How Does Our Digital Life Affect Our Theology?
Scripture Shapes What’s Important
Our digital life can shape our theology in several ways. I think one of the most prominent ways it does is that it tends to make us think of theology through the lens of other things, like news or controversies. The whole Bible is given to us for our instruction, but it’s really easy, when you’re looking out into the realm of social media, to base your theological reflection not on what Scripture emphasizes but on what social media wants to talk about.
The internet and social media are not simply mirror reflections of what’s important. These are programs that are engineered with algorithms to bring certain topics to the forefront and marginalize other topics.
Digital Liturgies
Samuel D. James
People search for heaven in all the wrong places, and the internet is no exception. Digital Liturgies warns readers of technology’s damaging effects and offers a fulfilling alternative through Scripture and rest in God’s perfect design.
So one of the things that I do see, especially of people of my age and even in myself, is a tendency to emphasize in our theology things that have a lot of bite online, and then we don’t want to talk about other things that aren’t as viral—things that don’t have the same kind of capacity for whipping up a big response online.
And so when we bring that kind of attitude to Scripture, we can, if we’re not being careful, instrumentalize Scripture. We can make Scripture’s teaching valuable to the degree that it allows me to argue with people, or it makes the other person look wrong, or it makes my life look righteous or beautiful.
And so that’s one way that technology can shape our engagement with theology for the worse. And we just have to be mindful of that and continually prioritize what the Scriptures prioritize, regardless of what the ambient culture might be saying.
Samuel D. James is the author of Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age.
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