Saturday Afternoon Book Review: Tim Challies

Chris Ridgeway has spoken on the Theology of Facebook and wrote a thesis on media ecology and scripture during his time as my research assistant at North Park Theological Seminary. He blogs atwww.theodigital.com

We’ve got another early blip in the inevitable flurry-to-come of theology meets digital technology.  Christian blogger Tim Challies offers The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion, released April 2011 by  Zondervan.  Challies, a web designer in Ontario, runs on the Reformed side of the track, but generally speaks to a broad evangelical audience. His book feels penned to the same–pastors and thoughtful Christians should find it accessible, thoughtful, personal, and grounded.

Challies frames the book in his own experience living with glowing screens both day and night.  “Is it possible that these technologies are changing me?” he wonders.  To discern, he invites us to consider our own use of technology and add two additional facets:  critical investigation and biblical theology. The triad of experience, theory, and theology carries through the book, even structuring the application points in his helpful chapter summaries and reflection questions.

The Right Questions

Just a brief glance over the table of contents tells me that Challies has spent some time working in my favorite world of media ecology. If the Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman references weren’t an early clue, his chapter categories are consistent with anyone thinking carefully about the digital world we find ourselves in:  Mediation/Identity, Distraction, Informationalism, Truth/Authority, Visibility and Privacy. Pastors should jot down the list; Challies is addressing the right questions and we need more to follow his lead.

“A medium,” Challies defines, “is quite simply something that stands between.” Beginning with Mediation/Identity, he addresses our hours on Facebook and TV and the increase in Avatar-like living: where we extend who we are out into a digital world. Will this lead to a new Gnosticism?  Adam and Eve had unmediated contact with God, he writes, and our best relationships must do the same.  Here Challies pastoral heart jumps to his sleeve and remains in plain view throughout as he writes. What of marriages? What of unhindered intimacy with God?

Under the header of Distraction, we are introduced to the important rapidly morphing categories of time and space, speed and capacity. Our content-skimming and continuous partial attention–anyone watch TV with the laptop on?–is removing our ability for sustained, careful reflection. Carve out distraction free time, Challies exhorts, seek solitude and cultivate concentration.

The glut of Information is next, and here Challies looks at what the overabundance of data does to us.  At risk is confusing data and information for their deeper cousins knowledge and wisdom.  And our desires are changing. “We want to be interrupted,” he observes,  “because each interruption brings a new bit of information.”  (One pictures an un-named blogging Biblical professor (ahem…) jumping momentarily from a conversation in his North Park office to the quick beep that has alerted him to new  blog comments!)  Here Challies urges us to “get wisdom.”

Truth and Authority is next, and Wikipedia and Google are redefining it, says Challies.  He urges us to be cautious of  “truth by consensus” or “truth by relevance” models that undermine a basic pillar that God is the source of all truth.

And Visibility and Privacy is a description of the data-trail we leave with GPS signals and credit-card transactions for our lunch. With masses of our data out there, Challies advises caution in handing out free info.  Pastorally, he rightly exposes a key issue:  as we lead increasingly public lives, our reputation can glorify or dishonor our God. “What does your data trail say about you?” he asks.

As he tours each topic, Challies’ strength is his repeated pastoral emphasis on speaking the truth in love.  Have we thought about the Christian view on laughing at failures of others just because YouTube lets us do it?  Are we slowly choking from information lust and barely noticing?  His words are friendly but direct.

Not All the Right Answers

Yet, Tim Challies and I might have a fundamental difference in our theoretical lens. Challies often speaks of technology in objectifying terms.  “Technology is taking over my life”(185). Technology is an idol, a distraction, and a  barrier. Challies draws examples from all types of digital interaction, whether Facebook or cell phones. For each of these negatives, he analyzes his relationship with technology itself.

Here’s how I see it differently:  communications technologies are remarkably and stunningly human. Not only are they created by us (and have been since before the alphabet), but they mediate humanpresence. When Challies laments that his attempt to check e-mail only once a day constantly fails because his wife and clients need him, he illustrates the issue.  People!  Text messages and email messages are not interrupting our days.  Computers are not calling us. The people on the other end of the keyboard are–our friends and co-workers, small group members and family.

Digital technology fundamentally re-configures real life relationships.  Even more important than the question of how to live with technology, the question may be, how do we live with other people in a digitally mediated world?

This re-casts the questions of mediation and identity.  I can’t follow Challies when he locates mediated communication in the Fall rather than in Creation. Isn’t all our interaction with a transcendent God mediated (including Adam and Eve)?  Mediation is not simply sin, but the reality of an un-made Creator in relationship with a physical Creation.  The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ should point us here.  Mcluhan says “In Christ, the medium and the message are one and the same.” At issue is not mediation (its there!) but its perfect congruency with the God of the universe.  Sin exists on Facebook or the phone–no doubt!  But this is the same sin (and grace) we encounter when we are face to face, just re-proportioned.

Another view?  Different media carry different resolutions (McLuhan spoke of “hot” and “cold”), but not necessarily less of us.  I wonder if sometimes a typed message–composed and cut and paste and re-framed in composition, doesn’t carry a more deliberative slice of the human condition than face-to-face ever will.

On Wikipedia, Challies joins a wider chorus of dissent, yet here I worried about oversimplification. He particularly laments the loss of Brittanica-like expertise in knowledge and authority, replaced by amateur “consensus.” There is more here than I can briefly engage, and I agree that “communications revolutions tend to problematize authority relations” (so Edward Lamoureux ).  But “the expert”–an idea that rises largely in conjunction with the industrial revolution–is a title itself conferred by communities (see Carolyn Marvin).   To speak of expertise in relation to groups of people isn’t to reduce truth to a relativistic mush. It’s to recognize the human limits in points of view.  This epistemic humility is decidedly Biblical, and may be in part why the history of the church has placed so much value in the consensus of counsels . Can “open-source theology” be abused by lowest-common-denominator truth? Yes, and we might reject this. But maybe we have something to learn from the leveling effect of wikified knowledge.

A few additional ambiguities to mention. In places Challies laments online spaces where we have too much control of our presented identity, yet spends a chapter on the loss of control (I believe the latter is more accurate). He speaks of the greater depth found in some online contexts, but also of how digital technologies discourage depth. He advocates throttling or shutting down information inputs but also speaks of how this is nearly impossible in the new information culture.  I worry that this latter strategy is nearly like advocating keeping your clothing dry while swimming. Could Challies’ emphasis on wisdom be even better with an accent on spirit-filled discernment?

To be fair, these are common enigmas as we think more deeply about digital culture. Where will we land in our understanding?  I do think we must come to grasp how fundamental to the imago dei it is for us to devise new ways to communicate and extend our presence. Where does the technology begin and the human being end?

This is precisely why we need Challies’ book, and can only hope that it serves as a signal for more to rise to the challenge. His pastoral tone urges us to be more prayerful about our own digital lives, from Facebook to text messages. I believe portions of the work miss the mark on theory, over-objectifying technology and not fully engaging with the human and environmental aspects of the digital world.  But this is not a fad-theological topic, and with many to come, Challies gives us one of the best new structures with which to engage.  The Next Story takes us to the next step.