How Christians Should Think About Economics
Dr. Brian Baugus joins Michael to discuss God’s view of our money and how Christians should approach politics in light of economics.
“As I was just investigating digital bibles in general and who’s making them and how they affect us, I found that most software developers since the eighties have been evangelicals.
Part of that was going into a couple of different churches and asking half the group to read in print and half on their phones. And just seeing how they comprehended and what they saw in the text. There were some differences between men and women and a little bit in age groups, But there were interesting differences in what they saw and didn’t see depending on if they were on screen or in print.”
“God’s word never changes. It’s eternal, unchanging, and inerrant. It’s authoritative for us, but the medium we use to read it shapes what we see and don’t see, thereby shaping us.
And as we read on screens, it’s a different experience. Early, big, fat, ugly screens were hard to read. People had a lot of trouble with comprehension. As screens have gotten smaller and lighter, people are doing better at the comprehension part of it. But it’s more than that because you have a device that can cause distractions to come in at the same time. So when we quiz people, they’re less likely to be able to put things in order when they read on a screen because that act of moving and turning the page helps you see what’s before and after.”
“So if we go back to the fifties, sixties, and seventies, a lot more scholars had access to computers at universities. This was before there were personal computers at home. They did a few experiments with Greek and Hebrew to try to figure out some things and compare manuscripts.
They also used it to generate concordances. So someone did the entire Strong’s concordance by hand. Some of those were evangelical, and some of them weren’t. Some were just scholars; some were business people trying to sell things. Then, in the eighties, you started to have those first personal computers and saw some believers in technology realize they could put these two things together, which would be awesome.
The technologist in me wants to make stuff because I can and then see if it’ll work. But I think it’s something that God wants us to do. Even from Genesis 1-2, He tells us to be fruitful and multiply; to fill the earth and have dominion over it.”
“I often ask audiences, ‘do you think technology is good, bad, or neutral?’ And every single time, 5% say good, 5% say bad, and 90% say neutral. Every time, they think all that matters is to use it for good and not for bad. And really, that’s how I grew up, thinking I wanted to use technology for the glory of God and avoid all the bad stuff. I didn’t realize that even when I’m using it for good things, there’s still some formative impact on me.
And the example I always give is a shovel. You know that you’re going to dig a hole; you’re going to change the world. But after you dig for a while, your hands get blisters which turn into calluses. And it doesn’t matter if you’re building a church or ax-murdering somebody and putting their body in the ground. Either way, the morality of the situation doesn’t change whether or not that tool shapes you as you’re using it. So this is true of all things. So we’re trying to be attentive to those things and think about how they’re shaping us as we do it.
The challenge is that today’s technology is going so much faster, and it’s not just shaping our hands but our minds and souls, which is harder to detect. So we can do some really powerful things with technology, but do we use that time well? What do we fill it with if we save a bunch of time? And sometimes we fill it with mindless things that aren’t helpful.”
“What do we want the outcome to be? Do we want someone just to be able to recall facts? We’re trying to think about the outcome on the other end. When it comes to the Christian life, there’s always this concern: since we have access to everything, is it shaping us the way we want to be shaped?
We want to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. We want the Holy Spirit to do that. Just having access to the Bible doesn’t do that. Something happens when we memorize and meditate on scripture, but we can’t meditate without memorizing. Being able to look up all this stuff is great, but we also want to decide if we want to do something old-school that will be formative for us. We need to think about how we want to shape our minds and souls with the tools we use.”
“I asked many people at different churches how they use all this. It ranged from people who use the You Version on their phone to someone with really deep Bible software. What I found interesting is that many of these people using it would say, ‘I love that I can get the answer.’ And there is an answer. But we also know that sometimes the text of the Bible can be a little bit multifaceted.
We believe that the Bible is something the average person can know without necessarily needing a church or some authoritative interpretation. This made it seem like people believed they could find the right answer if they downloaded the ‘right’ app. That’s the type of formative power that technology can have. It shifts our expectations of what we think the text is and what we think we need to know.”
“When we talk about these different technology shifts in the Bible, we talk about how there were scrolls and the codex, the early handwritten books, and then the printing press.
In each of those cases, we replaced what we had before. The digital Bible won’t replace print. We’ve seen with paper books that people still like those. What we’re looking at now is more of a multimedia environment. We all probably look up the Bible on our phones for a quick hit when we don’t have it. We get out our print Bible when we want to be more devotional.
We get on our computers when we want to study. Something that we see a lot of now is audiobooks. That is a powerful thing that we didn’t have for a long time. When it comes to technology, we should always be aware of what’s happening. If we think the print version of a book will be good for us, we need to make the extra effort to find it. At the same time, developers have to think carefully about what we are trying to get people to do.”
“This orientation is called hopeful entrepreneurial pragmatism. So ‘hopeful’ is this idea that most evangelicals tend to have a more positive view of technology. We know there’s bad stuff, but we choose to use the good parts of it.
The ‘entrepreneurial’ component is that we are all used to experimenting and trying new things. When people came to the Americas, we didn’t have a way to fund churches, so you just had to experiment. That’s built into the DNA of American religion. The ‘pragmatism’ component is finding out if what we did worked. Did this ministry plan work? It’s not always whether or not it’s right or wrong, it’s just about whether or not it worked. Now, sometimes that’s great because it helps us to work with people who are different from us on peripheral issues. After all, we want the gospel to go out.
But on the other hand, sometimes this can be negative for us because we’re concerned with the end goal. We partner with people we shouldn’t. We see this a lot in American politics. What a lot of this book is doing is describing what’s happening and not as much trying to tell you what to do.”
“I had two groups of people read Jude, and I asked what they thought. The print reader saw a God who was judgemental. And the phone readers saw a God who was faithful. But the print reader said God, who was judgmental in their eyes, encouraged them. Whereas the phone readers who saw a faithful God were discouraged by Him. When we have a printed Bible, it feels like something that’s solid to us.
However, we associate a lot of anxiety with our phones. When we turn on social media, most of the verses we see are happy, not judgemental. So what we see on screen is a happy God. But our phones are sometimes the things that make us sad.
We see a lot of things we feel anxious about. So the God of the screen is nice but makes you sad, and the printed God is probably a little bit more complicated. So it is important to think about how your phone shapes you.”
John Dyer (Ph.D., Durham University) is VP for educational technology and professor of theology and sociology at Dallas Theological Seminary. He has also been a technology creator for more than 20 years, building tools used by Facebook, Google, Apple, Anheuser-Busch, the Department of Defense, and the Digital Bible Society. His open-source code is used on more than 40% of all websites. Dr. Dyer speaks and writes on technology, faith, and education for several publications, including Gizmodo, Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, and books such as From the Garden to the City, Ecclesiology for a Digital Church, and People of the Screen. John and his brilliant wife Amber have two bright and hilarious children, Benjamin and Rebecca. You can find out more about him at https://j.hn/.
People of The Screen by Dr. John Dyer
From The Garden to The City by Dr. John Dyer
Reading The Bible in The Digital Age Interview
Habits and Hermeneutics of Digital Bible Readers by Dr. John Dyer
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