Short Excerpts on Technology

Trevin Wax quotes from John Dyer’s,  From the Garden to the City:

1. “In some sense, all of our technology can be understood as an attempt to overcome the effects of the fall.”

2. “Technology should not dictate our values or our methods. Rather, we must use technology out of our convictions and values.”

3. “Rather than taking our cues about technology from the Scriptures and the outline of God’s plan for humanity, we seem to be locked in a cycle of questioning the really, really new but accepting the just barely old.”

4. “When technology has distracted us to the point that we no longer examine it, it gains the greatest opportunity to enslave us.”

5. ”God is more interested in our theology of worship than in our technology of worship.”

6. “Technology is the means by which we transform the world as it is into the world that we desire. What we often fail to notice is that it is not only the world that gets transformed by technology. We, too, are transformed.”

7. “Digital natives grow up with technology, and the use of technology becomes engrained in the way these individuals think and go about life. But digital immigrants are always learning and playing catch-up, like an adult learning a second language.”

8. “We use our idols fundamentally as a way of meeting our needs apart from God, and this is our greatest temptation with technology—to use it as a substitute for God.”

9. “As Christians, we often say, ‘the means change, but the message stays the same.’ However, while it’s true that the gospel message never changes, the means by which that message is communicated does, in fact, bring with it additional ends. Much of this is due to the fact that like all other things we create, our technology brings with it a set of values.”

10. “We must begin by continually returning to the Scriptures to find our Christian values and identity. From that perspective we can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of technology and determine what values will emerge from the tendencies of use built into its design.”