and this theory and that theory and higher-critical theories, at the end of the day we had better remember it is not we who are reading the book as much as that the book is reading us. (A Fish Out of Water: Loving People)

O God, help us forget ourselves. Help us to forsake technique in favor of trust in Your sovereignty; help us to be doers of the Word and not just defenders of its truth. Teach us to fear You more than men. Fix our eyes on the Cross, fuel the fires in our bellies, sharpen our minds to glorify You with the truth, soften our hearts to love a lost world, and ready us in every way to make disciples of the nations… Amen.