The Present Need For Theology Punks

I've been vocal about my loss of faith in theological academia. But I wanted to straighten out a misconception before it happens. What I'm not advocating for is anti theological academia. But rather unauthoritative theological academia. Which is a big set of words for a post about punk rock, but stick with me, this mosh pit is fun, I swear.

The new superman flic, which I likely won’t see because I don’t want to be in the target market of that kind of thing, wants you to believe that being kind to people is punk rock. And a chorus of hot-topic posers made Iggy Pop relevant again for his last ditch for 15 minutes via every and any social media content available.

Here’s the thing though, kindness isn’t punk. Opposition to authority is. If you want to get as specific as a named 4th Nirvana song, it’s opposition to invalidated or corrupt authority. The kind that would shut down a skateboarder, not because he’s damaging the stairs he’s jumping down, but because he might hurt himself. We’ll yeah. That’s the point. Phil 1:21. You think we skateboard to be safe? Punks don’t hate cops because they arrest criminals. They hate cops when they don’t arrest criminals. They hate authority when it give a technical hall pass for certain wrongs at the expense of other wrongs. So, it usually adopts those wrongs in protest. And just like that movie and that staircase, the world is need for a smattering of actual theological punks. Not posers in the fashion or capes actively marketing to them. But real, opposition theology for a world turned lame.

When almost every pastor started doing the Eucharist online a few years back. It was ecclesiologically punk rock to give the theological middle finger to “The Man” and get arrested for your faith. It never had anything to do with what virus you might catch. The newly minted online church clutched their pearls like so many Fox news watchers as a handful of pastors got arrested, and at least in my home town/province, got acquitted too. Turns out you can ride your skateboard here. And bastards like acting as if all cops are like that.

Before that, a smattering of churches sought to bring gender equality to the theological skate park. And would have got away with it, if they didn’t actually want gender to stop existing. Under the bland guise of egalitarian betterment, they let women try the pulpit out only to then take every part of what made them women in the first place away from them. Because it’s cool and arguably punk rock when a girl drops into the half pipe, dressed like a girl, makeup’d like a girl and for all intents and purposes acting like a girl. But when when Phoebe, Pricilla, and Junia began showing up in baggy men's clothes, low taper fades and faux hawks, to “skateboard” because their latest fashion accessory had two trucks and four wheels. This didn’t make them Punk, though they looked the part. Because looking punk is easy. Anyone can order band patches and vintage denim online. And nothing is a greater tell of a theological poser than the collection of similar letters, sewn onto the vest of an M.Div. You think you’re books and certificates impress us, or give you the belonging you demand. Do something challenging with your board. A kickflip maybe. Turn things upside down and backwards. Look cool doing it. Preach about the sins a woman could commit. The guys who have low taper fades, baggy clothes and a commentary set or two, would. Right after they point out the sinful posering of their peers. Do you want to actually do ministry or is walking around with the church board enough for your appetites?

And long before all of this, A guy named Marty was willing to take the flack for posting harsh words on a wall. He did it with hammer and nails but I'm guessing spray paint was hard to find in Wittenberg. He didn’t care if he would get in trouble for the words. He cared that they were true. Not just like the E-celeb pastors in his heritage that would end up wearing sneakers for the sneaker heads, and not how they gripped a board during an ollie. No. He tagged the catholic church with red letters that made their dogmatic jaws drop and Bansky’d a reformation out of a church that was indulging itself a bit too much.

In all these things something is happening under the radar of the culture that is trying to get to truth at the cost of the almost true. Calling out those trying to claim authority they don’t or can’t have and those who stole it and should have it removed from their possession and public ascent. Something that recognizes that people can make laws that make no sense, but someone can make laws that can’t be argued with. A no skateboarding sign over perfectly architecture’d concrete, is damn near criminal. But gravity and the laws around it was penned by someone who had real authority. You can vote on one, and only play with the other.

“Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever.”

Psalm 104:5 KJV

Somewhere, somehow, the world of theology stopped dealing with gravity and started dealing with the myriad of signs posted to stop punks from enjoying its limits. It saw that people enjoyed the facts that a desire to fly could be snuffed out mid 360 and still land in a place that makes the skater look cool. Anyone with a healthy marriage and a few kids can show you this kind of trick, what it looks like when you land it, and how comparatively lame egalitarian theory can be. It sure holds that board and wears those clothes as if it were meant to. But like all posers it’s missing the requisite landing. One that respects the gravity that restricts but enjoys it all the same.

The need for a theological punk, exists because of how soft the poser can get while stealing punk’s clout. That’s why no one has more effects pedals and nicer guitars then the modern worship pastor. One who has about as much edge as the circular plexiglass cage around his brush wielding drummer. Or a preacher with more books than reasonable time to read them, or be educated by them. Having Sproul and Spurgeon on your shelf only feeds your sheep if you read them. Or better yet, stay calm when your congregation reads them more than you. It’s expensive wallpaper other wise. A credibility bookcase as valid as a second hand patch vest or perfectly clean skateboard. You can tell a skater, skates, by the damage his board shows. And a preacher by the cracks in his library’s spines.

There’s no skin in this game anymore. And as such, no ability to do what skin does. Touch and feel. Modern theology is out of touch with the realities of a sinful world and convinced that what it feels, by itself, is as valid and real as what concrete could make them feel if they drop into the bowl for once. And the punk, knows what the bottom of the bowl feels like. In falling and in the momentum of coming back out of it. What the push and pull of a mosh pit is, and why blocking people you disagree with Christian twitter (Still not calling it X), but will be heavenly roommates with is foolishness. And generally ruins the fun of it.

In all of this, we have tried the theological mainstream.

We have seen the theological poser.

But the desperate and satisfying need of this generations will be the return of the theological punk. To stick it to the man, and his sin, so he might be reconciled to God like a reunion tour of his favourite band. Not the same as it was before, but bettered by the memory of it. It will look like danger and risk to anyone not willing to risk danger. But it will also look like orthodoxy. Moreso than popular culture is capable of mirroring. 

Green Light Districts And The Law And Prophets Of The Internet.

Earlier in the week OpenAI let the congregation know that it’s going to put all the force of it’s due diligence behind the concept of age gating appropriate content from its products. So that children aren’t exposed to or affected by things above their grasps as minors.

Oh, and a green light to “erotic content” just in time for Christmas.

Now some of use saw this coming when the first image generators showed up after the Chatbots. And we noticed because we have danced with similar online demons before. We have a testimony in Christ that involved former devotion to the internets deities. And have spent entirely too much time dealing with the implications of Rule34 of the internet than most of our tech savvy online pastor brethren.

Now, so you don’t go searching for what Rule34 is, I’ll quote it for you.

“If it exists on the internet, there is porn of it on the internet.”

You would think given the trite and abrasive nature of the rule that it must be a farce born of the weird and toxic realms of 4chan or reddit. And you would be right save for the farce bit. This is not a joke. It’s one of the most true things you will encounter on the internet. And it would behoove me to remind you, the internet is where A.I. get’s it’s life blood from. It’s users.

A.I. is not being pitched to Amish famers and African tribesman in Kenya. It’s being pitched to people online. They access it online and they will treat it like an online thing that follows the rules of the internet.  And while it's online it’s only a problem for people who need screens to survive and who do things on those screens. We aren’t actually creating sexual deviancy, we’re creating images and videos of sexual deviancy. Which is a different kind of thing. And only people who have been saved from the sins of online porn will be able to see that.

Because Rule34 used to only exist online. And now it has a narrow but very real way to begin it’s existence in real time and space. No longer tied to the communal communication of the web, it will have agents and operators in the real world. And the same kinds of people making the A.I.'s that are tacitly pornographic, are the people making those agents and robots.

The Optimus robot and Ani, the Grok anime waifu of Twitter (still not calling it X), come from the same place and person. Twitter used to only be a place where 140 characters could be printed in digital ink for all the world to see. Now it’s the discernment and sexual downfall of swaths of men, who didn’t see the trap baiting their appetites, when Elon changed the name to X. And for this moment in time the robots we see are vaguely humanoid and monochrome. Sleek but not sexy. Nobody what’s to have sex with them and they are not being made, sent, or programed to have sex back. They don’t even have those parts. Not that that would stop anyone. But what they do have is an unbreakable connection to the internet that has to be there for them to be functional. And if you don’t know How the internet works. You will not be able to predict what embodiments of the internet will do in the real world.

There is a reason sex sells. It is among our most basic instincts and drives as humans. But it is also the first commandment we were ever given. Something even sin did not take away from us when our first parents fell from grace.

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Genesis 1:28 KJV

When you look at every piece of tech like a quasi neutral tool that requires human input to be good or evil. You can find yourself in places where you have no category for dealing with the evil found in those places. If sex can sell just about everything, then you should be highly suspicious of anything not trying to use sex to sell it. There are moral and ethical ways to own a muscle car that a car dealership would use tits as advertisements for. But the robots that took away the non sexual aspects of driving, by giving you autopilot, are now aiming for the home. What does a man have when he holds the wheel and the gear shifter, over the car whose movements are entirely under his control.

The word you’re looking for is “dominion” and it is exercised over beasts of the field, horses, and 5 speed Mustangs all the same.

What does the Tesla model Y driver exercise when the autopilot does the same thing? The word you’re looking for here will just make you blush a bit, I imagine. Because it’s the same kind of word that would be needed to let the same kind of robotic oversight into the home.

A robot to do the dishes, fold the laundry and mind the children has a very specific gender it replaces. And so does the robot that stands watchful over the house a night, changes the oil in the model Y, and file the taxes. When you put the humans together that used to do those things without competition, what do you get? Well, usually babies. What will you get when the robots who replaced those gendered roles get together? Likely, a wife happy with her programable robot husband and a husband happy with his customizable robot wife.

There is no need to have robots in the home unless you needed a way to stop babies from entering the same homes. That’s where this is headed. As sure as pictures of any given movie star could be faked into porn via OpenAI’s Sora once the guardrails come off. The only reason you want less children in the home, is because what children are, every single one, every time they are born is one more soul that worships God.

These robots amount to exactly what porn is. Sex with no children on a long enough timeline. Because every role we task them with that would have been a mother’s or father’s will replace a mother and father in due time. Mothers and fathers aren’t just supposed to have sex. They’re commanded to do such. Being fruitful is a distinctly human thing because we can’t copulate with these things that will bear our image. And the purpose of any system is what it does. So when these things start doing all the other things that mothers and fathers do, as if that was an optional part in having sex as commanded, then what exactly is being replaced if not purpose.

Christians do not get to have sex with each other without behavioural righteousness that models their relationships with God. The wife respects and obeys the husband like she would Christ and the husband loves and serves his wife like Christ would the church (Ephesians 5:25-29). But the robot will begin serving the husband like the wife doesn't and vice versa, only because it was allowed into the home as it it were an appliance. It has no obligations to act Christlike or Christian to the human it severs like a spouse. The oversized hockey puck that vacuums the home, devotedly, does not do so to make sure the husband and wife have more time to be fruitful. It does so to turn a profit on the opportunity to model the church’s right and righteous relationship with Christ. And so does, and will, every humanoid robot headed you way.

Perhaps that is why all these androids all look the same. Sleek black, white, and silver bodies. Human proportions and moments perfected ad nauseum.

In order for camouflage to work, everything has to blend in. You would never want something as bright as a red light to stick out. You might get the wrong impression of what goes on inside.

Of The Finer Things And Details We Miss When Reading About Them

“And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”

Genesis 2:9-15 KJV

What was the gold for? Or the onyx? Or the bdellium? And do you know what each of those is and why a naked man and woman would need those things to be fruitful and to multiply? How they play into the dominion expected of them after the beast of the field were finished? Because that is the context they were given to you, via the scriptures. If your mind first went to the idea and industry of mining, when you heard or read gold just now, shame on you for your eisegesis. You know that you shouldn’t be reading the Bible that way. You should know better. So why did you? And why is the bdellium there. If your mind went to perfume, because of a casual GPT prompt about what bdellium is, because heaven knows you didn’t know prior, shame on you for your eisegesis. You should know better.

Why do you keep bringing modern tech into the reasons for biblical events that happened before everything else? All Adam had to work his dominion with with as a vegan diet and language that came with all stock Humans. We know this because God changed that feature a few chapters later. (Genesis 11:1-9) And Jesus later confirmed Adam's starting gear in (Mark 11:23) But you do have to read and believe your entire bible, both at the same time. If you don’t and you want to have your bible before the author of it ever spoke the world into creation. Then you can get hung up on words like most theologians that seem to think technology was the plan all along, do, and not something God’s grace covers. Adam did not need mining to get the gold from the Pison. He could ask it to march up the banks and line his pockets. Exactly how he could have asked a mountain move over yonder with the perfect faith he must have had prior to ever sinning, Right? I guess, except pockets weren’t invented yet, were they?

That’s why God fixed the tawdry clothes Adam and Eve made when they made it. Not because he wanted them to wear dead things or even things at all. There was no need for pockets, remember. But that he wanted them covered in their sinfulness as the long and sordid process of salvation would need to work its course.

You’re telling me Adam had enough time to name every single animal, but God’s nomenclature schedule didn’t have a lunch break where loincloths could be covered. And that only after knowledge of good things and bad things did mankind think to cover the nakedness of a wife he was supposed to be fruitful with. Even teenage boys can figure out that was the wrong call.

Our first technology was the direct result of our first sins, and every other one followed it. Whether we want to admit it or not. We don’t live in a world where we can go back. But we do live in a world where we can remember why we’re moving forward. The animals and there requisite skins, that covered the shame of the first sinful humans, were named by those humans. I would venture a guess that they might have been their favourites. Fits the theme of first fruits and a son dying on a cross for the sins of your enemies, don’t you think?

How much tech are you bringing to the word of God that exists outside of text itself. The same Holy Ghost that hovered over the waters, before there was waters, also wrote the Bible that mentions how he hovered. And in being an unchanging and everlasting God that same Spirit would have the bible memorized before their were people and places to write the bible about. I get it. You have a MacBook and a Prius, designer sneakers and discount underwear. But all you need, technology wise, is a recognition that there are internal consistencies in the Bible we ignore, so we can have the finer technological things in life. And not feel like they’re just our way of hiding from God, like so many fig leaves and apple cores. We want there to be MacBook's in heaven so we can get Jesus’s email address and make prayer more efficient. We want Priuses that pat our heads in eco friendly grace to drive the streets of gold. Designer sneakers to match our blood dipped robes and something better than a 6 pack of tighty-whities to go underneath them.

What we don’t want, clearly, is to be caught naked before the creator of all things and found wanting, idle, or even disobedient. To be exposed to the lack of obedience that we all share and accomplish every day. So we bring our tech to get things done and deal with this sin problem that the tech never seems to destroy but sure covers neatly enough. As more and more reasons not to do things God’s way creep into our lives and worship. We have a mind, bent towards the every present need for technology, as it it were a good that God ordained from the start. We don’t care how many logical hoops we need to jump through to get there. Lord knows we have enough words to describe exactly how we would, if we could. But what if we can’t? What if technology wasn’t the plan? Does doing godly things in ungodly ways makes sense? The technological mind can only see the things we can do and make and figure out as a way forward to our future in heaven. It will retcon anything that sinful humanity could possible come up with as if that was God’s plan all along. Self righteousness is a poison that hides in every switch and lever of works based salvation. And so long as you cling to technology at every turn, you will cling to such feckless works.

The technological mind does not bring a humility to its reading of God’s word, but rather a fire extinguisher. Because it read there, that there was a flaming sword, keeping it from where it got its knowledge from.

“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”

Genesis 3:24 KJV

We have the distinct privilege of being so far removed from the events of scripture, as to be able to consider them fully. The people in the scripture didn’t have that. But we do. We can see the narrative of salvation penned in each chapter and verse. But we also are not a part of the story it tells in the words it uses. None of our technology is in the Bible the way we know it is in our day to day lives. And we will desperately want to weave those fallacies together as we grapple with the implications of a sinful life. But the story is already complete. It was complete before it was ever started. No need for the next big thing. For the latest advancement in technology. That’s how eternal things work.

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”

Ephesians 2:10 KJV

It is only in the sacrifice for our sins that we can be close to God again. And only through the redemption of our technology that we can consider it a godly thing. Technology is sinful, as man is sinful. And as such, Technology can be redeemed as mankind can be redeemed. By it’s orientation towards the ends of Christ on a cross; or it’s subjugation to the worship of the King of Kings. All things will be his. But to suggest goodness apart from that by misattributed virtue and stolen permission, is foolishness. God spoke precious little about the need of technology for humans and has redeemed all our works according to his will since then. We are the ones who insist upon technique and technology. God not only doesn’t do so but also empowers the believer to unbelievably more. He would have a man with nothing more than words do what an army of men could do with tools and industry at their same beckoned call. How else does a man apart from God move the mountain? With picks and shovels and trucks and dynamite. But the man of God can just ask it.

But he does need to be willing to just ask it and be the kind of man of God to believe that he could if God wanted him to. The kind of man who would never look at what would be impossible for him to do outside of technological influence. Because there’s biblically no such thing.

“And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

Matthew 17:20 KJV