"IT'S IN REVELATION, PEOPLE!"

It had to come out sooner or later that I am, in addition to being a film nerd, also a Simpsons nerd. The above call to panic from Kent Brockman tends to come to mind any time I come across eschatologically preoccupied Christian friends. In a recent conversation with a group of them, the talk turned to the rapid increase in communication technologies. After recounting all that is wrong with them and wringing hands about the demise of our culture that they are facilitating, one friend said words to the effect of, "It makes you wonder if the end is near and Christ is coming back soon." No, not really.

In fairness to these kinds of views, I should belabor a couple of obvious points:

1. These technologies are progressing at disorienting rates - Most of us over the age of thirty remember what it was like to actually have to wonder something that - barring our own recall, immediate good fortune, or the ability to somehow find what we wanted to know in the reference section of the library - we were going to have to be content speculating about. The internet soon solved that problem. (Good thing, too, because I don't know how I could have lived without knowing the name of the actor that played Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo - Hugh "Lumpy" Brannum, by the way.) Of course, information retrieval was only one of the technological issues we were encountering. People far smarter than I were confronting obstacles to the speed, ease, and mode of communication, and their solutions can be hard to handle. The first time I saw someone speaking on a Bluetooth headset, I caught them from the non-headset side, and just thought that the kind of craziness we're used to associating with big cities had wandered out to the suburbs (which, in a way, it had). I have to admit, between classes on the campus where I teach, I've taken to counting just how many people I see speaking or texting on their phones. Invariably, it is in the neighborhood of one-in-three, and it's hard not to imagine all kinds of deleterious effects or to project forward these kinds of advances to extreme levels of invasiveness and potential control at the hands of would-be tyrants, busybodies, etc.
2. These technologies can seem to promote increased privatization, dependency, etc. - I get that beyond the apparent ubiquity of the technologies or their speed of advance, many thoughtful people see in them not just the potential for abuse but the open door for accelerating the effects of thoughtlessness, which are not pretty things (and I'm not just speaking about cell phone use while driving). One might justly be prone to wonder whether the endless noise that MP3 players and cell phones introduce into our lives more than offsets any immediate, practical benefit they might offer. It's not just leaving the television on for background noise, we now take our distractions on the go, leaving little opportunity to be genuinely alone in our own thoughts for any substantial period, raising questions about possible vulnerability to politicians, advertisers, and our own unchecked lusts.

That said, some Christians should probably be aware of the implications of their luddite fears before pronouncing on them with such self-assurance. First, these claims show a remarkable ignorance of patterns in cultural history. Consider the following statement: "If it be true, that the present age is more corrupt than the preceding, the great multiplication of internet technology has probably contributed to its degeneracy." Now, replace the phrase internet technology with the word novels, and you have a verbatim quotation from the Reverend Vicesimus Knox's essay "On Novel Reading," written in 1778. Did you get that? Reading the kinds of novels that we now think of as ennobling and generally beneficial classics was considered by many religious leaders of the mid-eighteenth century to contribute to unhealthy expectations of life, distaste for traditions, and an over-emphasis of autonomy. The intriguing point is that the eighteenth-century claims were somewhat valid within their own culture, just as many current criticisms about text messaging are valid, but could it be that, just as the first trend turned out not to be the harbinger of the end that many had anticipated, that we too might not want to be looking to the skies just yet?

If this doesn't carry much weight for you, consider also the history of speculative dispensationalist Christian eschatology in this country. I was an undergraduate in college when the first Gulf War broke out. If you remember that time, you may recall a lot of hand-wringing in the culture at large. Politicians speculated that 40,000 soldiers would be returning home in body bags. The ubiquitous presence and urgent tone of national news coverage regularly crossed from gravity into grandstanding. Not to be outdone, the Christian presses were publishing book after book that laid out who in the book of Daniel Saddam Hussein was supposed to be and when Russia - which was of course known to be "Magog" - would jump into the fray, heralding the final battle. You may cringe, as I do, when I reflect on how badly evangelical Christians handled that situation, but the most serious implications of that behavior was not a damage to reputation but a loss of focus. Here we were, presented with an ideal opportunity to say something meaningful about equity, justice, charity, empire, and the place of faith in politics; and instead we tried to show ourselves masters of "the secret things"(revealing along the way a doubt that the gospel speaks to life in any immediate sense).

There are other practical theological implications of seeing every cultural trend as a potential enemy: we tend to reflect a lack of grace and develop what is commonly referred to as a "fortress mentality." I have written about this before, so I am not going to dwell on this point for long, except to encourage other Christians not to lose the perspective that God's works include both creation and providence. Just as God declared the creation "good" at various points, there is a very meaningful sense - despite real evil, real pain - in which those works that are carried out in providence get a similar declaration. Sometimes that declaration is expressed in judgment, but we should be prepared (as St. Paul was in Acts 17) to recognize his work in surprising places in our culture - not just as some superficial moment of manipulation toward what we want to talk about but because, as the saying goes, "It's all good."

Am I advocating an unreflective or naive approach to culture? Quite to the contrary, I think we need to constantly look for that point at which what is gospel departs from the norms of the world system, but we need to do so 1) mindful of what we really mean when we say gospel - quite the opposite of behaving morally, 2) receiving the works of culture as qualified goods, works of providence mediated through culture, and 3) eager to see where God invades even those worldviews, habits, and artifacts that try to discount the Author of Grace.