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?
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