A Theology Of Bricks

This piece is about web browsers, not bricks. But because of the massive technical ignorance of most of us concerning how web browsers work, we're going to talk about bricks. They are mentioned often in the scriptures and the inner workings are easier to grasp.

What we do with any technology is often the focus of our reasons and excuses to use that technology. You don't get into a canoe without the assumption of also getting into your swim trunks. Because one thing does in fact lead to another and tipping a canoe in the summertime is often one of the best ways to also go swimming. Use and failure to use any given technology can both walk hand in hand with enjoyment. If not fulfillment. 

But there is a marked difference between donning a pair of shorts with pink flamingos on them and grabbing a fibreglass canoe from your summer camp's boat house to have such enjoyment, and building a hand-crafted white cedar canoe in your garage. And the difference isn't just that one is mass-produced and plastic and the other, is one-of-a-kind and wood. It's that one is meant to be used for taking a person places and the other is meant to be used. That travel is intended for one and use is implied by the other. Yes, you can glide gracefully through a misty morning pond doing perfect J-strokes in an Old Town or a Grummun, but we all know why jostling and tipping a hand-made wooden canoe like the teenage boys tend to do at any given summer camp, is wrong.

Maybe it's the respect for craftsmanship? Maybe it's the neglect of brute utility? But both canoes have their intents while maintaining the same functions and technical ability to do both sets of activities. 

The same duality cannot be honestly said of other bits of technology. Ones meant to also take us places and to also be used for fun. You won't, for example, find one web browser without the ability to browse secretly and leave no trace of what was seen or participated, that is not a bug but a shared feature of every other browser. Every browser gets you where you want to go. Every browser gets you there with the option to have not gone there by the click of a button or three. Usually CTRL-SHIFT-N. Unlike their aquatic counterparts, Chrome wants you to tip over, as does Safari, Firefox, Brave, and Edge. They also want you to glide smoothly across the internet as if they were barely there. They don't only maintain the ability to function in both sets of activities on the web, it's a feature that you can do both. 

64% of pastors can use their browsers for detailed exegesis and biblical study, then at the click of a button or three, see every manner of perversion to their sinful heart's content. This is a feature, not a bug. But to be clear it's not a feature of the internet. Or a feature of the mouse they click with or the laptop they type on. There is no option to not have the ability to both access the world's information or to not be able to get to any porn site imaginable with no trace of it in your history. It's not an either/or, and it's not a both/and. It's something else.

Back to bricks and basics. When the people of Babel invented bricks they did so out of their need for a stackable building material. They didn't start with a tower to heaven in mind. They started with a brick in mind. But a lack of knowing what that brick could do or was capable of doing is what got their little construction project obstructively translated. They would have known what sacrifices were, as a concept, because people all the way back to Cain and Abel they were doing them. So they knew how to communicate with God. They also, would have known who God was because they were building a tower to his dwelling. But what they didn't have a grasp on, clearly, was what sin does to technological innovation.

When you start from the base point of technology being sinful, then you have a different relationship every time a new brick comes along. Because it begs for redemption the way you beg for redemption. Maybe it's a brown brick made of clay, or maybe it's black brick made of glass and silicon, but when tech is being introduced as a good thing, knowing it actually is a bad thing, matters. Both kinds of bricks can be used for all kinds of things. 

"Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them." Gen 3:21 KJV

Humanity's first response to sinful actions was technological, the weaving of fig leaves to cover their shame and their nakedness, was a desperate advancement of technology with the best intentions. What if it worked? What if God never found them and the clothes they made were the solution to sin, as they likely thought they might have been. It's as pragmatic as any new tool entering the market. When presented with a nakedness problem, technological progress did, in fact, provide a solution to nakedness. Why then did God not leave them in their weavings? I would submit that like them, their technology was sinful. And God wanted to atone for that sin as well. The clothes of skins that he gave them would not only give them clothing but also point to future sacrifices made for sin, indeed a final sacrifice made for all sin. He could have just made atonement for their disobedience, instead, he covered their shame and iniquity as well, and pointed them towards the future cross.

This is the way God views technology in the context of a sinner's life. Something to be remade in the redemptive story's arc. So the question then becomes. What do we do with our bricks and canoes? Because the uncomfortable reality we live in, might just be, that every technological advancement has been made in the scheme of needing the same kind of redemptive 2.0 version of itself, from day one of the invention's use.

The church has never seen the need or exercised the ability to redeem canoes. Or bricks for that matter. And that's because of a false sense and treatment of what technology is from its onset. Everyone clearly wants tech to be neutral so we don't get our hands dirty with it but the plain truth of the matter is that our tech is already dirty. Because it's our dirty hands that made it so. We're all still naked under these clothes and someone had to do something about it, and has, thank God!

It's therefore not a necessity that we buy substandard bricks from a Christian brother in the clay and straw industry, or that we have to, to the glory of God, buy the finest fired cinderblocks from the heathen. But that in the moment we realize we need bricks we take account of the evil that lives in them like the fabled and feared determinism tech is so famous for. We have a name for such predispositions in our theology, Sin. And sin's nature is paired with mankind and pried off it by the work of the cross. And will only be pried off by the very same work. Don't read me wrong here. Jesus didn't die for iPhones, but he did die and then rise from the grave so iPhones would one day be used for his glory. Not in the way the device inspires fanboyishness in its followers. but in the way they can be used to speak about things other than themselves. 

The bricks of Babel work the exact same way, and fell not because they were bad bricks, but because there were never good people correcting them. How many iPhone app developers are trying to make iPhones less addicting, less distracting, more capable of promoting Christian virtues and values, and less capable of sinning with? Yes, we do have the Bible App in a good rank in the app store. And I'm sure glad they fixed that child porn problem. 

People will want to argue that bricks can be used to build schools and strip clubs alongside churches as well. And here's the rub. Not that you want any rubbing when dealing with strip clubs. It's a lot harder to host strippers in a well-lit, stain-glassed cathedral than it is in a dark room with a sound stage and lights. Yes, the big screens get everyone signing with their heads up, instead of into a hymnal. But they also allow for close-ups and mirror what gets done every Friday night under the lights. I'm surprised we don't have instant replays yet. All we did was split the jumbotron in half. One building is stacked bricks to the glory of God and the other is stacked bricks alongside the glory of man. Our tech should look radically different than the world's. Even if we're using the same bricks. The same way clothes made from the skins of animals would look radically different to people who thought fig leaves did the job.

The schoolhouse, city hall, and strip club can all be built with the same bricks the church uses. But it is only inside the church's bricks that the gospel can change the crooked laws, secular heresies, and sexual perversions of the other three. Not because it uses bricks rightly apart from those things, but because it uses bricks against those things. It knows that its walls could be compromised and treats all technological additions to the walls as if they are the weak spots. Does it matter if, in our modern times, a youth pastor can do youth ministry online with apps like Instagram and TikTok, if the number of kids baptized doubles, compared to the number of kids suffering from depression and anxiety and suicide tripling? Who cares if no one understands the consequences of building this tower to heaven, at least we making progress. Look at our views! 

   

As such web browsers might be the first place the church actually does internet-based and technologically sound ministry. Not by figuring out how to use the current options. But by piloting a new one that you can't use for online sins. A covenant built into the code that stops anyone using it from ever seeing a porn site, with no option to turn it off and no way to get to the sin apart from using another browser. A browser that if found on the laptop of a person would let you know they are Christian because its presence meant they were putting to death sin. We've been treating web browsers and social media like they were part of the natural world. As real and unchangeable as Milwaukee or Paris. But the truth is they are not places, they are things, and they are things that have been designed with abilities that help you sin. Simply not using those abilities does not make you righteous for allowing them to exist in a world where, like other sins, they could be put to death.

If Christians want to do ministry online, may I suggest we take our first steps in making an online that's more Christlike? 

The Name Calling Of Goods And Services

When you challenge the zeitgeist of churches using technology, a fairly predictable script emerges.

"If we can't use (X) that means that (Y) must also be forbidden."

"Y", is often a bombastic or hyperbolic example. Used to add absurdity to what I promise is a valid line of concern and questioning regarding tech use in the church. Question the use of something like the internet, and often, the response is that then we have to question the use of the Bible itself since it too is a form of technology. The apples and oranges wiggle together and we have ourselves a nice fruit salad of theological mush. Not formed enough to be spiritual meat but not reformed enough to be soul food and casserole.

What's happened here is a certain type of pastor has midwitted his way past an honest layman making trouble by asking questions. He did so because he doesn't see or hear the difference between any kind of technology. To him, his theology of a brick is his theology of a laptop. It's neat and tidy and all-encompassing. Allowing him to do what literally everyone else is doing with his tech but to feel like that is what tech does all by itself.

But for the sake of argument, let's pick up a guitar and try to worship our way out of this false dichotomy.

I've said before, that tech is not neutral because it's not made or used by neutral people. So, what is the difference between an acoustic guitar playing amazing grace and an electric one? Surely we can't pick a technological fight with one without embroiling the other in the brawl. They are both pieces of technology that we are using for worship music. We can't get mad at one without getting mad at the other. Right?

Well, yes we can. Because one is a musical instrument and the other is a service styled like a musical instrument.

This difference between goods (the guitar) and a service (the electric guitar) is hard to see at first because they are both real-life things. The electric guitar looks like the acoustic guitar in enough ways that you can tell their cousins, and likely cousins that shouldn't marry if they were Mennonites. There are too many similarities to outright call them essentially different things. But put them both on stage and they do very different things. The acoustic guitar plays six strings with chords and picks single strings to accent them, it strums and tunes and behaves like a guitar does. And the electric guitar can barely be heard from the stage.

"Wait." The church sound guy says. "You need to plug it into the amp."

"Wait, you need the plug the amp into the electrical outlet."

"Wait, you need to plug the amp into the sound system."

"Wait, are you using effects pedals? you need to plug them in too."

"Wait, we need to do a sound check."

There are more wait's in waiting but I don't mean to keep you.

What just happened here? These two instruments are conceptually the same things. Six strings, fretboard, pegs, hardwood fixtures, mother-of-pearl inlays, and a PVC pickguard. And the best electric guitars seem to be hollow-bodied just like the acoustic ones. About the only tangible difference is one has the microphone built into it, technically. What's with all this waiting.

Because goods come as they are and services come with conditions.

The sun will dry your clothes for free and reliably every day. So long as the rain is not giving them an extra rinse. But solar power, to run your dryer, needs specific angles and hours of sunlight to charge specific batteries and off-grid systems, built by specifically trained tradesmen who hang their coveralls out to dry in the sun.

A Tesla only looks like a car. Anyone with a real car can tell you this. But those that bit the magic EV bullet from Mr. Musk aren't driving cars. They're being driven by A.I. and what is ostensibly a phone app on more expensive hardware. You can tell that they are being driven by the way you can't idly hit someone because the car will decide your driving needs to stop. My everyday driver can hit people and requires a sacrifice of my sinful desires to drive in a straight line and swerve when necessary. It can't stop me from sinning because it's a car and I'm a sinner. It's also fully capable of sinning, fully capable of doing sinful things. But doesn't because it's a car not a service of a car. 

My 1.8-litre Toyota Echo and its neighbour of a work truck, a domestic 6.7-liter Dodge Ram 2500, are the kinds of cousins that can't have extra fun at family reunions. They are versions of each other and are what every car since Great Grampy Ford Model T left the assembly line were. And the best part is they know it. The Dodge doesn't try anything with its Japanese cousin because the relationship is too close, and vice versa. So, they both sneak into the pantry for snacks and not other things that involve mouths and tongues. They don't cause the kinds of problems that a more complicated machine can cause when it's made to look like something simpler.

But the Tesla, is something else. It comes to the family reunion like a newcomer and with conditions. Like the kind you get from your mother when you want to bring the new girlfriend to said reunion. She might look like everyone else there, two eyes, one nose, and a fondness for casserole and sweet tea. But she isn't family unless an entirely new set of conditions are met. She can take the Dodge to the pantry and get in a lot more trouble because there are less relations, and that strangeness is the fuel for that trouble when not addressed. No one bats an eye at Dodge and Toyota being in a room alone together. They're family. But people wonder what that Ram is doing with his bedroom door closed with the Cyber Truck every time she comes over. We all have heard the joke that that family of cars spells S3XY, better keep the door open, Mr. Musk.

The guitar like the voice is a relation to music outright. The voice makes sound and with a bit of training the guitar makes sound too and that sound can be joyful and the delight of the Lord. 

The difference between a mic'd acoustic guitar and an electric guitar is one is an amplified version of the genuine article. The other is a manipulated version of the genuine article. One is made for and used to the end in its purpose. The other is an end in itself leading to other purposes and other ends. As many ends as you could fit into an effects pedal, to be exact. This is an important distinction because of the lack of distinguishing between what goods are and what services are. Goods are actual things in time and space. And services aren't. Services are concepts that pull goods in as their fuel. Services are what give you the security of never having to worry about hitting a pedestrian, by removing your right to repair your own vehicle, or drive. Services are what let you play a worship song, exactly, literally, like Hillsong and Bethel play their songs, at the cost of having to own and operate a litany of tech to support the idea of that song in the first place. A fragile system that often goes down mid-song the way a hymnal and a choir never seemed to.

What we then call the goods in our lives and the services matters. Because it's only by saying things are alright when they are not, that we get ourselves in trouble. It wasn't until we said we could "gather" online that we dared to try sharing communion with ourselves and a screen. We would never try to share communion over a postcard or letter to the Corinthians, but pen and paper are conceptually understood as the kind of goods that can't provide those services. But when given enough stimuli, a screen that tastes nothing like the bread and speakers that taste nothing like wine, convinced us that we could do a communal and metaphorical meal, with our gathered body of believers at home, with wine and bread we didn't actually share with them communally.

You all did it a few years back in the hopes that it was at least permissible to do. Tech convinced you to enter into a form of worship and sacrament, during a pandemic, that was drastically different than what was theologically correct. And it did so because it's what technological services do. They beg you to use them. Beg you to try it out to see if they can satisfy your needs and desires. They're an attractive newcomer asking for help in the pantry to get the honey, and their features and services look as smooth as they are. Which is the problem. 

"Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple. For your obedience is come abroad unto all men. I am glad therefore on your behalf: but yet I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil.

Romans 16:17-19 KJV

The church saw the internet in its time of need or maybe better put desire and saw that it could provide the service of Sunday mornings and communion with very little tweaks to what we did on Sunday mornings and during communion. It saw that bread on a screen and bread on a charger looked almost the same so they called it the same and let the electric guitar do a slightly longer solo because it was good for engagement on the livestream.

But what the church didn't do during COVID, was communion. Because it wasn't together, no one shared bread, no one passed the cup, and some of us ate later because the live stream was recorded. It provided a service instead of practicing good. Until the church can rightly make these kinds of distinctions. We will have the kinds of things that went sideways during COVID go sideways without it. 

For in eating every one taketh before other his own supper: and one is hungry, and another is drunken. What? have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of God, and shame them that have not? what shall I say to you? shall I praise you in this? I praise you not.

But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.

1 Corinthians 11:21-22, 28-29 KJV