Radix: Pastor Paul, I thank you so much for your willingness to share your time and your experience and your thoughts in this particular issue for Radix. It’s two really big themes that are coming together. On the one hand, you have technology, which asks these questions: What does it do? Is it good or bad? Does it help the individual? Does it help society? What about flourishing? What does it do to our perspectives? And at the same time, the word pastor could evoke the same questions, because pastors play a big role. And so, to combine those two together I found was interesting, intimidating, and being able to have someone like you who is both versed in technology and doing the pastoring thing—doing both—is really cool.
So, just to get us started, could you give us a little bit of your background and how you came to be interested in both technology and pastoring?
PT: Yeah, definitely. So, I grew up as a kind of technology enthusiast, loved technology, was a little bit of a geek as a kid and then when I was in high school, decided that God was calling me to become a pastor. So that became a little bit of my plan, to go into ministry, but at the same time I was interested in technology. I was interested in engineering. I was going to an elite private school in Houston and I had visited Stanford University and really had my heart set on coming out to California and going to school there, if possible. So, I ended up getting into Stanford, and I thought I wanted to study and work for a few years in the normal world before going into ministry, and whenever I would float that idea by people, they would be very enthusiastic that that would be a great plan. So that’s what I ended up doing. I worked in technology when I graduated from school, worked for Oracle Corporation as a product manager, helping to develop some new software they were working on, and after a few years of that full-time, decided to go to seminary part-time while I kept working in tech. Then, when I graduated from seminary, I left tech to work full-time as a pastor, but I’ve always maintained my interest in technology. Then, particularly over the last five to seven years, I have become more and more burdened, I’d say, by the fact that I pastor in Palo Alto, which is very much in the heart of Silicon Valley. A lot of technology companies are here and a lot of people that work in tech are here, and it seems like technology is one of the biggest influences on world culture today. So, if we are going to be a church in the Bay Area, we ought to be thinking well about technology from a biblical and theological perspective. So, I’ve been burdened by that in trying to do my best efforts at starting to think that way.
Radix: In one of your interviews, you talk about the importance of thinking about the theological implications of technology—and again, because you’re a pastor and you do the technology, I think your perspective is really worth hearing. And then you have another question: does technology enhance or degrade humanity? You’re thinking about these things, so we want to hear your perspective on that.
PT: Yeah, I think it’s really important to consider technology from a theological perspective, because I think our inclination is to want to render a verdict on technology. Either it’s good or it’s bad, or these are the ways that it’s good or these are the ways that it’s bad––and that’s helpful and we need to be thinking about those types of things, but also from a more descriptive framework: what is technology doing to our sense of ourselves, our sense of who God is, our sense of how life in the world works, and some of those things are just too complex to render a verdict on them as good or bad. They just are the world we live in, and it affects us and affects what it means to minister here.
One of my stories I tell a lot, and one of the ways I started thinking about this, was when we outfitted our house with smart lights and the voice assistant device—it was the Amazon Alexa at the time—we used to sit down for movies as a family and I would say, “Alexa, turn on family dark” and the lights would go out and then we’d watch our movie and then at the end of the movie I would say, “Alexa, turn on family bright” and all the lights would come on. And it occurred to me that I was doing the first thing that God was recorded as having done in the scriptures, that I was calling forth light with the power of my voice. I was declaring “let there be light” and there was light and I’m not sure that’s good or bad, but it has to be something. There has to be something happening in me that I am acting like God and, frankly, enjoying it and that has to change how I understand who God is and who I am. And so, that was one of the things that kind of led me into, “Hey, let’s think about this. Let’s read the scriptures with the lens of how does technology work from a biblical perspective and be realistic about it.”
Radix: And I think for some people, depending on the take—and I am probably more negative than I maybe should be—but I think, from a philosophical point of view, I am more concerned about technology. So, when people say technology is not neutral, I’m like, “Yeah, totally, technology’s not neutral!” and then I think more on the negative side, so I appreciate your thoughts. I was talking with John Dyer and he was talking about the importance of making sure to keep in mind that, yeah, technology isn’t neutral, but technology is also a creation of humanity, which means it is a creation of culture, which means it can be a good thing. Thinking of somebody like Andy Crouch, who says if you’re concerned about bad culture, make more good culture – and so in that way, technology can be good.
PT: Yes, definitely, and I think from a biblical perspective it seems to me that God absolutely intended us to innovate, to create, to come up with technology. There are a ton of stories that I like to tell. One of them is that in the early pages of Genesis, God says that he creates the fish that swarm in the seas, and the birds that fly in the air, and it seems to be a very emphasized aspect that these creatures live in places that are off limits to humans. They seem to be identified as we can’t get in the air and we can’t go very far in the sea, and yet these creatures live there, and then a few verses later we are told to have dominion over them, and so it seems to me immediately that God is setting us up to say, “You can’t get there now, but if you work a little bit you’ll probably figure out a way.” So, how are we to have charge over creatures that live in realms that are inaccessible to us unless we create the tools to get there? I think there are a lot of stories like that in scripture where it seems like God is setting us up to say, “You are intended to create and innovate and come up with tools that help you.” For me, I use the definition of technology as something we create that extends our natural capabilities. None of our technology gives us essentially new capabilities. It just extends the capabilities we already have. I can jump and get in the air, but for a pretty brief time. But I can build a plane and I can get in the air and stay in the air a whole lot longer. So, there’s this sense, I think, all throughout the creation story that we have a potential to do more than we can initially do, and it seems to me that God intends for us to mine that potential and to build it out.
Radix: It seems like probably for the people who are maybe more negative, they should be hearing more positive aspects; and for the people who are hugely optimistic, it’s like I want to say, “okay, yeah, but also, here are some concerns.” And I like what you said: something we can create that extends our capabilities in terms of technology and we know that our capabilities within human nature is the proclivity to do good, but also bad, so it works along with our nature. Very cool.
As a pastor, how do you think pastors think about technology; and are more pastors aware of technology or not aware, in terms of the potential and the complications that surround them?
PT: I think pastors have to be aware of technology, but the temptation to pastors is to think about technology strictly in terms of “what am I supposed to do with it for the sake of my church?” So, I think most pastors feel like, “Oh, I need to have a better social media presence and I don’t,” and “who can I hire or talk to or cajole into making my social media presence online better?” or “I need to have better tech.” Certainly with the pandemic, “I need to have a better live stream or better video, or better whatever.” So, I think the question of how should the church use technology is one of those practical questions that a lot of pastors are asking, and there’s probably an inverse proportion of the age of the pastor and the amount of angst felt; the younger pastors are really excited and doing great and loving it, and the older pastors feel like, “I have no idea what I’m doing and am really frustrated that it doesn’t make any sense to me.” That’s an important topic for sure that pastors need to figure out, but I think that’s not the heart of the topic. I think there’s a previous question about how is technology changing the way we understand ourselves, and understand God. And then I think the aspect that a lot of people don’t consider, and we’re starting to do this more—we have a kind of faith and work cohort in our church where we’re trying to think about a lot of these things and one of the things we’ve started doing is to separate the idea of technology from the technology industry. Because I think when a lot of people have negative opinions about technology, those opinions can actually be traced more to the technology industry than the technology itself. So, the technology itself is, I agree with John, it’s not neutral, but the technology itself exists as something that extends our capability, but we live within an industry and an economic system where there are certain priorities of the industry, and I think it’s those priorities that probably give rise to more of the negative aspects of technology than the technology itself.
So, for instance, people like to talk about social media and the dangers of social media—and there are certainly lots of dangers—but I’d say it’s the way that the industry is designed, that the technology industry has to make money. It’s part of a system where money is the goal, and so they’re trying to make money using technology to do so, and that’s what drives a lot of the negative behaviors rather than the technology itself.
Radix: It would be easy for us to view technology through the lens of seeing how the industries have improperly used it, so yeah, that’s important. What are some ways to negate those negative effects?
PT: Yeah, I think along the lines of, well, you quoted Andy Crouch saying if there’s bad culture, then create good culture. I think it’s worth recognizing how the systems that we live within deform our understandings of ourselves and of God, and then replacing that with truth. We really need to ground ourselves in knowing what does it mean to be a person. What does it mean to be in a community? What is my goal in this world? If I think of myself primarily as a member of an economic system, then my goal is to consume. That’s how I function within an economic system. Then I become a consumer, and that’s how I think about myself, and I can contribute to the well-being of the world by consuming more because that stimulates the economy and promotes growth and all these things. So, that seeps into my understanding of myself, but that’s not who we are biblically. We’re not meant to be consumers and it’s not that we can’t be a consumer, but that ought not be the main way that we understand ourselves. We need to be faithful to preaching and studying and learning a really robust biblical view of what it means to be a human, as a way of countering that narrative that we exist primarily as consumers, and then we can live courageously and faithfully as whole people and we can function as a consumer at times. I have to go to the grocery store and buy food. I have to be a consumer to live within this system, but it doesn’t have to be the way that I consider who I am.
Radix: Social media was mentioned and I’m curious with pastors—and especially because pastors are held to a higher moral standard than most, but I think it’s true that they are, and loneliness is an issue with pastors—I read a stat, I think it was taken from 2016 or something, that 70% of pastors suffer from lack of meaningful friendships and I think about social media. How do you think that affects pastors? I’m assuming it’s both—it’s going to be positive and negative—but you speaking as a pastor, how does social media affect you as a pastor? In terms of community?
PT: You know, actually personally—not maybe quite this dramatically—but at the turn of the year I made a bit of a New Year’s resolution to be more on social media.
Radix: Oh, okay!
PT: Opposite of others, yes. But I very much prefer to be connecting with people in person. That is my strong preference. I am not inclined at all to be part of the social media race for followers or likes or whatever. That’s very stressful to me, and yet a lot of my friends live there on social media, and a lot of them use that primarily, and so I’ve actually found it to be a great way to connect with people at times, to share important things that are going on, to ask for prayer, to invite people into my life and to connect with them in that way, which I think a lot of people have felt. I think that’s the draw of social media. There’s a way that it can connect us with people, and so to use it in a way that benefits me and benefits my relationships, and then to avoid the temptation to get sucked into some of the less helpful ways, I think that’s the call. And honestly, as pastors we want to be pastoring people in our culture and our culture is filled with social media, so I think it’s probably helpful for us to be in that world and try to navigate it as best we can for the sake of helping and being in it with our people so that we can understand it and give advice from a personal perspective, not just an outsider’s perspective.
Radix: Yes. That makes really good sense in terms of technology and pastors. A pastor friend sent me this picture, and it’s the six pictures that say what my friends think I do, what I think I do, and that’s what I really did.
PT: Those are hilarious, right?
Radix: Right?! So, I think people know that pastors are really busy. They’re really busy, they’re underpaid in a lot of cases and so, as a pastor, a person would want to incorporate time-saving technologies. What are—and again, it’s a really big question because it could be answered negatively or positively or in between—when you think of time-saving devices for pastors, time-saving technologies, what are your thoughts?
PT: Yeah. So, this is a bit of a weakness of mine because in college I trained as an industrial engineer, and industrial engineers don’t actually do anything – they just make it easier for things to be done, and so this is a temptation of mine. I’ll confess, I love to-do apps and I spend far too much time researching the best to-do app when I should be doing my to-dos. So, I love optimizing things. I love optimizing systems and sometimes you can spend so much time optimizing that you don’t actually do the things that you need to get done! But I have found the tools like to-do apps and scheduling apps. I really am a fan of time-blocking and planning my to-dos, and so apps that combine task management with calendaring and scheduling, I find those personally very useful. I think that it is helpful just as a way of managing and understanding time.
As a pastor you have to be, to some extent, compartmentalized. I’ll go from a meeting where I’m counseling somebody in a marriage crisis, to evaluating website content, to talking about budget, to doing a deep dive into Exodus to prepare a sermon within four hours, and you have to find a way to shift from one thing to the other and create some boundaries so that you can do all those things and not go crazy. So, I’ve found technology to be useful in that regard. But also, that’s one of the tendencies of both technology and the industry that we live within that we need to be careful of, that we are not primarily producers. We are not machines and so productivity is a useful goal, but it cannot be the primary goal. I’ve personally found a lot of benefit from the idea in scripture about fruitfullness—I talk a lot about how scripture tells us to be fruitful, not productive. Fruitfulness and productivity are very different. They both have outputs, but fruitfulness comes in season and not out of season. Sometimes it’s very affected by the environment. It also contains within it the potential for future fruitfulness. Whereas, if we think about ourselves as machines that produce things like sermons—the machines that we use in our culture, the things that we produce, they start dying as soon as we produce them. As soon as an iPhone comes off the line, it’s going to be replaced by the next one in a year. It’s already begun its path towards obsolescence, but fruit works differently. Fruit, as soon as it’s produced, has a future within it and so to think of ourselves not as optimizing productivity, but optimizing fruitfulness, I found to be really refreshing and helpful.
Radix: Yes. That is a very cool metaphor, the seasonality and yeah, the fruit having life inside of itself. Yeah, that’s very cool.
PT: Yeah, and no, it doesn’t mean that we can’t use technology. Technology actually has been incredibly helpful in increasing fruitfulness of the agricultural industry starting from thousands of years ago. There’s a lot of ways to use technology that help us to be fruitful and avoid some of the dangers that make fruitfulness difficult. So, it’s not a reversal from technology. It’s more of a rethinking and recasting how do I think of myself and what is my role in the world and how does technology contribute to that? So, it’s not actually so focused on the tech, it’s focused on those earlier questions about who I am and how I work and how I contribute.
Radix: Are you interested in going to the ChatGPT question?
PT: [Laughter] Sure. Let’s do it.
Radix: So, I got into this shortly after it was out, and I remember looking at it and asking it some questions and fiddling around with it and wasting time. This was 11 o’clock at night. I’m drinking some of my homemade wine ‘cause BC has expensive wine prices and I like wine, so I make my own.
PT: That sounds great. You’ll have to invite me over. I wanna try some.
Radix: [Laughter] And so, I’m having this “conversation,” and about 27 minutes into it, I started laughing. And as I was laughing, I was suddenly aware: I don’t laugh at my laptop, I don’t laugh at my car, I don’t laugh at a fridge, but I was laughing at – or maybe it was with? – this chatbot.
PT: Right. Yeah.
Radix: And it gave me these implications of, okay, I’m interacting in a different way and that’s not a bad thing. It was an interesting thing. I mean, it might be a bad thing. So, I started thinking about ChatGPT and reading these different things, and I wanted to look for positive things and one of them I came across—I don’t know if it was positive—horrified me. The ad said, “Stuck in sermon prep? Struggling to find the right words to drive a point home? Need a good illustration for your sermon? Need help structuring your thoughts? ChatGPT is the droid you’re looking for.” And the words “anti-Christ” flashed in my mind first!
PT: For sure.
Radix: And I think there’s always this concern with technology. I’m pretty sure when the printing press first came about, there were grumblings from people who said it was going to be a cheat for pastors because now they’re not going to write their sermons. They’re just going to take their sermon from a book. And yet there were beautiful things that happened with that. But with this ChatGPT thing, I guess it’s difficult to ferret out how much of it is an aid and how much of it is a crutch; how much is being lazy and how much are we disallowing the Spirit of God from interacting in creating something for the people.
PT: Sure.
Radix: Yeah. So, tell us what your thoughts are.
PT: Yeah, I’ve got lots of thoughts. Everybody has lots of thoughts about ChatGPT. I was at a men’s retreat a few weeks ago and every conversation at every meal eventually got to ChatGPT; it’s all roads lead to Rome and all conversations lead to ChatGPT these days. I think that, again, ChatGPT is a technology that extends our natural capability. So, it’s not fundamentally something new. I can ask ChatGPT for the best recipe for oven-baked lasagna and it’ll tell me because it’s done a ton of research through its machine-learning algorithms. I could scour the internet and find 150 recipes for lasagna, and I could read the reviews, and I could see how many recipes are linked to others, and do some optimization and analysis of how good they are, and I could come up with the best of those 150—ChatGPT’s just already done that for me. So, it’s not doing something I can’t do. It’s just doing something that I can do better than I could do it and faster than I could do it. Maybe not even better, but certainly faster.
So, you know the question of is it a crutch? Is it going to replace effort? Maybe, but to me, that’s not the most interesting question. I come from a kind of biblical studies tradition where I pastorate a Bible church, and we always teach people when you study the Bible study it first for yourself: read it, dissect it, make observations—just the text. Then, after you’ve studied it, then open up a commentary and see what others have said about it. That’s always a big emphasis for us is do your own thought first and then check with others. So, it strikes me as a similar thing, like, ChatGPT is out there. It’s basically an incredibly powerful research assistant, and so that requires a new level of figuring out rhythms of how to do your own research and how to do your own thinking, or if you’re doing something that you’re afraid others’ thoughts might prove more tempting to believe than to make your own thoughts, then you have to have kind of new rhythms to figure out how to interact with ChatGPT. And I know pastors that use it already; I have a friend who writes his church newsletters using ChatGPT and tells it what’s going on and it spits out several hundred words of great newsletter content and then he reads it and edits it, and he does what would take him four hours in an hour because it starts with something, and he can tweak it and make it better and off it goes. So, is that a bad thing that he’s saving time? Is it less authentic? Can we evaluate those things? Sure, but at the end of the day, it’s just going to be part of our life moving forward. There’s going to be all these capabilities. Every app that I use is integrating now with ChatGPT and offering capabilities. So, to me, the most interesting question, again, is how does this change how we think about ourselves? How does this change how we think about God? And what does it look like to build healthy rhythms around this technology rather than, again, the initial temptation to render a verdict. And I think what disturbs me the most is not a lot of people when they talk about AI, or when they talk about things like ChatGPT, think carefully enough. Even the phrase you used, I wrote it down, you said you found yourself laughing with or at ChatGPT; it’s interesting to me that you weren’t sure which one you were doing. Was it laughing with you? Is it capable of laughing? Was it enjoying the experience of chatting with you in the same way that you were amused by the experience of chatting with it? And I would say no. I would say you weren’t laughing with it. It does not have the capability to laugh. It is not an entity. It is not a being. And I think the danger that I perceive is not so much that AI would become human, but that we would allow our understanding of ourselves to be reduced to what an AI can do.
Radix: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PT: So, that the fear that AI becomes human is not so much about the power of AI, but about our own deficient understanding of humanity. That we think that all we are is our meaty chatbots that walk around chatting with other people, and so if a really good electronic chat bot comes around, then it basically, it must be human. But we are far more than that and we have to recover that kind of robust sense of what it means to be a human. Once we do that, the concern that AI will become human, in my mind, becomes way less concerning.
Radix: Interesting. Interesting. My forms of resistance are—and I’ve mostly taken it out of my vocabulary, and I’ll notice it in someone else’s and maybe say something funnily—so someone says or they talk about their mental process. No, you don’t have a mental process. If you’re talking about, like, the old term of the word two hundred years ago, that’s fine. But using process now is, like, no, you don’t have processing power. You don’t have memory banks. Stop doing that because you’re not a machine.
PT: When people talk about their bandwidth, we use all of these metaphors. If I’m going to contact somebody, I say, “oh, I’m going to ping them.” But computers ping. People don’t ping. It’s like, we create things in our image, and then we refine our understandings of ourselves based on what we’ve created and that’s a danger, whether it’s sports terms or military terms or technology terms, we create these things and then we use the language and the abstractions of what we’ve created to redefine what it means to be ourselves. And that’s where I think the danger is: how we change our understanding of ourselves, not so much what it is we’re creating.
Radix: Right, right. That was a very thoughtful answer. I am more hopeful.
PT: Oh, good. Oh, great. I’ve given you a little bit more optimism. I’ll count that as a win.
Radix: If I may ask, in general—and it sounds like you are, because some people are terribly unhopeful, and I think much of that depends on a person’s theological understanding—but I think our hope in Christ is ultimately hopeful. And I don’t think it’s just hopeful, like, when I die, then everything’s okay. It’s like, no, actually, God has a plan for us, now, in this world. Goodness can still happen, and it sounds like you’re hopeful as compared to some of the total Luddites who say it’s the end of the world. It’s all bad. I think you’re hopeful, right?
PT: Absolutely. And I’m hopeful not because I think that technology is going to do great things––although I do think it is and it has and it will continue to be––but I guess maybe I would say I’m not as fearful as some and I’m hopeful in the person of God and the character of who he is. Part of my hope, well, I find the creation story is one of the richest places to think about technology. At the end of the creation story, of course, Adam and Eve violate the commandment and then this creation of God, the tree of life, becomes a danger to them. It becomes something that could hurt them, and so God takes action to protect them from that. He casts them out of the garden. He sets up an angel with a flaming sword so that they would not eat of the tree of life. Now, eventually, at the end of the story in Revelation, the tree of life is back. We don’t hear about it throughout all of scripture, until we get back to Revelation where the tree of life is now in the new heavens and the new Earth. It’s in the new city, and it seems to be that we do have access to it, and so something has changed from when they were expelled from the garden and they had to be protected from the tree of life to when the tree of life is now accessible to them. That’s what makes me less fearful––God set up an angel with the flaming sword to protect them from doing something that would destroy them, and the tree of life is currently, as far as I understand, inaccessible to us.
So, I just have confidence that God is going to protect us from the things that would be our complete undoing. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be realistic about some of the damage we could do and some of the harm we can do. We absolutely should be, and we should be careful about issues of justice and issues about mental health and issues about how the technology industry is changing our world. Absolutely, we should be thinking about those things, but I don’t think we need to be fearful that we’ve accidentally caused the end of the world, because God’s in charge of that, not us, and he’s going to protect us.
Radix: A slightly tricky question—but you’ve answered in positive ways, and I’m hoping maybe you’ll speak something positive to this thought—Martin Buber has become increasingly popular in the current lingo, or at least, so it seems to me. I was just reading a paper recently presented about the connection that Lewis had read Buber in his later life, I think, and so more people are talking about the I/thou relationship as compared to the I/it, and a lot of people are saying that technology contributes to an I/it instead of an I/thou; however, maybe technology can help actually facilitate, if we approach it and use it the right way, an I/thou relationship. Is that possible?
PT: Yeah, definitely. I would extend that idea. So, when I talk about technology, I actually talk about four main relationships. I should say, when I talk about technology, I immediately start to talk about anthropology, what it means to be human, as a way of understanding technology. And when I talk about what it means to be human, I talk about four major relationships that God created us with from the creation account in Genesis. Those would be our relationship with God, our relationship with creation, our relationship with others, and our sort of self relationship, which is our relationship with ourselves. So, Buber’s characterization of the I/thou relationship as us to God is what I would think of as part of that network of relationships. I think that what it means to be human is essentially to exist within this interconnected network of relationships and I use a preposition to characterize each of those four relationships; we exist under God, we exist over creation, we exist with other people, and we exist unto ourselves. And so, each of those four relationships—I have a visual chart that I use that kind of maps it out—has a natural intended approach, and technology disrupts that relational network.
So, to go back to Buber’s language of I/thou, absolutely technology disrupts, but it doesn’t have to destroy. Within a network, when you disrupt it, you have to adapt things to re-establish some sense of equilibrium, and so I think that’s happened all throughout history. Technology has changed our relationship with creation, but our relationship over creation does not exist in isolation from our relationship under God or with each other or unto ourselves, and so all those relationships have to change dynamically with each other when new technology is introduced. So, I would agree that, and I resonate with the kind of I/it, that our tendency then is to depersonalize God to not be under him, but in fact, sometimes to be over him or to be unaware of him, and you can replace the preposition with some other prepositions that perhaps are more common today. But then as Christians, as pastors, as people who read the Bible and preach it to each other, we can recast those relationships such that we can establish a better sense of equilibrium.
Radix: Very interesting. Very interesting.
PT: So, the problem is there. I would not deny the problem, but I would also say the problem’s always been there and this is what the church does. The church responds to culture with the character of God and the beauty of the text and the truth of the gospel, and we understand and we think through and we suffer through ourselves, because we suffer the consequences of some of these things personally, and we trust that Christ in us and Christ through us can continue his work of redemption through the church. So, I believe in the church as capable of handling this because of Christ, of course not because the church is much in and of itself.
Radix: Again, my spirits are increased!
PT: I love it. I love it. I’m going to have you becoming a social media influencer by the end of this interview. It’s great.
Radix: [Laughter] On maybe a more—this would go towards not technology, but it would be the importance of formation—I was talking to Chris Martin, and he wrote The Wolf in Their Pockets, and he’s talking about the danger, though he’s not negative either. He believes that there’s positive aspects to it. But speaking of formation, a quote in his book was chilling to me: it says, “Pastor, are you aware that the people who bow their heads in prayer after your sermon bow their heads in devotion to all manner of foolishness on their screen the other six days of the week?” This is something that a pastor would have to deal with, I think more now than, say 50 years ago, or definitely a hundred years ago, because they didn’t have as much opportunity to have these multiplicities of voices coming to them. As a pastor thinking about formation and that statement, how do you deal with that as a pastor, knowing that you are just one voice amongst many throughout the counted hours of the week?
PT: Yeah, absolutely. My only problem with that quote is what makes them think that they’re not bowing their heads to foolishness on the seventh day of the week, also?
Radix: Right!
PT: Like, I’m pretty sure out of my congregation, they could be reading the Bible on their phones during my sermon, but I’m not convinced they are. So absolutely, and it’s a new problem, but it’s an old problem as well. I would say it’s a new form of an old problem, that we are creatures who love to worship and so we are going to worship something, and we are going to be drawn away into worshiping false gods by our nature. And so this has always been true that we are worshiping all nature of foolishness, all the time, apart from God. And so it’s just the new cultural context of what it looks like to pastor people who are prone to idolatry, “prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,” right? “Prone to leave the one I love.” So, it’s the same call, and it’s helping people to see that, to recognize that this is what’s happening, to recognize the power, and to help people to think critically about what is happening when you’re using your phone. What are you looking for? What is driving you? To help them think about practices to combat that, to help form communities where they can be honest about that and struggle with it together, to encourage them in their successes and comfort them in their failures. So, it’s all the things that we’ve been doing as the church for hundreds of years, but it now has a new cultural form, and absolutely it’s difficult because people aren’t dealing with it in the same way.
We pastor diverse congregations, and some people have very healthy habits, and some people have unhealthy habits. It’s like alcohol: there are people who can have a drink once, twice, a couple times a week, and that’s wonderful and healthy for them. And there are other people who can’t do that. They have to stop drinking altogether or keep themselves out of situations where they might be tempted to drink, not because they’re any weaker or because they’re less capable, but just because that’s part of their story and they have to react to that particular temptation differently. The same is true with our people. There are people in our congregations that have to be really careful because they’re going to get sucked down a dangerous hole with the power of social media, and there are other people who just couldn’t care less and hate it and never use it, and it’s not a problem for them. So, it’s understanding also how to pastor to a group of people that handles this particular temptation in different ways.
Radix: You’ve already given a number of answers for this, and if you have any more thoughts—a favorite question of mine to ask is, because I believe that pastors do have an influence, less of an influence now, but totally an influence, but because they have an influence—as a pastor, if you were able to speak to all the pastors in a room and they had to listen to you, and they had to do it with a smile on their face—because if people are smiling, they’re more receptive, generally…
PT: Yes, agreed.
Radix: …what would you want to tell pastors to think about, ponder on, etcetera?
PT: Yeah. I would say there are two big areas that, as pastors, two big truths that we preach and teach that counter some of the narratives around technology in the technology industry. Theologically speaking, the words are anthropology and eschatology, but more commonly it’s what does it mean to be human and where’s the world going? I think those are the things where technology and the way it’s used in our culture, they can tend to degrade our understanding of what it means to be human and reduce us to be machines, and reduce us in our self-understanding to be less than what God intended us. So, faithfully preaching a biblical picture of what it means to be human, and sacrifice, and the love and the intimacy and the connection and the relationship with creation, the relationship with God, the relationship with others, the relationship with ourselves, all of those things.
Forgiveness––like a really robust picture of the glory and tragedy and beauty of humanity––needs to be part of our teaching and preaching, and it is for all of us. And then, the other temptation with technology is that there is the sense that technology is going to be what saves us. That there is an incredibly naive optimism in our culture around the power of technology to defeat death and aging. There’s a book someone published recently, oh, I wish I could remember the name, Infinite Wisdom or something. The subtitle was How the Internet is Going to End Poverty, Disease, Death and War, and it’s like, really? That’s a really bold claim for the internet; and of course it hasn’t, and it won’t, but it’s tempting to believe that if we just figure out this next thing, if we could just come up with the right innovation, if we could just come up with the right new technology, then we could essentially bring in the kingdom. We could make life work the way it’s supposed to work and we’re just one technology away from doing that.
Radix: Yes.
PT: As pastors, we just have to remind our people over and over again that it’s Jesus that brings in the new kingdom, that it’s the work of Christ, that it’s God’s plan and that we contribute to it, but we do not make it happen and that’s an incredibly freeing truth. It’s good news for people to remember that because then our frantic efforts to do all that we can to either create or use technology in a way that’ll save the world gets put in the right perspective. So, I think your original question was what would I say to pastors; and I would say, remind people what it means to be human, and remind people that Jesus is coming back, and he is bringing in the new creation with him.
Radix: Yes. Yes. And I’m assuming, or maybe some of the similar, but if you were able to talk to developers, to software developers what would you want to tell them?
PT: Yeah, I think I would just tell them, you have to find a way to live in this tension of not believing that what you’re doing is going to save the world. I’ve spoken to a lot of developers. I’ve done some interviews and one of the guys I interviewed said, “To work in my job, I have to maintain the kind of commitment and energy level that they expect of me. I have to believe that the product that I’m making is going to save them. I have to have faith in my product, and I have to think that I’m not just creating a video game console, or I’m not just creating a smartphone. I’m not just creating a tool, but I’m creating something that will fundamentally improve people’s lives for the better in the long run.” And I think they’re told that. It’s in the water they drink, in the air they breathe, and you just have to remember that’s not what I’m doing here. I’m not creating something that’s going to save people, but neither am I necessarily creating something that’s going to destroy them. So, you have to find a way to live in that tension of I contribute to God’s work. I contribute to culture, and I have to do so in careful ways. And I’m not overly optimistic, but neither am I overly pessimistic and disillusioned.
One of the things I tell people is, I find the biblical metaphor of exile to be really helpful as a way of helping people to navigate that tension. If you think about Daniel working for Nebuchadnezzar, who was a really bad guy, but yet somehow Daniel found a way to help Nebuchadnezzar succeed as a tyrannical leader, but also maintain his integrity and his relationship with God. Somehow Daniel managed to walk that tension, and that’s why his stories are so powerful and so easily relatable. I tell people, “If Daniel could work for Nebuchadnezzar, then you can work for Elon Musk.”
Radix: Yeah. Yeah.
PT: You can navigate the tension. You can find a way to do it. It might not be easy, but that’s the Spirit. Spirit will be with you in it.
Radix: The last one: if you were to talk to people—so I’m not a pastor. I know some pastors and I think you guys have a huge responsibility, and often, I mentioned before, you guys and girls don’t get paid enough, but with all these things, you have such a responsibility, and we as congregants/flock often don’t appreciate what you guys are going through. I wonder what you would maybe—it might be difficult to do this—but what would you want people to think about in terms of what pastors are dealing with technologically, and not just technology, maybe just in general?
PT: Yeah. Wow. Great question. We’re inclined and tempted to just want voices of authority. We want voices of absolute truth. We want to be told what to do. We want to be told what to think and that’s not my job as a pastor. I’m not the ultimate authority. I’m not telling people what to do, what to think. My job is to lead them to the Spirit, to help them, and awaken them to the Spirit in their lives, through the power of the text and the work of Christ. I’m just a disciple along with everybody else, and I happen to be called by my community to help us in certain ways, to spend the time it takes to understand the text and preach it faithfully, but there’s no unique access I have to anything that anybody else doesn’t have. So, for people, I think just to come alongside, and to say, “don’t expect that much from us,” and offer to walk alongside with us. We’re all trying to figure this out together. We’re all trying to navigate this culture and figure out what God’s doing and how we can come alongside Him, and we all have the Spirit and we all have the text, and we all have the work of Christ, and so I really think in the church, we’re in this together. It’s not up to the pastors to figure out the answers and disseminate them to their congregation. We’re journeying. We are the church. It’s not one person who is leading the church, it’s we’re the church together. Come alongside, be helpful, be in dialogue. Don’t expect them to have the answers. All those kinds of things.
Radix: Yeah. Again, I so appreciate you taking the time and I should ask where’s the best place for people to find you online? If you want to be found online.
PT: Sure. Yeah. There’s a blog and a podcast that I have at All Things New Tech, and there’s some conversations that I have with mostly Christian technologists on that. There’s not a whole lot of new ones, but there’s a fairly decent library of, I don’t know, fifteen or so that I find interesting. I enjoyed those conversations. I think people interested in this topic would enjoy hearing how the people creating technology think about what they’re doing from a Christian perspective. So that’s what most of those conversations are about and that’s probably the best place for people to find some of the stuff I’ve done.
Radix: Okay, I will definitely put a link up. You have kept on going back to what does it mean to be human, and we need to think about it more, because we can escape from these foundational thinkings. So, thank you for introducing and reinforcing the importance of what does it mean to be human. That’s one of the primary things.
Okay. Thank you so much. Have a lovely afternoon and may you be blessed richly in all the things that you need: courage, and strength, and all that stuff.PT: Thanks, Matthew. I enjoyed chatting with you. It was a lot of fun.