TECHNOLOGY

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.

They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not
argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities
and commercials.

—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

We find ourselves, whether we like it or not, in a hyper-technological

age. Many of us live in constant contact with our devices, in particular
our smartphones. We use our devices to praise technology; we use them
to critique technology. Even the Neo-Luddites have email and a preferred
hashtag today.

From the beginning, God and man have engaged in complex creation,
building complicated realities from created matter. The crude tools of the
ancient world may not seem technological, but they surely are and were.
Clothes, food, shelter, weapons, implements—these and many more
products enhanced the lives of their users, allowing greater efficiency in
daily tasks, augmenting the creative capacities of mankind, and enabling
humanity to probe the mysteries of existence, transcendence, and
greatness. Technology is not the focus of the Bible, but the Bible
contains numerous instances of technological achievement and
technological idolatry. Technology in both Word and world is used to
praise God; technology in both Word and world is used to defame and
push away from God.

In this chapter, we consider Scripture’s conception of technology. We

can’t use a Bible’s index to look up technology, but we can put together
several passages from across the biblical canon. In doing so, we find that
the Word of God both commends and critiques technology. From this
perspective, we transition to consider several matters related to a
theology of the body, intertwined as these subjects frequently are in our
age. In sum, we see that our hyper-technological age bears both
challenge and promise for a vibrant Christian anthropology.

Creation, Pride, and the Holy Meal: Complex

Crafting in the Bible
God is the original technologist; he performed the first miracle of the
Bible: creation ex nihilo. Like a massive gong struck with superlative
force, the supernatural theme of miraculous, extra-creational
involvement reverberates through the rest of the biblical text. God is not
the creation, but neither is he removed from it by a fathomless gap. He
is near it, watching over it, reaching into it. In the beginning, he makes
something from nothing; in the end, he will make something into
nothing, executing judgment in order to prepare the world for his blood-
bought people.

In creating, the Lord shows us the essential nature of divine activity:

out of the overflow of his righteous character, the Lord builds up,
complexifies, and creates beauty. He is not indifferent to matter, to
existence, to life; he loves matter, he births existence, he sustains all life
(Psalm 135; Col 1:17; 2 Pet 3:7). Further, the Lord’s creative work does
not render a dull creation, nor his craftsmanship a mute and merely
existing humanity. The Lord brings the creation into full flowering.
Through his powerful work, the birds figure out their flight patterns, the
fish know to swim in schools, rain pours out of the sky and returns to the
clouds. The creation is not filled with wonder and beauty by accident; it
is filled with wonder and beauty because God made it to function well.

The human body is the original technological wonder. Designed by

the Lord himself, the body of mankind represents many supercomputers
effectively working together—often seamlessly—for human flourishing.
The body, truly, is a marvel of symmetry, synchronicity, and
specialization. We think, for example, of what transpires in order for our
eyes to comprehend, say, the words you are currently reading. Michael
Behe’s summary—edited for length—is worth quoting, given our
tendency to take bodily workings for granted:

Here is a brief overview of the biochemistry of vision. When light

first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called
11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal.
The change in the shape of retinal forces a change in the shape of
the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound.…
When attached to activated rhodopsin and its entourage, the
phosphodiesterase acquires the ability to chemically cut a
molecule called cGMP (a chemical relative of both GDP and GTP).…
Another membrane protein that binds cGMP is called an ion
channel.… When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of
 cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, the ion channel closes,
causing the cellular concentration of positively charged sodium
ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the
cell membrane which, finally, causes a current to be transmitted
down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by
the brain, is vision.1

I quote this extensive scientific breakdown of the phenomenon of sight

because it reveals how much we take for granted and, more importantly,
just how complex the ordinary processes of our bodies are. God
designed the eye and gave us sight. Simply to read a line of text
requires a flawless fourteen-step process, with none of these steps
occurring through conscious choice. God, the original technologist, has
opened our eyes to the wonder of activated rhodopsin serving in concert
with phosphodiesterase in support of the humble act of reading.

Such complexity makes sense to the Christian. We believe that a God

of infinite intelligence and unlimited power formed us by his irresistible
will. Beyond the individual person, the Lord fitted the man and woman
together; he gave the first couple the ability to perform a natural
miracle, the creation of a living being. We would not commonly label the
feats of pregnancy and childbearing “technological,” but neither can we
miss that every child is a little marvel, a sign to humanity that
complexity and beauty pervade our lives. A husband and wife may join
in one-flesh union, and one flesh may result. Only a divine mind could
yield such wondrous outcomes.

The early chapters of the Old Testament show us that the Lord uses
technology of a kind. He took animal skins and clothed the sin-stricken
man and woman in them, an early sign of God-given imputed
righteousness (Gen 3:21).2 Cain built a city after striking down his
brother, showing that the human race is spreading and clustering (Gen
4:17). Some time later, we learn of the tower of Babel, perhaps the most
striking picture of engineering in the Old Testament. In Genesis 11, the
11 Michael Behe, “Evidence for Intelligent Design from Biochemistry,” in
Christian Apologetics: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed. Khaldoun A.
Sweis and Chad V. Meister (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 101–2.

22 For more on the doctrine of imputation, see John Piper, Counted

Righteous in Christ: Should We Abandon the Imputation of Christ’s
Righteousness? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002); Murray,
Redemption Accomplished and Applied, 117–31 (see chap. 5, n. 31).
people shared aspirations for feats of greatness and built toward that
lofty end:

The whole earth had the same language and vocabulary. As people
migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar
and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let us make
oven-fired bricks.” (They used brick for stone and asphalt for
mortar.) And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a
tower with its top in the sky. Let us make a name for ourselves;
otherwise, we will be scattered throughout the earth.” (Gen 11:1–
4)

The construction of the city and tower contained both positive and
negative elements. The people employed their powers of creativity to
enable complex building. They used an oven, a device that requires
careful handling, to produce the building blocks of their structures. 3 They
deployed different materials, making both bricks and asphalt, in order to
bind the edifice together. Here is human ingenuity on display. As anyone
who has worked a day on construction will know, planning and executing
a major building project is anything but unintellectual. It involves
considerable skill and planning. These God-given abilities were on full
display at Babel.4

So too was human pride. The very end of the project in question was
the display of human greatness. We hear nothing honoring the Lord in
this text; we see no indication that the people understood themselves as
little creators due to the kind providence of the greater Creator. The

33 The calculated nature of this proud effort shows through when one
considers the technical process necessary to make a structure in
southern Mesopotamia: “Mudbrick, however, is not durable, so it was a
great technological development to discover that baking the brick made
it as durable as stone. This was still an expensive process, since the kilns
had to be fueled. As a result, mudbrick was used as much as possible,
with baked brick used only for outer shells of important buildings or
where waterproofing was desirable.” Walton, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, Deuteronomy, 60 (see chap. 1, n. 22).

44 The people of God are emulating the pagan nations in their building
project. See E. A. Speiser, Genesis: A New Translation with Introduction
and Commentary, The Anchor Bible, vol. 1, (New York: Doubleday, 1963),
75–76.
people wished to make themselves impressive. 5 They wanted “a name”
that would echo throughout the earth. They did not want to spread over
the land in the postdiluvian age, taking dominion of it once more,
claiming it for God as in his original instructions to humanity. They had
lost the mission, the charge of their Maker, so they gave themselves
their own decree. Instead of spreading across the earth, they built what
amounted to a secular temple, a landmark to human excellence. Instead
of magnifying the greatness of the Lord, they decided to put their own
abilities on display, seeking a reputation among the living. Instead of
risking their safety in obedience to the holy mandate of God, they
hunkered down in Babel, bringing the expansion of human dominion to a
crawl.6

Technology does not cause this outbreak of evil. Technology facilitates

the instinctual expression of evil. The call to take dominion is a call from
God to use every bit of horsepower preloaded into our beings to honor
God. The follower of the Lord does not read Gen 1:26–28 and come away
thinking he should hold back a portion of his intellect, physical strength,
or passion from the mandate of God. We read about God’s work as
Creator earlier in the chapter and then consider afresh his summons to a
dominion-taking existence and recognize we have exhilarating
possibilities before us.7

55 The people are of the earth, but we note that the passage presents
God as coming down from the heavens in verses 5 and 7. On this point
see Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed.
John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 31.

66 Geerhardus Vos argues that the Babel project is an attempt to find a

“centre of unity, such as would keep the human race together.” This is
certainly part of the problem. Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and
New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948; Eugene, OR: Wipf and
Stock, 2003), 59. Citations refer to the Wipf and Stock edition.

77 The divine work of creation—as opposed to the bloodless evolutionary

process—inspires us to create and to organize. Behind the work of
creation is the mind of an artist and a technologist. Kuyper makes this
distinction plain: “Thus you recognize that the cosmos, instead of being
a heap of stones, loosely thrown together, on the contrary presents to
our mind a monumental building erected in a severely consistent style.”
Kuyper, “Calvinism and Science,” lecture, Princeton Univ., October 19,
1898, Princeton, NJ, in Lectures on Calvinism (1931; repr., Grand Rapids:
 But Babel shows us what happens when we humans use our God-
endowed capacities for ourselves. The mind, body, and soul are made
for holistic, all-consuming worship of the divine. In his Adamic sinfulness,
however, mankind employs mind, body, and soul for holistic, all-
consuming worship of the creation, with particular respect to the self.
Man takes the physical material and the critical powers embedded in his
intellect, and he fashions the things of the earth—the matter made by
God himself—as objects of worship and means of pride. The man-made
idol draws the sinful heart’s adoration, yes, but also represents the
created being’s attempt to play God, and thereby register certain worldly
things as worthy of fealty and praise. Knowing both of these darkened
desires—the hunger to idolize what is not God and to take the
authoritative liberty of identifying idolatry-worthy ends—equips us to
spot the lie in the technology that still tries to tower over us in a
postlapsarian world.

We note as well what the people try to build: a city and a tower. The
people wish to unite themselves in even deeper communion with one
another, a move made easy by their shared language. They use speech,
an ability given to them by the speaking God, to share commonality not
in God but in their non-God-focused humanness. 8 Their “community” is
not necessarily a positive reality. 9 We observe other problems as well. In
the tower, the people create a beacon of transcendence. The sinful
human heart, it seems, has not lost interest in the concept of grandeur,
but rather finds grandeur in created things. Instead of majestic
structures pointing to heaven by intention, such edifices point downward
to man. Even after Adam’s fall, humanity still reaches upward but
outside of God; we reach upward to lift ourselves upward. God has set
eternity in our hearts, but our sins twist even this spiritual instinct, real
as it is (Eccl 3:11).10

Eerdmans, 2000), 106.

88 On the uniqueness of human speech, see Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of

Speech (New York: Little, Brown, 2016).

99 Derek Kidner argues that this text shows “that unity and peace are
not ultimate goods: better division than collective apostasy (cf. Luke
12:51).” Kidner, Genesis, 119 (see chap. 2, n. 24).

010 R. Kent Hughes zeroes in on the narcissism of this effort: “the

unadorned belief that man by his superior effort could reach God betrays
the fatal delusion of all man-made religion. This delusion is at the heart
 As happens in numerous places when the pride of man rears itself,
the Lord judges Babel. He comes down, confuses their speech, and
scatters them across the land (7–8). He does not wipe out the
technological proclivities of the people, as we see in the storyline of
Scripture.11 But he does introduce a significant degree of chaos into
human interaction, frustrating the connective ability of the race he
made. In the starkest of terms, people are divided by words. That which
gave life to the earth, which created all things in perfect harmony, now
splits the race asunder. We still speak, but we do not all speak the same
language, and so we find commonality at even a basic level only with
strain. All this owes to the human desire to be great, and the expression
of this pride through technological prowess.

Already the relationship between mankind and technology is a

fraught one. We gain both helpful and unhelpful examples of
technological engagement in successive texts. The book of Exodus sets
both kinds in close company. In Exodus 31, the Lord specially indicates
his blessing on the craftsman Bezalel. He is filled with “God’s Spirit, with
wisdom, understanding, and ability in every craft to design artistic works
in gold, silver, and bronze, to cut gemstones for mounting, and to carve
wood for work in every craft” (Exod 31:3–5). Every facet of Bezalel’s
artisanship depends on serious creative ability and requires the ability to
engage in robust engineering. So too with Oholiab and all the faithful
designers who labor on the tabernacle; they must create an ark, a pure
gold lampstand, multiple altars, and specially woven garments, among
other products (6–11). Clearly the Lord is deeply honored by such skilled
labor.12 The tabernacle, the forerunner to the more resplendent temple,

of every religious enterprise apart from the gospel because the world’s
religions all teach that works bring spiritual advance—as in an improved
karma or works-righteousness. Collective apostasy had engulfed the
descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth as they stacked their bricks up
to heaven.” Hughes, Genesis, 171 (see chap. 2, n. 7).

111 Kidner suggests that the Lord is acting graciously here, not as a
“rival” to the people. He intervenes in act of common grace to stop the
spread of sin. Kidner, Genesis, 119 (see chap. 2, n. 24).

212 “This text is important for understanding the relationship that the
Creator seeks with creative and skilled people. The Lord created a
beautiful and good world. God called people, gifted them, and filled
them with the Spirit to participate in bringing beauty into the world as
is a kind of counter-Babel, however distantly. It showcases human
ingenuity of the vertical kind.13

Just one chapter later, Aaron forms an idol, a golden calf for the
people to worship. He does so by using “an engraving tool” (Exod 32:4).
At one moment, the biblical text shows us technology gone right; at the
next, it shows us technology gone wrong. Complex craftsmanship may
create the center of national worship, or it may yield the very
incarnation of sin itself. This proves true throughout Israel’s history; the
kings of the nation undertake projects that glorify the Lord even as they
build monuments to their own supposed renown. Through it all, the Bible
stands at a distance from such prideful making. “Some take pride in
chariots,” says the Psalmist of a fearsome innovation in ancient warfare,
“and others in horses, but we take pride in the name of the Lord our
God” (Ps 20:7).

Technology in the New Testament

The New Testament begins with a marvel of engineering that far
outstrips any human endeavor. Through the Holy Spirit, Mary conceives
the God-man, Jesus Christ. How striking that the greatest anthropological
miracle known to human history is performed not by a scientific genius,
but by God. The Lord puts the human race on notice in the incarnation.
Humanity reaches its heights only through the agency of God, not that of
man. Karl Barth says it well: “It means that God Himself—acting directly

God continues to do in every generation. Also I have given skill to all

the craftsmen. They came from every tribe, qualified by their created
and developed ability. The construction of the tabernacle required all
kinds of skilled people: spinners, weavers, tailors, dyers, metallurgists,
silversmiths, woodworkers, lapidaries, perfumers, and tanners.” James K.
Bruckner, Exodus, New International Biblical Commentary (Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson, 2008), 255.

313 John Mackay shows that Bezalel received both a command but also a
summons to creativity, which is truly the happy lot of every worker in
God’s kingdom. “For instance, he had been told that there were to be
cherubim woven into the draperies, but how exactly they were to be
portrayed was a matter for Bezalel’s artistry. ‘Work in wood’ is not just
cutting wood into planks. It refers to something closer to the skills of a
cabinet maker, carving and ornamenting wood.” John L. Mackay, Exodus,
A Mentor Commentary (Fearn, UK: Mentor, 2001), 514–15.
in His own and not in human fashion—stands at the beginning of this
human existence and is its direct author. It is He who gives to man in the
person of Mary the capacity which man does not have of himself, which
she does not have and which no man could give her.” 14 Barth uses the
word miracle to describe this event, an important word for our
considerations. What term, after all, is more an affront to the secular
mind than miracle?15

In definite contrast to even the most skilled fallen entrepreneur, Jesus

enjoys total and unquestioned sovereignty over the earth. The thrall in
which Christ holds the creation owes not to an unlocked technique—an
advantage Jesus gains through some form of ontological upgrade—but to
the divinized, Spirit-empowered humanity Christ possesses. What
technologist would not wish to exercise perfect control over the weather,
rule the sea, heal the sick, and raise the dead? That which sinful
humanity strains to do and to be, Jesus effortlessly does and is. The
Gospels speak to our hyper-technological age not so much by explicit
rebuke as by implicit corollary. Jesus—and no feat of human engineering,
no burst of technological insight—is the true marvel.

We shall probe these matters further in our final chapter. For now, it is
enough to cast a spotlight on the God-man, the one who reminds us that
we are no longer justified in looking for a great king, a great feat, or a
transcendent human person. We do not squelch interest in technology
and complex creation as the church. We do, however, note that the
terminus of human greatness has come. The Son of God cannot be
outshone. Knowing this fact of facts influences the way we engage the
made world. Coming face to face with the truth in embodied form affects
our view of technology. Meeting the Messiah through repentant faith
corrects the messianic expectations of the modern world. We cheer on
advances in science and medicine, workplace efficiency, and even in-
game streaming; but we do so with an asterisk in our minds at all times.
No matter what Silicon Valley produces, it will never come within 10,000

414 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, The Doctrine of Reconciliation,

ed. T. F. Torrance and G.W. Bromiley, trans. G. W. Bromiley (London: T&T
Clark, 2004), 1: 207.

515 “This is the miracle of the Virgin Birth as it indicates the mystery of
the incarnation, the first attestation of the divine Sonship of the man
Jesus of Nazareth, comparable with the miracle of the empty tomb at His
exodus from temporal existence.” Barth, 207.
miles of the throne room of God, where the crucified and resurrected Son
of God sits at the Father’s right hand.

Human life span may continue to lengthen; if so, good. But the
lengthening of our days will not mean and cannot mean that we may
become gods ourselves. We hear such promises today, provided we are
paying attention to our surroundings. The believer, however, knows that
God has done in Christ what no man can do in himself. The point, the
apex, and the end of history have already dawned. There is no room for
any other messiah, whether political, technological, ideological, or
otherwise. There is no possibility of a miracle greater than the coming of
the second person of the Godhead to earth. Stephen Wellum captures
the unique nature of Christ’s coming as a “divine intrusion—the last
great culminating eruption of the power of God into the plight of
humanity.”16 Christ’s coming was an intrusion in his day, and it is an
intrusion in ours.

Jesus, interestingly, did not lead his followers into a cave. When he
came and began his ministry, Jesus took the world as it was. He worked
a technological trade, carpentry, and built structures with his hands,
using his mind to solve numerous problems unique to such work. When
he entered his earthly ministry, Jesus made frequent, even surprising,
references to the material world, much of it existing due to human
technology. He spoke of cities and lamps (Matt 5:14–16); houses built on
different foundations (Matt 7:24–27); city gates (Matt 7:13–14); fishing
nets (Matt 13:47–50); oil lamps (Matt 25:1–13); and investing money,
activity dependent on market exchange (Matt 25:14–30).17

Perhaps the most unexpected biblical citation of technological

achievement emerges from Christ’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper. The
holy meal itself depends upon human engineering:

616 Stephen J. Wellum, God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of Christ,
Foundations of Evangelical Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016),
238.

717 Jeffrey L. Nyhoff and Steven H. VanderLeest, “What Does God Tell Us
about Technology?” Being Fluent and Faithful in a Digital World, Calvin
College, 2005,
https://www.calvin.edu/academic/rit/web‌Book/chapter1/lesson2/bible.ht
m.
 As they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, gave it
to the disciples, and said, “Take and eat it; this is my body.” Then
he took a cup, and after giving thanks, he gave it to them and
said, “Drink from it, all of you. For this is my blood of the covenant,
which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. But I tell
you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until
that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
After singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. (Matt
26:26–30)

We would not likely associate the Supper with craftsmanship. Yet the
very meal that memorializes a spiritual event—the life-giving, life-
sacrificing death of Christ—depends upon a most grainy set of tasks:
bread making and grape pressing. In order to celebrate together the
atoning work of Jesus, the church needed access to those who could
harvest wheat, mill it, create the right dough mixture, and bake it. In
addition, someone had to grow grapes, harvest them, crush them, and
ferment them. Both the baking and wine-making processes involved
substantial labor, specialized utensils, and expert oversight.

We would not confuse the Lord’s Supper with a science fair project or
a religious invention. We would, however, identify the commendation of
technology and craftsmanship inherent in the memorial feast honoring
the cornerstone act of Christianity, the atonement. 18 This is how
enchanted the Christian worldview is: even bread and wine acquire
eternal significance.19 The holy meal, a feast rooted in Passover rescue
and offered in celebration of the king who rules from a cross, does not

818 Zwingli’s “memorial” view, Ware shows convincingly, was not nearly
as “mere” or symbolic as is sometimes alleged. Bruce A. Ware, “The
Meaning of the Lord’s Supper in the Theology of Ulrich Zwingli (1484–
1531),” in The Lord’s Supper: Remembering and Proclaiming Christ Until
He Comes, NAC Studies in Bible and Theology (Nashville: B&H Academic,
2011), 229–47.

919 Blomberg notes that this is a “common loaf.” There is nothing special
about it in spiritual terms, in other words. Craig Blomberg, Matthew, The
New American Commentary, vol. 22 (Nashville: B&H, 1992), 390.
ontologically become supernatural.20 The bread and wine do, however,
point to supernatural realities, even the salvation of the wicked. 21

The atonement itself witnessed the Son of God dying on a torture

device. Here again the Christian faith bumps into technology in a
surprising way. This crude innovation—if it may be called that—allowed
the Romans to inflict maximal misery on lawbreakers. Jesus Christ died
on this awful implement, and he did so as the Father’s satisfactory
offering for sin (Isa 53:10). This matters because the Son of God did not
assuage the just and perfect wrath of the Father against sinners in the
abstract. He did not offer a lecture in the synagogues that shifted the

020 Jesus bases the meal in Passover but reworks the ceremony: “By
identifying the cup of wine as ‘my blood poured out’ Jesus adds to the
symbolism of the broken bread in v. 26: it is his own imminent death that
is the basis of his new interpretation of the Passover. The blood of the
Passover lamb featured prominently in the original Passover ritual (Exod
12:7, 13, 22–23), but now it will be Jesus’ blood which is his people’s
salvation. But the lamb’s blood was smeared on the doorposts, certainly
not drunk; the idea would have been unthinkable to a Jew, for whom the
consumption of any blood was strictly forbidden. Yet now the disciples,
who have just been invited to ‘eat Jesus’ body,’ are invited also to ‘drink
Jesus’ blood.’ ” R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, The New
International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2007), 993.

121 In contradistinction to the low-key way many evangelicals might

approach the Lord’s Supper (experientially, that is), the Supper may be
seen as a triumphant ceremony, a victory meal as after a great battle.
The Supper is also a foretaste of the long-promised feasting in the new
heavens and new earth, where delicious food and wine flow (see Isa
25:6; Rev 19:6–9). The Supper, John Mark Hicks argues, comes in
“fulfillment in the new covenant meal of the inaugurated kingdom (the
church) as well as the eschatological banquet. When the church eats this
meal, it eats the new covenant Passover (or thanksgiving meal) and it
does so with the expectation of eschatological victory. It eats in the light
of the resurrected Lord who has conquered death and will remove the
disgrace of his people. The supper is a meal shared with the risen Lord.
This eschatological victory is won on the ground of the blood of the new
covenant and the sacrificial offering of the body of Christ.” John Mark
Hicks, “The Lord’s Table: A Covenant Meal,” Leaven 3, no. 3 (December
1995): 6.
balance; he did not simply announce a new way of life anchored in
righteous deeds; he did not buy back the guilty through a monetary
transaction. The Son of God died on a tree, albeit one fashioned into a
death-weapon. We track with Bavinck on this point:

By the power of love, he laid down life itself and, fully conscious
and with a firm will, entered the valley of the shadow of death.
There he was, and felt, forsaken by God, so that in precisely that
fashion he might be able to taste death for everyone (Heb. 2:9).…
Christ was made to be a sin and a curse for us, that in him we
might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13).
He is the expiation for our sins; he purchased us for God by his
blood and cleansed us from all our sins (1 John 1:7; 2:2; Rev. 5:9;
7:14). He offered himself up once for all for the sins of the people
and thereby secured an eternal redemption (Heb. 1:3; 2:17; 7:27;
9:12; 10:12). He bore on sins on the tree and redeemed us by his
blood. (1 Pet. 1:18; 2:24)22

It was a tree that led the first Adam to leave Eden in disgrace; it was a
tree that led to the deliverance of all the children of God from sin. If ever
a God-fearing person redeemed technology for divine ends, Jesus did.

All Christian doctrine begins with revelation, without which we would

not know God.23 This was no rote affair; the inscripturation of the Bible
transpired through a technical process. 24 Holy men of God received the

222 Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in

Christ, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,
2006), 390.

323 “God’s purpose in revelation is that we may know him personally as

he is, may avail ourselves of his gracious forgiveness and offer of new
life, may escape catastrophic judgment for our sins, and venture
personal fellowship with him.” Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and
Authority, vol. 2, God who Speaks and Shows (Waco, TX: Word, 1976),
31. See the reflection on Henry’s method by Paul House, “Hope,
Discipline, and the Incarnational Scholar: Carl F. H. Henry’s Motives,
Methods, and Manners,” in Essential Evangelicalism: The Enduring
Influence of Carl F. H. Henry, ed. Matthew J. Hall and Owen Strachan
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 115–33.

424 See Charles E. Hill, “ “The Truth Above All Demonstration”: Scripture
in the Patristic Period to Augustine,” in The Enduring Authority of the
oracles of God, using their backgrounds, trainings, and personalities to
communicate divine truth. This was both a miraculous and a resolutely
practical act, as Benjamin B. Warfield lays out:

It is this final act in the production of Scripture which is technically

called “inspiration”; and inspiration is thus brought before us as, in
the minds of the writers of the New Testament, that particular
operation of God in the production of Scripture which takes effect
at the very point of the writing of Scripture—understanding the
term “writing” here as inclusive of all the processes of the actual
composition of Scripture, the investigation of documents, the
collection of facts, the excogitation of conclusions, the adaptation
of exhortations as means to ends and the like—with the effect of
giving to the resultant Scripture a specifically supernatural
character, and constituting it a Divine, as well as human, book. 25

To record divine revelation, the biblical author took a stylus, which does
not grow on trees, and parchment, which one cannot pluck out of the
ground. In the power and influence of the Spirit, he wrote the original
manuscripts of the biblical documents and passed them on for copying
and transcription. Here as in other facets of Christian theology and
practice, we see the people of God using the common grace-filled world
of God to maximize the glory of God by transmitting the Word of God.
More than we may recognize, our faith depends on the products and
expertise of enterprising image-bearers.26

Our appreciation and our amazement only grow when we consider

the spread of the gospel in church history. Without central planning,
while frequently under the boot of Roman authorities, the early church
sent the gospel message and the biblical manuscripts all around the
ancient world. The church did not sit back on its heels, striving to avoid
civilized society like a countess in a weed patch, but rather took full

Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016),

85.

525 The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, ed. James Orr

(Chicago: Howard-Severance, 1915), s.v. “inspiration, 8–18.”

626 The divine element, as in the incarnation of the Son of God, is the
dominant factor in inspiration. But this affirmation must never allow us
to omit or take lightly the human factor, superintended as it was by the
Spirit (2 Pet 1:19–21).
advantage of the highly developed Roman transport system—both land
and sea—to disperse witnesses and plant churches. 27 Without Roman
roads and Roman ships, the church would not have known such
explosive growth.

So too with the printing press in the Reformation age. Though poor
Gutenberg went into debt to print the works of Luther and others, he
succeeded in launching the print onslaught of the Reformation, creating
the tipping point of this movement.28 George Whitefield, the great
evangelist, used the growing medium of newspapers to promote his
evangelistic events and drew crowds beyond colonial imagining in the
eighteenth century.29 Billy Graham and his colleagues took to the
airwaves, the television, and the constricted space of the mid-twentieth-
century airplane to tell the postwar world of Christic hope. 30 In our time,
most Christian ministries use the internet and engage social media to
find and grow their audience. Technological innovations, often pioneered
by unbelievers, have led to unthinkable reach over several millennia.
Israel was influential in its context; the church has the world for its
parish.

But the church also must combat technology and suffer its ill effects.
The same Roman roads that sped the gospel on its way to unreached
peoples carried Christians to suffering and death. The same printing
press that unleashed the Protestant voice also enabled the rise of a
concomitant movement, the Enlightenment, with its secular body of
thought.31 Edwards and Spurgeon printed millions of words; so too did
Voltaire and Darwin. The military technology that defended the innocent

727 See Stark, The Rise of Christianity (see chap. 4, no. 32).

828 See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern

Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); Albert Kapr, Johann
Gutenberg: The Man and His Invention, trans. Douglas Martin (Aldershot,
Hants: Scolar, 1996).

929 See Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the
Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, Library of Religious Biography (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).

030 See Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of

American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997).

131 See Philipp Blom, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of

the European Enlightenment (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
was used to savage them as well, leading to more deaths in the
twentieth century than in all other centuries combined. 32 The Nazis used
experimental science to pioneer one dark art after another culminating
in the gas chambers, which exterminated millions of Jews and other
Europeans.33 Enhanced medicine and nutritional knowledge originating
in the modern world has shot life expectancy into the sky and brought
untold happiness to many; but the bright minds of science have also
pioneered new ways to kill unborn children, prematurely dispose of the
elderly, and warp the body.34

A proper theology of technology neither unreservedly cheers nor

unequivocally denounces it. As we have seen, both by explicit teaching
and by inference, the Bible urges caution in this realm. More than this,
our Christocentric Scripture punctures the fundamental delusion of many
modern technologists. We cannot live forever outside of God. Though the
New Testament does not offer extensive step-by-step directions on how
to handle emerging innovations, we cannot miss that it pops the balloon
of any messianic expectation outside of the person of Jesus Christ. For
the believer, it is not simply that Jesus is the exclusive way to God and
the road to Calvary the only road to glory; it is that every other messiah
fails, and fails utterly. The ultimate response to any technocratic claim of
authority is the lordly kingship of the Son of God. We think of the
commentary of Michael Horton on this matter: “To say Christos kyrios
(Χριστός κύριος) is to witness to the fact that the advent of God’s
lordship visibly in history has occurred, and it is located in the person of
Christ. There are no powers, authorities, thrones, or dominions that can
thwart his purposes, although they may present fierce opposition until
they are finally destroyed.”35

The Christian, paying careful attention to the Lordship dimension of

Christology in the New Testament, cannot fail to exercise shrewd

232 See Taylor Downing, Churchill’s War Lab: Codebreakers, Scientists,

and the Mavericks Churchill Led to Victory (New York: Overlook, 2011).

333 See Mark Walker, Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, And the German Atomic
Bomb (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1995).

434 For a biased but still informative take on modern developments in

global health, see Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for
Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).

535 Horton, Lord and Servant, 262.

watchfulness when it comes to branding, advertising, and cultural
phenomena.36 In doing so, we observe that technologists often offer us
what amounts to a secular eschaton through the sum total of their costly
innovations. We think once more of the language of Homo deus, which
treats death not in spiritual terms but physical terms. Death, like ill
health, is a problem we can solve if we focus on eradicating it. In such
renderings, death is not a theological problem caused by sin; death is a
physiological problem caused by ignorance. But here Christian theology
raises its voice once more and answers all the fevered promises of
technocracy with one doctrine: resurrection. That which pride-dominated
technology seeks as a witness of its greatness, God has already done.
Jesus is raised. In anthropological terms, nothing greater can be
imagined or done.37 No matter how powerful man becomes, though, he
can never do the works of God.38

We do well to reject such thinking on biblical-theological grounds, but

the Christian may be skeptical of technologism on logical grounds alone.
We are, after all, the original skeptics and the true skeptics; we know just
how flawed the world is, how deceitful the serpent and his antiwisdom is,
and what lies in the heart of man. We do not unthinkingly engage the
world, nor do we unthinkingly come to faith in Christ. To the contrary—
against a common view of biblical Christianity—the believer weighs all
things, tests all claims, and ponders all ideas. We test views for
coherence, correspondence, and logic.39 God has given us a written

636 On the lordship of Christ, see F. F. Bruce, Jesus: Lord and Savior
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986).

737 “Not only has the Lord of the covenant been made Lord in his
resurrection, but he has been declared in this event to be the Lord that
he has always been (Rom 1:4).” Horton, Lord and Servant, 267. No one
else may occupy this role; no one else may claim lordship in the earth.
By virtue of his resurrection, only Christ holds this title.

838 Any conversation about technology is thus in some form a

conversation about power.

939 “The proper task of theology is to exposit and elucidate the content
of Scripture in an orderly way.” Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and
Authority, vol. 1, God Who Speaks and Shows: Preliminary Consideration
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 215. Henry proposes two tests for
truth claims, the first of which is consistency, a negative test meaning
what is logically contradictory cannot be true, as a denial of the law of
revelation filled with truth, bursting with propositions, and loaded with
spiritual meaning communicated through poems, dreams, visions,
apocalyptic prophecies, and more. In coming to faith in Christ, repentant
believers do not switch their brains off. They turn their brains on. 40
Gripped by the knowledge of God, the believer turns back to the world,
ready to probe it, test it, critique it, and call it to the absolute truth of the
Lord.41

Technology and the Body: Posthumanism and

Transhumanism
The believer shows real gratitude for technological progress and
scientific breakthroughs. We have no quarrel with science, and we know
that many of the greatest scientists in human history were people of
faith. We do differ with scientism, the view that science alone—without

contradiction would make truth and error equivalent. The second test is
coherence, a positive test, meaning the Christian system of truth can
indeed be coherently correlated with all other information, including
empirical data involving chronology, geography, history, and
psychological experience as well. This is my summation of Henry, God,
Revelation, and Authority, 1: 237. See also Bavinck on a related point,
the principium cognoscendi internum, which is “the light of reason, the
intellect, which, itself originating in the Logos, discovers and recognizes
the Logos in things. It is the internal foundation of knowledge.” Herman
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, Prolegomena, ed. John Bolt, trans.
John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 233.

040 The believer knows truly but always in a creaturely way. See the
distinction between archetypal and ectypal knowledge made by
Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg,
NJ: P&R, 1949), 203. See also Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith
(Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1967), 64. Van Til writes that God “interprets
absolutely” while man is the “re-interpreter of God’s interpretation,” a
statement in line with Bavinck’s thought. For reference and helpful
interpretation, see John M. Frame, Van Til the Theologian (Phillipsburg,
NJ: Pilgrim, 1976); John M. Frame, Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His
Thought (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1995).

141 See Mark A. Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2011).
assistance from other worldviews or definitive texts—furnishes us with
the truth we need to make sense of the world. The believer is a God-
trusting skeptic—one who is skeptical of the claims, presuppositions, and
branding of fallen people and fallen institutions. All truth is God’s truth,
and so wherever we find truth, we affirm that truth. But we do not affirm
that all worldviews are correct or that all ideas are equal. They are not.

We need such a perspective when we consider emerging visions of

the human body. The first we shall consider is the posthumanist view.
Michael Plato summarizes this school of thought:

At its core, posthumanism is a rejection of the humanist tradition

in the west of human exceptionalism (the notion that humans are
unique in the world) and human instrumentalism (that humans
have the right to control and dominate the natural world). Much of
this has its origins in the academic liberation movements of the
1960s and 1970s, especially feminism, postcolonialism and queer
theory which first began to challenge traditional western male
understandings of what constitutes humanity. Posthumanism takes
the next step and treats the human as no different from any other
life or “non-life” form and calls for a more inclusive definition of
“humanity” and even life itself. As such, a central concern of
posthumanism is the diffusion of “human” rights to non-human
subjects such as animals, ecosystems and even inorganic entities
such as machines, computer code and geological formations. 42

The posthumanists do not view humanity as the special creation of

Almighty God. Rather, they identify consciousness or “mind” in all things
and thus humanize them. According to mathematician and science-
fiction novelist Rudy Rucker, “Stars, hills, chairs, rocks, scraps of paper,
flakes of skin, molecules—each of them possess the same inner glow as
a human, each of them has singular inner experiences and sensations.” 43
There is no distinction in posthumanist between God and the world, mind
and matter. All things are “smart matter.”44 The posthumanist views the
merging of technology and humanity as a positive outcome toward
242 Michael Plato, “C. S. Lewis’s Nightmare: Christianity after the
Abolition of Man (Part 1),” In All Things, October 11, 2016,
https://inallthings.org/c-s-lewiss-nightmare-christianity-after-the-
abolition-of-man-part-1.

343 Rudy Rucker, “Mind is a Universally Distributed Quality,” Edge,

accessed January 24, 2019, www.edge.org/q2006/q06_3.html#rucker.
which society is headed. Someday, human people will not be needed.
Posthumanism is antihuman and nihilistic at its core.

The second anthropological vision we need to reckon with is the

transhumanist view. Michael Plato defines transhumanism succinctly as
an ideology that “promotes striving for immortality through technology”
and “seeks to improve human intelligence, physical strength, and the
five senses by technological means.” 45 Frequently, the call for a
transhumanist reimagining of humanity marries with the call to control
the world’s climate. Humanity is seen not as the steward of the earth but
as the scourge of the earth. Despite the fact that human lifespan has
shot upward since the Industrial Revolution, global poverty rates are at
an all-time low, and the standard of living has never been higher,
transhumanists argue that humanity must undergo genetic remaking to
save the planet.46

These claims deserve closer scrutiny. Consider a journal article by

Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache for the secular
resource Ethics, Policy and the Environment. The authors are
enthusiastic advocates of transhumanism who approach humanity as a
problem to be solved and view Earth as the property to be saved. For
this to happen, scientists should alter the immune system “to induce
mild intolerance (akin, e.g., to milk intolerance)” to meat. The authors
argue that since the “human ecological footprints are partly correlated
with our size … Reducing the average US height by 15 cm would mean a
mass reduction of 23% for men and 25% for women, with a
corresponding reduction of metabolic rate (15%/18%), since less tissue
means lower nutrients and energy needs.”47

444 Plato grounds this thinking in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and
references films such as Alien and Avatar that present this view at the
popular level. Plato, “C. S. Lewis’s Nightmare.”

545 Michael Plato, “The Immortality Machine: Transhumanism and the

Race to Beat Death,” Plough Quarterly 15 (Winter 2018): 21,
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/the-immortality-
machine.

646 Many transhumanists also trumpet the coming of the singularity,

when artificial intelligence will effectively become sovereign. This idea is
worth pondering in view of the distinctly godlike properties it assigns AI.
See Plato, “Immortality Machine.”
 In addition to these major changes in functioning, humans should
undergo cognitive enhancement. “There seems to be a link between
cognition itself and lower birth-rates,” opine Liao, Sandberg, and Roache.
The authors argue that population should decline across the earth to
safeguard dwindling natural resources, and the human race should
embrace “pharmacological enhancements” in pursuit of increased
“altruism and empathy.”48 What does this mean, practically? It means
targeting testosterone, which “appears to decrease aspects of empathy.”
Surveying these proposed changes to the human person, ethicist C. Ben
Mitchell concludes that “For the transhumanists, human beings are
maladaptive and need re-engineering. Instead of seeing human
creativity, innovation, and market forces applied in stewardly ways for
the sake of the truly human good, the technologist (the human)
becomes the technological artifact (the modified post-human).” 49

Mitchell is right. The kinds of arguments made by Liao, Sandberg, and

Roache remind us to spot the presuppositions behind a worldview.
Whether such thinkers know it or not, they regard the earth as the point
of all things, not humanity. The planet needs saving; humanity needs
culling. This is chiliast to the core: every day places planetary
sustenance in mortal peril. There is no God at the end of this
eschatological rainbow. If we do end up saving the planet through meat
aversion, cognitive enhancement, and pharmacological enhancements,
then we only preserve it. But for transhumanist environmentalists,
preservation of the planet is enough to justify the substantial overhaul of
the human person.

Many transhumanists do not merely wish for humans to enjoy a

slightly better diet or walk a little bit faster. They hold a secular
anthropology, they believe in a secular hamartiology, they quest after a
secular soteriology, and they live in thrall to a paranoid and deeply
secular eschatology. They believe that man is not made by God but is
the latest species to achieve evolutionary dominance (not for long,

747 S. Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, and Rebecca Roache, “Human

Engineering and Climate Change,” Ethics, Policy and Environment 15,
no. 2 (July 2012): 206, 208.

848 Liao, “Human Engineering,” 209–10.

949 C. Ben Mitchell, “Tiny, Happy People,” First Things, April 10, 2012,
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/04/tiny-happy‌-people.
though).50 They do not view mankind as the God-ordained ruler of the
earth but see mankind as a problem that has dawned in the earth, for
the human race inflicts far more punishment to the earth than do most
animals.

Let us linger for a moment on the soteriology of the transhumanist.

The transhumanists may not use chapter and verse, but many proffer a
distinct doctrine of salvation. Salvation does not come by gracious
renewal; salvation comes by genetic reengineering. Our problem is not
inherently spiritual but physical, so scientists should have a free hand to
rewire human instincts, thus shrinking human appetite, forgoing
procreation, and reducing testosterone. Each of these ideological
commitments flies in the face of biblical teaching. God made the earth
as the dwelling-place for humanity. Adam did not live in subservience to
the animals; Adam was called to rule the animals, and the earth was
created to sustain life. Further, we know that God formed Adam by his
own hand, that God thus made manhood, and that God does not call for
the church to drain men of testosterone but to reorient manhood to
pursue a doxological existence.51

Once we start looking for cultural reengineering efforts, our blood

chills at all we find. In both quiet and harsh ways, our secular culture
encourages us to see humanity as a virus, a deadly contagion on the

050 Both posthumanism and transhumanism are responses to Christian

humanism. Each is a fruit of the secular Enlightenment. The two systems
affirm the importance of altering humanity by technological means, but
they diverge in their teleology. Posthumanism seeks the end of humanity
and the ascendance of “living matter”; transhumanism quests after the
secular transcendence of humanity with the aid of technology. In the
former, technology is master; in the latter, technology is servant.

151 On the subject of testosterone and men, we do well to reflect on the

shocking number of boys in America who live on a steady diet of Ritalin
and Adderall. Some boys receive genuine help through such
prescriptions, but we should think hard about the rush to medicate boys.
As an alternative to medication, we should think collectively about
strengthening families, returning fathers to their families, and prioritizing
father-son engagement in physically rewarding activities. For cultural
context, see Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How
Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (New York: Touchstone,
2000). Sommers, it should be noted, identifies as a feminist.
earth. Transhumanism represents one enfleshment of such thinking, but
the dark apotheosis of such ideology is abortion. Abortion proceeds from
a woman or couple’s desire to do away with an unwanted child, yes, but
it also fits within a eugenicist (and posthumanist) worldview. 52 In
philosophical terms, abortion functions as a major part of the effort to
keep the population as small as is possible.

Abortion by means of modern technology causes extreme bodily

harm. I do not mean primarily that it kills pregnant women, though it
surely does in some instances, but that abortion trains women to fight
the natural workings of their God-given bodies. Surely, many modern
women realize too late that the promises of the sexual revolution do not
measure up to their advance billing. The idea of free-and-open no-
strings-attached sex does not hold true in many cases for either men or
women, but it is women who bear the greatest responsibility for
nonmarital sex resulting in a pregnancy. The woman who discovers a
child growing within her body in these circumstances feels justifiable
fear. She is in no way excused in her sin, but she does now face a major
consequence that a man may more easily avoid (to his shame). Her
choices become very stark: she may either embrace what has happened
and protect and nurture her unborn child, or she may destroy it. In the
latter situation, she must act against her body; she must hate her own
child. She will bring into her body not medicine to care for life, but
surgical or pharmacological means to wipe it out. The abortive
worldview, indissolubly linked to a so-called sex-positive ideology, does
not encourage a woman to love her body, contrary to its claims. The
abortive worldview leads a woman to make war on her own body and on
the body of her child.53

Beyond abortion, our secular society is very hard on the human body.
The body has never been more idealized, more scrutinized, more
obsessed-over, than in our age. The female physique in particular seems
at once an object of open worship and unrelenting criticism. To survey

252 Every act of abortion is a successful instantiation of a posthumanist

vision which sees humanity as a problem to be overcome and even
eradicated.

353 Cf. Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation, 193–226 (see chap.
1, n. 17). Matthew Levering makes several insightful points in his critique
of antinatal culture. One need not agree with every detail to profit from
it.
our culture is to witness insecurity and personal obsession in epidemic
form. Much of the pressure on women, as with the solutions offered to
women to relieve that pressure, is spiritual in nature and dependent on
technology. If we alter the body through surgery and drugs, we hear
today, we will find happiness. But as we saw in fallen Eden, physical
methods cannot solve spiritual problems.

Technology facilitates this tragic undoing. The internet, alongside

wireless technologies, has enabled the commodification of the body to a
degree unthinkable in previous human history. Pornography, available in
myriad forms in our emergent platforms, trains men to embrace their
animal lusts and see women as objects for their own gratification. It
warps men and ruins them; research shows that pornography literally
rewires the male brain:

Viewing pornography is not an emotionally or physiologically

neutral experience. It is fundamentally different from looking at
black and white photos of the Lincoln Memorial or taking in a color
map of the provinces of Canada. Men are reflexively drawn to the
content of pornographic material. As such, pornography has wide-
reaching effects to energize a man toward intimacy. It is not a
neutral stimulus. It draws us in. Porn is vicarious and voyeuristic at
its core, but it is also something more. Porn is a whispered
promise. It promises more sex, better sex, endless sex, sex on
demand, more intense orgasms, experiences of transcendence. 54

Pornography is essentially Pandora. According to Struthers, it “acts as a

polydrug” on the male brain, ramping up the emotions, catalyzing the
senses, and energizing the body. God is the one who wired the man to
desire the woman, but pornography awakens desire outside the context
of marriage and effectively entraps the viewer. Men and women alike
who view pornography think they are free, but in truth they are
enslaved.

Addiction—even nonsexual—to digital culture has deleterious effects.

Consider the 2017 report by Jean Twenge, a researcher and sociologist,
on social media addiction and suicide rates:

Not only did smartphone use and depression increase in tandem,

but time spent online also was linked to mental-health issues

454 William M. Struthers, Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks

the Male Brain (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010), 68–69.
 across two different data sets. We found that teens who spent five
or more hours a day online were 71 percent more likely than those
who spent only one hour a day to have at least one suicide risk
factor (depression, thinking about suicide, making a suicide plan or
attempting suicide). Overall, suicide risk factors rose significantly
after two or more hours a day of time online. 55

The rising generation, we hear, is composed of “digital natives” who

essentially live online. This bodes ill for those who do. Fathers and
mothers must think with great care about the health—holistically—of
their children. Beyond parental responsibility, individuals must make
careful decisions in keeping with godliness and self-control. This does not
mean that we cannot use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other outlets
as believers. But we should engage the digital world with considerable
care, reflection, and thoughtfulness.56

The Christian can and should avail himself of technology. We depend

on it more than we know, and Scripture gives us many signs that God
approves of and even incorporates technology into a properly
doxological existence. In addition, we do well to try to use worldly things
for heavenly good. We may not be able to redeem them—no one is
baptizing smartphones in tiny bathtubs—but we can approach them from
a distinctly Christian perspective. This perspective will reduce to neither
a jaundiced view of technological products nor an unthinking embrace of
the same. We will instead view technology in theological terms,

555 Jean Twenge, “Teenage Depression and Suicide Are Way Up—and So
Is Smartphone Use,” Washington Post, November 19, 2017,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/teenage-
depression-and-suicide-are-way-up—and-so-is-smartphone-use/
2017/11/17/624641ea-ca13-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html?
utm_term=.4558df703633. This article is based on Jean M. Twenge,
Thomas E. Joiner, Megan L. Rogers, and Gabrielle N. Martin, “Increases in
Depressive Symptoms, Suicide-Related Outcomes, and Suicide Rates
Among U.S. Adolescents After 2010 and Links to Increased New Media
Screen Time,” Clinical Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (January 2018): 3–
17.

656 Two texts full of wisdom along these lines are Andy Crouch, The Tech-
Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place
(Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2017; Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is
Changing You (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017).
remembering the first principles of our faith and seeking God’s glory in
all our doings.

Conclusion
The Bible takes subjects that the world has disenchanted and reenchants
them. Mankind seeks to make a name for itself and builds cities to find
nondivine community, but Christians may enter the earthly city and do
so as the Christ-infused city on a hill. We are not mere matter to be
reengineered at a philosopher’s whim; we are embodied people, and
through the gracious work of the Holy Spirit, our bodies are temples of
the living God (1 Cor 6:19). A baby growing in the womb is not refuse to
be cast off, but a child to be warmly welcomed into life. The world itself
is made by God, but it is not the object of our salvation. Beauty is given
by the Lord and reflects something of God’s own excellence, but it must
be stewarded well, accompanied by the grace of modesty, and
disconnected from straining after an eternal youth that does not exist.
Charm is fleeting; beauty is vain; a crown of gray hair speaks to a life
well-lived.

In the midst of confusion and chaos, God is building something. He is

gathering a people for himself. He will soon renew and remake the earth,
and the biblical story that began in a real garden will end in a real city.
The details of the end of this narrative await their unveiling, but we
cannot miss just how beautiful, and beautifully crafted, the new
Jerusalem is in John’s apocalyptic vision:

The foundations of the city wall were adorned with every kind of
precious stone:

the first foundation jasper,

the second sapphire,

the third chalcedony,

the fourth emerald,

the fifth sardonyx,

the sixth carnelian,

the seventh chrysolite,

the eighth beryl,

 the ninth topaz,

the tenth chrysoprase,

the eleventh jacinth,

the twelfth amethyst.

The 12 gates are 12 pearls; each individual gate was made of a

single pearl. The broad street of the city was pure gold, like
transparent glass.

I did not see a sanctuary in it, because the Lord God the
Almighty and the Lamb are its sanctuary. The city does not need
the sun or the moon to shine on it, because God’s glory illuminates
it, and its lamp is the Lamb. (Rev 21:19–23 HCSB)B)

This is not a city for spectators standing miles off and gazing through
binoculars. This is a city for the people of God brimming with the
creative beauty of God. Here technology, or more accurately, the
handiwork of God in the created realm, reaches its celestial peak. There,
“The nations will walk in its light, and the kings of the earth will bring
their glory into it” (21:24 HCSB).B).

It will be a visual feast, a time to marvel at the gifting of God in the

mind and body of man, and a celebration of the creative and recreative
power of the Almighty.

B)HCSB Holman Christian Standard Bible

B).HCSB Holman Christian Standard Bible